NewWorld

If God Does Exist, He Doesn’t Matter

Excerpted from Luigi Giussani, The Religious Awareness of Modern Man, Communio 25,
Spring 1998, pp. 114-115.


The term for this conception of life, insofar as it has through political power and public education become a social mindset, a dominant cultural influence, is “secularism.” Secularism is “the assertion that man belongs to himself and to no one else” (Cornelio Fabro); it is the presumption that man is totally autonomous.
Herein lies the cause of the terrible impasse confronting the religious awareness of human beings in our day. In fact, a God who is not relevant to our lives is at best a useless God. It follows that the more active, interested, and engaged with life a man is, the more he will feel it a waste of time to pause to think about such a God. God is reduced to a more or less private option, a pathetic psychological consolation, or a museum piece. For a man who feels keenly the brevity of his life and the many tasks to be accomplished, such a God is not only useless, but even harmful: He is the “opiate of the people.” A society informed by such a mindset may not be formally atheistic, but it is so de facto.
In truth, such a God is not only useless, not only harmful; he is not even God. A god who does not pertain to man’s activity, his constitution, his path toward destiny, is at best a waste of time; in the end, a god of this sort should be dispensed with, eliminated. The formula, “If God does exist, He doesn’t matter,” bears within itself the logical conclusion, “God does not exist.”
The real enemy of authentic religiosity, in my view, is not so much atheism as it is the secularism outlined above. If the sacred is irrelevant to the concrete domain of our daily efforts, then man’s relationship with God is conceivable only as something totally subjective. Consequently, human reality is left to itself. Our problems and concerns are then at the mercy of sheerly human criteria, which, in practice, are readily subsumed by the powers that be.