It was the Enlightenment that caused the confusion. To many then, it came to seem that human beings no longer need to strive for the heavenly city because heaven was becoming a place on earth. They could be forgiven for imagining that as fantastic progress was being made in science. The beneficent world of modernity no longer seemed to belong to God or his priests, or require anything that was out of human reach. The notion of higher flourishing, nurtured in religion, seeking transcendence, was dismissed: human well-being is of humankind's own making! There emerged what Charles Taylor calls “exclusive humanism”: the conviction that the location of meaning is not found in anything beyond human comprehension. Taylor writes:

Coupled to that came a sense of entitlement that this-worldly happiness was a right, or at least, to recall the American Declaration of Independence, something that everyone has a right to pursue. That led to something else: an expectation, that each, in his or her own way, should enjoy the pleasures the world can offer.