Seculosity: How Career, Parenting, Technology, Food, Politics, and Romance Became Our New Religion and What to Do about It

by David Zahl

For instance, as sanctuaries in Europe have emptied, folkloric beliefs have thrived. A majority of Icelanders claim to believe in hidden creatures like elves and about a third of Austrians in lucky charms (not the cereal). Half of Sweden gives credence to mental telepathy. According to AppStore downloads, millennials in the United States are increasingly enamored of astrology.

Tempting as occult belief systems such as these may be, this book sets out to look at how the promise of salvation has fastened onto more everyday pursuits like work, exercise, and romance—and how it’s making us anxious, lonely, and unhappy.

Perhaps a more helpful definition of religion comes from writer David Dark. He calls it “a controlling story” or “the question of how we dispose our energies, how we see fit to organize our...

Because religion in real life is more than a filter or paradigm. It is what we lean on to tell us we’re okay, that our lives matter, another name for all the ladders we spend our days climbing toward a dream of wholeness. It refers to our preferred guilt-management system. Our small-r religion is the justifying story of our life. Ritual and community and all the other stuff come second.

Our religion is that which we rely on not just for meaning or hope but enoughness.

Listen carefully and you’ll hear that word enough everywhere, especially when it comes to the anxiety, loneliness, exhaustion, and division that plague our moment to such tragic proportions. You’ll hear about people scrambling to be successful enough, happy enough, thin enough, wealthy enough, influential enough, desired enough, charitable enough, woke enough, good enough. We believe instinctively that, were we to reach some benchmark in our minds, then value, vindication, and love would be ours—that if we got enough, we would be enough.

Instead, “people are suffering and dying under the torture of the fantasy self they’re failing to become.”

The theological and psychological term for the energy we expend for the sake of feeling righteous is self-justification, and it cannot be overstated as a motivation in human affairs.

The most public Christian you know may be just as ensconced in various forms of seculosity as anyone else. It doesn’t make their belief necessarily insincere. It’s simply evidence that they are subject to the same conflicting temptations and fears as you are. Your author certainly is.

You don’t need a clever meme to deduce this. Just ask the next person you see how they’re doing. The stock reply used to be “fine” or “well.” Today, there’s a very good chance they’ll respond with “busy.”

It sounds like I’m complaining about the super abundance of activity, when in truth I actually prefer it that way. Idleness makes me far more uncomfortable than busyness, a blank to-do list considerably more nerve-wracking than an overstuffed one. What would it mean about me if I didn’t have enough commitments to fill my schedule? Nothing good, that’s for sure.

To be busy is to be valuable, desired, justified. It signals importance and, therefore, enoughness. Busy is not just how we are but who we are—or who we’d like to be.

In other words, pathological busyness is not confined to the streets of Manhattan or the LA freeway. Even among what used to be called “the leisure class,” busyness now serves as a barometer of personal enoughness and, therefore, justification.

Busyness has become a virtue in and of itself.

Unremitting busyness reliably predicts chronic stress, and therefore heart disease, sleeplessness, higher blood pressure, and shorter life spans, to say nothing of general fatigue.

Well, talk to any marriage counselor and they will tell you that worse than anger or guilt in marriage is weariness. That’s when the relationship is really on the rocks, when you’re too tired to fight, or no longer see the point of another attempt at rapprochement. The same can be true when it comes to your relationship with yourself.

by a “busier than thou” attitude, in which people unconsciously (or not) compete over who has more going on. The religious language (“thou”) is no accident.

“keeping up with the Joneses now means trying to out-schedule them.” Busyness has become a status symbol, a.k.a. a public display of enoughness.

performancism, one of the hallmarks of all forms of seculosity.

Performancism is the assumption, usually unspoken, that there is no distinction between what we do and who we are. Your resumé isn’t part of your identity; it is your identity. What makes you lovable, indeed what makes your life worth living, is your performance at X, Y, or Z. Performancism holds that if you are not doing enough, or doing enough well, you are not enough. At least, you are less than those who are “killing it.”

Performancism turns life into a competition to be won (#winning) or a problem to be solved, as opposed to, say, a series of moments to be experienced or an adventure to relish. Performancism invests daily tasks with existential significance and turns even menial activities into measures of enoughness. The language of performancism is the language of scorekeeping, and just like the weight scale or the calendar, it knows no mercy. When supercharged by technology, the result can even be deadly.

We just call it a cleanse now—which only makes our motivation more transparent. We are cleaning out our insides, purging the toxins, purifying our systems