Religion’s Quiet Power in Modern Life

The idea that the modern world has shed religion is a myth. Even as Europe claimed a secular age in the seventeenth century, faith still shaped science, politics and everyday values. Think of Francis Bacon: his famous experiments were written in biblical language, and he pictured nature as a woman to be “penetrated” by human curiosity. He was not stepping away from Christianity; he was turning it into the language of science. The same pattern appears in other thinkers. Descartes, Kepler and Galileo all used God as a proof of truth or a guardian of the cosmos. Newton spoke of gravity as evidence of divine design, and Boyle called laboratory work a form of worship. Even the Enlightenment’s great minds—Luther, Locke and Spinoza—kept God in the centre of their arguments. Religion was not lost; it simply moved into new forms. After World War II, church attendance fell, but the idea that religion was disappearing proved wrong. In the Cold War’s early days, British intellectuals argued that Western civilisation could survive only by reaffirming Christian ideas of sin and grace. They saw the Soviet Union as a “godless” threat, so they used Christian language to protect their way of life. This shows that religious themes were still the backbone of political thinking.In the 1980s, leaders like Reagan and Thatcher worked with right‑wing churches to rebuild order after the collapse of authority. They combined market ideas with moral values, turning religion into a political tool. The same pattern spread to Latin America and Africa, where Christian churches supported economic reforms that were actually a continuation of colonial domination. Religion also played a role in the rise of European capitalism, empire and slavery. It justified wars that killed more people than World War II, and it helped spread colonial control for profit. When Protestant churches later protested slavery, they did so only after centuries of complicity. The claim that religion has disappeared is therefore exaggerated. The West’s narrative of scientific objectivity and separation from faith is a story that hides how much religion still influences politics, culture and even science. Even in a supposedly secular age, religious ideas are woven into everyday language—“grace, ” “sin, ” “redemption”—and shape how people think about success, guilt and morality. This influence is not limited to the past. Modern societies still use religious concepts in new ways: confession becomes therapy, sin becomes personal failure, and salvation turns into self‑improvement. These ideas are now secularised but still control how people view themselves and the world. The persistence of these structures shows that civilisation’s power comes from a long line of religious thinking. To change the direction of society, we must recognise this continuity and question how it shapes our values today.