My friends and family have always asked whether I am religious. I usually answer yes. Very religious. Deeply religious. Religious in almost all its forms and designs. And I do not say this because I am faithful in the way they expect. I say it because I do not have the option not to be religious. Life itself is made up of rituals tied to religion, even when those rituals no longer admit their sacred origins. To live among people, to commune with the living, to belong to society, to be recognised as serious, respectable, disciplined, or worthy, one must participate in rituals of belief. One must wake up at certain hours, work, obey calendars, honour money, fear debt, respect institutions, perform ambition, mourn properly, celebrate properly, dress properly, speak properly, and submit oneself to systems of judgment. If this is not religion, then it is at least one of religion’s children.

Therefore, I am religious.

We have curated capitalism to be the most sacred religion. The chronic capitalists always pride themselves on being more secular and relieved from the rituals of religion. They claim to be more factual and objective. But I think that religion is the greatest of the descendants of religion, if not religion itself. We can inteprete Marx’s definition of capitalism loosely as “an economic system in which the main means of production, transportation, and exchange are privately owned, and those who own them generate profit by employing workers whose labour operates and sustains that capital.” Reading through this, capitalism has grown and is aggressively growing into the same fitting of social and psychological functions that religion once performed. It determines what we value, how to suffer, what to desire, whom to obey, and how to imagine salvation. The difference is that salvation is no longer called heaven/Jannah.

I have a hate love relationship wuth Nietzche’s work. On the Genealogy of Morality, he assesses religion from its historical formation shaped by weakness, resentment and guilt, and the religious need to elevate suffering. Nietzsche argued that religion interprets suffering. It guides the believer towards the idea that pain comes in the form of purification, whatever that means, punishment, sacrifice and discipline, all in preparation for salvation. Religion therefore “moralises” suffering. Capitalism does the same. The anxiety of the indebted, the exhaustion of the overworked, the entrepreneur’s instability, and the consumer’s dissatisfaction are treated as individual moral problems. One must work harder, become more disciplined, save better, invest more wisely, improve one’s skills, build resilience, or increase one’s market value, all in the chase of economic salvation.

The interpretation of Nietzsche’s analysis of guilt comes into place. He traced the moral guilt to the creditor-debtor relation, which is not coincidental. He noted that the situation demanded an obligation that emerged from the memory of what is owed. Religion spiritualized the debt; infinitely indebted to God and his divine grace. In our economic case, the individual becomes indebted to banks, employers, landlords, universities, states, platforms, families, and the imagined future self. In both cases, the religious and the victims of capitalism are governed by the feeling of insufficiency.

When I turned 20, my most stubborn friend gifted me Karl Marx’s Capital. It took me four years to complete the three volumes (i might never touch that torturous book again!). In there, the concept of commodity fetishism is well developed. Money and products acquire a sacred power, independent of the labour and social relations that produced them. Here, I see how human creation comes back to dominate human beings. It is more like an item that the society collectively produces begins to stand above society as an external authority. Capitalism, in its most basic form, alienates the commission people from the product of their labour, the whole labour process and also from other people. It promises self-realisation, provided that you toe the line and do the economic worship.

Capitalism is the most sacred religion. There is no final forgiveness or eternal salvation. Its worship is permanent, the rituals are continuous, and the guilt, or fear, is endless. At least typical religions offer an imagination of absolution and redemption. And a promise of eternal damnation with no hope, eternal grace with no suffering. On the other hand, the market has no Sabbath. Capitalism always finds a way to intensify every obligation with no aspect of release. Capitalism intensifies obligation without release. One must continue working, consuming, borrowing, repaying, competing, optimising, and improving.

I do all these; therefore, I am religious.

Back to our philosophical negative Nancy. To him, religion was used as a tool of discipline. Appetite, pride, sexuality and instincts are conceptualised as morally dangerous in religion. In the new capitalist religion, these appear to be celebrated. However, the ugly kick is that that capitlaism also disciplines the body. There is a never-ending demand for punctuality, productivity, emotional regulation, employability and constant self-optimisation.

To understand capitalism as a secular descendant of religion, we must move beyond abstract theory and examine the current economy. In religion, especially in its more total forms, God is not merely one belief among others. God becomes the condition of possibility for life itself. One cannot be saved without God, forgiven without God, morally purified without God, or finally redeemed without God. God is the highest authority through which value, legitimacy, and destiny are organised. “Poor is the pupil who does not surpass his master.” Capitalism occupies a similar position in modern life, if not more. There are basic things that cannot easily be done outside the hold of the market. One cannot eat without purchasing food, live without paying rent or owning property, move without paying for transport or fuel, study without fees or debt, access healthcare without money or insurance, communicate without privately owned digital platforms, or participate socially without devices, data, and subscriptions. Capitalism is the religion/god in which existence itself is now mediated.

In the religious language of the beatitudes, blessed are those with capital, credit, ownership, credentials, networks, and market value. And condemned are those without purchasing power, without formal employment, without assets, without visibility, and without the capacity to convert themselves into economic value.

In religious life, the believer often learns that human action is insufficient without divine permission. In capitalist life, human need is insufficient without purchasing power. A person may need food, shelter, medicine, education, or rest, but need alone does not guarantee access. Capitalism asks a prior question: can you pay? The economic drama of affordability therefore replaces the moral drama of religion. Where religion once asked whether one was worthy before God, capitalism asks whether one is solvent before the market.

Capitalism now runs the world with divine command. And there are numerous institutions we can consult to validate this. Let us start with the government. They measure themselves through growth, investment, inflation, employment, credit ratings, productivity, and competitiveness. The check will be for universities. They justify themselves through employability, market alignment, innovation, and entrepreneurial output.

“Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”

In a very godly manner, we have been created to meet the image of God. Our personal identities are more like brands, and even the most basic imagination is disciplined by market logic. How much would it cost? Is it monetizable? Is it scalable?

All known human societies and institutions have developed with the help of rituals. In this religion, the rituals are everywhere, and they have surpassed the usual structure of rituals, which normally has a leading individual guiding the others. In this case, we have adaptive rituals regulated by their consequences. the daily commute, the job application, the rent payment, the loan repayment, the subscription renewal, the credit score, the shopping mall, the business pitch, the productivity tracker, the performance review, and the investment portfolio. The rituals always remind the subjects that survival depends on obedience to the economic order. To refuse participation is treated just as heresy in the old religious sense, exclusion, poverty, invisibility, and social death. In a very godly manner again, capitalism is omnipresent. data, platforms, surveillance, credit systems, digital payments, work metrics, ratings, and algorithmic ranking work like the religious Zabaniya, Memitim or Kushiel. Every transaction, delay, debt, purchase, click, rating, and productivity measure can become part of a profile through which the subject is assessed, which is basically a continuous judgement day.

You cannot run from this; therefore, you are religious

This is not against religion (it’s partly against capitalism), but against the theology of reward and punishment. It is against the effects of the unending mechanisms of control. It is against the continuation of the creation of systems that divide the “sacred” from the “profane” and bind people into a moral community. Capitalism produces its own sacred objects, and all these are now used to measure human worth. At this stage, it has become evident that failing economically is seen as morally deficient.

Perhaps this is the most uncomfortable conclusion: Not in the heroic way we like to imagine. We inherit systems before we can name them, obey rules before we can question them, desire things before we can ask who planted the desire in us. We are born into languages, economies, borders, families, debts, gods, markets, ambitions, fears, and rituals. By the time we begin to speak of freedom, we are already speaking from inside a structure that has taught us what freedom should sound like.

And yet, we keep building more systems. We create institutions to protect us, and they govern us. We create markets to serve us, and they discipline us. We create technologies to connect us, and they watch us. We create identities to express ourselves, and they trap us into performance. We create dreams of success, mobility, ownership, and self-making, and then spend our lives feeding the machines that sell those dreams back to us as proof that we are free. I think this is the most dangerous form of slavery: the one that arrives dressed as choice. The one that tells us we are free because we can choose between brands, careers, cities, lifestyles, platforms, beliefs, and versions of the self. The one that gives us options but not escape. The one that gives us the language of freedom while quietly narrowing the conditions under which life can be lived.

But perhaps that is also why freedom remains the most valuable illusion. Life is unbearable without this illusion. We need the illusion to resist, to imagine otherwise, to refuse complete surrender, to believe that the systems we inherited are not the final architecture of the world. Freedom may be an illusion, but it is the illusion that keeps the prisoner looking for cracks in the wall.

So maybe the task is not to declare ourselves free. That would be too easy, too religious, too capitalist, too obedient to the old promise of salvation. Maybe the task is to become suspicious of every system that sells us freedom while demanding our sacrifice. Maybe it is to notice the gods we keep making, the temples we keep entering, the debts we keep calling destiny, and the rituals we keep mistaking for life.

No one is free. But at least learn to recognise the shape of your cage. That might be the beginning of freedom.