These are the same people who will, incidentally, liken religious faith to a belief in an ‘old bearded man in the sky’, in order to diminish it.

This is because such persons have fragile egos, which is often the case with individuals whose sense of self is purely psychological, and whose defenses, while elaborately constructed, fail when encountered by the confidence or self-possession of a person whose idea of truth has been detached from their ambitions and vanities.

Though if you are bold enough to witness to these facts, and to voice them in earshot of the ‘reasonable’ people, they are just as likely as not to object to you, or even to slander you, as their tolerance for anyone whose convictions differ from theirs, or who show theirs to be insufficient, or erroneously held, is nil.

And by which prayer a person might discern the will of God, as it pertains to them, in all matters that concern them, including those matters that are described as ‘social’ or ‘political’.

Of course, when I say “recourse to the supernatural”, I do not mean that a person of faith attempts to harness or channel supernatural energies to effect change in the natural realm; I do not mean ‘supernatural’ in the occult sense of that word. What I mean is that faith, grounded in reason, allows a person to communicate with the divine, through prayer.

Which is why such persons will insist so vehemently on ‘social justice’ or ‘equity’, or other merely natural indicators (which in themselves can be good, and are often warranted), as the only measures of an active and responsible conscience.

The contemporary type of this person, in America, can be found across political and socio-economic spectrums, but at the moment appears most often to be the humorless, intellectual, self-identifying 'liberal’ who knows at some level their life is comfortable, relative to many, and feels uneasy about that fact (as they should), but who, for the alleviation or working through of that unease, and having no recourse to the supernatural order (as they do not believe in it), can seek redress in the natural order alone.

For there are more people in society today, at least in the West, who are unspiritual, or even anti-spiritual, than there are people who are spiritual. When Hannah Arendt spoke of the ‘banality of evil’, she may as well have been describing the shoulder-shrugging inertia with which so-called ‘modern man’ has lost interest in his own soul.

Which isn’t to say that such a person won’t feel at home in society, or culture at large. To the contrary, that person is likely to find themselves surrounded by like-minded individuals.

What can be said of them, rather, is that, feeling something amiss, they will look only outward (to their material conditions) for an explanation of a condition that is inward, and immaterial. And so they will forever be searching in the wrong place for an answer to the wrong questions.

Although, because such a person will not recognize that they even have spiritual needs (not, anyway, genuine ones, which are ordered to the supernatural), they can hardly be said to be aware that something integral to them is missing from them.

In other words, the person who makes an idol of ‘reason’, and who dismisses faith as nothing to be taken seriously, sets themself up for demoralization (even if the causes they champion are worthy) because that person has decided to function within a paradigm that does not recognize their most profound spiritual needs.

Now, it is true that such a person might have devoted themselves so completely to a ‘cause’ that they are willing to suffer for it and for nothing else, in which case they are possessed of a certain integrity. But, because they justify that cause in purely social terms (and not in supernatural terms), their suffering will lose its meaning if ever their cause finds its fruition, and still they suffer; or if ever that cause is shown to be unjust, or produces unforeseen results that they regret. In such instances they will despair. Because that which had given them meaning will have had its limitations revealed.

This is because such a person regards suffering as necessarily meaningless, something to be avoided at all costs, unless it can be endured with stoicism, in which case the stoicism produces, in their mind, its own reward, insofar as they imagine that it casts them, the sufferer, in a ‘noble’ or valorous light, which of course is a vanity, and thus an illusion.

On the other hand, the person who rejects faith as simplistic and ‘childish’, and admires ‘reason alone’, and in fact attempts to build a system of ethics upon it (which is impossible insofar as reason alone cannot defend any moral position exhaustively, or absolutely), more often than not shows themself to be indeed childish whenever they find themself in a circumstance that threatens their physical or psychological comfort.

Such a person does not, in other words, reject reason, but cherishes it, and uses it as it is meant to be used, moderately, prudently, and not for its own sake, or for self-aggrandizement, but for their own good and for the good of others.

So that the person whose faith is strong will only seem, at times, to be child-like, because he or she has rejected the ‘worldliness’ of adulthood, where sin finds its most fertile or sympathetic ground.

In other words, the Church holds that by faith and reason together, and not by faith alone, does a person come to know God, and increase in love and friendship for God.

To be sure, it is only because the Church endorses the proper ordering of reason, and not because she is ‘against’ reason (which she isn’t), that she becomes a target for those who, wishing to make an idol of reason, would denounce her in this respect, and, more broadly, observe with glee the errors that people have made in her name, and the scandals that have brought her low.

Not to mention that the presence of ‘reason’ as a faculty of humankind (which scripture tells us is made in the image of God) suggests that our rationality has a provenance in, or bears a trace of, the divine.