Ellul Jacques. The New Demons

Seabury Press , 1975. — 228 p.The modem world is secularized: everyone takes that for grantednow. We are supposedly in the third (positivist or scientific) age of Saint-Simon and Auguste Comte. Religious society indeed existed once upon a time, but we have left those primitive forms behind. Religions are old, ruptured cocoons, fit only to be studied by antiquarians; they cannot support or manifest life, for the butterfly has left the chrysalis. Man and his world have developed into mature insects and have nothing left to do but reproduce themselves and die. But is it really possible to reconstruct the social evolution of man by taking religious society or religion generally as the starting point? The conventional wisdom again says Yes: all early societies were religious! Yet no thinking person will really regard "religion" (a rather grabbag word) and religious societies as simple curiosities and toss them aside as though there were only one way to explain the historical development of mankind. If we really want to understand in any degree our present situation, we must try to understand better the situation out of which we emerged and which we reject. This approach means that we will not be dealing with the kind of religious society to be found in ancient Greece or the Egypt of the Old Kingdom or among the Polynesians or the Bantus (to take four different types of religion and of correlation between religion and society). We will be dealing, rather, with the specific kind of society that emerged from Christianity and was called Christendom. Modern society is not to be understood in relation to just any religious society whatever, nor is it to be taken simply as the opposite of religious society in the abstract. No, it emerged from a specific society that thought of itself as Christian, and is to be understood in relation to it. There is no point, then, in talking about an abstract, general
relationship between "religion" and "society." The important thing is to focus our attention on Christendom as a specific type of religious society that is not identical with any other. In other words, if we are accurately to understand our own situation, we must reflect on what Christendom was; only then can we interpret our own "areligious" condition.