Republished with permission by Vista, see original articl e here Photo by Francisco Ghisletti on Unsplash. The topic of this article may seem a bit odd. As an example, data from the European Social Survey —16 showed that in twelve of the European countries a majority of to years-olds confessed to no religion at all — meaning they did not self-identify as religious, never prayed to God, and hardly ever attended a religious ceremony 1.
Obviously, this is not the whole picture. While countries like the Czech Republic, Estonia and my own country Sweden qualify as some of the most secularized in the world, countries like Poland, Lithuania and Ireland still stand strong when it comes to Christian faith.
However, one of the foundational truths of both the Old and New Testament is that the real question is not whether we worship — but what we worship. Also, as all readers of Scripture should know: the struggle between competing gods does not end with us confessing Jesus Christ as our Lord and Saviour. There will always be gods and powers and trends and ideologies that command our worship. The Bible speaks of these things as idols, where idols take the shape of physical entities.
Instead, our gods tend to be of a more subtle, and often more ideological, kind. The most obvious candidate should probably be the worship of the self, that goes back all the way to the garden of Eden, but is more prominent than ever in the postmodern European culture.
More often than not we tend to put ourselves and our feelings at the centre of our worldview. Everyone has his or her own truth, and the customer is always right. And ultimately it is the question of power: do I surrender to God, or do I myself want to be a god?
