Abstract

With the US hellbent on becoming a rhyme with the Roman empire including its fall, Western societies are potentially on their way into new Middle Ages, i.e. a period of substantially lower political, economic and cultural integration. (A possible scenario would be a bursting of the AI bubble, quickly deteriorating economic conditions in the US leading to a civil war like state, China taking Taiwan as the start of a rapid de-globalization and finally in the wake of all of this the breakdown of liberal institutions at all scales; we can only hope that under such circumstances minorities like for instance trans people do not end up in camps.) If so, then now would be a good time to think about how religion could do what Islam and Christianity did for the Graeco-Roman culture; take up, transform, preserve and expand the core civilizational advances of antiquity. Currently, illiberal populists wield reactionary Catholic ideas as weapons in ‘culture wars’ to capture liberal democracies for personal gain. The forceful return of religion on the public stage is likely not reversible and does not have to be a bad thing per se, but this toxic mix of reactionary faith with grandiose male narcissism is fundamentally ill-suited to shepherd Western culture. Here, ‘cultural containment’ by more progressive forces is needed. So that is the titular (sort of) new task for the philosophy of religion: To answer the question of how we want religion to look like for the next Middle Ages.