If we are seeking to equip our children in kingdom service, then our children will need to be adequately equipped for the kinds of battles that they are going to be facing. We owe it to our children to take these matters seriously. We may be dead before the full weight of these shifts are felt culturally, but they will be the lived reality for our children and grandchildren. We owe it to our prodigy to speak up and to shout a warning. If not now, when; if not us, who?
We are not in an age of change, but a change of age.
We are amid a 500-year historical geo-political inflection point. The world as we have known it is changing, so profoundly that our histories going forward are going to be altered.
We are not talking here about the accumulation of incremental changes, but the wholesale changes of assumptions, global actors, and personal experiences. We are facing a paradigm shift—the likes of the fall of Rome (475 AD), the collapse of Constantinople (1453 AD), and Luther at the Diet of Worms (1521 AD).
The issues facing the church are significantly deeper and longer lasting than the shift from a Neutral to a Negative World. We are shifting from a Negative World to an outright hostile world.
This hostility is not conscious or explicit but implicit, not personal but foundational, and not political but cultural. It is an invisible hostility that makes it even more dangerous. This makes the new social reality the church is facing far more significant than we have previously imagined.
The first step is to wake up to the depth of the situation facing the church and to get our diagnosis aligned to reality. In this process of diagnosis, you cannot trust the mainstream media or the normal purveyors of academic insight as the elite culture is complicit and sometimes even the source of the disease.
The Four Civilizational Shifts
There are four primary shifts that we are currently facing as believers: from Christian to post-Christian, from classical liberalism to Nietzschean nihilism, from Global West to Global East, and from Enlightenment rationalism to post-Enlightenment re-enchantment.
Shift One: Christian to Post-Christian. We are living in a world that is functionally divorced from any reference to the sacred. We have shifted from societies based on fate and faith to one based on fiction. Moreover, the foundational basis of society, namely traditional marriage, has been rejected. The fruit of marriage, namely the procreation of children, has also been rejected. Replacing these historic foundations to social life is an unchecked hedonism reinforced by a world without boundaries, that is unchecked license.
The late University of Pennsylvania sociologist Philip Rieff described our contemporary world in this manner: “No culture has ever preserved itself where it is not a registration of sacred order. There, cultures have not survived. This kind of society where the notion of a culture that persists independent of all sacred orders is unprecedented in human history.”
In the past cultural conflicts were between competing sacred symbolics. Not so today. What makes our contemporary culture war distinctive is that it is a negation against all sacred orders and the verticals in authority that mediate the sacred to society. This is an entirely new historical situation. What this means is that we cannot simply return to older approaches as they are no longer relevant to our cultural situation.
Shift Two: Classical Liberalism to Nietzschean Nihilism (Individual Rights to State Power). The assumptions of the Enlightenment which gave rise to the political ideology of classical liberalism have been rejected by the leadership class. There is a much-debated question whether a democratic society can survive when its underlying assumptions are no longer believed by those who are being governed by it. Social solidarity requires shared social beliefs. When these are abandoned, as is increasingly the case by the political elites, then politics naturally defaults and devolves to the will-to-power in a world where the leadership class believes in nothing.
This is the experiential definition of nihilism. We have today a competition between left wing and right-wing forms of nihilism. Classical liberalism is defunct. By elevating individualism and progress into guiding social values, liberalism destroys the traditions and norms that allow human beings to make sense of life and find their place in the world.
American Christianity is on the decline, small-town America is hollowed out, drug abuse rates are rising, suicide is an accept outlet for many, particularly men—all symptoms of a spiritual crisis brought on by liberalism’s philosophical assault on the sources of social stability.
This is the combined argument of Notre Dame political scientist Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed and University of Virginia sociologist James Davison Hunter’s Democracy and Solidarity. No one has yet provided a meaningful future political solution to this problem apart from doubling down on past assumptions in an ongoing culture war between populism and elitism. What concerned analysts have agreed on is that there is no easy or quick fix. This reality is going to be with us for some time.