Sixty years ago, Time Magazine captured the ethos of the day in raising the question on its cover, “Is God Dead?” Among a certain segment of society, represented by such figures as Thomas Altizer and William Hamilton, the cry of Friedrich Nietzsche’s madman (“God is dead”), expressed the felt need to carry on the work of theology and philosophy without God. It was a time in the United States when secularism captured the mass imagination, in a sensibility William Desmond dubs “default atheism.” In default atheism there are atheistic presumptions that may or may not be fully conscious. While the new atheists gained a popular hearing, there has also been a shift toward religion in politics and in the public imagination, which might be characterized as a “default religion” which unwittingly takes up atheistic assumptions. God’s existence is not the issue, but his moral character reflected in Christ, tied to the ground of being. If the Hebrew Scriptures depict the contention between belief in a tribal God (one who commits genocide, killing the inhabitants of the land to make way for “his chosen people”) and a God who is good, we might have thought the issue was resolved in the Christian picture of the Father of Christ. The God revealed in Christ is universal, the very ground of being as overflowing goodness. Where God is too small, there is a metaphysical disconnect between God, the world, and human interiority, and this disconnect can function as a practical atheism. The question is, if something more insidious than atheism is now at work, perhaps a “default” notion of God more nihilistic in its outcomes than atheism?
Statistically there has not been much of a shift, but in a time when Christians seem to be supporting harsh immigration policies, open racism, and genocide in Gaza (in supporting the present administration) one might expect that there would be a mass moral outcry against detaining migrants in torturous crowded conditions, depriving them of medical care and disappearing them to other countries or within the prison archipelago, arresting children and separating them from their parents, killing women, children, and civilians in Iran and Gaza, and killing U.S. citizens in the streets. One might expect that an administration populated by devout Christians, would have within it a moral counter voice to the draconian policies.
The present administration is made up largely of devout Christians with J. D. Vance (Vice President), Marco Rubio (Secretary of State) Sean Duffy (Transportation Secretary) John Ratcliffe (CIA Director), Linda McMahon (Education Secretary), and Elise Stefanik (UN Ambassador) all devout Catholics. Jonathan Heaps notes in this mornings Commonweal Magazine, that the administration has added one of the nation’s most prominent Catholic intellectuals, Chad Pecknold of Catholic University of America, to serve as Principal Director for Cultural Outreach at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Pecknold is to be the voice of administrations policies, working in Homeland Security’s Office of Public Engagement. He will provide explanation for the policies implemented under former Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Kristi Noem (now head of The Shield of the Americas) and her replacement Markwayne Mullin (both devout Pentecostals). Rather than a moral counter voice, these prominent Christians are literally the voice promoting the worst cruelties of this administration. Heaps points out that Pecknold, as a professor of CUA is under the authority of the church (serving on “a pontifical faculty accredited by the Holy See.”). As such, he “has been hired to continue to publicly promote the administration’s hyper-hawkish immigration aims, to continue to say things like ‘mass deportations may be a legitimate response to mass migration’” as he has argued in a policy paper.[1] It seems Pecknold will be in charge of justifying the “disappearing” and torture of immigrants and the “de-legalizing more than a million Black and brown refugees.”
Pecknold is joining a strong lineup of deeply pious Protestant Christians such as Mike Huckabee (Ambassador to Israel and a Baptist Preacher), who stated in an interview that it would be “fine” if Israel took the land stretching from the Nile River to the Euphrates River (the “Greater Israel” promised in the Bible), which would include the eastern parts of Egypt, western and central parts of Iraq, all of Syria, all of Jordan, all of Lebanon, the northern part of Saudi Arabia, and of course all of Palestine the West Bank and Gaza. Huckabee has recently come out condemning Israeli settlers’ treatment of Palestinians, but as U.S. Ambassador he has supported the right to occupy these lands. He has carried out U.S. policy in support of Israel, and the genocidal actions of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
We could go on to describe the piety of Russell Vought (Director of the Office of Management and Budget), who has weaponized Trump’s policies against States resistant to his powers (as an outspoken evangelical), or the deep religiosity of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who has implemented a policy of “maximum lethality” in bombing Iran, in extra-judicial killings of occupants of boats on the Caribbean, and in ignoring international law in warfare, recklessly killing civilians. We could point to Trump’s own religious concerns in his appointment of Paula White-Cain who serves as a senior advisor leading the White House Faith Office, acting as primary spiritual advisor to the President. Trump’s spirituality may be the most marked characteristic of the pervading religious sensibility. His religion is indistinguishable from nihilism, and though Jesus and God and prayer provide window dressing, any serious notion of God, of Christian ethics, of human compassion or empathy, or of any resistance to secularism or atheism are indiscernible. Trump embodies a religion that has succeeded in emptying the world of Christian social concern. He probably could not articulate the world which foregrounds and determines his actions, but it is clearly lacking in serious recognition of the Father of Christ or of a Christian ground of being.
The point is obvious, that the Christian religion, as understood and practiced by this administration, and perhaps the religion which garnered the vote to put this administration in office, is more insidious than atheism, in that it worships a God who either allows for or justifies evil. The practical atheism and nihilism of this faith is covered by a veneer of Christianity, but the default atheism of one generation now pervades and foregrounds the religion of this generation. This God is less intellectually viable than the non-existent God of atheism, more of a primitive tribal God, disconnected from the ontological ground of goodness fused to the world in Christ. Whether default atheism and secularism are responsible, or simply a malformed Christianity or both, it is obvious that the God behind America’s religious nationalism and popular ethos lacks the basic qualifications for serious belief.
Godlessness may have so bewitched a generation, that serious consideration of God among philosophers and even theologians, to say nothing of the popular imagination, now seems to elude the Christian majority. It is a fairly simple exercise to pose the moral teaching of Christ against the morality of this religion. Nonviolence, welcoming the stranger, God as love, taking up the cross, forsaking selfish egoism, abandoning greed, giving to the poor, forgiveness, the universal value of all God’s creation and all people, is the entry point into Christianity 101. This moral teaching of Christ and the New Testament does not enter into the cruel ethos promoted by this administration and its supporters. Finite purposes, immediate selfish needs, greed, patriotism, white nationalism, Zionism, racism, all serve the immanent realm and the religion either does not interfere or is made to support this closed moral consideration enchained by worldly concerns (a failed metaphysics and morality). What seems to have been lost with moral seriousness, is a seriousness about God, such that default atheism and default religion occupy the same space. It may be that the popular religion has simply inherited the presumptions of atheism, presuming either that God is totally immanent (identical with the world), or so transcendent so as to be unknowable and unknown or at least not interfering with the world (deism). Transcendence removed from immanence, or an immanence without transcendence, function equally well to preserve presumptions of human autonomy. No God, a non-interfering God, or the world as God, serve the same practices, but perhaps more to the point, none of these systems presume to penetrate beneath the world foregrounding practice.
There is a closure within the self, in Charles Taylor’s description. Religious and non-religious inhabit the same “immanent frame,” existing as “buffered subjects” having closed off the boundary between inside (thought) and outside (nature, the physical), living in a disenchanted world. “Living in a disenchanted world, the buffered self is no longer open, vulnerable to a world of spirits and forces which cross the boundaries of the mind, indeed, negate the very idea of there being a secure boundary . . .”[2] The immanent frame is a practical atheism, excluding the interpenetration of the world and human interiority from realization of the divine.
William Desmond, imagines that we can break out of the immanent frame which binds by a reworked metaphysical recognition. He counters this lost porosity with the idea that there should be a concerted effort to realize the porosity of being, to recognize there is an intersection with the divine in the immanent. To unblock the boundaries clogging porosity, he calls upon a philosophical and theological acknowledgement of being saturated, a “too muchness.” “The very identity of philosophy might itself have to be called into question — an identity to be reformulated perhaps in terms of a porosity of thinking to what exceeds its determination purely through thought’s own immanent resources.”[3] The signs of transcendence intersecting with immanence are in an over determinate being (the idiocy or givenness of the world), in the aesthetics or beauty of the world, in the very nature of human desire or erotics and in, what Desmond calls, an agapeic outpouring. He describes breaching the walls of default atheism through recognition that human existence is between the transcendent and immanent: “Within the between there are hyperboles of being which communicate more than the terms of immanence can circumscribe: pointers to ultimate transcendence as Other to the immanent between.”[4] He describes these hyperboles as throwing us above, pointing both beyond ourselves and the immediate world. In Christian terms, there is an intersection, in Christ, between the immanent and transcendent, which points to the metaphysical reality we inhabit. Desmond’s resolution to default atheism addresses the failures of a default religion with very similar presumptions.
First, there is givenness (an “idiocy of being”), the wonder that there is something rather than nothing. With Pascal, we realize that we exist between an infinite something and an absolute nothing hidden from man:
A nothing compared to the infinite, a whole compared to the nothing, a middle point between all and nothing, infinitely remote from an understanding of the extremes; the end of things and their principles are unattainably hidden from him in impenetrable secrecy. Equally incapable of seeing the nothing from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed. What else can he do, then, but perceive some semblance of the middle of things, eternally hopeless of knowing either their principles or their end? All things come out of nothingness and are carried onwards to infinity. Who can follow these astonishing processes? The author of these wonders understands them no one else can.[5]
The wonder of existence described by Pascal was once readily available, but default religion systematically reduces everything, so as to rid us of being either frightened or exhilarated (enchanted) by the darkness or the light. “Man is a double being, and yet in him the extremities can touch each other. It is as if the extremities flash across the interim between and find their point of intensive condensation in us. There is nothing middling or mediocre about our being between.”[6] The Pascalian realization however, points to the existential divide which will soon follow, in which human interiority is a world closed within itself. Friedrich Nietzsche considered Pascal the only logical Christian, and is one of his heirs. At least Nietzsche’s atheism retained some of the possible wonder, but modern scientism and secularism would reduce all to a grey sameness. Pascal has hit upon the wonder of being, a metaphysical astonishment beyond finite determinations, which for Pascal, as a Christian, pointed directly to God.
Second, is the hyperbole of aesthetics: “The incarnate glory of aesthetic happening rouses astonishment and appreciation before finite being yet seems to exceed finitization.”[7] The world speaks of the glory of God, in excess of its finite possibilities, on the order of a great work of art. “The beauty of creation: integral being lovely for self, splendid immanence as a whole, yet not a closed but rather an open whole. The sublimity of creation: the beyond of aesthetic finitude shattering finitude in finitude and elevating it above itself.”[8] There is an over determinacy in divine goodness showing forth in the shining glory of the world. As the Psalmist declares, “The heavens are telling of the glory of God; and their expanse is declaring the work of His hands. Day to day pours forth speech, and night to night reveals knowledge” (Ps 19:1-2). “This cannot be just another finite intelligibility, since this is in question, but rather we are pointed to an intelligibility hyperbolic to finite intelligibility. The intelligibility that allows us to render the finite intelligible is not itself intelligible in fully finitizable terms.”[9] It is not just a matter of intelligent design, but what is beyond and provides for intelligence and the rational. “We are awakened to something inexhaustible about the good of being at all. There is something too much about this for us. We are secretly sustained by it, but being so intimate with it, participating in it, we cannot get a fix on it.”[10] Aesthetics (as well as ethics) is a call to a deeper, transcendent being, in the goodness of creation.
Third, there is the hyperbole of “erotics” in which human passion draws us toward the world and toward others, which witnesses to a deep porosity or relatedness, natural and integral to being human. “Indeed, the passion of our being (passio essendi) points to something deeper than just self- surpassing, since it witnesses to a more primal porosity to what exceeds us.”[11] Human passion and erotics continually pull us beyond the self as part of the self: “the erotics of human selving makes us a living incarnation of an aporia of finitude: a living impasse in finite being that cannot pass beyond itself as impasse through its own power alone, even when it seems to surpass itself infinitely.”[12] There is pleasure, delight, or an aesthetic potency made manifest in passion, in recognition or realization of the good. We experience this bodily, but this bodily satisfaction is not simply physical, but points to an ontological depth, the pure goodness of being. This goodness does not by-pass the senses, but in the biblical understanding, this truth is received through the senses. As in the Song of Solomon, the flame of Yahweh is burning in the erotic, directly joined to enjoyment of the divine.
Fourth, in our relational identity, is the hyperbole of agapeics of community. “There is an ecstasis from fullness giving itself as well as from lack seeking itself in fullness, our being is in receiving and in giving. We are at all, in a primal ontological sense, by receiving our’ ‘to be’, by being received into being at all.”[13] This fourth way intersects with Desmond’s grounding notion of the metaxological or the between, in that this is the grounding reality of the the gift, of receiving ourselves. “There is a sign of this in the ontological situation of our finitude itself: we are given to be before we can give ourselves to be; finitude as such is given, but not given from itself alone.”[14] It puts the stress, not on self-mediation, but the mediation through a community beyond the self, beyond univocal sameness and even beyond dialectics. As he says, “It puts the emphasis on an intermediation, not a self-mediation, however dialectically qualified.”[15] This inter opens the space for God, for community, for otherness, and plurality, simultaneously showing forth the truth in the univocal, the equivocal and the dialectical, but setting these ways in a larger context (the metaxological). As Desmond concludes, “These hyperboles, and most ultimately the hyperbole of agapeic being, offer us the richest senses of the ‘to be’ in finitude that also speak of the ‘too muchness’, the overdeterminacy of being in which we participate in the between. Properly understood, they communicate signs of the overdeterminacy of God.”[16]
This overdeterminancy, I take to be the sign and message of Christ, who brings together the divine and human. While Desmond is working primarily in a philosophical register, with the aim of bringing philosophy alongside theology, perhaps this one step back from theology, in philosophy, provides the necessary interval to recognizing the overflowing goodness of God. On the other hand, his project rests upon his Christian faith, which does not always serve to overtly ground his description. This is not necessarily a defect, but apart from this open recognition, it could be presumed (which is definitely not his presumption) that philosophy, observation, metaphysics, are adequate, apart from recognition that ultimate insight flows from a Christian center. Where this connection is not made (e.g., Nietzsche reading Pascal), one wonders if his descriptions might be reversed. One could restate his project in the negative, and describe how it is that being caught between something and nothing can drain beauty, desire, and love out of the world, in a crushing nihilism. This is the existential possibility that Pascal introduces, which Nietzsche develops, and which a default atheism presumes.
It seems it is this existential nihilism, the crack unfilled by a metaxological spirituality, that has a grip on American Christianity. With Slavoj Žižek, we might focus on the dis-ease of the discord and assume it points to a final lack, or with Desmond, we might see the gap as a “godsend” which points to the overflow of reality, but it is the same crack (letting in the darkness and the light) opened in the modern frame. In the “crack” there is a mystery which speaks of excess, which the theologian recognizes as Logos. The God/man certainly makes a moral demand, but this moral demand is grounded in the intersection of time and eternity, immanence and transcendence, heaven and earth, and divine and human in His person – he opens up the metaxological reality Desmond describes. Christ relieves us of the Big Other of the transgressive law, the crushing transcendence, whether in the form of Nietzschean atheism or a demonic theism. Desmond, in spite of his reticence, is a key aid in extrapolating from Christ, to break down the suffocating walls of default atheism, the immanent frame, which has captured the American religious ethos.
[1] Jonathan Heaps, “Chad Pecknold’s New Job” in Commonweal (September 15, 2026).
[2] Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 300-301
[3] William Desmond, “On God and the Between, in Between philosophy and Theolog:Ccontemporary Interpretations of Christianity (Routledge, 2019),101.
[4] On God and the Between, 118.
[5] Blaise Pascal, Pensées, translated with an introduction by A.J. Krailsheimer (Baltimore: Penguin, 1966), 90. Cited in On God and the Between, 110.
[6] On God and the Between, 110.
[7] On God and the Between, 120.
[8] On God and the Between, 120.
[9] On God and the Between, 120.
[10] William Desmond, Ethics and the Between (New York: State University of New York Press, 2001) 66. Chapter 6 is entitled “Potencies of the Ethical: On the Sources of Being Good.”
[11] On God and the Between, 120.
[12] On God and the Between, 121.
[13] On God and the Between, 121.
[14] On God and the Between, 121.
[15] William Desmond, “The Fourfold Way” in The William Desmond Reader (State University of New York Press, Kindle Edition) location 295.
[16] On God and the Between, 121.