The limits of religion today

In the end, the religious person in the modern world can be certain of nothing except their own faith.

This enables the greatest encouragements; as, for example, in the Psalms. But it avails little against subjection to most forms of domination, because of the way subjectivity in the modern world is individualized. For those with property and liberty it is privatized. For those whose manner of living is notably precarious, what they are expected to need and want is correctional treatments (therapy, 'spirituality', etc.); they must not be allowed to develop or pursue a politics; that is recoded as illness when it is not recoded as personal success. This is worth mentioning because people adopt religious attitudes and things like them partly as a response to precarious positioning and a way of resisting domination. Often the claim is that it is totalizing, or stronger (a "higher power"), thus perhaps guaranteeing or at least promising victory. But the totalizing positions are easily recuperated by authorities as merely individual ones. It is for the sake of this individualization, which is in the first place a strategy of domination (and not, or not only, what opposes and is opposed by it) that all the problems of everyday life become psychologized. Of course, to have any way of organizing and managing, in theory or practice, the problems of everyday life as experienced in a totalizing way is precisely what it means to have a religion. There are many secular religions in that sense. That fact does not entail that the canonical ones are the "truly true" ones and the others inadequate. They are all inadequate if one treats them as only magic can. Magic guarantees the success of endeavors in getting what one wants. There are magical ethics, the stuff of many religions, but there is no magical politics, and the way the modern world understands both the sciences that are central to it and history as the dynamism of the social world, is not magical. It may be political or merely governmental. Governance managed things; politics seeks to change them.