A Century Without God?

Alfred Müller-Armack (economist, university professor, originator of the term and co-founder of the Social Market Economy) spoke in 1948 in his book of the “century without God.” By this, he meant the disappearance of Christianity as the cultural foundation of Europe. He could not have been more wrong. Christianity was never truly the spiritual basis of Europe – it was always only a substitute spirituality, a political doctrine that destroyed and exploited the actual cultural foundation, replacing it rather than building upon it.

If we look honestly: 85% of all living traditions we still practice today are pagan and not originally Christian. Christmas? Yule. Easter? Fertility festival. Maypole, midsummer, harvest festival? All deeply rooted in pre-Christian, nature-bound cycles. Tradition means: it is used. And what was always used was what was grounded in real life – never abstract ideologies.

Christianity as Substitute Spirituality

Christianity in its secularized form shows what it is at its core: a religious substitute spirituality, full of contradictions, peculiar currents, esoteric mishmash, and inner conflicts. Its legends are hollow replacement-mysticisms, giving people no answers but only consolation.

Transcendent theology remains abstract to the point of surreal – fantasies about an invisible God, an invisible afterlife, an endless hope that one’s imagination might become reality. Nothing tangible about it. By contrast, Germanic-Nordic spirituality (and its pan-European siblings) rests on the observation of nature. It is not a blind creed but at once natural science, philosophy, and psychology – a metaphysics of human existence. Myths like the world tree Yggdrasil or Ragnarök are not “fantasies,” but images for universally valid processes, cycles of nature and the human soul.

While churches cheaply copied traditions and drained them of meaning, the original sense – at least symbolically and superficially – remained perceptible, if veiled behind the scenes, buried under dogmas, uprooted and stripped of depth. What attracts believers is merely the pompous stage set and the vague echo of absorbed ancient archetypes, faintly reflecting through the veil.

Religion as an Instrument of Power

“Religion” in its origin does not mean belief, but institution and dogma in theological text form (lat. religio = to read, to doubt). It was always only a tool of control:

Moses, priest of Akhenaten, created a monotheistic Judaism modeled on the Aten cult.
The Council of Nicaea created a political Christianity.
Islam served from its first day as an imperial ideology.
All Abrahamic systems worship the same “God” (YHWH/Allah), an unproven, abstract ruler who forces human submission and thus serves above all one function: legitimizing the supposed claims to power of religious leaders.

This is not spirituality, but political ideology – and as such foreign domination, it brought wars, inquisitions, crusades, colonialism, terror, and oppression to Europe, escaping consequence only due to its interpretative authority. With 430 million historically documented deaths, Christianity is by far the most murderous ideology in the world.

The faith in the crucified one of Golgotha founded the greatest genocides in history: 60% of the Germanic and 93% of the South American population were exterminated through Christianization. (For comparison: the Nazis exterminated 36% of the Jewish population.)

By contrast, the Germanic-Nordic view is no religion, no belief – but knowledge based on observation. It mirrors the collective unconscious of our people, our psychological archetypes, our cultural memory.

Renaissance of Paganism: Europe’s Cultural Turning Point

Europe did not win its great cultural breakthroughs from Christianity, but despite and against Christianity. Only the Renaissance – the rediscovery of pagan-antique ideas – brought us light again after 1,500 years of the darkest Middle Ages. Art, science, philosophy – all of it flourished when people began to cast off the chains of religion and reconnect with pre-Christian, pan-European traditions.

Pan-European Spirituality

Gods are forces of nature: Thor is not “a man with a hammer,” but the power of thunder and weather. Freya represents fertility, beauty, love – universal life forces.
These gods are real principles, visible and tangible – not invisible, abstract “rulers in heaven.”
Their names and associated ideas belong to the oldest Indo-European layer of myth (PIE – 6,500 years old!) and connect us with all European cultures – from Greece to Iceland.

This makes pan-European spirituality understandable, human, and alive.

No “Neo”-Paganism

We do not need a “new religion,” no artificial movement, no “neo” in paganism. Our traditions were never lost. They live on in festivals, songs, legends, symbols, in language, and in our bond with nature. What is missing is only a renewed awareness of them – a making-conscious of the unconscious, not a reinvention through copying church religiosity.

Why Revival Is Vital

A revival of our own culture is vital today. Because:

It preserves the beauty and truth of life in all aspects.
It is not politically manipulative like religious institutions.
By its very nature, it can never devolve into genocide or ideology – except when churches are built upon its foundation.

Therefore: We need no churches, no religion, no dogmas, no sects. We need spirituality as lived tradition. That is authentic, nature-bound, culture-forming, and ultimately divine (= celebration of one’s own existence embedded in nature).

Conclusion

Müller-Armack spoke of the “century without God.” In truth, God is dead. Christians have gradually killed everything divine over two millennia. For centuries we have lived without usable traditions because we allowed real spirituality to be buried under substitute spiritualities. The result was further substitute religions such as socialism (Christianity 2.0) and wokism (Christianity 3.0), which adopted the Christian doctrine (=emptiness) of suicidal empathy, false promises of salvation, messianism, and much more.

The Abrahamic religions are constructs of control – full of contradictions, empty myths, and deceptive transcendence. In contrast stands the pan-European tradition: not belief, but knowledge. Not dogma, but culture. Not substitute spirituality, but real, experiential spirituality.

Whoever wants the future does not need to reinvent the old. He only needs to finally live it consciously again.