 |
| Illustration by R.E. Slater & ChatGPT |
Power, Empire, Trauma, and Identity
Series Outline: Essays IV–VII
Essay IV - What the Greeks Already Knew (and We Forgot)
Ethics, Explanation, and the End of Coercive Belief
→ Extracts and reframes the core lessons of Greek unbelief developed in Essays I–III, showing that ethical failure, explanatory sufficiency, and epistemic humility dismantled divine authority long before modernity.
Ethics precedes metaphysics.Divinity must remain morally responsive.Faith collapses when ethical trust collapses.The gods are refused, not denied, when disenchantment rises.
Power, Empire, Trauma, and Identity
→ Examines what Greek unbelief did not face: imperial entanglement, domination systems, identity-based belief, and religious trauma - factors that make modern Christian collapse more volatile and painful.Meaning may persist without metaphysical closure.Unbelief and skepticism may become optional rather than forbidden.Epistemic humility may be seen as a strength, not a loss.
Process Theology Beyond Control, Certainty, and Fear
→ Introduces a constructive but restrained process-theological framework in which faith is reimagined as relational responsiveness rather than metaphysical certainty or as institutional authority.Where does authority reside?In religion? In the state?In morality? In humanity?
Hope, Trust, Participation, and Becoming
→ Explores faith as lived orientation rather than belief-system: a way of inhabiting an open, evolving reality through trust, participation, and ethical becoming.
Faith is not certainty about what will be,but participation in what is becoming.
 |
| Together, the essays form a metamodern sequence: from collapse → through critique → toward inhabitable faith. |
Preface: Why This Collapse Is Not Ancient, but Our Own
The collapse of religious authority in contemporary Christianity is often narrated as a singular modern event - the inevitable result of scientific progress, secularization, or cultural decline. Such accounts are historically thin and analytically insufficient. As the preceding essays have shown, the fundamental dynamics now destabilizing Christian belief were already operative in antiquity. Ethical disillusionment, explanatory sufficiency, and epistemic humility did not originate with modernity; they were articulated with remarkable clarity in ancient Greece.
Yet Christianity’s present crisis differs in both structure and consequence.
Where Greek unbelief unfolded gradually and non-traumatically, Christianity’s loss of authority has proven volatile, defensive, and deeply injurious to both believers and non-believers alike. The reason is not theological error alone, but historical entanglement. Christianity did not merely function as a religious imagination; it became an apparatus of empire, identity, and moral governance. Belief was fused to power, certainty to salvation, and dissent to threat.
This essay therefore marks a transition in the series. We no longer ask how belief erodes in general. We ask why this faith tradition, here, now, in Christian America, has collapsed the way it did - and why its aftermath feels uniquely painful, polarizing, and destabilizing in contemporary American life.
The task here is diagnostic rather than polemical. This essay does not aim to indict Christianity wholesale, nor to defend it reflexively. Instead, it examines the historical conditions under which Christian faith became structurally incapable of accommodating the same ethical growth and epistemic humility that Greek religion eventually absorbed.
Process theology enters not as a solution imposed from outside, but as a conceptual lens capable of explaining why this collapse occurred - and what might still remain viable beyond it.
Introduction: Collapse Under Power, Not Doubt
Faith fails when it claims more certainty, power, or authority than reality itself allows.Faith endures when it learns how to belong to becoming rather than rule over it.
Christianity did not collapse because it was disproven.
It collapsed because it became unlivable.
Contemporary skepticism toward Christianity - especially within and around evangelical traditions - is frequently misdiagnosed as disbelief driven by intellectual rebellion or moral laxity. In reality, it bears striking resemblance to ancient Greek skepticism: a withdrawal of ethical trust, a recognition of explanatory independence, and a refusal to grant certainty where none is warranted.
The difference lies not in the skepticism itself, but in what Christianity had become by the time skepticism arrived.
By the fourth century CE, Christianity had undergone a decisive transformation. What began as a marginal, persecuted movement oriented around communal care and moral witness became, under imperial patronage, a system of authority. God was increasingly imagined as sovereign ruler, lawgiver, and judge. Belief became a marker of loyalty. Doubt became deviance. Faith fused with identity, and identity fused with power. It is a characteristic which has marked history again and again and again for the past 1500+ years.
Under these conditions, disbelief could no longer remain gentle.
Greek religion could be outgrown.Christian faith, bound to empire and identity, had to be escaped.
This essay traces that difference. It examines how Christianity’s entanglement with domination (empire) systems altered the experience of skepticism itself - transforming what might have been ethical maturation into trauma, what might have been humility into fear, and what might have been revision into collapse.
Process theology does not deny this history. It helps explain it.
By reframing divinity as relational rather than coercive, and faith as participatory rather than propositional, process thought offers a way to understand why Christianity’s collapse has been uniquely destabilizing - and why any future faith, Christian, non-Christian, or otherwise, must disentangle itself from power if it is to remain credible in any age, including our current metamodern age.
I. Greek Disenchantment and Christian Collapse Compared
“The gods were not abandoned because they were false,
but because they no longer bore the weight of trust.”
The skepticism confronting contemporary Christianity is not historically novel. What is novel is its psychological intensity, social volatility, and moral fallout. To understand this difference, one must move beyond questions of belief and disbelief and examine the structures within which belief was embedded.
Greek religion and Christianity did not fail under the same conditions. Consequently, they did not collapse in the same way. Time, culture, era separates these events by some 2500+ years.
Disenchantment Without Domination
Greek religion was never a centralized system of doctrinal enforcement:
- It lacked a unified creed,
- an institutional hierarchy governing belief, and
- a salvific narrative binding metaphysical assent to eternal destiny.
Participation in Greek religion was civic and ritual rather than confessional. Belief was assumed, but rarely policed.
As a result, when ethical trust eroded and explanatory sufficiency emerged, disbelief could take the form of withdrawal rather than rebellion. Skepticism did not threaten social belonging. Doubt did not sever identity. One could question the gods without questioning one’s place in the world.
Greek unbelief was therefore non-traumatic. It unfolded gradually, unevenly, and without existential panic. The gods faded from necessity, but the social fabric remained intact.
Christianity as a System of Meaning, Power, and Identity
Christianity developed under radically different historical pressures.
From the fourth century onward, Christianity became entwined with imperial governance, moral regulation, and collective identity. Belief was no longer merely an inherited worldview; it became a condition of belonging. Doctrine carried legal, social, and salvific weight. God was no longer simply revered; God governed - and he did this through human rulers and institutions.
This transformation altered the nature of faith itself. Christianity increasingly functioned not only as a spiritual orientation, but as a total meaning-system - explaining the cosmos, regulating morality, securing salvation, and legitimizing authority.
Under these conditions, doubt could no longer remain gentle.
To question Christian belief was not merely to revise metaphysics. It was to risk:
- moral condemnation,
- social exclusion,
- existential terror,
- and the loss of ultimate meaning.
Skepticism became dangerous because belief had become structural and institutional.
Why Modern Skepticism Feels Like Escape
Contemporary skepticism - especially within evangelical Christianity - often appears angry, urgent, or absolutist. This is frequently misinterpreted as hostility toward faith itself. In reality, it reflects the conditions under which belief was imposed.
- When belief is fused with identity, doubt feels like betrayal.
- When salvation is tied to certainty, uncertainty feels lethal.
- When God is imagined as sovereign controller, disbelief feels like chaos.
Unlike Greek religion, Christianity trained adherents to depend on belief not merely for meaning, but for safety. When that belief collapses, the result is not quiet withdrawal, but rupture (cf. social theory).
This explains why modern deconversion narratives are frequently marked by grief, rage, and relief simultaneously. The exit is not simply intellectual; it is existential across many levels.
Process-Theological Observation
Skepticism as Structural Response
From a process-theological perspective, this difference is not accidental.
Process thought understands belief systems as embedded within relational, historical, and institutional processes. Faith collapses not only when ideas fail, but when structures exceed the capacity of persons to inhabit them ethically and psychologically.
Greek religion allowed ethical growth because it was not bound to domination. Christianity resisted ethical revision because it was bound to authority. The result was not greater faithfulness, but fragility.
In process terms, skepticism functions here not as negation, but as adaptive response. It is an attempt by individuals and communities to restore relational integrity when inherited frameworks have become coercive, rigid, or morally misaligned.
Seen this way, contemporary skepticism is not an enemy of faith. It is a signal that faith has been asked to carry more certainty, power, and finality than reality itself can sustain. At this point, faith has become a human construction rather than a processual flow with the Divine.
This insight will guide the remainder of the essay.
The next section examines the decisive historical catalyst that transformed Christianity from a vulnerable movement into a system of control - and in doing so, altered the experience of doubt itself.
II. Empire and the Mutation of God
“When divinity is modeled on empire,
authority replaces persuasion,
and certainty replaces relationship.”
Skepticism encountered this transformed faith very differently than it had encountered Greek religion.
From Marginal Movement to Imperial Logic
Prior to Constantine, Christianity functioned as a minority movement marked by ethical seriousness, communal care, and eschatological hope. Authority was largely relational. Belief was persuasive rather than enforced. Moral credibility rested on witness rather than power.
Imperial patronage reversed this orientation.
Once Christianity became aligned with the Roman state, it absorbed the logic of empire - hierarchy, control, law, and enforcement. Theology followed structure. God was increasingly imagined not merely as creator or redeemer, but as sovereign ruler, cosmic judge, and final arbiter of truth.
This shift was not merely rhetorical. It altered how faith functioned psychologically and socially.
Where Greek religion tolerated plurality and revision, imperial Christianity demanded orthodoxy.
Theological Centralization and Moral Inflexibility
As doctrine crystallized, belief ceased to be a living orientation and became a boundary marker. Councils defined truth. Creeds fixed meaning. Theological certainty was treated as a moral virtue.
This had lasting consequences.
Once God was imagined as omnipotent sovereign exercising unilateral control, ethical questioning became dangerous. To critique divine action was to challenge authority itself. Moral protest, so central to Greek tragedy, was increasingly reframed as rebellion rather than fidelity.
Faith ceased to be responsive. It became defensive.
Evangelical Christianity as Heir to Empire
Contemporary evangelical Christianity inherits this imperial logic even where it denies historical continuity.
Despite cultural marginalization, evangelicalism often retains:
- authoritarian conceptions of God,
- absolutist claims to truth,
- identity-bound belief,
- and fear-based moral enforcement.
The persistence of these structures explains why skepticism today feels existentially threatening. Doubt does not merely revise belief; it destabilizes an entire architecture of meaning.
This is why appeals to humility, dialogue, or gradual revision often fail within such systems. The structure itself resists adaptation.
Process-Theological Observation
Power Freezes Becoming
From a process-theological perspective, empire performs a specific metaphysical distortion.
Process thought insists that reality unfolds through relational becoming rather than unilateral control. When divinity is modeled on empire, God becomes static, final, and unresponsive. Ethical development is arrested. Relationship is subordinated to command.
Power freezes becoming.
Once this happens, faith loses its capacity to grow. It must either dominate or collapse. Adaptation appears as betrayal. Revision feels like dissolution.
Greek religion never faced this dilemma because it never fused divinity with total authority. Christianity did - and therefore experiences skepticism not as maturation, but as threat.
Process theology does not deny Christianity’s history. It explains its fragility.
A faith that learned to rule could not easily learn to listen.
The next section examines the human cost of this distortion - how fear, trauma, and defensive belief became stabilizing mechanisms, and why their failure produces such profound disorientation today.
III. Trauma, Fear, and Defensive Faith
“Fear does not protect faith.
It reveals where faith has already failed.”
When Christianity absorbed imperial authority, belief did not merely gain power - it acquired risk. Over time, this risk reshaped the psychology of faith itself.
In systems where belief is bound to salvation, morality, identity, and social belonging, doubt ceases to be an intellectual posture. It becomes an existential threat.
Fear as a Stabilizing Technology
Christian theology gradually developed mechanisms to stabilize belief under conditions of uncertainty. These mechanisms were not accidental. They functioned as technologies of survival within a framework that could not tolerate epistemic openness.
Among the most consequential were:
- eternal punishment as deterrence,
- doctrinal certainty as moral proof,
- binary moral classification,
- and identity-based belonging.
Within such systems, fear performs a structural role. It secures loyalty when trust erodes. It enforces cohesion when relational credibility weakens.
This dynamic is especially visible in evangelical Christianity, where salvation is often framed as precarious, belief as decisive, and doubt as spiritually dangerous. Under these conditions, faith becomes less a response to reality than a defense against loss.
Religious Trauma as Structural Outcome
What is often described today as religious trauma is not merely the result of individual abuse or isolated authoritarian leadership. It is a systemic consequence of belief structures that equate uncertainty with danger.
When questioning threatens eternal destiny, the psyche adapts accordingly:
- curiosity narrows,
- moral imagination contracts,
- fear displaces trust.
Leaving such systems rarely feels like intellectual liberation alone. It often involves grief, anger, guilt, and a profound sense of disorientation. The collapse of belief carries emotional weight because belief was asked to carry too much.
Greek unbelief did not produce this trauma because Greek religion did not demand existential submission.
Christianity did.
Why Defensive Faith Cannot Adapt
Defensive faith is inherently brittle.
Because it relies on fear to maintain coherence, it cannot revise itself without destabilization. Ethical critique feels like attack. Historical awareness feels corrosive. Skepticism feels fatal.
As a result, defensive faith often intensifies its claims precisely when they are least credible. Certainty hardens. Boundaries tighten. Complexity is rejected.
This escalation is not evidence of conviction, but of fragility.
Process-Theological Observation
Fear Signals Relational Failure
From a process-theological perspective, fear is not a moral flaw but a diagnostic signal.
When relational systems lose credibility, they compensate with control. When trust collapses, coercion emerges. Fear functions as a substitute for relational depth.
Process thought rejects the idea that faith must be protected from uncertainty. If reality itself is open, evolving, and relational, then faith grounded in fear is already misaligned with the nature of things.
A divinity that requires terror to sustain allegiance is not persuasive presence but imposed authority.
This distinction matters.
It suggests that the path forward does not lie in restoring certainty or authority, but in relinquishing them. Faith must be disentangled from fear if it is to remain livable in a world that no longer confuses control with meaning.
The final section of this essay examines why, under these conditions, exit from Christianity often involves profound loss - and why belief became impossible to revise without rupture.
IV. Why Exit Became Impossible Without Loss
“When belief becomes identity,
leaving does not feel like revision,
but like erasure.”
When belief becomes inseparable from identity, leaving does not feel like revision. It feels like self-erasure.
This is the final and most consequential difference between Greek unbelief and contemporary Christian skepticism. Greek religion permitted disengagement without demanding existential severance. Christianity, especially in its evangelical forms, frequently does not.
Belief as Total Orientation
Over centuries, Christianity increasingly fused belief with:
- moral worth,
- communal belonging,
- eternal destiny,
- and personal identity.
Faith ceased to function as a posture toward reality and became a comprehensive self-description. To believe was not merely to assent to claims, but to know who one was, where one belonged, and what one could hope for.
Within such systems, doubt is not neutral. It is interpreted as:
- moral failure,
- spiritual danger,
- betrayal of community,
- or capitulation to evil.
This is why modern deconversion narratives are so often marked by grief and rage rather than calm detachment. One does not simply leave a worldview. One loses a world.
Exit as Social and Moral Dislocation
For many contemporary Christians, especially those raised in evangelical subcultures, exiting faith involves cascading losses:
- rupture with family or community,
- loss of moral vocabulary,
- collapse of existential meaning,
- and fear of irreversible error.
These losses are not incidental. They are structural.
Christianity’s historical insistence on exclusive truth and salvific finality ensured that belief could not be revised incrementally. One was either inside or outside. Faith was binary. Exit was total.
Greek religion never produced such dislocation because it never demanded such totality.
Process-Theological Observation
Identity Must Remain Revisable
From a process-theological perspective, identity is not static possession but ongoing formation. Any faith that freezes identity at the level of belief violates the nature of becoming.
Process thought affirms that persons grow through relational responsiveness, not doctrinal completion. When belief systems demand finality, they force identity into rigidity. Growth becomes betrayal. Revision becomes loss.
The trauma of exit thus signals not personal failure, but structural misalignment between faith and the processual nature of human becoming.
Faith collapses when it cannot be left without devastation.
The movement traced in this essay does not culminate in denial, but in displacement.
Christianity did not collapse because it was disproven. It collapsed because it became structurally incapable of accommodating ethical growth, epistemic humility, and relational trust without fear.
Unlike Greek religion, which could be outgrown, Christianity bound belief to power, identity, and salvation. Skepticism under these conditions could not remain gentle. It became traumatic, polarizing, and absolutist.
The result is the present moment: a culture saturated with religious memory yet increasingly unable to inhabit inherited faith without harm.
This transformation unfolded unevenly across centuries, but its contours are now unmistakable. Where Essay I documented the ethical withdrawal of trust, and Essay II traced the explanatory and epistemic withdrawal of necessity, Essay V shows why Christianity’s collapse was experienced not as maturation, but as rupture.
The gods of antiquity faded.The God of empire fractured.
What disappears in this process is not meaning, but necessity. Belief is no longer required to explain the world, ground morality, or secure belonging. Faith persists only where it can justify itself relationally rather than coercively.
This marks a decisive threshold.
Christianity now faces the same question once faced by Greek religion - but under far more demanding conditions:
Can faith remain credible without domination, certainty, or fear?
Process-Theological Coda
After Collapse, What Remains Possible
From a process-theological perspective, the collapse of coercive Christianity is not a loss of the sacred, but a clearing of conceptual ground.
Greek disenchantment eliminated interventionist divinity and exposed the limits of certainty. Christianity’s collapse exposes the limits of domination, fear, and identity-bound belief. Both perform necessary work.
Process thought affirms the coherence of a world that does not require supernatural interruption. It affirms skepticism as epistemic discipline rather than moral failure. It affirms ethical growth as prior to metaphysical allegiance.
What Greek thought lacked was a metaphysics capable of articulating value, meaning, and relational depth as intrinsic to process itself. Christianity possessed such resources but buried them beneath power.
Process theology enters at this unresolved intersection.
Instead, it reframes divinity as persuasive presence rather than sovereign domination, and faith as participatory trust rather than propositional assent. God is not external ruler but relational depth within becoming itself.
In this light, contemporary skepticism is not the enemy of faith but its condition of possibility. It removes images of divinity that cannot grow, suffer, or respond. What remains is not atheism as negation, but a sharpened question:
That question now presses forward.
Essay VI turns from diagnosis to construction - asking how faith might be reimagined beyond control, certainty, and fear, without abandoning depth, meaning, or hope.
Faith did not fall
because the world grew darker,
but because it grew wider.
Faith walls were built for safety,
for containment, for protection,
for identity and enforcement.
learned to command in its institutions,
and then forget how to listen.
Belief became armor.
Doubt became danger.
Love was narrowed to the defendable.
but to breathe the airs of exploration again.
What remained was not absence,
but existential grounds of being
it will not arrive crowned by imperialism -
January 16, 2026
@copyright R.E. Slater Publications
all rights reserved
Eusebius of Caesarea. Life of Constantine. Translated by Averil Cameron and Stuart G. Hall. Oxford - Oxford University Press, 1999.
Augustine of Hippo. The City of God. Translated by Henry Bettenson. London - Penguin Classics, 2003.
Tertullian. Apology. Translated by T. R. Glover. Cambridge - Harvard University Press (Loeb), 1931.
Origen. Against Celsus. Translated by Henry Chadwick. Cambridge - Cambridge University Press, 1980.
II. Core Historical and Theological Scholarship (Graduate Level)
Brown, Peter. The Rise of Western Christendom. 2nd ed. Oxford - Blackwell, 2003.
MacMullen, Ramsay. Christianity and Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries. New Haven - Yale University Press, 1997.
Wilken, Robert Louis. The Christians as the Romans Saw Them. New Haven - Yale University Press, 2003.
Pagels, Elaine. The Origin of Satan. New York - Vintage, 1996.
Casey, Maurice. Jesus of Nazareth: An Independent Historian’s Account. London - T & T Clark, 2010.
III. Power, Empire, Trauma, and Identity (Religion and Society)
Assmann, Jan. The Price of Monotheism. Stanford - Stanford University Press, 2010.
Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge - Harvard University Press, 2007.
Asad, Talal. Formations of the Secular. Stanford - Stanford University Press, 2003.
Daly, Mary. Beyond God the Father. Boston - Beacon Press, 1973.
Griffith, R. Marie. Moral Combat: How Sex Divided American Christians and Fractured American Politics. New York - Basic Books, 2017.
Exline, Julie J., et al. Theology and Mental Health. Philadelphia - Templeton Press, 2019.
IV. Evangelicalism, Deconversion, and Religious Trauma
Barr, James. Fundamentalism. Philadelphia - Westminster Press, 1977.
Winell, Marlene. Leaving the Fold: A Guide for Former Fundamentalists and Others Leaving Their Religion. Oakland - New Harbinger Publications, 1993.
Fisher, Jeffrey. Spiritual Abuse. New York - Oxford University Press, 2018.
Dehlin, John, et al. “Religious Trauma Syndrome.” Journal of Trauma and Dissociation, vol. 19, no. 4, 2018.
V. Process Theology and Constructive Alternatives
Whitehead, Alfred North. Religion in the Making. New York - Fordham University Press, 1996.
Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality. Corrected Edition. New York - Free Press, 1978.
Cobb, John B. Transforming Christianity and the World. Maryknoll - Orbis Books, 1999.
Suchocki, Marjorie Hewitt. The End of Evil. Albany - SUNY Press, 1988.
Keller, Catherine. Political Theology of the Earth. New York - Columbia University Press, 2018.
Griffin, David Ray. God, Power, and Evil. Louisville - Westminster John Knox Press, 2004.
VI. Orientation for Public and General Readers
Armstrong, Karen. Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence. New York - Knopf, 2014.
Butler Bass, Diana. Christianity After Religion. New York - HarperOne, 2012.
Rohr, Richard. The Universal Christ. New York - Convergent, 2019.
Enns, Peter. The Sin of Certainty. New York - HarperOne, 2016.
