Spengler’s “Second Religiosity” and the Neo-Christian Revival

How the Decline of the West brings the Rise of Performative Christianity

By Bernhard Guenther, February 26, 2026

What’s behind the sudden wave of public Christian conversions, the rise in dogmatic Christianity, and the demonization of everything non-Christian?

Is it really a return to God and the coming of Christ?

Over a century ago, Oswald Spengler predicted this would happen.

In his seminal work The Decline of the West, Spengler argued that every civilization, in its late winter phase, would experience what he called the Second Religiosity: a return to the religious forms of its cultural springtime after rationalism, materialism, and the soulless machinery of modern life.

But this return is not a genuine spiritual rebirth. It is not the birth of a new era of enlightenment, but a nostalgic longing for sacred meaning in a world that feels mechanized, dark, full of evil, and spiritually empty.

It’s a reaching back toward empty rituals, literalism, and dogmas, not with the living, creative Divine impulse that originally animated them, but with the exhaustion of a civilization embedded in the dark age of materialism, devoid of Spirit, and spiritually bankrupt.

For Spengler, such revivals do not reverse the decline of a civilization. They are a sign of it. A civilization that has fulfilled its cycle and is moving toward its final consolidation and disintegration.

Spengler wrote that there’s a phase of “mock-religion” in which people toy with myths (which they tend to take literally) in the hope of filling an inner void.

What we see today is the same impulse taken public: people adopting a religious appearance and personality while feeling the need to show off this new costume to the world. Hollow, performative, and corrupted.

Sound familiar?

What we’re witnessing right now, and increasingly so over the past 6 years, is a textbook manifestation of Spengler’s Second Religiosity playing out in real time:

the wave of “reborn” Christians,

the New Age to dogmatic Christian pipeline,

the rigid literalist Bible-thumping,

the labeling of yoga, meditation, astrology, and shamanism as “demonic” or “Luciferian,”

the missionary zeal of “accept Jesus as your savior or go to hell,”

the compulsive need to post “Christ is King,”

the obsession with Jesus as a historical figure and Biblical literalism,

to announce being “saved by Jesus,”

to record oneself being baptized for public display,

and the rise of “Christian” influencers.

People are reverting to a medieval form of dogmatic mentalized Christianity, devoid of the inner Christ consciousness that infused the original teaching even before the Bible was produced.

The forms are reoccupied, but the cathedrals are not being built from within.

When religious forms are no longer alive and infused with Spirit from the inside, they have to be enforced from the outside: through posturing, dogma, moral absolutism, social shaming, and the demonization of everything that doesn’t fit the program.

The less inner spiritual embodiment and realization of the “kingdom within,” the more aggressive the outer proclamation and the need to proselytize.

This is why you see former ayahuasca participants, Burning Man “Burners,” and New Agers violently condemning their past as “satanic” after converting. They are often judgmental of others for still engaging in these practices and beliefs, or feel superior to them because they have been “saved.”

They’ve swung from one extreme identification to another. One pill for another. One escapism to another.

The dead giveaway of this shallow neo-Christian revival is the need to make a public display of the conversion, the baptism, the Bible thumping, the new “Christian” identity.

Carl Jung called it a flight into the opposites. It provides temporary psychological relief but suppresses essential parts of the psyche that remain unintegrated and continue to feed the shadow.

Spengler analyzed this as a civilizational pattern that is inevitable, mechanical, and deterministic. His view of the late winter phase of the West aligns with where we are now in the last phase of the Fourth Turning.

But Spengler could only describe the pattern from the viewpoint of world history. He couldn’t see what drives it from behind the veil.

From the esoteric, occult, and psychological framework, there is another layer: hostile non-physical occult forces, known to all esoteric traditions, actively steer this process and seduce people into this Second Religiosity.

These are the same forces that have corrupted religions, and especially Christianity, over many centuries.

From an occult perspective, the Second Religiosity is a final attempt of the adverse forces that have been ruling over humanity for thousands of years to hijack an awakening impulse through a corrupt, distorted form of Christian beliefs.

From the hyperdimensional perspective, it is a long-term conditioning program by occult forces in which religious leaders, prophets, and scriptures have been influenced and distorted over centuries to lay the foundation for religious control and manipulation.

It’s the real endgame of the spiritual war, and it’s happening through us, not out there.

The genuine impulse toward the Divine gets redirected into externalized belief systems that keep humanity locked in guilt, fear, and dependency for potential takeover of body, mind, and soul.

The “Jesus savior” program, the literalist belief that accepting a historical figure as your personal savior is sufficient for salvation, is itself an occult control mechanism.

It keeps people externally oriented, guilt-driven, and psychologically split. It prevents the very inner transformation it claims to offer.

It creates the Veil of Light that Rumi warned about: self-righteousness masquerading as spiritual awakening.

It is more dangerous than obvious darkness because it tells you the work is done when it has barely begun, that you are awake and “saved” when, in truth, you have fallen deeper into delusion and into lying to yourself.

But here is the real irony:

Dogmatic Christians claim to fight “demonic forces” while unknowingly serving them.

Shadow repression, moral absolutism, and the demonization of psychology and of inner work create exactly the psychic fragmentation that hostile entities feed on.

The person who won’t face their own shadow becomes the perfect vehicle for the very forces they project onto others.

Even more ironic:

Many neo-Christians and conspiracy-minded people condemn others and “the elite” as “Luciferian.” But the true, deep esoteric meaning of the Luciferic force has been grossly distorted into an oversimplified caricature.

The irony is that many of them are themselves entranced by the Luciferic impulse, that Lucifer works through them. Lucifer is behind the deceptive Veil of Light that blinds many Christians while they project their shadow externally onto others.

Luciferic forces feed on grandiosity, spiritual delusion, and subtle superiority. They give the illusion of spiritual progress while avoiding the real inner work of transformation.

And there are many other occult forces that feed on the projections of this distorted form of Christianity.

Spengler was right that the Second Religiosity was coming: a return to dead forms wearing a shallow performative appearance, literalist dogma, and external salvation.

But this is not a spiritual awakening. It’s civilizational sleepwalking dressed in holy robes.

It will all come burning down eventually, figuratively or even literally, as the end of this cosmic cycle, the Kali Yuga, and the end of the West as we know it draws closer in alignment with the last phase of the Fourth Turning.

Instead of making sincere efforts to raise consciousness via the inner purification and psycho-spiritual work, aligning with the bigger cycle and what the Divine truly wants from us in accordance with Dharma, people get hung up on forms, dogma, and appearances that represent the old world.

People are trying to save the West with the empty forms of “tradition” by regressing to the past with a superficial, mental, external approach to God that reflects lower states of consciousness.

It’s like clinging to dead leaves in winter, when the real work is to let go, to engage in the alchemical inner transformation to bring forth the true Self, to become the seeds of the next cycle, and to embody Christ, the Divine, Krishna, the Kingdom within.

You don’t need any ritual or savior for that. No baptism, no proclamation, no dogmatic attachment to any scripture.

Just the sincere aspiration and surrender to the Divine, and the humility, effort, and spiritual will to engage in the Great Work to bring forth the Kingdom within.

Godspeed.

If you want to learn more and for context, I recommend these articles and podcasts where I explored many of these topics in more depth:

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