I was fourteen years old and in a long-term treatment center after a drug overdose. I was a sophomore in high school, and since school was still in session. I had to go to school in-house every day. One day while sitting in my trigonometry class, my teacher proclaimed, “God is Dead” and suddenly he had my attention. The phrase did not horrify me like it did the surrounding people, who murmured of blasphemy. It intrigued me. I had grown up in a strict Pentecostal home, and while I was not exactly sheltered, I had never been around anyone with the nerve to speak that way, not openly. It was coming from the mouth of a teacher, and I was fascinated. Those three words made me smile. I could not suppress it and I did not know why. He would go on to take a decidedly Christian stance on the quote. He was making a labored point about the apathy we were all displaying, our wasted youth and heathenistic natures as teenage “junkies.” He did not mean to, but he opened my mind. 

I would not read the full quote or understand what Friedrich Nietzsche was actually getting at for many years, but that question lingered in the back of my mind: Could it be true?

When Nietzsche wrote, “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him,” he was not celebrating. He was delivering a frantic warning about the collapse of a universal moral order. In The Gay Science, he tells the story of a madman running into a marketplace shouting, “I seek God!” When the onlookers laugh, he tells them they have “unchained this earth from its sun.”

For centuries, that “Sun” provided a fixed point for everything: our morality, our purpose, and our truth. By “killing” God through rationalism and secularism, Nietzsche argued we did not just lose a religion; we lost the very foundation of Western values. He feared the coming shadow of nihilism, predicting a 20th century defined by massive wars where power was the only currency and people would desperately try to replace God with “isms.” Nationalism, Communism, or extreme political ideologies to fill the void. Nature abhors a vacuum.

I would argue that we have arrived. God is dead, and we have killed him.

When politics becomes a religion, compromise becomes ‌heresy. In a functional democracy, you can negotiate a tax rate or a trade deal, but you cannot negotiate with “evil.” If your opponent is not just someone with a different economic theory, but a “sinner” or an existential threat, the mechanisms of the empire, law, debate, voting, they all begin to break down. One of the first truths I learned in life: you can not win a fight about beliefs. Beliefs are ingrained, unbreakable for most; the mind instinctively rejects any dissonance that threatens the ideas embedded during its formative years.

History has a way of repeating itself, and we have seen this play before. Constantine was a visionary who recognized that the old Roman pagan model was decentralized and it could not hold a fracturing empire together. He saw in Christianity a unique opportunity: a disciplined, hierarchical structure that could mirror a centralized imperial government. By aligning himself with a single God, he shifted his authority from that of a mere general to the “Vicar of Christ.” It was the glue meant to bind a fractured empire, yet Rome still fell.

Constantine understood that an empire without a shared truth eventually tears itself apart from the inside.

Now what? What binds us now? Or do we just watch the sun go out?

“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.”