Until recently, one of the unquestioned assumptions about the modern world was the fact that it is disenchanted. This term refers to the idea that in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, the rise of bureaucracy, and the increasing mastery of nature that technology seemed to deliver, the world became a less magical place. Where our medieval ancestors lived in a world that they felt was permeated by the supernatural, we live in a world where everything can be reduced to an algorithm or a technique. The desire of Dickens’s Mr. Gradgrind in Hard Times, that children learn “facts, facts, facts,” exemplifies this attitude. Where once the stars above spoke of mysteries too profound to fathom and of a God whose power and glory has set them in order, now we just see masses of gas undergoing a prosaic chemical process, randomly distributed in otherwise empty, meaningless space.

There is a lot of truth to the notion of disenchantment. We do experience the world today in a manner that often lacks mystery, where the meaning of life is tied to consumption, and where a sense of the holy is lacking. But as a broad account of what is occurring in our society, disenchantment has clear limitations. To put it bluntly, modern man is not merely disenchanted man, though that captures something of the truth of his condition. Modern man is also desecrated man. His condition is one of active, exhilarating contravention of the sacred.

To take an example, there is a sense in which abortion is abortion, the unwarranted killing of an innocent. Yet there is still a significant difference at least in attitude between a society that argues it should be “safe, legal, and rare” and one where women are encouraged to “shout” their abortions, to take an exultant pride in killing their unborn children, and even to wear T-shirts bragging about it.

What category should we use to think about this? I would suggest that of desecration. This has the advantage over disenchantment because it captures something of the intentionally exultant nature of so much that is currently occurring. It is not simply that the social processes of late modernity are erasing what it means to be human. We are positively delighting in its destruction.

In a sense, of course, there is nothing in principle here that is novel or innovative. In Genesis, human beings, made in the image of God, intentionally eat from the fruit of the tree in direct contravention of God’s instructions. That involves the desecration of God’s image. Yet I would argue that while the principle of desecration lies at the heart of the reality of sin from the very start, today our capacity for desecration is considerably more powerful.

Limits and Ends, and Freedom

To explain what I mean, it is first useful to reflect upon two aspects of human nature in the state of creation: we are creatures of limits and of ends; and we are to respect and pursue these freely.

The limits and ends of being human are set forth in God’s instructions to Adam and Eve. They are to reproduce and to subdue the earth and to obey God. They also have limits: they are not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Elsewhere in Scripture, these ends and limits are elaborated in the wake of the fall via God’s law. To be fully human is to respect these.

The second aspect is our freedom, something critical to being human. A brief comparison to animals helps clarify this point. Foxes, for example, kill chickens. But place a chicken in the presence of a human being and the outcome is not typically predictable in advance: will the person kill it and eat it, release it into the wild, or keep it for producing eggs? With a fox, there is no such doubt.

Unlike other creatures, therefore, we are free. Further, created in God’s image, we act freely in a way that carries moral significance. The fox never asks whether killing the chicken is a good thing because it is for him a purely instinctive matter. For us, our treatment of the chicken can take into account a whole host of other factors—who owns the chicken? what future consequences would killing it carry? —that shape our behavior toward it. And in Genesis, these factors are reflected in that notion of limits and ends. We have limits to observe and ends to pursue because we are made in God’s image, and we have to choose to do so. Failure in this regard renders us less than human in the biblical sense; it involves desecration of the image of God.

Of course, desecration is exhilarating. Breaking through the limits and creating our own ends gives us the feeling of being gods ourselves. As it is God who determines reality, so our usurping of that task brings a godlike high. Augustine articulates this powerfully in Book 2 of his Confessions when he describes his intense pleasure as a youth in stealing pears—bitter, inedible pears—from a neighbor’s garden. It made him feel like God. A less well-known but perhaps more striking analysis is the description Dostoevsky gives of a fellow inmate during his time in a Siberian prison. Today we would use the term “serial killer” for such a person. Dostoevsky was fascinated by the inmate’s apparent need to kill, and he drew the following conclusion:

The first man he killed was an oppressor, an enemy; that is a crime, but understandable; he had a reason; but then he kills not an enemy but the first man he meets, kills him for fun, for a rude word, for a glance, for a trifle. . . . It’s as if the man is drunk, as if he’s in a feverish delirium. As if, having leaped over a line that was sacred to him, he begins to admire the fact that nothing is holy for him anymore; as if he feels an urge to leap over all legality and authority at once, and to revel in the most boundless and unbridled freedom, to revel in this thrill of horror, which it is impossible for him not to feel. (Notes from a Dead House, translated by Pevear and Volokhonsky, 119 [emphasis added])

What Dostoevsky describes here—that thrill that come from crossing a sacred line that must then be repeated again and again—captures the psychology of sin: the desecration of the divine image, while utterly self-destructive, generates a high. We do it freely, it makes us feel like gods ourselves, and we do it again and again. Desecration, in short, is fun and addictive.

The Impact of Technology

We live at a time when acts of desecration are, in a sense, reaching unprecedented heights of presumption. If we think of the image of God as involving limits and ends, then the less we think of ourselves as defined by limits and ends, the more scope we have for making desecration a practical reality in every aspect of our lives. At the heart of this lies the impact of technology.

For Adam and Eve, there was a limited scope for desecration. They could have rejected the ends God had set before them: they could have refused, for example, to subdue the earth or to procreate. They chose to eat the fruit, and this was followed in short order by expulsion from the garden and life in a creation now laboring under the curse. Desecration of the image led to swift and unpleasant consequences.

Modern technology, however, has created a very different world. Now we have more and more tools that encourage us to imagine that we can overcome our limits or ends with impunity. Technology tilts us toward seeing any given limit or end as merely a technical problem that can be overcome. Where Adam and Eve faced immediate consequences, technology allows us to think that the consequences of our actions can be endlessly deferred or solved by the application of some technique. We have even come to believe that the human body is just so much play dough over which we can exert technical mastery. Born a man but feel you are a woman? We have drugs and surgical procedures that can deal with that. Contracted a disease through irresponsible sexual behavior? Here is an antibiotic.

Then there is the realm of transhumanism. While this is a singular term for a plurality of philosophies, it points to something all of such have in common: an impatience with human limitations, be they physical or intellectual, and a dislike of the idea that to be human is to have a certain intrinsic end or teleology. Transgenderism is one good example. While many see it as part of the LGBTQ+ issue, it is more than that—it is a denial that human beings have given ends. Take the question of the hour: what is a woman? This is only hard to answer if the normative telos of womanhood—a body normatively tailored towards reproduction—is regarded as oppressive or problematic. That, of course, is not new: both liberal and radical feminisms have been arguing that since at least the time of Simone De Beauvoir. What is new is that technology now promises to be able to solve the problem once and for all.

Ours is an age of desecration. The old natural limits to our rebellion—for example, the limits of our physical bodies—no longer seem as solid and authoritative as they once did. And so the ecstasy of desecration today acknowledges few, if any, practical limits. Lewis rightly noted that man in modernity is being abolished. And we delight in that abolition because it is desecration.

The author is an OP minister and professor at Grove City College. New Horizons, June 2024.