Why Should Christians Understand the Sneaky Dangers of Nihilism?

Contributing Writer

Updated January 25, 2024

Nihilism is the belief that life is meaningless, and those who recognize this should accept it and make the most of the life that was forced upon them. The name comes from the Latin word nihil, which means nothing. The idea became popular in the 1800s. There are various reasons it became popular—a key one being that the Enlightenment had changed how many people talked about faith and reason. In its aftermath, various thinkers questioned the church and faith that had been taken for granted for centuries. With faith being questioned, objective morals were called into question.

Nihilism attempts to make sense of what comes after this shift. It presents a dark, new way of looking at the world, which still influences how we think today.

What Does Nihilism Teach?

The father of Nihilism, Friedrich Nietzsche, defined nihilism as “the absolute repudiation of worth, purpose, desirability.”

Nihilists believe that this life is all there is and that all attempts to make anything transcendent out of life are only an attempt to gain power over another person. They reject any meaning outside of themselves or that objective knowledge can be gained.

Nihilists frequently criticized Christianity, which was the dominant faith of Nietzsche’s day. For example, Nietzsche said in his book Will To Power, “However modest one may be in one’s demand for intellectual cleanliness, one cannot help feeling, when coming into contact with the New Testament, a kind of inexpressible discomfiture: for the unchecked impudence with which the least qualified want to raise their voice on the greatest problems, and even claim to be judges of things, surpasses all measure. The shameless levity with which the most intractable problems (life, world, God, purpose of life) are spoken of, as if they were not problems at all but simply things that these little bigots KNEW!”

This quote shows the hostility that nihilists had for Christians or anyone who claimed to know objective truth. Nietzsche particularly disliked the New Testament, which he saw as going against the natural human drive to power. In this context, he used nihilism to describe what he saw as having gone wrong with society.

Later in Will to Power, he says that Christianity has emptied society of “all the highest values of humanity” and that “the values of décadence, of nihilism, now prevail under the holiest names.” In other words, faith has emptied people of their drive to power, which Nietzsche sees as a problem.

While Nietzsche used nihilism in Will to Power to describe what he saw as society’s problem, the term is now associated with his own view: how to live a life that avoids faith and reclaims the will to power.

What Does Nihilism Say Gives Life Purpose?

A key question for any religion or philosophy is what teleology it teaches—its view of what finally matters. What is life’s end purpose?

Nihilism is unique because it rejects any teleology: there is no end for which anything was created. Things just are.

This gives rise to the idea of eternal recurrence, the belief that life will simply recur as it has before. If no one remembers what happened previously, then none of it matters. Nietszche’s book Twilight of the Gods includes a posthumously published note about whether things will happen again: “The question which thou wilt have to answer before every deed that thou doest: ‘is this such a deed as I am prepared to perform an incalculable number of times?’ is the best ballast.” Some have theorized that Nietzsche is trying to create his own system of morality here—morals built around asking, “Am I going to have to do this again?” Since the note was not published during Nietszche’s life, it’s hard to say what he fully meant, but it seems to summarize his beliefs on what people should believe once they’ve eliminated faith from their lives.

Various writers have discussed how Nietzsche’s writings about the will to power fit into nihilism. If the problem with life is that we have lost the will to power, does that mean nihilism is about getting that power back?

C.S. Lewis addresses his idea in The Pilgrim’s Regress, his first book written after becoming a Christian. He portrays nihilism as a character named Mr. Savage, who dwells in the far north. Mr. Savage’s northern location aligns with Nietzsche, who calls himself a hyperborean (Greek for someone who dwells in the far north), far from the chains of tradition and faith. Here is Savage’s take on Christianity:

“He said that he could understand old-fashioned people who believed in the Landlord and kept the rules and hoped to go up and live in the Landlord’s castle when they had to leave this country. ‘They have something to live for,’ he said. ‘And if their belief was true, their behavior would be perfectly sensible. But as their belief is not true, there remains only one way of life fit for a man.’ This other way of life was something he called Heroism, or Master-Morality, or Violence. ‘All the other people in between,’ he said, ‘are plowing the sand.’”

As the quote shows, Savage believes that all traditions and previous attempts at morality only distract from man’s ultimate purpose in a purposeless universe, to accumulate more power and use it to shape the world as they see fit. Lewis accurately represents Nietzsche’s ideas as leading to violence if taken to their logical conclusion. Max Whyte, Marc de Launay, and other historians have discussed how the Nazi Party twisted Nietzschean ideas in the 1930s-1940s.

How Did Nihilism Develop?

Nihilism came about after the Enlightenment when the categories that formed the worldview of the West (namely, the Biblical categories of objective truth, reason, good, and evil) came into question. Some forms of nihilism were also influenced by Charles Darwin and the theory of evolution he believed before reaching his conclusions on the origin of species.

Darwin subscribed to a theory of evolution proposed by his grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, who asserted that life evolved from a common ancestor. Darwin incorporated this idea and that of another prominent natural scientist, Charles Lyell, who published Principles of Geology in 1830. Lyell’s work inspired him to continue searching for a cause of evolution, which he believed he found with the Galapagos finches. This led him to publish On the Origin of Species.

Darwin’s ideas had wide-ranging implications for religion and science. Richard Dawkins proclaimed in his book The Blind Watchmaker that “Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.” More important to this discussion is that Darwin’s evolutionary theory held to survival of the fittest, which has nihilistic overtones.

John Richardson bridges the gap between Darwinism and nihilism in his book Nietzsche’s New Darwinism. Richardson observes, “I think Nietzsche profits when we notice and expose this shared ground. His position is stronger when we become aware—against his own efforts—of this Darwinian element in it. His views on a range of basic questions turn out to be more credible when we do justice to this element. This Darwinian part or aspect may seem minor or peripheral to Nietzsche—an intrusion of something foreign. But I claim that we see better what’s distinctively Nietzschean by setting all the rest of his views down on this Darwinian ground. The novelties in his positions lie with remarkable consistency in the ways he breaks from—and his view advances (in intent) beyond—Darwin.”

Both hold the idea of survival of the fittest. Nietzsche saw the goal of mankind as becoming stronger by embracing the ideas of nihilism. He called this strong man the Ubermensch, which means “over-man.” He says that humanity is not the end of creation, but only that we should continue to strive to improve the species and become stronger spiritually. As noted earlier, extremist groups like the Nazi Party co-opted this spiritual survival of the fittest, combining Darwin and Nietzsche with terrible effects. While scholars continue to debate whether the Nazis interpreted Nietzsche well, their adaptation raised important questions about what consistent nihilism leads to.

How Does Nihilism Impact Us Today?

Novelist and essayist Flannery O’Connor made a strong case against nihilism in a 1955 letter to her friend Elizabeth Hester: “If you live today, you breathe in nihilism . . . it’s the gas you breathe. If I hadn’t had the Church to fight it with or to tell me the necessity of fighting it, I would be the stinkingest logical positivist you ever saw right now.”

She shows in this quote that nihilism is all around us. In his preface to The Antichrist, a book attacking Christianity outright, Nietzsche claims that his writings are for those who have “Reverence for self; love of self; absolute freedom of self.” How many people fit this mold today? Self-love is the default of our culture, yet Nietzsche means it differently than people today do. People today practice what Nietzsche calls decadence (values that lead to decay), and Nietzsche would be appalled at the conclusions people have reached by applying his philosophy.

How Does Nihilism Relate To Postmodernism?

Cultural anthropologists like David Hasselgrave discuss three modes in which cultures operate:

guilt/innocence
fear/power
honor/shame

Nihilism represents an attempt to deconstruct the guilt-innocence model of Christianity into a fear-power mentality based on the fact that all human institutions are simply power plays.

This idea is also true in postmodernism, but shame is associated with an oppressor’s power in postmodernism. Postmodernism attempts to level the playing field of power by calling out oppression and making restitution for past mistakes. It seeks to remove the original writer’s bias and perspective to get access to more of the truth. This results in an honor/shame worldview, or, as Andy Crouch calls it, a fame/shame worldview.

In his Christianity Today article “The Return of Shame,” Crouch explains, “Instead of evolving into a traditional honor–shame culture, large parts of our culture are starting to look something like a postmodern fame–shame culture.

Like honor, fame is a public estimation of worth, a powerful currency of status. But fame is bestowed by a broad audience, with only the loosest of bonds to those they acclaim.”

This also helps explain the atomization of our modern age. Honor-shame cultures, such as those in China or the Muslim world, maintain close family ties, whereas, in the West, we choose individualism.

Postmodernism and nihilism both seek to upend objective morality and replace it with something new. The difference is in how they go about it. Postmodernism seeks to deconstruct the life of the writer and historian to peel back the layers. Nihilism is interested in creating meaning once those layers are gone.

What Can Christians Learn From Nihilism?

Nihilism shows the idolatry in people’s hearts. J. Budziszewski, former nihilist and current professor of government at UT Austin, gave this perspective on his years as a nihilist before finding Christianity:

“I had fallen under the spell of the nineteenth century German writer, Frederich Nietzsche. I was, if anything, more Nietzschean than Nietzsche. Whereas he thought that given the meaninglessness of things, nothing was left but to laugh or to be silent, I recognized that not even laughter or silence were left. One had no reason to do or not do anything at all. This is a terrible thing to believe, but, like Nietzsche, I imagined myself one of the few who could believe such things, who could walk the rocky heights where air is thin and cold. This is where Nietzsche’s concept of the ‘superman’ comes in. To survive this kind of a world, you’ve got to be the ultimate man. You’ve got to overcome the meaninglessness.”

“But,” Budziszewski continues, “you know, the real reason why I was a nihilist was sheer, mulish pride. I didn’t want God to be God. I wanted J. Budziszewski to be God.”

Solomon already outlined the key tenets of nihilism in Ecclesiastes. His cry, “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity,” is essentially the same as the meaninglessness of life. He then goes on to show all the ways in which life is meaningless and that everything will have no ultimate purpose. Except toward the end of the book, he says what truly gives life meaning: to fear God and to keep his commandments (12:13). This comes as a shock to readers, who have only seen the negativity throughout the book. That can be what makes nihilism so compelling, the nugget of truth it contains. Apart from God, our life is meaningless, but with him, we are a part of something greater than ourselves. We get to glorify the one who created everything and have hope that this broken, painful world will one day be set right.

Ben Reichert works with college students in New Zealand. He graduated from Iowa State in 2019 with degrees in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, and agronomy. He is passionate about church history, theology, and having people walk with Jesus. When not working or writing you can find him running or hiking in the beautiful New Zealand Bush.