Human beings have always tried to bargain with chaos.
You can see it clearest in the old stories. Imagine living in the ancient world: drought on the horizon, war that could strike any time, bandits and monsters beyond your city walls, plague and famine striking cities and farms alike. No weather reports. No antibiotics. No forecasts. Just fear, raw and unfiltered. People needed some way to feel they weren’t helpless. So they created rituals. They washed. They abstained. They fasted. And sometimes, in their terror, they brought the unthinkable — their own children — to Moloch’s furnace.
They weren’t monsters. They were humans trying to survive a world that didn’t care whether they lived or died.
This is the part modern people forget: purity rituals weren’t about superstition. They were about sanity. They were a way to say, “Somewhere in all this chaos, I can still do something that matters.”
We don’t worship Moloch anymore. Not openly, anyway. But that instinct, the need to cleanse, to impose order, to purify ourselves so the world feels manageable, never left.
Everyone Has a Purity Ritual
You don’t have to believe in God to perform one. You don’t even have to be spiritual. Ritual lives deeper than that.
Some people purify themselves through kale smoothies and cold plunges, or through CrossFit. Some do it through political virtue signaling, little digital ablutions to show they are morally clean. Some maintain perfect homes where nothing is out of place. Others ritually deny themselves pleasures but disguise it as “wellness.”
My ritual is writing.
Not the neat, packaged sort. The wrestling match sort. I take observations and patterns and chew on them until I can beat them into something coherent, something I can hand to the world with a straight spine. It’s not just work. It’s my way of taking overwhelming thoughts and cleansing them, ordering them, grounding myself again.
Everybody has rituals. We call them routines or habits or disciplines, but they’re all the same ancient structure: rote repeated actions that give us the illusion of control in a world we can’t actually master.
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When Purity Goes Off the Rails
Most rituals are harmless. Some are even healthy. They keep us centered, disciplined, focused. They give shape to the day. They clear a little space where chaos can’t follow. But when the ritual stops being chosen and starts being compulsive — that’s when everything turns.
History is full of purity movements that began with fear and ended in evil.
Medieval pogroms weren’t random explosions of hatred. They were attempts to “cleanse” a society that felt threatened, pressured, cursed. Salem wasn’t about witches; it was about a community trying to scrub away its own nightmares. And Nazi Germany wasn’t built on hatred alone. It was built on a national obsession with purification — the fantasy that if the right people were removed, everything broken would magically heal.
That’s the danger: when an inward ritual meant to calm your fear is projected outward onto other people. When your private need to feel orderly becomes a public demand that others must be cleansed.
This is how ritual becomes violence.
It’s not that purity, however you define it, is evil. Far from it. It can be healthy, grounding, and life-affirming. It’s that unconscious purity is blind, and blind purity reaches for scapegoats.
Paul saw this in the earliest Christian communities. Half his letters are him pleading with believers to stop inventing new purity codes, new rituals, new rules, new performances. Grace already handled the real purification, he points out over and over. Humans just kept rebuilding the old system because it felt safer than trusting God.
The instinct is older than Scripture and deeper than reason.
Purity With God, Purity Without Him
What’s striking is this: People purify themselves regardless of what they believe about God.
A Christian may pray or fast or hold to a code of life that gives structure and dignity. An atheist may purge his diet, detox his life, or chase ideological purity with evangelical energy. A secular progressive may treat environmental asceticism as moral absolution. A conservative may cling to cultural purity as identity.
Different doctrines. Same ritual bones.
But Christianity, at least, gives the one answer that actually breaks the cycle: You cannot purify yourself into righteousness. The heavy lifting is done by God — not you. The rituals can help you order your life, but they’re not what saves you.
That should free us.
And yet humans keep dragging the purity instinct back to center stage.
Because rituals feel safer than trust, predictability feels safer than grace, and control feels safer than surrender.
The Line Between Stability and Chaos
Here’s what I’ve learned — the thing I’m circling in my own writing ritual today, turning over and over like a stone in my hand:
Purity rituals aren’t dangerous when they’re intense.
They’re dangerous when they’re unconscious.
When you know what you’re doing — when you understand that the ritual is just your way of creating a small pocket of order — you stay in control of it. You stay humble, grounded, and human. But when you forget what the ritual is — when you confuse it for truth, or morality, or holiness, or cosmic necessity — the ritual starts making decisions for you.
You stop seeing people and start seeing impurities. You stop seeing problems and start seeing enemies. You stop seeing yourself clearly and start seeing a crusader in the mirror.
And that’s when the chaos you were trying to banish slips in through the back door.
Unconscious purity rituals don’t repel chaos. They broadcast an invitation. They let the chaos in, making everything worse.
A Better Way to See Ritual
So maybe the lesson isn’t that we should avoid purity rituals or try to transcend them. We can’t. They’re part of the human operating system. They’re stitched into our bones. But we can decide what kind of rituals we practice and what kind of people they make us.
Rituals done consciously don’t shrink your world. They expand it.
A good ritual humbles you. It reminds you you’re not in charge of the weather, or history, or the human heart, only your next choice. A good ritual builds rhythm into a life that easily dissolves into chaos. It roots you, or steadies you, or wakes you up. It gives you space to breathe and room to grow.
Writing does that for me. It clears the fog. It sharpens my attention. It helps me see the world as it is instead of as fear paints it. Someone else might find the same clarity in prayer, or lifting weights, or cooking, or coding, or gardening, or morning walks. These aren’t escapes. They’re forms of craftsmanship, ways of building a life that isn’t just reactive, anxious, or overwhelmed.
And this, I think, is where God fits into all of it.
Ritual isn’t supposed to replace Him. It’s supposed to prepare us, to make space in our minds and our days so we can notice the quiet things He’s doing. Ritual is a habit of attention, a way of tuning yourself so glory doesn’t slip by unnoticed. In the right frame, rituals don’t bind you. They free you from distraction long enough to hear something true.
Even outside of religion, rituals can shape a person into someone steadier, kinder, more thoughtful. Someone who responds instead of reacts. Someone who can create order without demanding control. Someone who can see patterns without inventing enemies.
Ritual, at its best, is what keeps the chaos from taking everything. Not because the ritual has magic power, but because the person practicing it becomes more grounded, more whole, more capable of meeting the world with clarity instead of fear.
And that’s the part worth holding onto.
Not the ancient terror.
Not the sacrifice.
Not the purity panic or the search for scapegoats.
Just the small, intentional things we do every day to become people who can weather the storm without losing who we are.
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