Telford Work in his chapter on mapping a modern view of the Holy Spirit offers a really nice index of how that gets expressed under the pressures of secularism. Let me share how he sketches that; this is under a section he calls a Dysteological Pneumatology (think something like a Dystopian doctrine of the Spirit).
For Nietzsche these spirits are individual wills vying for power. For Freud they are the dark psychological forces that drives single minds and whole civilizations. Among humanity’s countless groups and subgroups they are the countless human structures that Paul calls stoicheia or “elements” of the world (Gal. 4:3) and that Walter Wink associates with the New Testament’s powers and principalities. For neo-Darwinians, who posit a never-ending biological flux in a world of change and adaptation, they can be the ephemeral species themselves, their ecosystems, the whole evolving biosphere, genes, or individual specimens.
The world’s spirits are thus embedded in an eternal struggle with one another and with the world that creates and destroys them. The cosmology of dysteological modernity is pluralist, pagan, and ultimately nihilist. Ambition, shame, and envy rule the lives of individuals, families, empires, oppressed peoples, cultures, gangs, parties, and businesses—not because of original sin, because that has been dismissed out of hand, but because it is simply how things are. The power of this vision is as immense as its varieties are innumerable. Only a few prominent ones need mentioning: Social Darwinism makes “survival of the fittest” into a social ethic, to the point of imposing empire upon and even sterilizing the weak. National Socialism elevates the honor of a Volk (a people or race) above all human decency. Corporatism forges alliances between ruling parties and business, labor, and advocacy groups. Environmentalism weighs the conviction that ecological destruction ill serves humanity against its suspicion that the reality problem is humanity itself. Prejudice marginalizes whole groups in order to privilege others; meritocracy tries to defuse it by setting achievers against one another in a competition for access to power; affirmative action and then multiculturalism have turned the tables on the old winners in the name of justice.[1]
The secular has been so tightly woven into the fabric of global society that it can be difficult to disentangle this thread from that, and recognize just how diffuse these fallen Nietzschean and Hegelian spirits are throughout the sectors of the world; even our churches. But these are the spirits, who started out as the Holy Spirit (that is by way of the notion that the devil seeks to emulate in his perverse way), who we are contending with each and everyday in our society at large. Whether the spirit is diluted into the waters of the seemingly mundane of day-to-day life, or more extravagantly, into the shakers and movers of geopolitical maneuvering, they have a certain dark and even demonic yield that stands behind them. The demonic, or even more pointedly, the satanic nature of it all can be observed in its parody. That’s how the satan works; he is not an original thinker, so he attempts to take the Holy, parody it into more palatable visions—palatable to his already secular empire—and sell it to his squads of people in either romantic historical dress, or in just straight up brute materialist in your face reality.
What should stand out though, as we engage with Work’s work, is that the seedlings behind the secular are not areligious, atheological, or aChristian. They are highly religious, highly theological, even highly Christian by way of original orientation. And so, it ought to betake the Christians, of all people, to have the capacity and vivacity, to spot these false spirits, parading as the Holy Spirit, and exorcise them for what they are; indeed, the spirit[s] of antiChrist.
[1] Telford Work, “Pneumatology,” in Kelly M. Kapic and Bruce L. McCormack, eds., Mapping Modern Theology: A Thematic and Historical Introduction (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 2012), 236–37.