From the vantage-point of the late twentieth century, there is a certain irony in being invited to consider whether there will be a rise in religion in the twenty-first Century. Wasn't the twentieth century, after all, going to frame its endeavours within the four corners of Nietzsche's observation that "God is dead"? Consider all the pundits, scientists, philosophers, and even theologians who filled this century with confident assertions that religion had had its day and that the twentieth century itself would see God out. Well, it didn't and they have been proven wrong. In fact, let us for a moment take a brief look at what this century "without God" has shown us about attempts to conduct our affairs without attention to God.

First, it has brought unrivalled bloodshed and the rise of the widespread human holocaust as evidenced in the gulags of the Soviets, the "camps" of National Socialism, the eradication of all "intellectual" Cambodians by the Khmers Rouges, the ongoing horrors of China's laogai (forced "labour and reform" centres), and, virtually everywhere, the disposable unborn. Each movement came to see certain humans as "other", or as "threats". Once seen this way they quickly became inconvenient and then dispensable. Second, consider the squandering of technological possibilities (what could television, increased food production, and all the medical advances really have accomplished had they not been usurped by "the invisible hands" of "pure" commercial interests cut off from moral vision?). Third, this century's increase in psychic collapse and relational fragmentation (a 300 percent increase in teen suicides in Canada from the 1950s to the 1990s, for example) and, at the century's close, a seeming slide towards euthanasia and a general loss of confidence amongst political theorists as to whether "liberalism" itself is anything but a mask for power interests. It is clear that we are required to re-examine the assumption that intellectual godlessness is, in fact, next to intellectual cleanliness. As Dostoyevsky understood, it appears that if we think we can leave God out of things then "anything is possible." Religious movements can go and often have gone wrong but atheism means never having to say you are sorry.

It seems likely that in some near future humankind will have to rediscover the fact that there cannot be social life without an acknowledged place for God. This is because of the religious nature of how we live: all of us. We will worship something-whether, to use the older language, it is God or Mammon. There is simply no such place as a "godless" sphere. Whether that God is our own ego, career, orgasms, bank account(s), celebrity, or the State, there is something or someone in a place of ultimacy-that is, God (or gods or the goddess) and our common life will bear the marks of the type of worship we share.

The movement towards God on the personal and cultural levels is complex but must be dealt with: avoidance ("but I'm not a spiritual or religious person") is just dealing with it in a very superficial and incomplete way.

Realizing this, we then ask how sufficient a notion of God we have. Here is where the twenty-first century will have, relatively speaking, much the same job as any century but may have the advantage over the twentieth century of the death, not of God, but of the idea of the godless. "Let us compare gods together" could become the most useful set of explanations and exchanges we could hear. For there are many people open to the transcendent, whether it be something as banal as the power of crystals or some of the many syncretistic attempts to create a more palatable religion amidst the chaos of pluralistic societies. But it is here that we see the weakness of many types of religious commitment at the end of the twentieth century. Many are no longer able to "give a reason for the faith that is in them" because they have lost faith in the necessary place of reason and may also have lost the reasons for faith. These twin problems, of epistemology and apologetics, are the cause of much of the inability of contemporary religion to reach contemporary men and women (inside or outside their own four walls).

Many religious believers today are, like Milton's Satan, "vaunting aloud yet wracked with deep despair". Trees need their roots to be planted deep if they are to flourish and there are many signs that the waving branches of many aspects of contemporary religion are, too often, on trees that have lost their roots. The replacement of "virtues" language with the language of "values" by most Christians, who seem oblivious to what is lost by the exchange, is an indication how far outside of the whole tradition contemporary Christianities have wandered. The belief that "Grace perfects nature" has been replaced with the notion of a Grace that operates somehow outside of, or in spite of, nature itself. That God, in fact, loves the world is still a startling and unpalatable fact for far too many who claim to love God.

Will there be an upsurge of religion in the twenty first century? Perhaps. But what form will the contemporary worship of "unknown gods" take? Making the State itself an ultimate is to divinize the State and is, therefore, but another "form" of religion. Will religious people learn the arguments for their faiths and the so-called "non-religious" begin to see that they have gods of whatever sort? This will, in part, also depend on religious people and their communities being much more aware of the extent to which they worship the gods of the age in how they now live. But it is increasingly clear that the worship of only "unknown" gods gives little guidance for faith, hope, or charity and these are needed in every century.

Iain Benson is a lawyer, writer, and lecturer living on Bowen Island, B.C. In addition to practising administrative and constitutional law, he is the senior research fellow at the Centre for Renewal in Public Policy, Ottawa.