In Focus - The Age of ‘Anything’ ( March 2026 )

Title: The Age of ‘Anything’

Intro

When we take the one true God out of the picture, what remains to fill the deepest longing of our souls is darkness and evil, writes George Paul.

Highlight

Do you want to feel empowered? The Holy Spirit offers a power greater than any spell, a power to love, to heal, and to overcome sin and death. Do you want to know the future? Jesus offers something better: the promise of eternal life and a relationship with the One who holds the future in His hands. Do you want to connect with nature? The Christian faith teaches that the world was lovingly crafted by a Creator who invites us to be its stewards. Do you want to find your true self? Jesus says you must lose yourself for His sake, and in doing so, you will find a self more real and whole than you could ever ‘manifest’ on your own.

Article

Scroll. A 15-second video shows a pair of hands shuffling a deck of ornate tarot cards. The caption reads, ‘Collective Reading: What you need to hear today.’ Scroll. A crystal enthusiast explains how to use rose quartz to ‘manifest love’. Scroll. A user with dark lipstick and a pentagram necklace shares a simple ‘money spell’. This is #WitchTok, a corner of TikTok with billions of views, where ancient occult practices are repackaged as bite-sized life hacks for a new generation.

Meanwhile, on Netflix, a new season of a show featuring a teenage witch navigating high school, romance, and demonic forces is trending in the Top 10. On Instagram, astrology meme accounts have millions of followers, and dating apps now let you filter matches by their zodiac sign. Across the world, anxious young people are turning to online fortune-tellers and astrology apps to cope with uncertainty about their careers and relationships.

In Germany, a young man walks into a building with soaring Gothic arches and stained-glass windows. But this is no longer a church. The former St Rochus Catholic Church is now a high-end bicycle shop. Across Europe, over 600 Catholic churches have been closed and decommissioned in Germany alone since 2000. They've been turned into apartments, hotels, pubs, and even a boxing arena. The bells have fallen silent.

This isn't just a niche subculture anymore. It's mainstream. And it's a symptom of a much deeper spiritual shift. As the historic churches of the West stand increasingly empty, something else is rushing in to fill the void. It's a chaotic, glittering, and sometimes dark mix of new beliefs, ancient superstitions, and digital spirituality. It proves the prescient words of GK Chesterton, who famously said that when people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing – they'll believe in anything.

We are living in the age of ‘anything’. And it's time to ask: what are these new gods we're building, and what happens when we invite them into our lives?

The Numbers Don't Lie

The statistics paint a stark picture. In the United States, those identifying as Christian have dropped from 78% to 62% in less than two decades. The religiously unaffiliated, the so-called ‘nones,’ now make up 29% of the population. Among young adults aged 18-24, only 46% identify as Christian. In Europe, the trend is even more dramatic. A majority of young people in 12 out of 21 European countries identify as non-religious, with the Czech Republic (91%), Estonia (80%), and the UK (70%) leading the way.

And yet, the spiritual impulse hasn't died. Nearly a quarter of Americans aged 18-29 consult tarot cards annually. Thirty percent of all Americans engage with astrology, tarot, or fortune-tellers. In India, 62% of Gen Z believe spirituality helps them gain clarity, and 80% of young Indians engage with spiritual content online. Nearly 60% of astrology app users in India are Gen Z.

People are still searching. They're just searching in different places. And what they're finding is often a dangerous substitute for the real thing.

The Rise of the Occult

Let's be clear. The renewed interest in witchcraft, astrology, and the occult is not a harmless fad. It's a spiritual search, but it's a search in a world that has lost its compass. When a society turns its back on the one true God, it doesn't become a rational, secular utopia. It becomes haunted. The spiritual vacuum pulls in other forces, and not all of them are friendly.

The Bible is unequivocal about the dangers of dabbling in the occult. Deuteronomy 18:10-12 gives a stark warning against anyone who practices divination or sorcery, interprets omens, engages in witchcraft, or casts spells, or who is a medium or spiritist or who consults the dead. These practices are called ‘detestable’ because God, as a loving Father, knows they open doors to spiritual realities that are deceptive and destructive. They promise power and knowledge but often lead to fear, anxiety, and bondage.

Today's pop culture often presents witchcraft as a tool of empowerment, a way to reclaim personal power, especially for women. Shows like Chilling Adventures of Sabrina portray the occult as edgy, glamorous, and even heroic. Celebrities consult psychics and tarot readers, and fashion brands now incorporate spiritual themes into their marketing. Dior's own creative director was recently photographed having his tarot cards read. But this glosses over a darker truth. By seeking power from sources other than God, we place ourselves under the influence of forces that do not have our best interests at heart. We trade the loving authority of our Creator for the fickle and often malevolent whims of lesser spirits.

This isn't just about candles and crystals. When we reject the true God, we don't create a spiritual vacuum. We create an invitation. And darker forces are always ready to RSVP.

For many young people this spiritual search doesn't lead to a formal new religion, but to a kind of personalised, digital spirituality. It's a spirituality that fits into a busy, noisy, and anxious modern life. Anxious about the future, struggling with mental health, young people are turning to astrology apps and online tarot readers as a form of therapy.

While some are turning to the supernatural, others are pouring their religious impulses into secular causes that have taken on the shape of a faith. These new ‘religions’ have their own dogmas, priests, and punishments.

One of the most powerful is a hyper-politicised ideology that sees the world as a battle between oppressor and oppressed. It has its own version of original sin (privilege), a need for public confession, and a form of excommunication (cancel culture) that offers no forgiveness. As one analyst put it, ‘The Last Judgment of political correctness knows no forgiveness.’ It's a religion of law without grace, a system of rigid moral accounting that judges people based on their group identity rather than their character.

Another is a form of radical environmentalism that worships a wrathful Mother Earth, or ‘Gaia.’ In this faith, humanity is a virus, and salvation comes through a strict asceticism of consuming less and sacrificing modern comforts. It has a powerful sense of impending doom and a call for collective repentance, a secular apocalypse story for an age that has forgotten the real one.

A third is what we might call ‘Technicism,’ the belief that humanity can, through its own ingenuity, overcome its limitations and achieve a form of godhood. This is the dream of Silicon Valley, the promise that artificial intelligence and biotechnology will conquer death and suffering. It's the ancient Tower of Babel rebuilt with code and algorithms. It is the ultimate expression of human pride.

These secular faiths may seem noble, but they fall short. They locate evil in systems or in other people, but never in the human heart itself. They offer no real solution for the fundamental problem of sin and no hope for personal transformation.

How We Lost the Enchanted World

To understand how we got here, we have to understand what we lost. For a thousand years, the West lived in what the philosopher Charles Taylor calls an ‘enchanted’ world. This wasn't a world of fairy tales, but a world where the spiritual and material were deeply intertwined. For the medieval Catholic, the world was charged with the grandeur of God. Heaven was not a distant, abstract place; it was a reality that constantly broke into the earthly realm.

The Eucharist was the centre of this world – not a symbol, but the true Body and Blood of Christ, a miracle happening on the altar of every church. The saints were not just historical figures; they were friends and intercessors in heaven, part of the great family of the Church. Angels were messengers and guardians, a constant, unseen presence. The sacraments were not mere rituals, but powerful channels of grace that marked every stage of life, from birth to death. Relics, holy water, and blessed objects were points of contact with the divine. The cosmos itself was a great cathedral, filled with meaning, purpose, and signs that pointed back to the Creator.

This enchanted worldview began to crumble centuries ago. The process was slow, a gradual draining of the world's spiritual colour. The Protestant Reformation, as one writer put it, was an ‘engine of disenchantment’. By rejecting the sacraments, the intercession of the saints, and the Real Presence in the Eucharist, it pushed God further away, making Him a distant sovereign who ruled from afar rather than a loving Father intimately present in His creation. The world became less a place of mystery and more a collection of objects.

Then came the Enlightenment, which championed a cold, mechanical reason that had no room for mystery or revelation. Science became the only path to truth, and anything that couldn't be measured or quantified – like angels, miracles, or the soul – was dismissed as superstition. The world was no longer a cathedral. It was a clock, a machine that could be understood and controlled without any reference to a Creator.

By the time Nietzsche declared ‘God is dead’ in the 19th century, he was simply stating the logical conclusion of this long process of disenchantment. The West had built a world that no longer had any need for God. But in doing so, it had created a profound spiritual vacuum.

Nietzsche wasn't celebrating. He was terrified. He knew that killing God meant killing the very foundation of Western morality. ‘When one gives up the Christian faith,’ he wrote, ‘one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one's feet. This morality is by no means self-evident… By breaking one main concept out of Christianity, the faith in God, one breaks the whole: nothing necessary remains in one's hands.’

Values like compassion, human dignity, and equality are not ‘self-evident.’ They are the inheritance of a civilisation built on the belief that God became a man, lived among us, and died for our sins. Without that foundation, Nietzsche predicted, our values would eventually crumble, leaving a ‘void’ and a ‘monstrous logic’ in their place.

We are living in that void. The new spiritualities, from #WitchTok to political fanaticism, are humanity's desperate attempt to find meaning, morality, and hope in a world where the ultimate source of all three has been abandoned. 

The Only Thing That Fills the Void

The answer is to recognise the genuine spiritual hunger that drives people to these things. A 2003 Vatican document (Pontifical Council for Culture & Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue. Jesus Christ The Bearer Of The Water Of Life - A Christian reflection on the ‘New Age’) put it perfectly, acknowledging that the attraction of New Age ideas is often due to a failure within our own communities to address the deepest needs of the human heart: ‘the search for life's meaning, the link between human beings and the rest of creation, the desire for personal and social transformation’.

The document further states: ‘New Age is attractive mainly because so much of what it offers meets hungers often left unsatisfied by the established institutions.’ Pope John Paul II posed the crucial question: ‘Pastors must honestly ask whether they have paid sufficient attention to the thirst of the human heart for the true “living water” which only Christ our Redeemer can give.’

People are looking for an experience of the transcendent. They are looking for a sense of mystery and power. They are looking for a way to make sense of their lives. We cannot counter a religion of self-help with a faith that is just about self-improvement. We must present Christianity for what it truly is: a radical, life-changing encounter with the person of Jesus Christ.

Jesus is the answer to every one of these misguided searches. Do you want to feel empowered? The Holy Spirit offers a power greater than any spell, a power to love, to heal, and to overcome sin and death. Do you want to know the future? Jesus offers something better: the promise of eternal life and a relationship with the One who holds the future in His hands. Do you want to connect with nature? The Christian faith teaches that the world was lovingly crafted by a Creator who invites us to be its stewards. Do you want to find your true self? Jesus says you must lose yourself for His sake, and in doing so, you will find a self more real and whole than you could ever ‘manifest’ on your own.

The void in the heart of our generation was made for God, and only He can fill it. Crystals, tarot cards, political ideologies, and even our own best efforts are like broken cisterns that can hold no water. They will always leave us thirsty.

The task for us is clear. We must stop just cursing the darkness and start shining a light. We must offer the world not another product in the spiritual supermarket, but the ‘living water’ that alone can quench the deepest thirst of the human heart. Because when people finally get tired of believing in anything, it is the perfect moment for them to encounter the one thing that is everything.