The use of the messiah in secular texts begs the question: Why does a religious trope recur in a system designed to erase religion for the sake of social equality? Following from this point of inquiry, this project argues that the return of the messiah is symptomatic of trauma. According to psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, trauma indicates the 'encounter with the real', where the 'real' is so inexplicable it is visible only in what is left behind to haunt the subject: the objet a. If the messiah may be seen as the objet a of some trauma, what is its source? This project does not attempt to seek an answer to this question so much as to circumscribe a field of exploration: is there a relation between the modern messiah and the earliest witness to the term in Paul's encounter with his 'Christ'? What is the relation between Paul's Christianity and secularism? In other words, what of Paul's 'real' returns in the twentieth century?