Faith & Spirit Quote by John Ralston Saul

The line plays like a diagnosis of modern authority’s power vacuum: once the ultimate guarantor of meaning is declared dead, everyone else starts auditioning for the role. Saul’s phrasing - “was said to have died” - is doing quiet, pointed work. He’s less interested in metaphysical theology than in the cultural rumor of God’s death (Nietzsche filtered through mass society), the way that idea licenses a scramble for replacement certainties. It’s not grief; it’s opportunism.

“Various leaders, professions and sectors” is a deliberately unromantic list. Saul isn’t warning about a single tyrant so much as a bureaucratic ecology of would-be priests: politicians dressing up managerial choices as destiny, economists presenting models as moral law, technocrats turning optimization into a worldview, even media and corporate culture selling narratives that ask for faith rather than scrutiny. The subtext is that secular modernity didn’t eliminate the hunger for the sacred; it privatized it, then outsourced it to institutions with incentives other than truth.

The verb “risk” matters too. It suggests that claiming transcendence in a post-transcendent age is both tempting and dangerous - not because society becomes godless, but because it becomes crowded with small gods, each demanding deference in its own dialect. Saul’s intent, consistent with his broader skepticism about “expert” rule, is to expose how authority repackages itself when traditional legitimacy collapses: the old altar disappears, but the urge to build new ones doesn’t.