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Returning to Church won't save us from nihilism

Engaging in ritual for ritual’s sake only deepens nihilism.

He likens this trend to the rise of 19th-century Russian nihilists, whom writers like Turgenev and Dostoyevsky depicted as rejecting established norms and seeking radical upheaval. Brooks sees “one spot of good news” in recent studies that have shown that more young people are returning to church, which he interprets as a desire to have faith in something. As I discuss elsewhere in the book, Nietzsche viewed the death of God as an opportunity for people to actively decide for themselves what values to uphold rather than merely continuing to passively accept the traditions or authority of others as grounds for how to live.

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