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Eighty years ago today, on January 27, 1945, Soviet forces overran a section of German-occupied Poland. The Nazis had been on the run for a couple of years by this point near the end of World War II, so it was not the retreat that shocked the Soviets.

In the neighborhood of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Soviets discovered 600 corpses and 7000 live, emaciated prisoners. It was only the beginning of the discovery of the horrors of the Holocaust, a word now used as a synonym for evil. 

In 12 years of Nazi power, and particularly after the 1942 start of the “Final Solution,” some six million Jews, along with five million Slavs, Roma, dissidents and other prisoners were worked, shot, or gassed to death. The bulk were taken from modern day Poland, Belarus and Ukraine, but Hitler’s odious apparatus netted victims from across Europe, sometimes with complicity of local governments. The Nazis claimed that the Jews were being resettled in newly conquered areas of the USSR, but they were instead systematically executed. Those who could work were worked to death. Those who couldn’t work, including children and the elderly, were killed with all the industrial genius of the German nation. 

What should be a source of shock for today is the increasing number of young Americans who doubt that the Holocaust, one of the most well-attested events in all history, even happened. The records are there, as were a number of eyewitnesses. The Nazis said they were going to do it, and Germans today admit they did. This evil happened.  

This is why Holocaust Remembrance Day is important to note and observe, especially with the next generation. It is a historical marker that forces us to face the reality and potential of evil. Especially in a culture like ours, which too often caricatures evil, we must not downplay the potential of humanity to commit evils after the Fall.   

My generation owes much to films that taught us about the Holocaust, such as Schindler’s List or Life is Beautiful.  Schools once assigned books such as The Diary of Anne Frank, Man’s Search for Meaning, or Eyewitness Auschwitz, in which a narrator describes three years working in the crematorium. The Holocaust Museums in Washington, D.C. and Jerusalem are especially invaluable tools for bolstering our cultural memories.   

It is a profound and dangerous mistake to deny this evil or to assume it is a matter of the past, as if our “enlightened age” is incapable of doing what our ancestors did. Moral evolution is a pernicious and dangerous lie. Future generations must know the truth of the human condition, lest they too are deluded by moral and technological hubris.   

After all, the Holocaust was not the work of the oppressed seeking to redress sins of the past. Nor can it be explained as the work of barbarians or uneducated bigots lashing out against all who were different. Germany was arguably the most scientifically advanced and best-educated nation in the world at that time.    

The unnerving HBO movie Conspiracy portrays how military, legal, and political German leaders gathered at the Wannsee Conference on January 20, 1942. There, they set in motion a plan to rid the world of Jews. Most of the men at that meeting were caught and killed or died before the end of the war, but their actions endure as among the vilest archetypes of human depravity. 

The Holocaust perpetrated by the Nazi regime is the most well-known horror of a horror-filled twentieth century. At Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and Bergen-Belsen, the world confronts the realities of evil in this world and the human condition. Whatever it takes, we must never forget. 

Image from Getty.

According to a recent report from statistician Ryan Burge, the belief in miracles has risen in recent years among the college-educated, the group most correlated with materialistic beliefs. In 1991, just 45% of Americans with a bachelor’s degree said they “definitely believe” in miracles. However, according to the U.S. government’s General Social Survey, that number climbed to 63% by 2018. The change was even more dramatic among those with graduate-level degrees. In 1991, a mere 30% of those with at least a master’s degree believed in miracles. By 2018, that number had jumped to 61%. 

Apparently, education is no longer the de-supernaturalizing influence it once was. In fact, those with higher education are as likely to believe in miracles as those without higher education. However, these surprising numbers are part of the larger story of Western secular society. 

The standard prediction about the West has been that the growth and expansion of technology would continue to make us more secular, and that more secular would mean less belief in God and the supernatural. But, the percentage of atheists and agnostics in America has hardly budged, even among the group Burge refers to as the “non-religious.” Even the so-called “Great de-Churching” has not been a mass conversion to atheism, but rather an explosion of what sociologists call “nones,” people with no religion in particular.  

Making sense of this apparent contradiction requires rethinking what it means to be “secular.” For example, just as rejecting religion is not the same as rejecting the supernatural, so an increased openness to the supernatural should not be equated with religious revival. New York Times columnist Ross Douthat suggested that the softening toward “signs and wonders” among college-educated Americans may simply reflect “the general resilience of supernaturalism.” This is not the same thing as embracing faith, Christian or otherwise. Put differently, there is such a thing as a secular spirituality, and that may be what we are seeing today.  

In the middle of the twentieth century, the eminent sociologist Peter Berger proposed the “secularization thesis.” He speculated that as societies advanced into the modern, scientific age, religion would lose its grip on people. In its place would be a secularism that, among other things, was marked by a rejection of anything supernatural.  

Decades later, Berger renounced this thesis, recognizing the resilience of religion. For example, the world had become more religious, not less. Christianity is projected to number 2.7 billion or 33.8% of the world’s population soon, while atheism and the non-religious are declining as a percentage of world population.  

In this sense, the West is an outlier. However, it’s not clear that Berger’s self-rejected thesis was wrong. More than 25 years ago, another observer argued that the form of secularism overtaking our society wasn’t Dawkins-style materialism. Rather, it was the tendency to think about the world and to live not as if God does not exist, but as if He were largely irrelevant. In his book The Way of the Modern World, Dr. Craig Gay suggested that our modern, consumeristic and, yes, secular world elevated convenience, control, and choice above all other values. Thus, we may still “believe” in God and want spirituality, but our approach mimics shopping or eating at a buffet, in which we pick and choose what we like rather than relying on the authority of Scriptures, traditions, or creeds.  

In this view, the West is as deeply secular about spirituality as about technology, politics, or anything else. An example is the disturbing video that recently went viral which portrayed white-collar Americans on an ayahuasca retreat in Central America. Spiritual tourism is big business, and these tourists, sitting in the dirt violently vomiting from hallucinogenic drugs while local guides wiped their chins, were willing to pay for their manufactured “miracle.”  

The growth of spiritual secularism, or secular spiritualism, does not disprove the secularization thesis, but it does reframe it. To be clear, the understanding of spirituality that has emerged in the West is as far from Christian as the non-spirituality that was predicted. The mixing and matching approach suits customers who believe they are in charge, and that the right techniques will give them the convenience, control, and choice Gay described, even beyond the physical world.  

Some, including higher profile former secularists, are by God’s grace finding the One who is the Truth and actually in charge of the universe. Others are finding themselves, in this increasingly popular marketplace of secular spirituality, deep in pagan darkness, subjected to forces they can’t possibly understand, let alone command. Which is why the increased openness to miracles among educated Americans is mixed news.   

Secular spirituality is far from revival. Christians know of these other forces capable of counterfeit “miracles” but that lead away from the Way, the Truth, and the Life. This should cause us to cry out for mercy for those who are being deceived.