Chesterton and Voltaire gave us due warning. “He who does not believe in God will believe in anything,” stated the former, while the latter said: “and if God did not exist, we would need to invent him.”
And together these aphorisms may explain why modern campaigning groups are beginning to look not so much like religious movements as like cults.
It’s the apocalyptic elements that seem to provide the shift from immature religiosity gone wrong to something more extreme. Weather changes, organisations fail, civilisations collapse, but there seems a particular heightened anxiety that draws people into fundamentalist activism.
