Nomadic Modernity

This essay first appeared with First Things.

A man trudged down the streets of Vienna in the winter of 1909, hugging the shadows cast by evening lamps. His dark brown hair touched his collar. His beard was unkempt. The brown jacket he’d purchased at a pawnshop for fifty kronen was threadbare, and his shoes looked ready to disintegrate with each step.

This vagrant had no home, no destination, no community. He drifted from flophouse to flophouse, sleeping in doorways when he had no money for a bed. He sold postcards he painted to tourists, barely scraping together enough to eat. Most days he went hungry. He was driven by an insatiable desire to belong.

It is almost impossible to imagine that this homeless drifter would, within three decades, command one of the most murderous regimes in history. But Adolf Hitler’s years of vagrancy—what he would later call the period when he “grew hard”—offer a disturbing window into what happens when human beings are severed from home, place, and genuine spiritual community.

From 1908 to 1913, Hitler was rootless in every sense. He had been rejected by the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts—twice. His best friend August Kubizek was succeeding as a musician while Hitler lived in squalor. His mother was dead. He had no family, no church, no trade, no purpose. He was, in the fullest sense, spiritually and physically homeless.

And in that homelessness, he found something dark to cling to. “Wherever I went, I now saw Jews,” Hitler later wrote in Mein Kampf, “and the more I saw, the more sharply they set themselves apart in my eyes from the rest of humanity.” Vienna’s burgeoning anti-Semitic culture offered Hitler what he desperately needed: an enemy to blame for his suffering, and a twisted sense of belonging.

Hitler’s story is not offered here in sympathy but as anthropological evidence. Human beings were not created for rootlessness. We were made for place, for people, for belonging. When those bonds are severed—whether by poverty, ideology, or the dislocations of modernity itself—we become desperate. And desperate people will latch onto anything that offers them identity and community, even if that something is monstrous.

Robert Birley, in his 1947 Burge Memorial Lecture, comments that totalitarianism seduces young people with a sense of community. “The most obvious symptom of the spiritual disease of our civilization is the widespread feeling among men that they have lost all control of their destinies. . . . Hitler’s answer to that frustration was one of the main secrets of his power.” Robert Nisbet, in The Quest for Community, likewise notes that the “disenchanted and alienated German worker” is key to understanding what drove millions to fanaticism.

Hitler’s homelessness was concrete—a vagrant literally sleeping in doorways. But decades later, a Polish sociologist would diagnose a different kind of homelessness, one that now penetrates the entire structure of Western civilization. Zygmunt Bauman, a disillusioned socialist who had seen both fascism and communism fail, understood that modernity itself had become liquid. Bauman, in Modernity and the Holocaust, offered a cogent analysis of the Holocaust that posited that Nazism was a modern enterprise. He notes that “the Holocaust was not simply a Jewish problem, and not an event in Jewish history alone. The Holocaust was born and executed in our modern rational society, at the high stage of our civilization and at the peak of human cultural achievement, and for this reason it is a problem of that society, civilization and culture.” Henry Feingold notes that the Final Solution marked where the European system went off the rails and “instead of enhancing life”—the goal of modernity post-Enlightenment—“it began to consume itself.” Thus Hitler’s hatred for modernity in Vienna ended up leading him to not only a twisted ideology but to modernity itself.

“The whole of modernity,” Bauman wrote, “stands out from preceding epochs by its compulsive and obsessive modernizing—and modernizing means liquefaction, melting and smelting.” Relationships have become provisional. Anxieties are no longer concrete and local but diffuse and global. Products are designed for obsolescence. Even identity itself is consumable—you “try on” selves like clothes, discarding them when they no longer serve you. Gender is merely an expression, and love is whatever you want it to be. The self is a fleshly vehicle for expression. We pursue progress for the sake of progress, not toward any destination.

Yet Bauman offered no solution, and certainly no solution that Christians can grab onto and hold to in the liquid waters of the modern storm. He had seen socialism fail in Poland and capitalism liquefy everything in the West. He saw the homelessness of modern life with perfect clarity—but his work fails to point us toward the eternal rooted home that man has been seeking since the Garden of Eden.

So yes, Bauman’s theory is essential for understanding our crisis, but it doesn’t go far enough. Liquidity describes the mechanism; nomadism describes its consequence. To be liquid means lacking a stable form. To be nomadic means you have no home to return to. Against modernity’s eternal return to nowhere, the Christian faith offers the return to eternity. We, like the prodigal son, squander what we have until we have nowhere to look but back home.

Modern man has become a nomad, constantly moving from place to place, relationship to relationship, identity to identity. “The decline of community in the modern world has as its inevitable religious consequence the creation of masses of helpless, bewildered individuals who are unable to find solace in Christianity regarded merely as creed,” writes Robert Nisbet. “The stress upon the individual, at the expense of the churchly community, has led remorselessly to the isolation of the individual, to the shattering of the man-God relationship, and to the atomization of personality.” In other words, this nomadism is not just geographical but spiritual.

Unlike the nomads of old who moved with their tribes across familiar territories following ancient patterns, modern nomads wander alone through an undifferentiated landscape, following no pattern except the compulsion to keep moving. Nomadic modernity is the condition of being structurally homeless in a liquid world. It manifests in three domains that correspond precisely to what human beings were created for—and what modernity has systematically destroyed.

We are homeless in place. COVID-19 clarified what had already become true. Work detached from location. Offices closed, team meetings moved to Zoom, relationships migrated to apps. The digital age promised freedom—work from anywhere!—but delivered a strange placelessness. When everywhere is potentially “home,” nowhere actually is. But this doesn’t just impact those of us who work in an office, or from home on a computer. It impacts those of us who farm the land and work with our hands. Blue-collar jobs, the backbone of America, are being suffocated by rising costs, international labor, and competition from large blue-collar corporations. Even if we don’t move away from home physically, our work has become placeless in that we are bombarded by globalization even in small-town America.

For younger generations, even securing a physical place has become radically difficult. Skyrocketing housing costs have turned home ownership from an expected milestone into a luxury reserved for the already-wealthy or the exceptionally fortunate. Millennials and Gen Z aren’t nomadic by choice—they’re nomadic by economic necessity. Nomadism tells you that if you settle down, or if you commit, you’ll miss opportunities. It’s exhausting. In the words of Nisbet, “The human mind cannot support moral chaos for very long.” Moral chaos breeds fatigue. And the desire for rest can lead us to dark places if we are not careful.

We are homeless among people. As we seek fulfillment in perpetual self-exploration—”finding yourself”—we lose connection to communities around us. Relationships become projects, friendships become networks, and even family becomes optional. Influencer culture makes us feel like we have “a people,” but we’re merely hopping around, shifting our attention too quickly to lay down roots. We’re constantly auditioning our identity, performing for audiences we’ll never meet, seeking validation from strangers while ignoring our neighbors. Dating apps embody this perfectly. People are interchangeable, commitment is optional, and there’s always someone better waiting for us.

We are homeless in time. History is seen as an endless march toward progress. Any claim to a rooted past impedes the perpetual revolution. The result is historical amnesia. Hannah Arendt calls this the severing of “the thread of tradition.” This thread is connected, according to Arendt, to our natality. Every day the world is invaded by newcomers and those who are already here are merely waiting to move on. How are they to know where to go if they are left no clues as to where they are from? Many of us can’t even name our great-grandparents or trace our nation’s history. This is of course in part due to the stress on forward movement. We are taught to view tradition as oppressive, inheritance as privilege, and the wisdom of previous generations as irrelevant at best and harmful at worst. We have sought to unshackle ourselves from our very past, our very shared natality. When we’re constantly moving, constantly remaking ourselves, we lose touch with where we came from. We become temporal nomads. Though situated in time, we live as if time began with us—acknowledging only this fleeting present that dissolves even as we grasp it, and the perpetually receding future that promises fulfillment but never delivers. The past becomes weightless. Those who came before us vanish into forgetting. This is the tyranny of the present.

Taken together, these three forms of nomadism create an ersatz freedom that amounts to exile. Liquid modernity promised liberation from the constraints of place, people, and past. It delivered rootlessness, loneliness, and despair. You have no ground to stand on and no story to inhabit. You’re not liberated; you’re lost.

And like Hitler in Vienna, lost people will grasp at anything that offers them a tribe: A nation to worship, a brand to identify with, a cause to die for, or an enemy to blame. All are attempts to resolve homelessness without going home. We see this all around us. Millions are grasping for something to resolve the drive for belonging, and unfortunately many are grabbing the wrong things.

But what if there is a home that has remained constant? One institution has remained solid for two thousand years while empires rose and fell, technologies came and went, and ideologies burned bright and collapsed. The Church—flawed, human, often flailing—has endured because it is rooted not in the shifting sands of human progress but in the bedrock of divine revelation.

Against the nomadism of placelessness, the Church offers place: The same liturgy—though in different variations—in the same building across generations, particular dirt under particular trees with particular neighbors. The Church is united by the past, present, and future. Reciting the Nicene Creed unites us, wherever we are, to something rooted. The kingdom of God is not merely an ethereal concept, but a place—God’s people worshiping him for eternity.

Against the nomadism of peoplelessness, the Church offers people. I can’t help but hear the old John Michael Talbot lyrics, “we are one body, one body in Christ, and we do not stand alone” (see 1 Cor. 12).

Against the nomadism of pastlessness, the Church offers a past and a future: “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever” (Heb. 13:8). There is something profound in the Christian faith’s understanding of the past, present, and future. Our faith is rooted in history, and yet it is rooted in the future as well. We look back to the cross in order to live now in the kingdom. The past and future are intertwined at the foot of the cross. To be a Christian is to join together with millions of saints across all time, and together proclaim the shared heritage of faith.

In other words, the Church is structurally anti-liquid, anti-nomadic, anti-homeless. It offers what desperate modern nomads most need: roots that go deeper than modernity can reach. In the face of the ebb and flow of modernity, the Church is a bulwark of certainty; we profess with millions before us and millions to come that “We believe in one God, the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible.” She does not change, for the God who made her does not change.

We were created to be with God in a place, with a people, and with a purpose. Nomadic modernity has severed all three bonds, leaving us wandering in a modern wasteland. But the Church remains—ancient, enduring, solid—calling to the wanderer: “Come in and find rest here. Find purpose. Find hope. Find love.” The Church is the answer to nomadic modernity