The prospects for many religions seem very bright indeed, particularly outside of Western Europe and North America. For example, Christianity is booming around the equator, according to Terry Rigelhof in Blue Boy in a Black Dress; and the trend everywhere is toward Pentecostal forms of worship. Who can deny the signs of a vast burgeoning in every region and denomination of the faithful? But this is not in my view tantamount to saying that the twenty-first century will be "an age of religious revival".

There is no reason to doubt that religion in all its aspects, constructive or destructive, is going to go on and on. But with the advent of gradual maturation of constitutional liberal democracy into a bureaucratic substitute for community and collective culture, the social status and meaning of religion have shifted irrevocably. Although the urgency of the instincts which fuel religion is never likely to abate, the context in which they play out their social melodramas has changed drastically. Religion is no longer realistically conceivable as the ultimate containing form of social life. It has become one of its cultural contents, one of the many things happening in a vast and seething sea of market economics and cultural politics. No matter how ubiquitous and aggressive the social manifestations of religious feeling may become in the next century (think for example of the sudden escalation of ritualized ressentiment after the death of Lady Di), it does seem unlikely that any religion could resurrect itself to the point of becoming once again a universal social form. That function has been taken over by legalistic liberalism, the rule of law, and the entrenched principles of habeas corpus, due process, freedom of conscience, freedom of communication, equal opportunity, and so on. To a variable extent, liberal democracies both create and reflect this novel circumstance of social relativity. Under these conditions, religion like everything else must be satisfied to compete in a game which has no final winner. In functional terms, it is now just another commodity, another social or political trend, another "lifestyle choice" to be wondered about and polled and televised and marketed but never absolutely embraced because-thank God-we are now protected by Constitutional Law even from our own deepest wishes.

So unless there occurs a spectacular historical somersault, in which all traces of liberalism are wiped from the annals of the cultural evolution, traditional religion is doomed, no matter how popular it becomes. This is not because we shall eventually conquer the unconscious through science, as Freud thought, but because we are recontextualizing human irrationality into increasingly manageable fragments of public administration or personal responsibility. Religion survives and prospers, but only provided it is able to renounce its dearest temptation: the enforcement of certainty through intellectual control of subject populations. Those religious movements which insist on identifying themselves with the "nation" or the "people" will eventually go the way of fascism or communism, or of the religious cults which have been imitating them on a smaller scale, such as the Solar Temple in the Laurentians. As we know only too well, those which do not in the end self-destruct will eventually turn their aggression onto their neighbours, usually during an ecstatic moment of collective folly. As in the past, they will have to be beaten into submission through bloody wars and harsh containment policies.

Christianity was itself once a dangerous suicide cult. It was so subversive it even tried to undermine human procreation. Some of the early fathers like Origen castrated themselves, so as to give an encouraging example for hastening the end of history and the Day of Judgement. The Book of Revelation is still an inspiration for extremist sects. But the official Church has long since tacitly accepted the fact of secular and commercial culture. Indeed, Christianity has been one of the more important ideological sources of modernity, not least for our belief in individual freedom (no less fictional than other faiths), and our progressive egalitarian politics, including universal suffrage, the abolition of slavery, and gender equality.

Islam also holds that all souls are equal. There is no reason why, after sorting out its internal tribal entanglements, Islam cannot follow the example of Christianity and Shintoism in working out some sort of accommodation with the principles of liberal democracy. We shall have to wait and see.

There was a time when religion, with its emphasis on orderly conduct and duty, may have represented the sanest and most civilized force in traditional societies. But the great asset of religion today is its steadfast commitment to the undeniable fact of human irrationality. People turn to religion because it speaks to the unconscious: it responds to the profound but embarrassing need for reassuring illusion in us all, and offers a framework within which the ferocity of ordinary daily dread and envy can be managed in a responsible way. In this regard, the semantics of traditional religious practice and of the modern psychoanalytic process of psychotherapy overlap significantly. The difference lies in their understanding of the human body. For psychoanalysis, there is no psychological alternative to the body. Symbolic elaboration of the body is hoped for, but transcendence of it is considered highly unlikely. Contrary to popular perception, psychoanalysis is not a form of salvation, and does not offer to take over responsibility for a person's life. The psychoanalysed individual is supposed, eventually, to bear his or her disillusionment privately, whereas religion, like the traditional cultures which are dissolving all around us, still offers safety through group identification. Religion also has the advantage of seeming to validate our primitive need to divide experience into good and evil. In contrast, psychoanalysis has a disquieting tendency to expose conventional morality as a defensive rationalization concealing the helpless feelings of dependency and frustration which inevitably carry over from early emotional development.

Charles Levin is a practising member of the Canadian Psychoanalytic Society, and also teaches in the Graduate Program in Communications, McGill University. His most recent book is Jean Baudrillard: A Study in Cultural Metaphysics (London, Prentice Hall).