Daily Inspiration Quote by Ulrich Beck

Beck’s line lands like a scalpel aimed at modern liberal common sense: the quiet faith that history itself will do the work of disenchanted reason. Calling it a “basic assumption” is the tell. He’s not describing a fact so much as diagnosing an ideology - a story secular society tells about itself to feel inevitable, grown-up, and safely beyond the messy commitments religion represents.

The phrasing matters. “Secular society” isn’t “the secular state” or “secularism” as a doctrine; it’s a whole social atmosphere, a default setting. That widens the target from policy to cultural reflex: newsrooms, universities, technocrats, even everyday manners that treat belief as a private hobby destined to fade. “Modernity overcomes religion” frames modernity as a solvent - progress as replacement, not coexistence. Beck is prodding the triumphalist narrative of modernization theory, the mid-20th-century confidence that industrialization, education, and science would steadily drain the sacred from public life.

Subtext: that narrative is politically soothing and empirically shaky. Religion doesn’t simply retreat; it mutates, globalizes, returns in public forms, and gets entangled with identity, migration, and risk. Beck’s broader work on “risk society” and reflexive modernization is all about how modernity generates new uncertainties it can’t master with its own tools. In that climate, religion can reappear not as a relic but as a resource - for meaning, solidarity, moral language, even protest against technocratic governance.

The intent isn’t to re-enchant the world; it’s to puncture secular self-congratulation and force a harder question: if modernity isn’t a one-way escalator away from religion, what else have we mistaken as destiny?