Book Review: Bulwarks of Unbelief

Joseph Minich provides a rich account of the causes of divine absence in the modern age

Imagine it is Sunday after church. I approach you to make awkward small talk. With a small smirk and raised brow, I gesture at a tiny vial of water in my hand. It doesn’t seem all that special to you, but I persist. I explain that, unlike the standard “holy water” from the Jordan, this vial was recently blessed by a priest, who exorcised any demons that might have been present in it. I say I plan to use this vial along with some exorcised salt for my baptism in a few weeks. With deadly seriousness, I state that God has prescribed these precautions as necessary to prevent demons from entering my body. After all, demons could be anywhere, even in salt.

After our conversation, you might think I had been conned by a charlatan—or that I was one. Such a view of the world seems deeply implausible to us, bordering on psychosis. “And are these salt demons in the room with us right now?” is the punchline to a joke, not the center of Christian rites. There is nothing about salt or water that requires an exorcism, let alone needing these materials to prevent demonic possession. Yet such was the medieval world that these sorts of expectations and practices were part of ordinary life. The universe was filled with spirits and demons, these strange and deadly forces only ever held at bay by the three orders of society working in tandem to keep governed society from falling into utter disarray at the hands of cosmic chaos. Every corner of life was infused with agency, from crowded towns and shared beds to spiritual beings holding sway over material elements. In this deeply spiritual world, the idea that God did not exist was almost impossible to entertain.¹

Contrary to the medieval world, the modern one feels utterly devoid of God. While survey results continue to identify even secular Europe as a set of loosely “Christian” nations, sociological studies and the findings of recent data-driven analysis suggest we do not live as Christians. It is not just nominalism either: in America, over 40 million adults have left the church in the last generation. There are a number of different accounts for why Christianity is shrinking in the West. What no one disagrees with, however, is the fact that it is occurring and that it is largely driven by unbelief.

It is here that Joseph Minich, in his Bulwarks of Unbelief: Atheism and Divine Absence in a Secular Age (Lexham Press, 2023), makes a compelling argument that the current widespread feeling of divine absence driving modern unbelief is not a necessary state of affairs but a historically contingent outcome. By comparing the material conditions which shape the modern world with those of the pre-modern, Minich argues that specific shifts in work and family, which began in the industrial revolution and have accelerated in the modern age, have led to the widespread loss of belief in God by changing the very notion of what we think counts as real and plausible.

It is a rich and detailed argument that is unexpectedly hopeful. It has some significant implications for our practices of evangelism and how we should use apologetics in the life of the church. It also has strong explanatory power for many of the social and religious shifts we have seen in the last few decades, both at the local and corporate level. I will address some of these ideas toward the end of this review after summarizing the book.

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A Brief Summary

Bulwarks of Unbelief is split into four chapters, each representing a stage of a complex, cumulative argument. I will do my best to recount the major moves in each area, though it will hardly be exhaustive. If you are short on time, here is a brief summary of each chapter:

Chapter one evaluates the state of scholarship on the rise of unbelief in the modern age, providing context for its causes and arguing against the narrative that widespread atheism was a necessary outcome of either philosophy or history.

Chapter two argues that the rise of specific features of the modern world, what he calls technoculture—the concrete historical and cultural usage of technology that shapes a human being and his or her relationships with the self, others, and the world—is strongly correlated with the rise of felt divine absence, which suggests a possible causal relationship between the two.

Chapter three argues the shifts in the modern world around work, family, and nature have changed our understanding of being—our ontological outlook—such that our basic experience of the world is one in which everything is devoid of divine or immaterial agency, the greatest of which is God and his activity.

The most important of these shifts, which are discussed in both chapter two and three, are our general alienation from labor and the evaporation of thick community and family relationships that used to make reality feel as if it contained other agents which we could not avoid and had to deal with directly. Our new modern conditions warp our view of the world, making it seem as if we are under the control of impersonal forces over which we have no influence. Everything seems like meaningless, manipulable matter.

Chapter four addresses the implications of this argument for the practice of Christianity from a classically Reformed perspective, to render orthodox belief more substantive and mature. The state of the world makes it very difficult to be a nominal Christian. Accepting these limitations allows us to discern how best to hold to our convictions while modifying our faith formation and evangelism to meet the conditions driving unbelief. Critical among these recommendations is a call to radical self-giving love, a hospitality of the kind that generates the thick community bonds which make God plausible.

Chapter One

Chapter one might be best described as a genealogy of modernity. It includes a taxonomy of atheism that evaluates the current state of scholarship on the historical context and specific causes of the rise of modern secularism. There are two major schools of thought here. The first is that atheism arose as a conflict of ideas. There were always atheists, it is claimed, but they were suppressed. Eventually the intellectual superiority of secular arguments were allowed to shine forth and destroy the religious nonsense that formerly shackled our minds. Where once God explained, science is now the great explainer. (As the mathematician Laplace apocryphally quipped regarding God, “I have no need for that hypothesis.”)

It is a familiar account, but, as Minich argues, largely rejected as false among scholars. This mode of interacting with the world has a way of distorting the historical record for both Christians and atheists: Minich points out that with the rise of Darwin’s scientific work, most orthodox theologians responded not with hostility, but with the desire to account for these advances in light of revealed revelation. Drawing on a wide body of current scholarship, Minich claims there was no contest between the two:

In point of fact, many orthodox theologians saw no threat even to the book of Genesis in Darwin’s contentions—drawing on many ancient exegetical foundations as well as a host of related disciplines to align the content of both special and general revelation with one another (which, contrary to the popular narrative, has been the usual move when such tensions arose in ecclesiastical history).²

Minich’s point is not so much that these popular narratives are wrong (even though they are!) but that the history of the rise of atheism shows that it was not a necessary one, either intellectually or historically. This is the second school of thought, which rejects the “conflict narrative” in favor of different explanations. The most prominent of these is Charles Taylor’s magisterial A Secular Age, which occupies a significant portion of chapter one. Taylor’s work is difficult to summarize, but it can be considered as a project which tries to understand how it is the West went from a medieval world in which God’s existence was not just thought to be true in an intellectual sense, but felt to be obvious in an almost visceral way, to a world in which even Christians admit to feeling as if daily existence is so often without divine presence or purpose. In other words, Taylor’s account tries to show that while we can still believe in the same Christianity as of the past, that belief will not be felt or experienced in the same way.

The first chapter of A Secular Age is called “Bulwarks of Belief,” and in it Taylor identifies some of the main features that made belief in God an obvious, felt part of the medieval experience. The influence on the title of Minich’s book should be obvious, and this is the point of departure for Bulwarks of Unbelief. What are the main drivers of modernity that make unbelief as plausible as belief was in the pre-modern world? Here Minich diverges from Taylor in some significant ways. I won’t detail the full argument, but here is the gist: Taylor’s account can explain the loss of belief in ecclesial structures but not quite the loss of belief in God. In other words, if we keep only to Taylor’s account, there is no explanation for why the advance of secularism did not just terminate at anti-clericalism, ditching priests and pastors for an individualized Christianity or even latent deism. Instead, our culture has aggressively internalized atheism. We don’t even feel as if God is a plausible idea.

Chapter Two

This chapter concerns the correlation between widespread atheism and the rise of what Minich terms technoculture, the concrete historical and cultural usage of technology that shapes a human being and his or her relationships with the self, others, and the world.

In terms of its history, Minich argues that until around 1860, atheism existed primarily among certain cultural elites, and arose usually after a period of sustained reflection, suggesting it was not an obvious conclusion.³ From 1860 to 1960, unbelief rose among the urban working classes. However, it continued to exist in an equilibrium with religious belief until about 1960, when belief began to evaporate during what we otherwise consider a material golden age among the middle class.

These religious shifts occurred at the same time as major social developments in four areas: technology, urbanity, economy, and labor. Most of these shifts will be familiar to those who have studied industrialization. But central to Minich’s argument is the premise that our ordinary experience of reality explains our behavioral and belief tendencies.⁴ This explains why the urban working classes lost religion before the middle class, which was largely insulated from the technological and labor shifts of industrialization until the 1960’s and experienced them differently than their lower class counterparts.

This places Bulwarks of Unbelief squarely in the phenomenological tradition. This is a philosophical school that descends largely from 20th C. German philosopher Martin Heidegger, one of the most important in the last century. Phenomenology as a discipline is concerned primarily with the way things are experienced and the objects related to that experience. And so Minich writes:

The sense in which I seek to offer an interpretation [of human behavior], then, is in trying to creatively imagine and articulate a theoretical and phenomenological account of “what it is like” to be otherwise, and (most importantly) how it is that the lived world(s) that we are analyzing gives rise to one or the other…

Much of nineteenth-century unbelief was consciously motivated by moral revulsion to Christianity or to the church. But the plausibility of atheism in relation to such moral critique could be suspended atop an already experienced world where God’s being was felt to be a necessary ineradicable feature. To dispense with God, then, God has to seem dispensable as a theoretical and practical concept in the first place. And it is a shift in the latter structure that I seek to illuminate.⁵

The nature of this shift is important to Minich’s argument (and has important implications for our approach to apologetics). He argues that the particular transition in unbelief from the 1860’s until the present “was not a transition from belief (say) in Aquinas’s five proofs and Aristotle’s four causes to belief in materialism and modern science.”⁶ It is rather a fundamental shift in our understanding of what the world is like, of what it means for something to be real. Critical to this is the agentic quality of the premodern world. People in that era were forced to interact with each other and, perhaps just as important, the world forced itself upon local communities. Unlike the modern era, in which nature is largely subjected to our technological prowess and we can choose to live alone at anytime, the premodern world felt as if agency was everywhere. “It is not surprising in such a lived context that God-discourse was a natural way of speaking about reality as such.”⁷

Chapter Three

The third section of Minich’s argument demonstrates that the rise of unbelief is not merely a correlation but directly caused by shifts in the industrial revolution. He draws on a variety of theorists in this chapter, including Jacques Ellul, Martin Heidegger, Karl Marx, and Herbert Marcuse.⁸

Ellul’s critique of technological progress is that a humanity tied to technology changes in essence to become one centered around technique. Furthermore, this technique becomes its own autonomous force, creating a culture of efficiency and control that affects all it touches. It flattens the world along a singular logical dimension. Finally, by placing us in an artificial environment, technology causes us to see the world as fundamentally alien to us. In Aristotelian terms, form and being become identical. The key impact on society is that we become unable to imagine that fundamental reality has agentic qualities. Everything is lifeless.

Heidegger’s critique of technology is similar. In his (incredible) essay, The Question Concerning Technology, he argues that technology changes the way we view the world, transforming the world into objects. I don’t think Minich cites this in his book, but in that essay Heidegger gives a fascinating example to demonstrate the way in which technology changes our view of the world (emphasis mine):

The hydroelectric plant is set into the current of the Rhine. It sets the Rhine to supplying its hydraulic pressure, which then sets the turbines turning. This turning sets those machines in motion whose thrust sets going the electric current for which the long-distance power station and its network of cables are set up to dispatch electricity. In the context of the interlocking processes pertaining to the orderly disposition of electrical energy, even the Rhine itself appears to be something at our command. The hydroelectric plant is not built into the Rhine River as was the old wooden bridge that joined bank with bank for hundreds of years. Rather, the river is dammed up into the power plant. What the river is now, namely, a water-power supplier, derives from the essence of the power station. In order that we may even remotely consider the monstrousness that reigns here, let us ponder for a moment the contrast that is spoken by the two titles: “The Rhine,” as dammed up into the power works, and “The Rhine,” as uttered by the art work, in Hölderlin's hymn by that name. But, it will be replied, the Rhine is still a river in the landscape, is it not? Perhaps. But how? In no other way than as an object on call for inspection by a tour group ordered there by the vacation industry.⁹

Marx’s argument is more fundamental.¹⁰ He believed humans were essentially laborers who make things. In capitalism, however, workers neither understand nor own the means of production, its tools, or its instruments. This is alienation from our labor and, on Marx’s account, from our very nature. If we are removed from enjoying our work (compare a factory worker pushing a button for eight hours a day with a farmer cultivating a fish pond or a garden of fruits and vegetables), then we are removed from experiencing the full measure of our humanity. The compensation for this alienation, of course, has been lots of material goods. However, this places our identity in the accumulation of material wealth.

Minich understands Marcuse’s critique as identifying a danger: he thinks technology can satisfy us in ways that undermine our humanity. It indoctrinates us into a consumerist mentality. This creates a one-dimensional view of the world in which everything is evaluated around consumption.

Using these philosophers, Minich argues that technology becomes for us what nature was for the previous generations, the background reality against which we judge all meaningful questions and actions. This revealed world is now:

• convenient — all problems can be solved by improved technology

• sanitized — we hide our factory farms in the same way we hide our retirement homes

• non-agentic — networks of trust have been dissolved in favor of faceless technological systems

This new view of the world necessarily frames the questions we ask. For Minich, this means that any answers to questions we ask must conform to a predictable, rational, and efficient order. In other words, no answer to any question can look like a person. Everything outside of technique or technology cannot be seen.¹¹

In the next part of chapter three,¹² Minich traces the changes in the perception of divine presence from antiquity to the late medieval era. He draws a strong contrast between how we view the world today and how ancient people did. For ancient people, and certainly in contrast to modern people, the city was viewed as the center of reality. Whereas the rest of reality was chaos, with the ocean as the highest form of disorder, the city was the place where order existed. This is because humans were a technology of the gods, created to bring about order in chaos.

Another implication of this worldview is that the world was not an ordered place. Unlike today, where we speak of a unified theory of physics, the ancient mindset did not believe it was possible to map the world outside of the city. The external non-city universe was not a total subject that could be manipulated in any meaningful way. At the foundation of this reality was vulnerability to chaos.

Minich then compares this view of the universe to the Hebrew and Greek traditions. In the Old Testament, the center of the universe was the earth, which was God’s cosmic temple. Here the universe is subject to God as an absolute agent. This creates the possibility of history (in the ancient world, “history” was viewed as cyclical!). Minich thinks this might have planted the seeds for viewing the world as a subject, something we could manipulate, rather than a kind of agent that did whatever it wished. To use a Thomstic model, the ancients prioritized pure potency to actuality, whereas the Hebrew tradition prioritized pure actuality to potentiality. Minich also treats ancient Greek philosophy, but (sadly) very briefly: it spoke of the world as a subject, in perhaps a proto-scientific way.

In the medieval world, the city was still associated with God and order. Yet as the late medieval age gave way to industrialization, the world moved from one of enchanted agencies to manipulable machine parts. Minich argues that the preconditions necessary for a loss of an enchanted world were changes in how society viewed the city, due to historical circumstances:

• The break up of the Holy Roman Empire into religiously varied city-states meant that unity was no longer along religious dimensions (such as the medieval conception of the Kingdom of God) but thereafter centered around shared temporal interests

• Bacon’s scientific method led to viewing nature as an instrument. This also led to huge advances in science and medicine and an optimism in human progress (no longer are we fundamentally vulnerable to nature)

• The city was no longer just for individuals but humanity as a whole (which necessarily included non-Christians who did not share views of the common good!)

• Nature became sentimentalized, not just in terms of greater empathy for animals, but such that in the Romantic period, it became a (the?) locus of God’s presence

• Eventually, however, nature came to be viewed through the same lens as the city: as a diminished mode of blind mechanical processes

Minich argues that the driving force behind the changing view of the city and nature as a whole was not predictability—the adoption and growth of science—but the shift in human control over nature.¹³ This reduces what is real to what is manipulable. “The least personal aspects of reality become the only realms of concern and care for us.”¹⁴

In any case, it is my claim that this is a large part of why atheism, for instance, and an urbanized modernity are highly correlated. It is here that one can move around in a world that has been controlled for the human and that consequently forecloses the experience of agency that has classically reinforced the notion of God by making personhood seem like a fundamental property of all being. This is especially the case by the 1960’s, by which time the majority of those living in the West experienced lifestyle comforts that were historically unimaginable to their ancestors just a few generations before.¹⁵

Minich then moves to discuss the active dimensions of our involvement with reality. He argues that we project ourselves onto others and the world rather than treating the world as alien to us. I did not completely understand this section, but I think Minich is arguing that, despite all the appearances of personal agency in a world where we are drowning in artificial, human made goods and environments, the manner in which we engage the world is still irreducibly impersonal. This is due to the nature of the work we do and the products we consume, all of which are mass marketed and mass produced with no real sense of connection at the personal level. The world around us is the product of systems we don’t understand that act beyond us and without regard for our desires. Furthermore, our interactions with others are largely through dependence on impersonal networks of experts that we engage with based on their given utility. All this reduces the people we interact with to material to be manipulated by technology. Digital technology has only increased this feature of the modern world, where we can easily block people on social media or refuse to answer a phone call. (A related phenomena is using the automobile to drive to a different church if you don’t like the one you currently attend.)

This is deeply problematic because, quoting Sennett, “We become particularly interested in the things we can change.”¹⁶ (If we do not believe we can change our circumstances or other people, we will have no interest in them!)

Minich also makes the provocative claim that Christians tend to treat atheism as something to be refuted rather than a way of seeing the world.¹⁷

(The chapter covers some other important subjects, including a discussion of film and Heidegger’s ontological turn, which are too dense for this review, but will certainly be of interest to scholars of culture and philosophy.)

Chapter Four

In the final chapter, Minich critiques modern responses to these trends while offering an alternative path from a confessionally Reformed perspective.

Minich believes many modern attempts to recalibrate our spiritual direction are ultimately bourgeois and boutique. These coping strategies fall into a few main categories. The first is the conservative impulse to undo the modern order, trying to turn back the clock or at least slow “progress.” These movements attempt to recapture or emphasize a specific kind of intellectual tradition of the West that underimagines the future. The second direction, progressivism, tries to take modern anxiety and transmute it into a unrealized good. This depends on a technocratic future that overimagines the future and papers over real problems or felt needs.

The problem with each view, Minich argues, is an improper orientation toward either the past or the future. For the conservative bent, if enchantment is supposed to solve our problems and the past was enchanted, then the results are decidedly underwhelming. (Think of widespread belief in God in the Old Testament. It hardly led to a sinless paradise!) The implicit optimism of the progressive direction seems to avoid dealing with the problems that might arise by blindly discarding those elements of history that ground us. In both cases, the problem is fundamentally the same in that it arises from the general disorientation of the modern world. We are no longer able to ground ourselves in history and this forecloses the possibility of creating a space that exists with both a shared history and a promising future—what we would otherwise call a home.

Minich believes a better frame is Martin Luther’s Two Kingdoms paradigm.¹⁸ The basic idea is that there are two simultaneous, interrelated modes of human existence. These modes, or kingdoms, are: (1) the spiritual kingdom where man is bound only to God, and (2) the earthly kingdom that treats our obligations to neighbors and authorities. Only a Christianity that is concrete and whole can successfully navigate these two realms.

Critical to this navigation is what Minich calls “Acts of Remembrance.” These are a set of intellectual, liturgical, or life strategies that are designed to reorient us away from the sense of materialistic meaninglessness inherent in modern technoculture. This takes a variety of forms:

First, we must revisit classical arguments for and about the nature of God and his being as well as our primal created freedom in relation to God. The goal is to understand that our mode of existence is primarily historical, contingent on God sustaining our existence. (We are not meaningless matter, even if everything in our modern world suggests we are.)

Second, we must understand our freedom as created beings. God intends for us to enjoy free and meaningful work. We were created to form order out of disorder. This limits the claims of others—the state, family, and law must all respect this freedom to labor freely and meaningfully. Of course, modern society does not do this. Most of us are alienated from our labor, unable to cultivate much and removed from “primal access” to nature.¹⁹

Third, knowing what we can change is essential to making good changes. Although we are meant to be free and have meaningful work, the “ancient exile” of the garden of Eden means there are limits to how much we can fix modern alienation. Altering the modern order to give us a common purpose and a common history is good, but there is an extent to which we must wait for God to resolve what we cannot resolve.

Fourth, we must make a commitment to living outside of ourselves. This manifests in generous hospitality, one purpose of which is to try and recreate some of the thick, overlapping networks of trust that are necessary to reorient our view of reality. (In other words, when new people show up to your church, find ways to enmesh them in your lives. On this measure, deep, meaningful hospitality is a way in which we can reflect divine reality into an otherwise godless world.)

Minich thinks extracting ourselves from the modern condition will be very difficult. This is because we no longer have any shared public sphere or common frame of reference from which to engage in collective action.²⁰ I won’t list them here, but Minich offers an interesting set of ten hypotheses of what would be necessary to restore corporate responsibility and allow for collective action.

The question the human race has yet to answer is whether it is possible for the late modern technological order to sustain the feeling that one is part of a local, national, and global (not to mention cosmic) economy—extended out from the primal site of home as concentric circles of home.²¹

Finally, and perhaps most helpfully, Minich offers a reason for why God would allow this period of sustained divine absence. Drawing on Bonhoeffer, our current era of divine silence should be interpreted as a time of testing. It is an opportunity to mature in our faith, as a child matures into an adult. Framed this way, Minich sees three possible responses: (1) retreating to childhood immaturity (a “conservative” option), (2) rejecting the authority of our parents (a “progressive” approach), and (3) standing critically within one’s heritage. Quoting Bonhoeffer:

But the principle of the Middle Ages is heteronomy in the form of clericalism; a return to that can be a counsel of despair, and it would be at the cost of intellectual honesty. It’s a dream that reminds one of the song O wüsst’ ich doch den Weg zurück, den weiten Weg ins Kinderland [“Oh, I wish I knew the way back, the long way into childhood.”] There is no such way…the only way is that of Matt. 18:3, i.e. through repentance, through ultimate honesty. And we cannot be honest unless we recognize that we have to live in the world etsi deus non daretur [“as if God did not exist”]. And this is just what we do recognize—before God! God himself compels us to recognize it. So our coming of age leads us to a true recognition of our situation before God.²²

Minich critically appropriates this metaphor and applies it to our current situation:

In my judgment, the best way to capture our age is to say that we are faced with the malady of young adulthood. Apart from our will…we have been kicked out of the house of our cultural childhood into a state of both increased dependence and increased interdependence.²³

Though the shifts of modernity create enormous amounts of anxiety (as, for example, the endless discussions around the three worlds hypothesis indicate), Minich treats it as an opportunity:

Atheism is the natural manner in which the world manifests itself when humans have been alienated from it and from their history. And humans are alienated especially from the latter when they are un-homed in their participation in the human project. These three—our alienation from our labor, our loss of history, and the decline of theism—share a history. And what evaporates in our sense of imposed agency is any default at-home-ness and engagement with the world. What is demanded, therefore, is a more willful posture toward reality. Via participation in the history of the kingdom of God as it irrupted (in Christ) and irrupts itself into the world, the Christian finds himself caught up in the history in which all persons already participate via ordinary calling (as animated by love). The kingdom of God, then, is not a mere surrogate of what has been lost but the primal history that it never was—that impels the Christian to echo its life into and to cultivate those histories that are suspended in it. To cultivate the world in this way is to cultivate a world in which classical theism is plausible and atheism is not—because it is a world in which we are once again at home in our own nature. Only this time, the will had to choose what was recognized by the mind despite felt and sometimes tempting alternatives. In other words, we had to grow up.²⁴

In his conclusion, Minich notes that this isn’t the first time God has seemingly (!) disappeared from history. There were several periods in the Old Testament where God made promises only to remain silent for hundreds of years.²⁵

Minich closes the book with a call to loving our neighbors. This is “the highest mode of our dominion, the most immediate way we can participate in history.”²⁶

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Endurance in the Age of Divine Absence

There is a great deal to be said about Minich’s fascinating book. Here are some general observations:

I found the shift from belief to phenomenology enlightening. If Minich is right, then our approach to Christian formation must change. If divine absence arises from our current material conditions, and it looks like our material conditions are unlikely to change in the near future, it is no longer sufficient to treat faith formation or evangelism as merely arguing for or against certain propositions. We might deploy all sorts of arguments in defense of God, Christ, and the general reliability of God’s Word. And these arguments are often right. (I don’t know of an intellectual defeater to the classical ontological argument or good arguments against evidentiary or historical defenses of the Resurrection grounded in works by N.T. Wright, Bauckham, or Habermas.) But clearly these do not generally lead to conversions. Many Christians hold these arguments as true and fall away anyway, not because their intellectual positions were refuted by ideas but because the only difference between their experience of the local church and the modern world is that the former demands you forfeit your Sundays for an hour long sermon sitting next to people you have nothing in common with. And so they turn to sins that promise a sense of meaning and fulfillment (or a dulling of pain), that are otherwise absent in our disconnected world of mass production and rampant loneliness.

This is probably unfair, but I have come to see the modern apologetics industry as operating in a way that mirrors the New Atheists it was geared to defeat. I am not saying atheism is true or that Christian apologetics are wrong. But both ideological movements are just that—ideological in believing that it is ideas on which the world turns, where almost no attention is paid to material conditions. The remarkably rapid decline of “the four horsemen of the apocalypse” in the face of the new gender paradigm and the total inability of apologetic arguments to give someone the felt presence of God suggests the plausibility structures that drive human understanding and behavior lie outside of ideas.

A digital piece I finished over the summer, where I painted over a 3d model I made in Blender. I was trying to replicate a reference image that drew on the imposing, impersonal structures in some of Zdzisław Beksińsk’s work. Coincidentally, it fits with many of the themes of alienation and disenchantment in Bulwarks of Unbelief.

Phenomenological arguments are difficult to evaluate. As Minich acknowledges in his work, there is a sense in which they are self-evident and thus ultimately subject to lived experience. The first time I read Heidegger’s essay The Question Concerning Technology I felt as if his argument was obviously true. It seems undeniable that technology treats the world as an exploitable resource and that in continuously using technology we enter a mode of living that conditions us to take on a technological view of the world, treating nature and people as a manipulable resource whose purposes are ultimately subject to our own. This is probably the weakest area of Minich’s monograph, not because it was poorly argued, but because it is (almost?) a category error to deploy arguments to convince those who feel otherwise about the nature of reality. Either a picture of the world resonates with you or it does not. The only question then is whether it is well presented.²⁷

If the structure of the modern world renders arguments insufficient (again, they are important, but not by themselves), then I take the most promising feature of Minich’s “acts of remembrance” to be active hospitality. One of (the late) Tim Keller’s favorite sermon illustrations was about a woman who decided to attend Redeemer Presbyterian after an act of kindness from a superior at work. She had made a serious blunder at her job. However, her superior decided to take the blame for it. Given his position, it would be a small hit to his credibility, and he would rather take a small hit than see her career derailed. The woman was shocked that someone would act this way in hyper-competitive New York City and pressed at his motivations. He demurred, but she continued and eventually he acknowledged it was because he was a Christian and that the work of Christ for him motivated his generosity toward others.

On Minich’s framework, here is an instance where the plausibility of Christianity became real to someone. Against the cutthroat competitive world of the Manhattan professional classes, which makes coworkers treat each other as threats and resources to be used to forward their own careers, here was a relational act that denied the usual way of the world. Suddenly, the idea of other-centered love became a live possibility.

I think hospitality is the most important practical way we can reintroduce the plausibility of God. I don’t think most Christian churches prioritize this, even though it is commanded for both the laity and elders (Romans 12:13, 1 Timothy 3:2). My experiences of multiple small groups since moving to Atlanta have been universally negative. This has not always been due to personality clashes, but they all dissolved at the same point every secular group does: when things became inconvenient. I won’t complain about this anymore save that I genuinely believe churches that do not work extremely hard to promote deep community will soon dissolve. This cannot be built on a scaffolding of lazy programs and activities centered on bland lectures or mediocre food. The world has much better production values, better content, and better cuisine. But the features of the modern world as outlined by Minich mean it does not have the resources to provide meaningful friendship and sustained relational presence, the kind that is offered despite inconvenience or exhaustion.

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Despite its rich content, I cannot recommend the work without qualification. Unfortunately, as Minich has joked elsewhere, Bulwarks of Unbelief is a “slightly more readable reworking of [his] dissertation.” While an abstruse style is one of the defining features of the great works of phenomenology, it does nothing to make it accessible to pastors and laypersons on the frontlines of secularization wondering how to understand and respond to ever shrinking church attendance. I sometimes had to reread paragraphs of the book and occasionally found myself taking ten minutes to read a page. (There are also a handful of difficult terms used without much explanation, such as poiesis, which in the context of Heidegger means a “bringing forth” or creation, or another term, forum, used in an slightly esoteric manner.) Again, this book was well worth the time and effort. I am just not sure the kinds of people who need the ideas presented here can make it through the work in its current form.

It’s a bit rich for me to make concrete suggestions. After all, Minich has his PhD and is successfully published—two ambitions I also had earlier in life but failed to accomplish. My only suggestion is finding a way to create a short booklet or essay version of Bulwarks of Unbelief with an editor who has a talent for translating academese into prose consistent with lay Christian vernacular.

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For those in the West, God is a question asked by religion and answered by silence. Given the trends in urbanization and digital technologies, especially the rapid developments in artificial intelligence, there is no reason to think these can be reversed. Our sense of divine absence is likely to remain and even intensify. Minich’s Bulwarks of Unbelief provides an insightful diagnostic that will orient us during this experience of divine silence. Following Minich’s call to remembrance will help us take up a posture of hope rather than a posture of fear as we continue through this time of testing and mature in our faith.

Bulwarks of Unbelief can count itself in that diminutive class of books that has changed the way I see the world. I will be reflecting on it for a long time.

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Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand, and place it in my side. Do not disbelieve, but believe.”

Thomas answered him, “My Lord and my God!”

Jesus said to him, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”

-John 20:27-28

1. It isn’t just conceptual differences that distance us from the medieval era. Until the modern age, people used to enjoy biphasic sleep—sleep was divided into two phases. It seems everyone would awake after what was called the “first sleep” and then return to bed for the “second sleep.” (This also explains how monks could get up in the middle of the night to pray. This wasn’t hardcore religious fervor; it was just part of the natural sleep schedule.) The material conditions of continuous light have changed even something as basic as our sleep.

2. Bulwarks of Unbelief, 32.

3. Ibid., 72ff.

4. Ibid., 76.

5. Ibid., 98-99.

6. Ibid., 100.

7. Ibid.

8. Ibid., 104ff.

9. The Question Concerning Technology, 5, PDF file (accessed 9/6/2023).

10. Bulwarks of Unbelief, 115ff.

11. Ibid., 125.

12. Ibid., 134ff.

13. Ibid., 146.

14. Ibid., 148.

15. Ibid.

16. Ibid., 155.

17. Ibid., 180.

18. Ibid., 190ff.

19. Ibid., 199.

20. Ibid., 210.

21. Ibid., 223.

22. Ibid., 236.

23. Ibid., 237.

24. Ibid., 256-57.

25. Ibid., 264ff.

26. Ibid., 272-274.

27. Minich draws a large body of traditional and spoken art forms—poetry, literature, plays, and films—to demonstrate the increased sense of divine absence. I would suggest another one too: computer games. Many people play games to gain a sense of mastery and control absent in their own lives, and to interact directly and for long periods of time with other agentic forces. Trailers for survival crafting games hint at epic encounters with the unknown, filled with wild beasts and untamed wilderness. The center of these games is learning to survive in a wilderness and eventually master it, building and defending a home, transforming it into a thriving base. In other forms, they sometimes issue scathing social commentary, such as the unrelenting emptiness of the American dream present throughout Grand Theft Auto V, especially in the character of Michael DeSanta, a successful bank robber suffering a midlife crisis. I am not about to write a paean to these forms of escapism, especially since the industry routinely takes advantage of people with crippling gambling addictions. But their attraction seems to reinforce Minich’s thesis.