The Re-Platforming of God: Restoring the Sacred in the Public Square
Mini-Essay #3
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Mini Essay #3:
Introduction: When the Sacred Lost Its Platform
We live in a world defined by platforms. Technology platforms, political platforms, economic platforms—each competing to shape our lives, our choices, our very sense of belonging. But one platform, older and deeper than all the rest, has been quietly pushed aside: the sacred platform that once anchored our shared moral compass.
I call this the de-platforming of God.
This doesn’t mean faith has disappeared. Nearly 90 percent of humanity still believes in some form of transcendent reality. It doesn’t mean that love, compassion, or conscience have been erased—they live on in private lives in acts of Love, in religious and spiritual congregations, in routine organizational life, and in movements across the globe.
But in public life—in our institutions, media, civic discourse, and cultural imagination—God has been quietly exiled.
The exile never made front-page news, nor was there any “official” announcement. Instead, it came quietly under the guise of neutrality: the idea that to sidestep division, we must avoid the sacred altogether. Yet in trying to prevent conflict, we stripped away coherence. In rejecting abuses of institutional religion, we unintentionally discarded the very moral and spiritual inheritance that once held communities together.
The result? A world drowning in complexity but starved of meaning.
At root, we have drifted from what many traditions have intuited, what I call an Ancient Blueprint—a universal sacred pattern for life, named by the Greeks and Christians as the Logos, the deeper order of Love and truth that makes coherence possible.
This is more than just a philosophical or theological idea. It is a tangible reality that impacts civic life.
When God is de-platformed, civic trust collapses, because trust requires something more than a legal contract or enforcement by a manmade authority —it requires a shared higher truth.
Without that grounding, politics becomes war by other means, business reduces to extraction, and culture devolves to the path of least resistance.
The Soul of Society and the Silence of Spirit
Every culture has a soul. By “soul,” I don’t mean private or religious belief, or inner serenity alone. I mean the animating center of a people—the shared moral and spiritual core where meaning, belonging, and sacred purpose reside.
When a society forgets its soul, it doesn’t just lose direction. It loses coherence—and with it, conscience.
That is our predicament today.
In the absence of the sacred, politics has become a surrogate religion. Ideological tribes battle for supremacy, and in the US we seem to have dueling oligarchies, each promising salvation through power or policy. Movements for justice fracture along identity lines. Activism is more often about outrage than moral clarity.
Meanwhile, people everywhere sense the void. Mental health crises surge. Addiction, loneliness, and despair have become silent plagues. Many quietly intuit what Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor called a “malaise of immanence”—a flat, disenchanted world where only matter matters.
The de-platforming of God created this vacuum. And history shows, when the sacred is sidelined, something else will always rush in to fill the void.
As G.K. Chesterton warned more than a century ago: “When people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing, they believe in anything.”
Today, we see this “anything” everywhere—from conspiracy cults to spiritual fads, from identity absolutism to technological utopianism. All of them attempt to address the spiritual hunger we seem unable to name.
In practical terms, people increasingly look to platforms—political parties, digital tribes, consumer brands—for meaning and belonging. Social media now functions like a secular liturgy: daily rituals of posting, reacting, and debating that shape identity and define community boundaries, often with beliefs more fervently held than religion itself.
Political rallies have become our latter-day revival meetings. Even corporate advertising borrows religious symbols—selling salvation in the form of products.
These substitutes mimic faith while eroding – denying -- its essence. Reversing this drift means re-centering our shared life in the Logos—the moral-spiritual order that calls us back to meaning, not as something externally imposed but something internally realized.
How We Got Here
The exile of the sacred from public life has deep roots. During the Enlightenment, Western thinkers sought to liberate society from what they saw as religious indoctrination and superstition. Science, reason, and secular governance were heralded as humanity’s pathway to a progressive, just, and enlightened society.
This wave led to beneficial advances in medicine, education, technology, human rights, and a reduction in poverty levels worldwide.
But there was also a cost: a creeping assumption that spiritual wisdom was dispensable, that conscience could be replaced by technocratic systems, that Love and Virtue could be reduced to sentiment or private preference.
At the same time, institutional religion often betrayed its calling—wielding temporal power, enforcing conformity, colluding with empire. Colonization and coercive conversion left deep scars. In the face of such abuse, we collectively “threw out the baby Jesus with the bathwater.”
The result? A society where the sacred is viewed with suspicion, especially in progressive circles, and dismissed as superstition in technocratic ones. Faith is tolerated only in private. As I suggested earlier, public life is supposed to be “neutral.”
But neutrality is never neutral. By pushing God to the margins, we didn’t create an unbiased playing field—we created a vacuum. And into that vacuum surged two substitutes: materialism and politics. One promised to meet all needs through consumption and technology. The other replaced secular authority with political ideology—a false substitute always destined to divide rather than unite.
Neither surrogate has been able to sustain the human soul.
As economist E.F. Schumacher warned:
“In ethics, as in so many other fields, we have recklessly and willfully abandoned our great classical Christian heritage. We have even degraded the very words without which ethical discourse cannot carry on — words like ‘Virtue,’ ‘love,’ and ‘temperance.’ The task of our generation, I have no doubt, is one of metaphysical reconstruction.”
This is the great irony of modernity: in exiling the sacred to preserve freedom, we ended up enslaved to substitutes that cannot sustain us.
This is why our civic systems today feel brittle. Schools try to teach values but without being anchored in a Transcendent higher power, lest they be seen favoring a religion. Businesses are pressured to adopt “ESG” or “DEI” frameworks as surrogate moral codes. Governments legislate ethics and force citizen behavior by fiat. These efforts are well-intentioned, but without foundation in the sacred they are reduced to slogans or mandates, vulnerable to capture by ideology.
The Culture of Separation and the Cost of De-Platforming God
The deeper cost of this exile is not only ideological—it is cultural.
We live in what I call a Culture of Separation: a society that severs the natural bonds that make for a spiritually-healthy society. We separate reason from reverence, economy from morality, science from spirit, self from community, humanity from creation.
Institutional religion, at its worst, reinforced this fragmentation through domination and coercion. Secularism, at its worst, reinforced it by exiling the sacred altogether. The result is a civilization addicted to silos—where each field claims autonomy, but the connective tissue of meaning is absent.
St. Maximus the Confessor, the 7th century Eastern Orthodox monk warned that the human tragedy is to live divided—splitting creation into fragments—when our true vocation is to unite all things in the Logos, perceiving the deeper harmony that holds them together.
His warning has come true.
This is why our world feels fractured, even when it appears connected. Despite all the networks, apps, and platforms, we are disconnected at the heart.
And the effects are measurable: record loneliness despite digital hyper-connection; ecological collapse despite “green” consumerism; polarization despite unprecedented access to diverse voices. Disconnection has not just become emotional—it has become structural.
The consequences of this cultural amnesia are everywhere.
There is a lack of authenticity, and a lack of trust at the core of our institutions. Without a higher moral compass, political positions harden into theologies. When meaning is absent, authoritarianism offers false certainty. Community disintegrates. Shared reverence, moral obligation, and mutual care give way to transaction and tribalism.
We are left with dazzling technologies and hollow hearts. Endless platforms for content, but no shared platform for conscience. Fractured silos, each mistaking ideology for ultimate truth.
This is what it means to de-platform God: we lost the ground beneath our feet.
The collapse of civic trust is perhaps the most urgent consequence. Polls show trust in Congress, media, corporations, even churches has plummeted. When nothing is seen as sacred, nothing is trustworthy. And when nothing is trustworthy, cynicism metastasizes into apathy—or rage.
Living Split Lives
This split isn’t just societal—it’s personal. I know it firsthand.
As a young activist in the 1980s, I fought against nuclear proliferation with fiery passion. I believed deeply in justice, but I distrusted organized religion and dismissed business as exploitative. Without realizing it, I had been absorbed into a progressive ideological silo.
Later, when I began building Symbiotic Networks in Reno, I had to confront those biases. I discovered that many who looked like my “opposites”—conservatives, business leaders, people of faith—were also serving their community with sincerity and sacrifice. My own healing began when I stopped compartmentalizing my spiritual life as something separate from my civic life.
This is the paradox I’ve seen everywhere: many of the most effective community leaders, bridge-builders, and changemakers I meet hold deep spiritual convictions. But they rarely speak of them publicly.
Why? Fear of exclusion. Fear of being dismissed as irrational. Fear of alienating allies.
So they remain silent. They compartmentalize their souls. They live split lives. And in doing so, they unconsciously reinforce the very separation they hope to heal.
I’ve seen this unconscious split on Main Street too. Local businesses often embody care—supporting their community, by sponsoring youth sports, helping neighbors and local organizations, serving with quiet faith—but they rarely articulate it in sacred terms. They fear mixing “religion and business.” Yet when that sacred motivation is silenced, community leadership is deprived of its most powerful fuel and tool.
Naming and living the sacred in public is not some proclamation of moral righteousness; it is the first step of cultural recovery—from split lives to integrated wholeness.
Reclaiming the Forgotten Power
Here is the good news: the sacred never left us. We abandoned it.
Consider that the word “religion,” from the Latin religare, means “to bind again.” Religious practice is not merely about individual wellbeing, but to weave us back into the web of life and the web of love -- to each other and to the Transcendent. It is meant to unite us with God, neighbor, and creation. It calls us beyond comfort into communion, beyond self-help into service.
At the heart of true religion is transformation not control, virtuous practice not virtue signaling. Re-platforming God is not about returning to the abuses of religious empires, enforcing conformity, or demanding conversion. It’s about recovering the inner and collective coherence we have forgotten, a coherence rooted in Divine Love.
What’s needed is a new kind of cultural “recovery movement” – where we recover shared moral ground that can be embraced across differences without erasing them.
Metanoia—the turning of the heart—is the first step. An inner revolution that awakens the power of Love, not as sentiment but as structure. It is the wellspring of courage, justice, and compassion. Without it, even the most well-intentioned reforms collapse into ideology.
This “inner revolution” is extended outward, lived daily in families, neighborhoods, workplaces, social movements, and even city councils. Whenever integrity, humility, and sacrificial service shape decisions, God is re-platformed. The sacred becomes civic again.
The Relational Worldview as Bridge
How, then, do we bring the sacred back into public life without reigniting old religious wars?
The answer lies in what I call a relational worldview. Unlike ideological worldviews, which divide people into camps of belief or identity, a relational worldview prioritizes connection, reciprocity, and mutual belonging. Its purpose is to consciously support connection across other worldviews.
It doesn’t ask us to agree on every doctrine. It asks us to recognize the sacred in one another.
This bridge already exists. We’ve seen it in:
The early Christian Church, which lived as a parallel society of mutual aid and belonging under empire.
The Sarvodaya Shramadana movement of Sri Lanka, which wove Buddhist spirituality with civic action across thousands of villages.
Indigenous traditions, which embody the link between Spirit, land, and community.
Local networks and faith-based organizations worldwide, serving neighbors daily with quiet fidelity.
These are not isolated examples, but part of a deeper lineage that has carried the same Blueprint across millennia.
It animated the earliest Christian communities of mutual care; it moved Gandhi’s satyagraha to awaken a nation; it flowed through Dr. A.T. Ariyaratne’s Sarvodaya network of 15,000 villages; and it sustained Václav Benda and friends as they nurtured a Parallel Polis in Czechoslovakia.
From Jesus, who embodied Divine Love in human form, to Gandhi, who showed how spiritual truth could disarm empires, to Ariyaratne, who built village-based movements of self-reliance and compassion, to Benda, who nurtured a moral society under totalitarian rule—one lineage, many expressions: the Ancient Blueprint in action.
At its foundation is Divine Love.
As Schumacher wrote, “The foundations of peace cannot be laid by universal prosperity in the material sense, but only by universal adherence to certain truths.” He meant that what is required is a shared orientation to spiritual and moral reality. These “certain truths” echo what I call the Ancient Blueprint—the Logos woven into creation itself.
When we live by this Ancient Blueprint, we begin to recover what I call Symbiotic Culture—a way of life where sacred relationship becomes the operating system of society. Its basic unit is the Symbiotic Circle: a small, intimate circle of trust where people embody Symbiotic Culture DNA (virtue, reciprocity, service, mutual empowerment).
Linked together, these circles form networks resilient enough to renew economies, politics, and communities alike.
As we seek to bring together diverse circles, the words we choose can either become obstacles or bridges.
This is why language matters. “God.” “Spirit.” “Transcendent.” Each word points beyond itself. Spoken with humility, sacred vocabulary is not a weapon but a bridge.
In my book, Birthing the Symbiotic Age: An Ancient Blueprint to Unite Humanity, I share how I came to live this bridge personally. From my earliest childhood awakening, I experienced a call that I later recognized as coming from Jesus—drawing me into a deeply personal relationship with God.
At the same time, I encountered what many would call the nondual: the boundless unity of all things held together in the Logos. For some, the Transcendent is a personal God; for others, an impersonal reality. The relational worldview creates a space where all are welcome.
That is why in the book I use the term “Transcendent” as a bridging word—it embraces both ways of knowing, without excluding either.
This reconciliation has allowed me to practice true inclusion—welcoming both traditional religious believers and secular seekers as partners in community renewal.
In a time when nonreligious movements often exclude the religious (even though believers remain the global majority), and some religious groups exclude others, we cannot afford these divisions. It is an all-hands-on-deck moment for humanity.
And everyday institutions are on the front lines.
Main Street businesses, schools, churches, nonprofits, civic clubs—these can become micro-platforms of the sacred, not through preaching, but through virtue embodied. When relationships, not ideology, guide the work, the sacred re-enters public space.
Put simply: a relational worldview lived out together is nothing less than the recovery of the Ancient Blueprint. It is Symbiotic Culture in practice, building a parallel society not through ideology or domination, but through love incarnated in community.
And when that love takes root in the ordinary spaces of life, the sacred is no longer hidden or privatized—it becomes the heartbeat of public life, renewing trust, justice, and belonging for all.
The missing piece is restored; a “sane and sacred center” becomes the foundation for a vibrant Culture of Connection.
We face a choice: remain fractured under the Culture of Separation—or recover coherence through Love. That choice will shape whether our shared future unravels, or becomes whole again.
Living in Truth — The Courage to Re-Platform Publicly
There is one final step: courage.
Vaclav Havel and the Charter 77 movement in Czechoslovakia faced down totalitarianism not by violence, but by “living in truth.” They refused to live by lies. Instead, they built what Václav Benda later called a Parallel Polis—a society within a society, grounded in truth, morality, and human dignity.
Our challenge today is no less urgent.
The de-platforming of God has created a void filled by ideology, consumerism, and power struggles. To re-platform the sacred requires not only inner transformation but public witness.
It asks us to bring our deepest convictions into the open, with humility and without apology.
This does not mean imposing belief. It means refusing to hide the love, reverence, and moral clarity that are the foundation of the aspects of our society that still work.
When spiritual leaders, business leaders, and everyday citizens integrate their inner convictions with their outer actions, a new coherence emerges—a fabric strong enough to resist fragmentation and a moral architecture resilient enough to withstand storms.
The courage to re-platform God today is more about practice than preaching. It often appears meek rather than bold. It may look like a CEO refusing to cut corners out of conscience, a teacher grounding students in reverence for truth, or a neighborhood standing together in mutual care. These small, public acts of sacred coherence are the seeds of renewal.
Strategically, this is a parallel society approach: we do not wait for captured institutions to change; we build healthy ones alongside them—and over time, we weave those into a broader commons of trust.
Conclusion: Love as the Missing Center
The de-platforming of God fractured our soul. It left us with politics as religion, technology as a faux savior, and ideology as substitute for truth. It gave us a world where we can connect instantly but rarely cohere deeply.
But God has not disappeared. The sacred waits patiently, whispering through ancient traditions, shining in small acts of kindness, stirring in communities willing to face challenges together.
To re-platform God is to reorient our culture in Love. Not as sentiment, but as the infrastructure of belonging. Not as private preference, but as the public foundation of our shared life. The path forward is not a new ideology.
It is an old commandment: Love God. Love Others.
That love is the platform that cannot be co-opted, outdated, or replaced. It is the foundation that makes coherence possible, the wellspring that sustains truth and justice, the architecture that binds us into a mutually-beneficial future.
The de-platforming of God was just a stage in humanity’s learning process. We now know what has been missing—and why it matters. The re-platforming of God is how we remember who we are.
And this remembering is more than an idea. It’s a courageous stand. Re-platforming begins now—in families, classrooms, boardrooms, neighborhoods, and circles of trust—wherever love is practiced as the structure of life.
If enough of us dare to live this way, we will not only recover the Ancient Blueprint; we will embody a culture strong enough to heal our divisions and radiant enough to inspire the world.
Background
The first is about the origins of the Parallel Polis (society). Then FAQs, and the final two posts are from the Preface and the Introduction from my upcoming book, Birthing the Symbiotic Age.
Very interesting. In our book, "Yoga Psychology and the Transformation of Consciousness: Seeing Through the Eyes of Infinity," we have a chapter on the awakening of the soul and the transformation of society. We include the Sarvodaya movement as one example of the power of small intentional communities to band together to transform a nation.
I wonder now, a few months after you wrote this, if you are still as optimistic?
On the other hand, I feel a sense of tension in the urgency you convey. I wonder if taking a leaf from Owen Barfield and Sri Aurobindo might be helpful?
Both see early humanity (some 10,000 to 250,000 years ago) as living in harmony - though a mostly subconscious harmony - with the universe.
With the "Fall" (the rise of the separative consciousness) some five to ten thousand years ago, humanity's suffering has been rooted in this alienation you speak of. My own sense is it will probably be (at least, as we moderns understand "time") at least 5 to 10 centuries before society as a whole will begin to live in a new more conscious harmony with the All, with God, the Tao, Brahman....
So we can kind of relax. We tune ourselves to the Infinite, give ourselves in utter love and self-offering and then trust that She will do what She is going to do!
100% thank you