Wow, what an insightful piece. Its so weird that christians embraced secularism when its proponents were literally trying to eradicate the church and its history...one for the believe-it-or-not files.

Overall, with a few notable exceptions (including Jesus Christ), the West has always been spiritually impoverished - before Christianity, during Christianity and after Christianity; before Trump and during Trump.

Is the west spiritually impoverished?

Depends on your take on spirituality? As always in these what if treaties, is some entity trying to assume moral authority, trying to define spirituality?

We've always had them from the witch doctor/tribal shaman/elder, imam priest clergy etc/etc. All owning their own facts and ever willing to sit in self appointed judgement, and decide what is good/moral!

There's no connection between lost spirituality and the rise of Donald trump! Just a COMPLETE REJECTION of PRETENDERS waxing fat as they spread their brand of misery and social injustice!

In America the minimum wage hadn't moved for nigh on thirty years, and the wealthy are finding new ways to transfer more wealth from those with the least! Thereby continuing to contract the entire economy, the only logical outcome!

And in so doing, have effectively dismantled, then completely reversed a post war period of unprecedented prosperity! That alone made America great/largest economy in the world!

It is written, inasmuch as you do to the least among you you also do unto me. Simply attending some church and singing Hallelujah, God is great, wont turn an out and out R sole/pretender into a decent human being!

Words and promises pounded into a pulpit mean little or nothing, only actions count!

By their fruits ( what they do, not what they say) we shall know them.

Spiritually impoverished?

Not possible, impossible to lose that which you never had!

But not applicable as a broad brush to the west, east, north or south, just the resident R soles!

As history shows, very little has changed in the attitude of the resident control freaks?

Another lesson of history tells us, from the Roman Emperors on down. Those who crave power for its own sake should never ever have it! But when they do have it invariably make everyone else's lot remarkably worse!

It's not spiritually that gone AWOL, just common humanity/human decency, and almost exclusively at the top of the dung heap of life, and in those we trust with the most important decisions!
Alan B.

Wow. what a confusing article.

I do hope Mark has some idea about politics because he knows nothing of science or spiritual matters.

Could it be that Western Christians gradually over the past years have woken up to the fact religion is a scam, lead by hypocritical people.

Just as they have woken up to the lies of Politicians and they are willing to accept anything rather than same same.
Brexit, Trump, Duterte and nearly Le Pen (in France)

Of course the West is spiritually impoverished.
It always was but that impoverishment became even more so as a result of the European Renaissance and the rise of left-brained "reason" as the presumed arbiter of what is True Real and even possible.
We now all "live" in and are trapped in a "world" created by left-brained reason. Some back-to-the-past Christian outfits even attempt to use left-brained reason to "prove" the various truth-claims of traditional Christian-ism - Let us Reason - Stand To Reason - Faith and Reason.
One dingbat Christian apologist even wrote a fatuous book titled The Victory of Reason.
For a superb closely argued description of the origins and all-encompassing cultural consequences of the "victory" of left-brained reason and how it has ECLIPSED the intrinsic intelligence of the heart check out the book The Master and His Emissary The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World by Iain McGilchrist - a book which took 10 years to write. In essence the book is very much about how we are now all trapped in the "world" of the Matrix Trilogy.

Trump was of course the inevitable outcome of many factors, two of which are "reality" TV, and the phenomenon described in the book by David Brock The Republican Noise Machine Right-Wing Media & How It Corrupts Democracy. Producing all of the dreadfully sane zombified ditto-heads propagandized/brainwashed by faithfully tuning into the message (massage). Right-wing Christian media helped create this situation too, especially TV.

This author has confused spirituality with culture.
Back to the drawing board!

'Could it be that Western Christians gradually over the past years have woken up to the fact religion is a scam, lead by hypocritical people.'

maybe Phillip S but only til you see how hopelessly bereft of morals secularism is. And as for the secular high priest one would be totally blind not to see their depraved nature. Why do you think they adopted the totally irrational big bang and evolution fantasies. A 2 year old could see what nonsense they are.

The U.S. electorate that a few years ago, when it had a highly qualified and experienced candidate in Mit Romney chose to elect an incompetent, racist, anti-American, climate fraud supporting, lying black dunce, , has evolved to electing a competent, honest, climate fraud denying, pro-American, over a criminal fraud supporting woman, This is encouraging, and something for which we should be grateful.

Mark has no valid basis for his pessimistic view, as we have emerged from a dangerous period in good shape. He should observe reality, instead of watching films and reading books, on which to base his misconceptions.

Philip S, you nailed it.

David

Whether you believe in religion, or spirituality or not, you cannot deny the reality that over millennia people have relied on faith in a superbeing to sustain them during times of extreme stress and trauma. Or even the small but accumulating daily woes.
Belief in rewards for living a virtuous life, belief that relief from oppression, stress, trauma, brutality, poverty etc will come eventually, even if it's after death, has sustained people through som horrific times and events.
Regardless of whether they are right or wrong, that faith has supported and enabled them to a degree nothing else can compare to.
You would have to wonder if today's youth have replaced that belief with drugs, because without that spiritual support, there is nothing to blunt the harsher realities of life, but external aids. Wasn't religion once referred to as the opium of the masses?
Good or bad, so far no one has found an effective substitute for a belief that no matter how bad life is, you are not alone and that life after death will bring relief.

Exclusivism v inclusiveism...capitalism as another religion. The world only makes sense if viewed through the eyes of the religion of Capitalism, verses the rest.
Capitalism pretends to present inclusiveness, but actually thrives on exclusion. (The doctrine of Competition).
All religions operate on the same level of exclusion. Capitalism has built itself on a grounding of the same belief. It is in direct competition with the many and varied Gods of world religions.
In the Christian religion, for example, Capitalism is presented as the devil tempting Christ in the 40 day sojourn in desert.

The devil is the fallen angel given free reign over the world, so the defeat of religion is seen as inevitable. But, God will win when he eventually "pulls the pin" and steps up the evolutionary processes of the universe. The first signs will be ecological collapse.

I think author John Michael Greer sums it up well

"Like rats, crows, and feral swine, we’re invasive, omnivorous, and adaptable; we’ve evolved some unusual cognitive and behavioral tricks, but we’re not above or outside nature in any sense that matters.

We evolved from other species long after life emerged on this planet, and we’ll go extinct long before life dies out. However important we may be to ourselves and each other—just as rats are important to other rats, for good reason, and swine to other swine—in the greater scheme of things, we’re a temporary perturbation in the damp film that covers one small rocky world in an ordinary solar system on the fringes of an ordinary galaxy, and that’s all we will ever be.

Most traditional religions embraced a similarly modest sense of our place in the cosmos, though the details differed for a range of reasons. Our contemporary self importance, by contrast, insists that humanity is destined to bestride the stars, outlive the sun, give meaning and purpose to the cosmos, and so on. That enthusiastic embrace of the quality the ancient Greeks called “hubris” is its distinctive feature. It’s also its distinctive flaw, because—as an honest scientific assessment of our limited gifts and vast dependencies could have predicted a long time ago—the project of living like gods isn’t working too well for us these days. Despite the increasingly shrill claims of Man’s devout worshippers, what’s more, it shows no signs of working any better in the foreseeable future—quite the contrary, in fact."

Cheers
Geoff

This link will show the total disintegration of so called educated western students holding a graduation ceremony as opposed to how the Russian graduation ceremony is total class.

Just compare the 2 the answer to what the future holds is in front of you.

http://www.thesun.co.uk/news/3877298/russia-students-graduation-posh-oxford-graduates-shame/

Don't have to read the pictures say it all.

How Trump got into the White House is simple. Hillary Goldman Sachs Clinton and her collaborator Debbie Wasserman Schultz delivered him by rigging the primary ballot to exclude Bernie Sanders as the Democrats' presidential candidate, when Sanders was on a roll that would have reduced Trump to single digits.

Occasionally, you get these laughable "the west is bereft of spiritualty" puff pieces from left wing ideologues, who just can't stand the idea that most people in the western world are happy with their lives. Mark Christiansen wants everybody in the western world to be a miserable and unhappy as he is.

Now, when Mark is talking about "spirituality", he is not talking about religion or Johnny Walker Black Label. No, he is talking about how utterly awful it is that most people in the west are quite happy with their consumer lifestyles, and they are not interested in Saving the World, like he does. "Spiritualty" is a euphemism for a left wing worldview devoid of common sense or intellect.

"Spiritual" people hate Trump. "Spiritual" people want to Save the World. "Spiritual" people ignore the fact that the west has provided the world with the model for economic success and personnel freedom. "Spiritual" people support every left wing cause imaginable, especially white self loathing.

You can be a "spiritual" person if you like, Mark. It's still largely a free country, despite the best efforts of "spiritual" people like your good self to turn it into a Brave New World ruled by an aristocracy of "spiritual" bureaucrats. But I prefer to be a rational person who uses reason and intellect to find answers to life's problems. "Spiritualism" is the antithesis of intellectualism

If you really need to understand Mark's mindset, you have to understand that there exists within all human societies a not insignificant minority of people who have a compulsive need to believe that they are morally above reproach, and superior human beings than every body else in society. Not only that, they feel a compulsive need to display their superiority. Like humans everywhere, they form an "us and them" class which sneers at both their lower class social inferiors, as well as the higher status business class (who are usually their parents.)

Mark Christiansen's article therefore, is simply a manifesto attesting to his membership of this intermediate Brahmin caste of "spiritual" pseudo intellectuals.

It's all your ego, stupid.

I think the quote Spritual unquote that Lego is deriding can best be described as giving a tuppenny stuff for people beyond me me me.

Another deep, incisive, well reasoned, convincing argument by EJ.

Since EJ can't formulate a reasoned argument, because his mindset has been entirely conditioned into his empty brain, I will explain what he is implying. He is implying that right wing people are selfish and that left wing people are altruistic. That being so, lefties like himself need to constantly virtue signal to display their moral superiority over us selfish right wingers. Hence we get this endless puritanical finger wagging, and whatever lame arguments (or sneery one liners) they can dream up to justify their position, are always submitted in the tone of moral outrage. They can't think up rational arguments support their position, so they are reduced to thinking up supposedly moral ones.

Lefties today are capitalising on the public perception that those who once fought against the Establishment in the past, were considered smart and witty. While Establishment advocates were considered intolerant, narrow minded, puritanical, and determined to stifle free speech. But the intelligent people in the past would have laughed uproariously at the intolerant, narrow minded finger wagging "spiritualised" lefties of today like Mark Christensen.

Today, the Left wing view has become the mainstream. They are now the Establishment who pronounce what must be "politically correct." It is now the Left who wants political censorship to defend their failed ideology. It is the Right who is now attracting the smart ones. People like Mark Steyn, Bill Leak, Douglas Murray, Anne Marie waters, Anne Coulter, Andrew Bolt, Piers Ackerman, Milo Yiannopoulas, Nigel Farage, and John Paul Watson.

"Spiritualism" is self evidently the antithesis of intellectualism. The Left want to be the new priestly caste who demand absolute obedience to whatever moral absolutes that they have decided among themselves the ascendent morality. As we are seeing with homosexual "marriage", democracy can not be allowed to get in the way of whatever moral position these evangelical "spiritualists" insist is right.

I wonder what Voltaire would think of today's "spiritual" lefties? He would probably say "When the first fool met the first sly rogue, that was the beginning of "spritualised" leftism"

Another spray for me-me-me-think couched in pterosaur-speak[1] by Lego

[1]left wing, right wing with scales in between as pejorative props for the mindless