When Faith Disappears, Idols Return: Santayana’s Warning to the Modern World
(ANALYSIS) People love to talk about “profound” philosophers. Socrates with his questions. Nietzsche with his hammer. Marx with his systems. But George Santayana rarely gets the same reverence, despite the unsettling precision of his view of modern life.
Santayana is hard to place, which may be why he is often skipped. Born in Spain, raised in Boston, educated at Harvard, he sounded European, reasoned like a skeptic and saw further than most believers. He didn’t believe in God in the creedal sense. Yet he understood religion better than many who profess it loudly — and better than most who dismiss it casually.
He was a Catholic by culture and temperament. He loved the cadence of ritual, the gravity of symbols and the timelessness of tradition. What he rejected was not faith as such, but literalism that treated poetry as physics. For Santayana, religion wasn’t a lab report but a language. A shared grammar of meaning. A way a civilization taught restraint, gratitude, and proportion.
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That distinction matters. Santayana saw that when religion is reduced to a checklist of facts, it becomes something memorized rather than lived. But when religion is discarded entirely, something worse happens. Societies don’t become clear-eyed and calm. Quite the opposite. They become feverish. They become hostile. You can see this pattern clearly in France during the French Revolution.
Once Christianity was torn out root and branch, it was replaced with civic cults, moral purges, and blood-soaked brutality. The Cult of Reason and the Cult of the Supreme Being weren’t rejections of religion so much as functional replacements. The language changed, but the structure remained: prescribed rituals, moral hierarchies, and public displays of belief. Meaning didn’t disappear. Instead, it was reorganized.
Germany in the 1930s followed the same pattern. As Christianity receded from public life, ideas of race and destiny moved in to organize meaning. Transcendence was reconfigured. The regime replaced inherited religious frameworks with a new symbolic order — myths of origin, rituals of belonging, iconography — and a warped moral logic.
Santayana’s warning was anthropological, not theological. People need ritual and restraint that stand above individual desire. Remove God, and those needs don’t disappear. They reassemble elsewhere — often in louder, far less forgiving forms.
Santayana watched the early twentieth century with alarm. He saw ideologies swell with religious intensity. He saw politics take on the posture of salvation. He saw crowds chanting slogans the way congregations once recited creeds. The altar was gone, but the impulse remained.
This, he argued, was regression with a body count — a return to primitive forms of belief dressed up as rational governance, enforced through bureaucracy and violence.
Religion, at its best, cultivated humility. It placed the individual inside a story larger than himself and imposed limits no single person could rewrite. Kings were reminded that they would die. Beggars were reminded that they mattered. Power was never absolute; conscience was never optional.
Christianity, in particular, supplied Europe (and later North America) with a shared symbolic grammar: time ordered by holy days, authority bounded by transcendence, and social roles framed within a coherent story.
Santayana had a dry sense of humor about this. He noted that those who mocked faith as childish often embraced political fantasies with the seriousness of monks. They scorned miracles, then demanded utopia. They said they had outgrown God. They hadn’t. Not really. They simply replaced Him with an idea incapable of forgiveness.
For Christians, this should sound familiar. Scripture is clear about the human hunger for idols. When the true God is rejected, false gods reign supreme. Santayana, the unbeliever, saw the same pattern through observation rather than revelation.
He also understood something many modern critics miss: religion civilizes desire, rather than indulging it.
Santayana didn't argue that everyone must believe the same doctrines. Instead, he argued that when a society loses sight of why religion exists, it pays for the amnesia. Faith wasn’t an accident of history. It was a hard-won achievement that made suffering intelligible and life endurable.
Modern culture, by contrast, is rich in feelings and poor in forms. It urges expression but resists discipline. It praises authenticity while dissolving authority. Santayana saw where this led. Not toward freedom, but toward disorder. A people untrained in reverence soon learn resentment by heart.
Readers needn’t share Santayana’s unbelief to appreciate his insight. In fact, his distance sharpens it. He reminds us that faith is not only about private salvation, but about public sanity. It forms people capable of living together without tearing one another apart.
The church, for all its failures, once taught habits no policy can replace. Confession over accusation. Repentance over rage. Mercy over mobs. When those habits disappear, something wicked rushes in to fill the space.
The philosopher who stood outside the sanctuary saw what followed when its doors were shut. He warned, calmly and clearly, that the absence of faith doesn’t leave us liberated —but exposed, confused, and far more vulnerable to our worst instincts. Nietzsche had his hammer. Santayana had his scalpel, and he used it with care.
John Mac Ghlionn is a researcher and essayist. He covers psychology and social relations. His writing has appeared in places such as UnHerd, The US Sun and The Spectator World.