Into the Void
by Donavon L Riley

Satan dominates Western culture, not with the menacing force of the old myths, but with the casual swagger of a rock star, a figure of detached irony. He is “cool” not because we fear him, but because we no longer care enough to fear anything. The grand narratives of good and evil have collapsed, leaving us in a wasteland of empty symbols and gestures. We wear Satan’s image as a fashion statement, a way to signal our distance from a world that no longer trembles at its own shadow.

In the Void that remains, we no longer bother to hate Christianity; it seems scarcely worth the effort. The great cathedrals, once temples of awe and reverence, now stand as relics of a better-off-forgotten era, their spires pointing to a heaven that we’ve long since stopped seeking. The words of the gospels, once proclaimed from pulpits with Pentecostal fire and Spirited conviction, now drift like autumn leaves, fragile and disconnected, exercising no power over our lives. Christianity, like so many other things in the post-modern era, has been drained of its potency, reduced to a vague memory of something that once mattered. We scoff at its remnants, but our scorn lacks the bite of genuine hatred. It’s a weary disdain, born not of opposition, but of indifference.

This indifference has spread like a virus through the marrow of our civilization. We no longer feel the pulse of the sacred beneath the skin of the world. The sacred and the profane have blurred into one another, leaving us with a landscape that is neither. Everything is reduced to the same flat plane of experience, where nothing is truly worth hating or loving. The great passions that once moved us—passions for goodness, for beauty, for truth—have withered under the relentless glare of irony and cynicism. We live in an age of detachment, where to care deeply about anything is seen as a kind of naïveté, a failure to understand the rules of the game.

But what is this game we are playing? It is a game of surfaces, where appearance is everything, and substance nothing. We adorn ourselves with the symbols of rebellion, of transgression, but these symbols are hollow, stripped of any real meaning. The devil on our t-shirts, the inverted cross around our necks, these are not signs of a genuine revolt against the divine order, but merely a way to signal our sophistication, our knowingness. We are too cool to believe in anything, and that is precisely the problem.

In this culture of cool detachment, the Void is the ultimate currency. To feel nothing, to be detached, is to be free—free from the burdens of conviction, of faith, of charity. But this freedom is a lie. It is the freedom of the hollow man, whose life is a series of gestures, of performances, all of them empty. We have traded the deep, rooted passions of our ancestors for a shallow, weightless existence, floating above the earth like ghosts. We are free, yes, but free from what? Free from meaning, from connection, from the God-Man, Jesus, who is Life itself.

There was a time when Christianity was hated with a fervor that matched its evangelical power. To hate something deeply is to acknowledge its significance, its impact on your life. The great heretics, the rebels of the past, they hated Christianity because they saw in it a force that shaped the world, a force that demanded a response. Today, we do not hate Christianity with such passion because we no longer see it as a force at all. It has been absorbed into the great Nothing, the Void where all things lose their shape, their color, their weight.

This is the tragedy of our time: not that we hate Christianity, but that we barely care enough to hate it. The sacred has become banal, and the banal sacred. We have turned our altars into stages, our prayers into soundbites, our hymns into jingles. And yet, in doing so, we have not liberated ourselves from the old forms of oppression, but have instead created new ones. The oppression of indifference, of apathy, of a world in which nothing is truly worth fighting for.

We live in a culture that celebrates the surface, the image, the fleeting moment. Everything is ephemeral, disposable, including our beliefs. The old God of Golgotha has died, and in his place we have erected idols of our own making—idols that demand nothing of us but our attention, our clicks, our likes. Satan is cool in this world, not because he represents a genuine threat to the order of things, but because he fits neatly into the aesthetic of detachment that defines our age. He is a symbol, not of rebellion, but of conformity—a conformity to the Void, to the emptiness at the heart of our civilization.

And what of charitable love in this barren landscape? Love, like hate, has been drained of its power. It has become a commodity, something to be bought and sold, consumed and discarded. We no longer love with the full force of our beings, with the kind of love that risks everything, that sacrifices everything. Instead, we love lightly, casually, as if to invest too much in another person, another cause, another faith, would be to expose ourselves to the ridicule of the indifferent. We have learned to love in the same way that we hate—with a kind of ironic distance, a refusal to commit ourselves fully to anything or anyone.

In the end, it is not Satan who wins in this culture, but the Void itself. The Void that swallows up all meaning, all passion, all life. We have become its willing subjects, participating in our own diminishment, our own erasure. We have forgotten what it means to stand for something, to believe in something with all our hearts. We have forgotten what it means to have a relationship to Life.

This is the world that we have demanded heaven allow us to create, and as judgment, he has—a world where nothing is worth hating, nothing is worth loving, because nothing is truly real anymore. And in this world, Satan smiles, not as a prince of darkness, but as a jaded spectator, watching as we drift further and further into the abyss. 

Kyrie Eleison.