Seculosity Quotes

“Our addiction to control ends up controlling us.”
― David Zahl, Seculosity: How Career, Parenting, Technology, Food, Politics, and Romance Became Our New Religion and What to Do about It

“What the heart desires, the will chooses and the mind justifies.”
― David Zahl, Seculosity: How Career, Parenting, Technology, Food, Politics, and Romance Became Our New Religion and What to Do about It

“As my friend Sherry never tires of reminding me in regard to her fundamentalist upbringing, a culture dominated by outward demonstrations of piety will become an increasingly merciless place, full not only of self-justification but self-consciousness and fear. It will be a place that crucifies rather than forgives.”
― David Zahl, Seculosity: How Career, Parenting, Technology, Food, Politics, and Romance Became Our New Religion and What to Do about It

“Real love does not recoil at weakness. That is where it begins.”
― David Zahl, Seculosity: How Career, Parenting, Technology, Food, Politics, and Romance Became Our New Religion and What to Do about It

“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.”
― David Zahl, Seculosity: How Career, Parenting, Technology, Food, Politics, and Romance Became Our New Religion and What to Do about It

“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.”
― David Zahl, Seculosity: How Career, Parenting, Technology, Food, Politics, and Romance Became Our New Religion and What to Do about It

“It would be one thing if such scorekeeping worked, but it never has and never will, not where the heart is concerned. When one person’s gain equals the other’s loss, the relationship between them always suffers. We become competitors rather than teammates. Moreover, like a husband pointing out the dishes he’s done in order to leverage some gratitude from his wife, the second we harness our good deeds for credit is the second they become less good. All of a sudden, a price tag is dangling off of what was supposed to be a gift. “If I knew that you’d require a ton of affirmation and thanks, or that you’d hold it over my head, I would’ve done the dishes myself!” And that’s just the petty stuff. The language of scorekeeping is the language of conditionality. “I’ll do this for you because you do that for me.” “I’ll hold up my end of the bargain as long as you hold up yours,” we say. However egalitarian our intention, that kind of nonassurance sets us up for a life of accounting. But what works at the office runs out of gas at home.”
― David Zahl, Seculosity: How Career, Parenting, Technology, Food, Politics, and Romance Became Our New Religion and What to Do about It

“Pretty soon you are living in a spiritualized version of that New Yorker cartoon of the man holding his companion’s hand, telling her, “I can’t promise I’ll change, but I promise I’ll pretend to change.”
― David Zahl, Seculosity: How Career, Parenting, Technology, Food, Politics, and Romance Became Our New Religion and What to Do about It

“One of the chief ways Christianity morphs into seculosity occurs under the heading transformation. As exciting a prospect as transformation may be, when it takes center stage in a person’s spiritual life, it swallows up grace and turns Christianity into a vehicle of anxiety and exhaustion.”
― David Zahl, Seculosity: How Career, Parenting, Technology, Food, Politics, and Romance Became Our New Religion and What to Do about It

“Religions of law promise wholeness and peace, but as the preceding chapters illustrate, they ultimately deliver anxiety, self-consciousness, and loneliness. A culture awash in seculosity is therefore a culture of despair.”
― David Zahl, Seculosity: How Career, Parenting, Technology, Food, Politics, and Romance Became Our New Religion and What to Do about It

“Politics makes an effective tool for changing people’s circumstances but a considerably less effective one for changing people’s minds, to say nothing of their hearts. We may be able to coerce a person to act in accordance with our vision of righteousness, but we cannot coerce them to like it.”
― David Zahl, Seculosity: How Career, Parenting, Technology, Food, Politics, and Romance Became Our New Religion and What to Do about It

“At the heart of the seculosity of politics lies the conviction, sometimes unspoken, that politics not only explains everything but can fix everything.”
― David Zahl, Seculosity: How Career, Parenting, Technology, Food, Politics, and Romance Became Our New Religion and What to Do about It

“An old Alcoholics Anonymous truism states, “The only thing better than being right is feeling wronged.”
― David Zahl, Seculosity: How Career, Parenting, Technology, Food, Politics, and Romance Became Our New Religion and What to Do about It

“How unfortunate, then, that as a rule, virtue signaling backfires. Not merely because the threshold of enough does not exist, but because the more aggressive our signals, the less convincing we render them. What comes across instead is the extent of our insecurity—otherwise we wouldn’t feel the need to preen in the first place.”
― David Zahl, Seculosity: How Career, Parenting, Technology, Food, Politics, and Romance Became Our New Religion and What to Do about It

“Indeed, calling others out for virtue signaling can be a mighty convenient way not only of dismissing any public utterance we don’t like but also of signaling our own superiority in the process.”
― David Zahl, Seculosity: How Career, Parenting, Technology, Food, Politics, and Romance Became Our New Religion and What to Do about It

“Alas, as Stephen Marche writes in The Unmade Bed, “The business of correcting idealism is a parlor game in which, one by one, everybody leaves the room.” Sub out “idealism” for “orthodoxy” and you’re pretty close to some churches I know.”
― David Zahl, Seculosity: How Career, Parenting, Technology, Food, Politics, and Romance Became Our New Religion and What to Do about It

“the most pathological example being the eating disorder on the rise known as Orthorexia nervosa, a term that literally means “fixation on righteous eating.”
― David Zahl, Seculosity: How Career, Parenting, Technology, Food, Politics, and Romance Became Our New Religion and What to Do about It

“But when someone pays close to twelve dollars for a small bottle of green juice, nutrition, connection, and taste are not the only draws. We are buying more than novelty or even status. We are bartering for purity, wholeness, and immortality. We are climbing a ladder to the heavens. Diet has become the justifying story of our lives.”
― David Zahl, Seculosity: How Career, Parenting, Technology, Food, Politics, and Romance Became Our New Religion and What to Do about It

“But the promise goes deeper. Whatever your conviction or interest, no matter how fringe or toxic, a community exists online that will reinforce it. A few clicks are all it takes to find allies who will confirm the righteousness of your opinions, as well as common enemies to fortify your tribe. It’s intoxicating, radicalizing, and more often than not dehumanizing.”
― David Zahl, Seculosity: How Career, Parenting, Technology, Food, Politics, and Romance Became Our New Religion and What to Do about It

“You cannot solve a problem with the same mindset you used to create it.”
― David Zahl, Seculosity: How Career, Parenting, Technology, Food, Politics, and Romance Became Our New Religion and What to Do about It

“There’s evidence that children who are never exposed to dirt fail to develop an adequate immune system. We forget that the same holds true for other aspects of life. Those who have never experienced failure lack resilience, sometimes fatally so. Protectiveness does not always protect.”
― David Zahl, Seculosity: How Career, Parenting, Technology, Food, Politics, and Romance Became Our New Religion and What to Do about It

“And nothing allows us to excuse ruthlessness easier than when we’ve painted our neighbor as an adversary to all that is true and holy. I’m not just talking about digital mobs and their penchant for public shaming and heresy hunting. I’m talking about heartache and divorce and job loss and estranged children.”
― David Zahl, Seculosity: How Career, Parenting, Technology, Food, Politics, and Romance Became Our New Religion and What to Do about It

“And nothing allows us to excuse ruthlessness easier than when we’ve painted our neighbor as an adversary to all that is true and holy.”
― David Zahl, Seculosity: How Career, Parenting, Technology, Food, Politics, and Romance Became Our New Religion and What to Do about It

“They tell us that confidence in the religious narratives we’ve inherited has collapsed. What they fail to report is that the marketplace in replacement religion is booming.”
― David Zahl, Seculosity: How Career, Parenting, Technology, Food, Politics, and Romance Became Our New Religion and What to Do about It

“It wasn’t the first time I had heard this. Tales of friends who’d left small towns for big cities in search of a more open-minded environment, only to discover that their new surroundings weren’t as orthodoxy-free as they’d hoped, had become almost cliché. It sounds like a Portlandia sketch, but it is empirically true: the religious impulse is easier to rebrand than to extinguish.”
― David Zahl, Seculosity: How Career, Parenting, Technology, Food, Politics, and Romance Became Our New Religion and What to Do about It

“Half the harm that is done in this world Is due to people who want to feel important. They don’t mean to do harm—but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it Because they are absorbed in the endless struggle To think well of themselves. —T. S. Eliot”
― David Zahl, Seculosity: How Career, Parenting, Technology, Food, Politics, and Romance Became Our New Religion and What to Do about It

“...life both in- and outside of Jesusland is no longer a vale of tears to be endured until the long-awaited twinkling-of-an-eye transformation, so much as a game to be won (which everyone loses). In practice, this is the difference between being surprised by moments of joy - and personal growth - versus expecting them.”
― David Zahl, Seculosity: How Career, Parenting, Technology, Food, Politics, and Romance Became Our New Religion and What to Do about It

“One of the chief ways Christianity morphs into seculosity occurs under the heading transformation. As exciting a prospect as transformation may be, when it takes center stage in a person's spiritual life, it swallows up grace and turns Christianity into a vehicle of anxiety and exhaustion...Christianity itself starts to resemble a self-improvement scheme on spiritual steroids, only as reliable as the personal growth it may have produced, which we know - from both experience and Scripture - is not always that reliable.”
― David Zahl, Seculosity: How Career, Parenting, Technology, Food, Politics, and Romance Became Our New Religion and What to Do about It