It was hardly an opinion one expected to hear from Norman Mailer. “Religion to me is now the last frontier,” the writer said in a recent interview.

Those words are almost as surprising in their way as Václav Havel’s assertion last fall about today’s crisis of moral responsibility in this “first atheistic civilization in the history of humankind.” The crisis, he said, is the result of our loss of the feeling that “the universe, nature, existence, and our lives are the work of a creation guided by a definite intention.”

When Václav Havel and Norman Mailer, ripe with years and not known as particu-larly pious men, join in emphasizing the new importance of religion and evoke perspectives introduced into the literature of our time by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, you may be sure that the twenty-first century will be the most religious in five hundred years. A sea change in the realm of ideas makes this so.

Three Great Intellectual Struggles of the Twentieth Century

Of the three great intellectual struggles of the bloody century now passing, two have been resolved, while the reckoning on the third has been postponed.

The first challenge was political and took this form: Dictatorship is better for people, especially poor people, than democracy. That idea swept large portions of the globe until the dictators committed unspeakable abuses against humanity. While many dictators remain in power, no one today (except, perhaps, Castro) argues that dictatorship is the wave of the future.

The second challenge was economic: Socialism is better for poor people than capitalism. Having discovered the plight of the poor behind the iron curtain and the fraud that was “real existing socialism,” no practical person accepts that boast. Socialist countries are rushing to absorb capitalist insights, practices, and reforms, precisely to improve the economic conditions of their poverty-stricken populations.

But suppose that every country of the world succeeds in adopting a free political system and a free economic system. Then the third great challenge asserts itself: How, then, shall we live? How must we live to preserve free societies and to be worthy of the blood and the pain? That is the unfinished business of our century, and serious thinkers have begun to take it up.

Reason Standing Alone

Another reason that moral and religious questions have come to the fore is that, for some five centuries, a leading secular elite has held that moral questions can be resolved on the plane of reason alone. Some still believe that. But it has become ever more apparent that such a belief is only a belief, a faith, a kind of religion of its own. For who, looking at the butcher’s bench that was the twentieth century, finds it self-evident that reason is adequate to its own defense? that reason is in tune with nature, history, or even itself? Postmodernists, nihilists, and relativists have been assuring us that reason has no particular grip on reality. Against this onslaught, reason has not defended itself well. That inadequacy is the more apparent when one thinks, not of the rare individual, but of the whole social order, in all its teeming varieties of passion, ignorance, ambition, and talent.

Those reflections suggest why our present crisis is better described as religious, or at least as moral and religious, rather than simply as moral alone. For the underlying question is deeper than moral: Who are we? What may we hope for? Why are our sentiments about justice so strong? Why do we long for universal amity? Why should we trust reason? Why should we be moral, especially when no one is looking and no one is harmed and no one will ever know?

For the past five hundred years, something like the Enlightenment or “secular humanism” gave us answers to those questions that no longer seem adequate even to many who tried hard to be faithful to them. That is why so many far-seeing souls announce that we have come to the edge of the Enlightenment and are stepping forth into something new, untried, not yet transparent. To death, sin, manifest unreason, and the need for community, secular humanism has given us answers too thin and, in the end, untenable. Its attempt at mythical self-presentation—the figure of a lonely Prometheus, tough, stoic, brave against the darkness and the wind—is morally ambiguous. Nazi doctors shared it.

Religion and Human Nature

That brings us to the third reason for the rising preoccupation with religious questions.

Faith in reason alone had as its premise the belief that humans are not naturally religious but naturally irreligious. Therefore, to be religious was in some way to be alienated from oneself and to exhibit a form of weakness. The fearful might cling to a blanket or need a crutch but not the free and the brave, not the mature.

Today, however, the religious question arises most insistently among the most successful and the most powerful and not at their moments of weakness but precisely during their hours of greatest triumph—in the arts (Mailer), in politics (Havel), and in every other field. Just then, just when they have achieved everything they once thought would make them happy, they bump into their own finitude—and their infinite hunger. I have seen this happen to scores of my acquaintances and see it more and more frequently in books. “There must be more to it than this!” is the essential cry of the human heart.

In brief, some of the leading spirits of our age have begun to sense that humans are naturally religious. They have learned that to discover God one does not have to be driven down on all fours. That can and does happen; the prison literature of our time gives all too frequent testimony to it. (“Where is God? He is to be found more often today in the prisons than in the universities.”) Today it is often the brightest and the most able and the most fortunate who are becoming aware of their true nature. This very nature is singing to them of God.

For Americans especially, every return to first principles brings us back to convictions central to this republic. Why are we so ardent about the separation of church and state? Not because we are irreligious but precisely the opposite. Our founders knew, as we know, that the fundamental human drama occurs in the depths of every human will. Conscience is, therefore, the most sacred of all arenas. The free exercise of conscience is the first of all other liberties. In the words of Jefferson: “The God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time.”

Lord Acton, the great historian of liberty, held that the idea of liberty is coincident with the history of Judaism and Christianity. Without liberty, Judaism and Christianity are empty, just as they are empty if reason be destroyed.
Thus it is that Norman Mailer begins to speak tentatively and indirectly not merely of “religion” but of Judaism and Christianity. In those two traditions, reason and faith spring from the same stream. The death of either reason or liberty means death for them, too.

What about the prevailing atheism? To the third great question of the twenty-first century, is an atheistic answer possible? Of course it is, and it will continue to appear. But one thing has changed. It can no longer appear as an experiment yet to be tried, in a pose of grand rebellion. We have all been brought up under it; we have tested it; we know what is in it. At the heights of civilization, East and West, it represents the establishment.

Of the 5.8 billion persons on this planet, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica, 2 billion are Christians, about 1 billion are Muslim, another 1.5 billion are Hindu and Buddhist, 13 million are Jewish, and fewer than 900,000 are atheist. To argue that the atheist position is natural and the others illusory and false seems self-serving.

Science and Religion

Suppose, finally, that in the twenty-first century, the findings of scientists converge with the reflections of religious thinkers, particularly Jews and Christians, as they have not done for five hundred years. Suppose that scientists begin approaching religions in an empirical frame of mind, instead of adversarially, and begin to search out fruitful hypotheses in them, instead of trying to replace them with a rival Weltanschauung. Quietly, this already seems to be happening in practical spheres like medicine and in theoretical spheres like physics. Mutual respect sometimes goes a lot further than automatic hostility. In such a context, even conflict and disagreement bear great intellectual fruits, as all parties struggle to go deeper and to start again in a fresh way.

Last year, Václav Havel suggested that modern science grew up within the context of a surrounding Jewish and Christian culture, one of whose deepest convictions is that everything that is proceeds from insight and love—the active powers of one Creator—and thus is subject to fruitful inquiry: Everything is made to be understandable by those who have the wit to inquire. Inquiry is an altogether fitting response to the Creator.

We have come through a long and bloody century, and something new is stirring everywhere. It is none too soon.

Michael Novak, winner of the 1994 Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion, is the George Frederick Jewett Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. With his daughter Jana, he has written Tell Me Why: A Father Answers His Daughter’s Questions about God, which will be published in August by Pocket Books.