For decades, a large part of Western intellectual elites believed they had understood the direction of history. That as education, science, technology, and prosperity advanced, religion would retreat. That churches would empty, that dogmas would lose their influence, and that the sacred would eventually occupy an increasingly insignificant place in collective life.
The data seemed to support that thesis. In much of Europe, religious practice declined, the number of vocations decreased, the authority of religious institutions diminished, and secularization emerged as one of the few historical processes as inexorable as the law of gravity.
But something unexpected happened along the way. Although churches began to empty, societies did not become less fervent. If old orthodoxies lost power, new ones emerged. Acceptance of the meaning of great religious narratives receded, but the need to bind oneself to a moral community remained intact. What actually disappeared? Specific forms of the sacred, not the human need that sustained them.
Perhaps we are facing the great cultural surprise of our time. Secularization has triumphed far less than expected and than we believe. Not because traditional religion has returned. Let us say clearly that it has not. The surprise is deeper. What has happened is that the sacred has changed location.
For years, the discussion has centered on whether we live in religious or secular societies. What if the question was poorly formulated from the beginning? What if the fundamental issue is not whether we believe more or less in God than our grandparents did? The fundamental question is what realities we consider inviolable today.
Because every society, even the most rational, technological, and secular, establishes zones of intense symbolic protection. These are ideas, values, identities, symbols, or narratives that cease to be mere opinions to become absolute references. Realities that are not only defended but even venerated. Realities that not only generate discussion but come to be considered morally and existentially sacred.
In this sense, we can consider numerous examples from contemporary politics. Just decades ago, ideologies presented themselves mainly as projects for organizing the economy and institutions. Currently, they function increasingly as systems of identity. They no longer limit themselves to proposing solutions; they also offer belonging, recognition, and meaning. They generate orthodoxies, heresies, and mechanisms of exclusion everywhere. They dictate who belongs to the group and who is left out.
Social networks have catalyzed this process. Never was it so easy to build moral communities instantly. Never was it so simple to immediately identify doctrinal deviations. We never had a technological infrastructure capable of turning every disagreement into a massive public spectacle.
The word “cancellation” and its meaning did not appear by chance. What is interesting is not that conflicts arise; conflicts are inevitable. What is striking is the form they take. Digital controversies are increasingly structured not as rational discussions between citizens but as disputes over moral purity. The logic they entail is not that of debate but of contamination. The problem no longer lies in someone being wrong but in having become impure and must be silenced and removed. And the phenomenon is not linked to any specific ideology. It appears in almost all political and cultural spheres, where contents change but the punitive structure remains.
Something similar occurs in the realm of consumption. For a long time, we thought that brands sold products. Today we know that what major brands really sell is identities. The purchase of certain objects has become a public declaration of who we are and in what community we include ourselves. Consumers not only acquire goods but also participate in narratives, seek recognition, express values, and even mark status. The market has learned a lesson that much social theory still resists accepting: we humans do not shop only for utility; we also shop for meaning.
In sport it occurs in a similar way. It is difficult to find another phenomenon capable of bringing together hundreds of millions of people around shared symbols, periodic rituals, and intense collective emotional experiences. Whoever has experienced a full stadium at an important final knows that something far beyond entertainment occurs there. And it is no accident that the language used by fans and journalists is full—subtly or explicitly—of references to faith, devotion, sacrifice, glory, or redemption. For a long time, these similarities have been interpreted as mere metaphors. Perhaps they are not, and we are observing the same human need expressing itself in different contexts.
The rise of alternative spiritualities points in the same direction. While institutional religions lose influence among broad sectors of the population, new forms of spiritual seeking proliferate. Meditation, mindfulness, retreats, transformative experiences, wellness practices, expanded consciousness, psychologies of personal growth, and countless hybrid proposals occupy an increasingly larger space in the social and vital sphere. They are often presented as completely new phenomena. They are not. What is new is not the search for transcendence but that this search no longer needs to present itself as religion.
And then artificial intelligence appears. The public conversation of 2026 is full of questions about regulation, employment, productivity, and security. These are certainly important matters. But perhaps we are overlooking another even more troubling question. What happens when individuals in a society delegate intellectual, emotional, and even existential guidance to algorithmic systems? Technologies have always enhanced human capacities. What is singular about artificial intelligence is that it begins to occupy territories we once reserved for other figures of authority. Increasingly more people consult it about what to study, how to raise their children, how to face a personal crisis, or what meaning to give to a difficult decision. We are not simply talking about tools. We are talking about trust. And all deep trust has cultural implications that transcend the technological sphere.
At this point, it is well to clarify a possible misunderstanding. None of this means that football is really a religion, that brands are churches, or that artificial intelligence is a new god. The question is different. Current societies are full of experiences that function as religion but do not call themselves religion. They are experiences that provide identity, community, moral orientation, symbolic transcendence, and shared narratives.
For years we have observed these phenomena separately. Politics on one hand; consumption on another; social networks on another; sport on another; technology on another. Perhaps the error was precisely that. Perhaps all of these form part of the same story and the same substrate.
Because the great mistake of cultural elites was not thinking that religions could lose influence. That was perfectly plausible and, to a large extent, has occurred. The mistake consisted in believing that the disappearance of religious forms would also imply that of their root: the human need for the sacred.
Recent history seems to suggest exactly the opposite. The more secular a society declares itself, the more visible becomes the energy it dedicates to creating new spaces of absolute meaning. And here an unexpected consequence appears. For a long time we have told the story of secularization as a story of loss. As the loss of God, of transcendence, of religion. Perhaps we should begin to consider it differently. Perhaps secularization is not the story of how the sacred disappeared. Perhaps it is the story of how the sacred escaped from its old forms and institutions. Like the story of a cultural force, a reality that abandoned one territory to colonize many others. It diversified. In other words, the story of a mutation.
Because perhaps God has not entirely died in contemporary culture. Perhaps God has simply stopped living where we thought and where we looked. And perhaps the most urgent intellectual task of our time is not to explain why modern societies have stopped believing but to understand what they believe in now.
Adolfo Sillóniz
Religión Digital