Monday Morning Greetings 2025 #2 – How Intellectuals Found God
Dhanurdhara Swami January 6th, 2025
In my senior year of high school, Joseph Zogby, my English teacher, asked the students to write an essay on Voltaire’s quotation, “If God did not exist it would be necessary to invent him.” Looking back, it seemed Mr. Zogby wanted to indoctrinate us with his own values. I fell for the bait. I wrote what I thought was a brilliant essay showing how God was a concept born of convenience. It all but reconfirmed in my heart the intellectual ethos of the ‘60s—religion was just the opiate of the people.
It appears that times have changed. People are again turning to God. From 2019 there has been almost an eighty per cent increase in converts to orthodox Christianity.[1] One of the largest Christian revival meetings in US history took place just recently at Ashbury University in Kentucky and it was led almost entirely by young people.[2] It has also been my own experience that more and more people are turning to God after years of turning away.
What convinced me of this revival more than anything else was my observation that even many modern intellectuals, those who were previously against God, were turning to Him. This was confirmed for me by a very interesting article I read in The Free Press titled “How Intellectuals Found God”[3] which told the story of prominent intellectuals coming into the theistic fold.
Matthew Crawford is a best-selling author and respected philosopher. At the beginning of his career, he seemed to be the typical American academic who in his own words “was impressed, as a young man, with Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity.”
Thirty-five years later, however:
“I liken it sometimes to a psychedelic experience. You feel like you’ve gained access to some layer of reality, but you just weren’t seeing it.
“A lot of very thoughtful people who once believed reason and science could explain everything—why we’re here, what comes after we’re gone, what it all means—are now feeling a genuine hunger for something more,” he said.
“There has to be a larger order that comprehends us and makes a demand on us,” Crawford added. “It’s clear that we can’t live without a sense of meaning beyond ourselves.”
The article also charted other prominent intellectuals’ spiritual growth:
Johnathan Haidt, New York University psychologist and best-selling author, although perhaps not a convert, reaffirmed this phenomenon in his own way. “There is a God-shaped hole in every human heart, and I believe it was put there by evolution.”
Jordan Peterson, world renowned academic, philosopher and biblical scholar, and author of the New York Times’ recent best seller We Who Wrestle with God: Perceptions of the Divine, never directly declared his faith in God, although he was pressed on the matter several times. Recently, however, in an interview, he finally acknowledged it: “I would say God is hyper-real, God is the reality upon which all reality depends.”
In this way, the article traced the way of ten prominent thoughtful people, previously agnostic at best, who have “reasoned their way to God”.
At this point of the Monday Morning Greetings, and near the deadline to get it to my editor, a question arose in my mind. “What’s the focus here and how is it relevant to your audience, those of the path of bhakti?” My take:
It is always edifying when reading a well thought out piece that confirms an observation of one’s own—in this case, that the Western intellectual world is more and more turning to God. I am not surprised. The Western world has increasingly descended into chaos under the direction of atheistic and post-modern thought. It has become increasingly obvious to thoughtful people that such chaos and suffering are caused by straying from a rational order represented by the teachings or words (logos) of God-centered wisdom traditions. Reflecting on that idea—and I am sure that they are not unaware of the harm also caused by religious fanaticism—they looked back at a prior world which in many ways had more of a semblance of order and harmony.
This revival should also give solace to those following the bhakti tradition. We are taught that even at the stage of perfection, when one no longer has personal suffering, we will still suffer, but only for the suffering of others. It is thus good news to hear that especially in the West, where society has been increasingly deprived of the experience of God, with secular reasoning taking its place, that more intellectual leaders are finding God. And perhaps we can all even become brothers-in-arms “to deliver the Western countries, which are filled with impersonalism and voidism,” which is our spiritual master’s stated mission.
[1] https://resources.finalsite.net/images/v1722890523/saintconstantineorg/wwfz57wzdrdkx7tj1xu1/ConvertstoOrthodoxy.pdf
[2] https://www.thefp.com/p/why-students-in-kentucky-have-been
[3] https://www.thefp.com/p/how-intellectuals-found-god-ayaan-hirsi-ali-peter-thiel-jordan-peterson
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