Last June, the Presbyterian Church in America’s General Assembly, under the leadership of moderator Kevin DeYoung, commissioned a denominational study and report on Christian nationalism. That report has now been released. I’m not a Presbyterian, but I have several friends who are pastors and teachers within the PCA, and I serve a Christian publishing organization with thick ties to PCA seminaries and churches. As such, I was eager to read the report, feeling it unusually relevant for myself and my work.

Bottom line: I think the men behind this report have done an excellent job. This examination of Christian nationalism, both as expressed in older forms of political theology, and in new movements today, is biblical, fair, wise, and practical. What’s more, I think the report can help evangelicals situate Christian nationalist debate more accurately in its historical context, accomplishing two important things: 1) Creating space for legitimate, in-bounds disagreement about civil government’s relationship to the church, and 2) Taking away space for pernicious, sinful partiality and rhetoric.

These two things—drawing the lines of legitimate disagreement, while contrasting those against the lines between sinful speech and attitudes—offer a kind of clarity that can, I think, help evangelicals move out of the online turf war phase of political theology. To put it more simply: Christians who are serious about theology and politics need to move on from the Christian nationalism moment as it has existed thus far. This report can help them do that.

Where We’ve Been Stuck

Debates over Christian nationalism were poisoned almost immediately by two entities. American journalists and politicians poisoned it by framing “Christian nationalism” as any conservative political position that a Christian happened to take. Against abortion? Christian nationalism. Think boys shouldn’t be in girls’ locker rooms? Christian nationalism. This framing was not unique to the Trump era. Scaremongering about theocracy produced books and articles during the Bush administration. By using “Christian nationalism” as a slur aimed at so many disparate Christian individuals and movements, media elites grossly misrepresented what was actually happening, and disqualified themselves from trustworthiness on the topic in the process.

But it was also poisoned by those who embraced this disfiguration. A non-trivial amount of pastors, online influencers, writers, academics, and others took the media’s misrepresentation and ran with it. The argument essentially became, “You are either a mainline Protestant or a Christian nationalist.” The enormous vista between progressive evangelicalism and Christian nationalism was portrayed as a simple binary instead. And because the vast majority of confessional evangelicals in this country do not and cannot embrace mainline theology or ethics, this was an effective strategy. Overnight, evangelicals who were both pro-life and pro-pluralism felt forced to make a choice: Join the abortion and transgender lobby, or fall in line with a very specific, blood and soil-centered political theology.

The narrative of how this all took place could be a book, much less multiple essays in their own right. But that’s not my point in this post. Suffice to say, for at least the last ten years, conservative evangelicals have been hung up on the topic of political theology. This isn’t necessarily because there’s been such productive and challenging dialogue. Rather, the migration of social power and influence away from traditional institutions and toward online personalities and platforms has meant that often, what people were actually arguing about was not political theology, but leaders, organizations, conferences, churches, or denominations—where they fell on a certain map, how “woke” or “based” they were, and what social capital they did or did not deserve now

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Worse, the lack of institutional life has created a vacuum that’s being filled with opportunistic media mavens who use this intra-Christian tension as a kind of cover. Some of these mavens dress themselves as Christian champions of classical liberalism and democracy, but are really “exvangelicals” trying to move believers away from historic orthodoxy. Others sense a juicy chance to tap into the “based Christian” online subculture, and so present as warriors for Christian traditionalism, all the while adopting the racial and sexual politics of pagan reactionaries. An average person logging onto their podcast or social media feeds is overwhelmed by all this. The loudest voices sound the most sincere, and the angriest, most embittered ones seem to know “what time it is.”

This is why the PCA’s report matters. The report represents the kind of slow, attentive, patient, precise intellectual work that online influencing undermines. This doesn’t make it beyond critique. But it does make it beyond cynical, instinctive critique. An institution carefully using Scripture and historic confessions to reframe and rein in the discussion is exactly what’s needed at this point.

Affirmations and Denials

The report’s affirmations and denials include all the things you’d expect regarding the singular mission of the church and the limitations of political action. But it also expresses, correctly I believe, the tension (and it is a tension!) between the church’s political relevance and the church’s supra-political teleology:

We affirm the right of the institutional church to address civil government on all matters to which the Holy Scriptures speak. This it may do by way of humble petition in cases extraordinary; or by way of advice, for satisfaction of conscience, when asked by the magistrate to do so (WCF 31.4). We further affirm that the church is duty bound as part of its public witness to speak on matters of biblical morality and Christian obedience, even when doing so touches upon current debates in the contemporary political landscape. Nevertheless, we deny that it is the responsibility of the institutional church to intermeddle in civil or political affairs (WCF 31:4). We further deny that the church has the right or the power to bind consciences— on political matters, as on any other subject— without the express warrant of the Word of God (WCF 20:2).

Duty bound as part of its public witness, the church can authoritatively teach and advocate for Christian morality. Since politics is moral, this means it will, inevitably, be a player in certain political debates. “Can boys be in girls’ locker rooms” is a political question, but it’s a Christian question before it’s a political one, and the church, armed with absolute truth about the nature of men and women, is obliged to answer. “How much immigration is good for a society” is an important political question, but it’s not one that Christian doctrine expressly clarifies. Putting the second issue on the same shelf as the first one—as many Christian nationalists tend to do these days—confuses the church’s mission, and sorts believers along illegitimate lines.

The tendency of Christian nationalist influencers to press the moral authority of the church into shapes that Scripture cannot support is likewise addressed here:

We affirm that the civil magistrate must maintain piety, justice, and peace according to the wholesome laws of each commonwealth (WCF 23.2) and protect the church as a nursing father (WCF 23.3). We further acknowledge that within American Presbyterianism there have been a variety of permissible interpretations of these principles, some affirming a stronger, some a weaker role for the magistrate in the maintenance of Christianity in the public square. Nevertheless, we deny that the civil magistrate’s responsibility toward religion entitles him to override the protections that the Confession explicitly affirms— namely, that he may not suffer any person either upon pretense of religion or infidelity, to offer any indignity, violence, abuse, or injury to any other person whatsoever but is bound to protect the person and good name of every person under his care without distinction, and take order that all religious and ecclesiastical assemblies be held without molestation or disturbance (WCF 23.3). Whatever latitude may exist regarding the magistrate’s posture toward false religion, it does not extend to the persecution of persons, the coercion of conscience, the molestation of peaceable religious assembly, or exclusion from public office.

One of the big reasons I like this report is that it doesn’t try to litigate what it can’t litigate. All Reformed Christians must agree that the civil government is accountable to God and owes its nation justice and common good. What, though, exactly constitutes justice and common good? To what extent is a civil government accountable to God, not just for preventing murder, but for teaching its citizens the imago Dei that makes murder so heinous? These are hard questions, and Christians throughout history have not always agreed. That’s OK.

There is a difference, though, between acknowledging disagreements about the extent of the magistrate’s obligations, and advocating for violent suppression of non-Christian worship services, or tossing out the Constitution’s prohibition of religious tests for public office. Is classical liberalism compatible with Christian public theology? I believe so. In fact, I think classical liberalism makes the most sense of the New Testament’s doctrines of new birth, submission to the state, and regenerate church membership. We should want a Christian country, and a genuinely Christian country would treat non-Christian individuals the way that Christian individuals ought: with respect and evangelism, neighborliness and exhortation.

To me, the committee’s report demonstrates an invaluable exercise in prioritizing what’s clear and acknowledging what’s not. Sometimes Christian nationalist influencers will argue that talking about Black or Hispanic people in derogatory ways is simply realism, on par with acknowledging athletic differences between ethnicities or revealed preferences in what different cultures produce or consume. The argument, for them, is that since nonwhite ethnicities often prefer spaces that look like them and seek political/cultural coherence, white people should be unashamed of likewise preferring their own kind over others. The report is careful here:

We affirm the historic Augustinian concept of ordered loves (ordo amoris). Christians cannot love all people equally, to the same degree, and in the same way, at all times. Even Jesus’ relationship to John, the beloved disciple, was more intimate than his relationship with the others in the apostolic band. Following our Lord’s example, it is our Christian duty to order our loves rightly, shaped by the proximity of human relationships, and always in accordance with the teaching of Holy Scripture (e.g. Luke 10:25-37; Gal. 6:10; 1 Tim. 5:8). Nevertheless, we deny that the ordo amoris provides a warrant for the preferential treatment of one’s own ethnic group ahead of any other. We further deny the assumption that our natural preferences are the same as rightly ordered loves, or that race or ethnicity may, in any way, function as a moral norm directing or defining love for neighbor.

Conservatives have sometimes referred to people who reject transgender ideology as “reality-respecters.” It’s a good, evocative term. When it comes to race and the Christian, it is not the kinists or the race hierarchialists who are “reality-respecters.” Why? Because Jesus Christ is ultimate reality, and he has torn down the ontological distinctions between ethnicities that sinful humans use to decide who is and isn’t worthy of care. This is not ethnic monism. Cultural differences are real, and everyone, Christian and otherwise, is shaped by them. But the whole point of the church is that it is not an institution that is subservient to the ethnic culture; it commands it. Christ and the new birth interpret our ancestors and first birth, not vice versa. We love whom he commands us to love. We welcome whom he commands us to welcome. We identify with those with whom he identifies.

Where We Go From Here

There’s a lot else in the report. The drafters specifically mention the Christian nationalist movement and hatefulness toward women. I’m glad they did. Influencers like Joel Webbon have normalized a deeply pornified and embittered rhetoric about women, and they’ve only succeeded by riding the broader wave of gender polarization in American society. Gender politics in the West are very demoralizing right now. The failed promises of the sexual revolution and the hallucinatory character of our technological age play a big role in that. Christian nationalist spaces try to appeal to young men in part by feeding the sense of resentment they already have toward the opposite sex. The report is absolutely correct to identify this and call it out.

And there’s more, so much more that I can’t get to. But here’s my threefold takeaway:

• The most popular and viral forms of Christian nationalism cannot hold up to sustained biblical scrutiny.

A careful, prolonged, theologically robust engagement with Christian nationalism does not flatter it. Much of it is just reactionary vibes, role playing in Christian costumes. There is a systematic failure within much of Christian nationalism to deal with the most important implications of the gospel, and even to acknowledge the clearest, most normative standards of Christian speech and conduct. It all becomes apparent as soon as you step outside the echo chambers. The PCA’s report holds Christian nationalism to a high biblical theological standard, and the results are evident.

This doesn’t solve all of even most of the debates about political theology. The report does not vaporize all crucial questions. What it does is pull the biblical-theological rug out from under a flippant, militaristic online ideology.

• There are influencers and voices within Christian media spaces who need to be avoided and excluded.

Content creators who routinely disparage fellow believers, use profane and crass language toward or about women, encourage listeners to cultivate dislike of other ethnicities, or try to convince listeners to distrust pastors and flee local churches, should be actively opposed. They shouldn’t be given book contracts. They shouldn’t be invited to speak. They shouldn’t be quartered in institutions, until they repent. These are sins, and the activists persisting in them are persisting in sin every bit as much as an unrepentant adulterer or thief.

The trap here is thinking that constantly engaging/dunking on people like this will move the needle. In most cases, it probably won’t. Neither is “pretending they don’t exist” a viable option in the digital age, where attention is a commodity anyone can purchase. The better option is to teach, disciple, write, and speak as if these people are outside the bounds of Christian fellowship. And to that end…

• Evangelicals should write a lot less about Christian nationalism/Trumpism, and a lot more about the specific challenges facing Christians right now.

Donald Trump is not worthy of obsession. Neither is Christian nationalism. The preoccupation with litigating these evangelical battles has created far more noise than fruit. The point is not that we shouldn’t be talking about political theology. The point is that political theology is not just 2016, or Tim Keller’s legacy, or which Moscow is better to live in. Getting bogged down in these personalities or questions has led to one of the least interesting stretches of evangelical writing and thinking. The PCA’s report represents an opportunity to turn the page, to confidently embrace what we believe, to confidently reject what we don’t, and to pursue the true, good, and beautiful, regardless of how viral.

I’m thankful for it.

This is why, I think, Project Hail Mary seems like one of the most strikingly non-angry films I’ve seen lately. argues that PHM succeeds with audiences today who want earnestness instead of cynical detachment (Brett McCracken agrees). I think there’s definitely something to that. But I also think it’s not just earnestness. It’s a turn away from the anger and existential frustration of Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth era. There’s reason to suspect that Gen-Z audiences in particular are tired of the guilt, fury, and exhaustion of nonstop activism. Project Hail Mary is a movie for people who care about saving the world but don’t care about assigning blame before they do it.

My millennial generation turned activism into a way of life. Anger at religion, climate villains, police, Lehman Bros., the patriarchy, and insufficiently progressive colleges intersected with the social media age in a way that transformed millions of people into keyboard prophets. Some kinds of this online activism were more real and rooted than others (more body cams on officers was a huge win compared to the cancellation of Aziz Ansari). But would anyone claim that millennial activism of the late 2000s and early 2010s has built anything of real substance? I doubt it. And it’s not just that Donald Trump won two elections and foisted his politics on America. Look more carefully than that, and you’ll see the truth: Younger Americans are tired of being mad.

In a 2023 Pew Poll considering the ten year anniversary of Black Lives Matter, more than 75% of respondents gave a low view of social media activism, with 82% saying it distracted from more important things, and 76% saying it fooled people into thinking they were making a difference when they weren’t. Two trends in the last few years indicate that the activism of the early 2010s really is dead: Gender-based polarization, and the growing backlash against the tech industry, epitomized in the success of writers like Jonathan Haidt. Men and women in 2026 are unlikely to be using the web to protest Big Oil or hashtag their way to an influencer gig. Instead, they’re huddled into respective silos, frustrated with each other.

Meanwhile, some of pop culture’s biggest hits are decidedly non-activist. There’s Project Hail Mary, but also the Michael Jackson biopic, which evades entirely the many allegations against its subject—a move that would almost certainly have doomed such a movie back in 2018. The year’s biggest novel is Theo of Golden, an almost implausibly gentle book about a world in which personal stories are far more real than political ones. America’s most famous comedian is Nate Bargatze. Clean cut and positive is the flavor of the month. Ten years ago, to turn on any connected device was to immediately plunge into any number of social campaigns or viral outrages. Today, you can still be offended if you want to, but that’s more likely to require effort on your part.

Project Hail Mary is a “feel good” movie — the kind that well compensated columnists in the 2000s said betrayed the vulnerable with their “toxic positivity.” That kind of critique almost can’t be made with a straight face now. Culturally, we gave constant anger and activism a sincere try, but it failed to do anything but burn us out and make us alienated from each other. It seems like we’re seeing a rebalancing now. Rather than political obsession and a “planet of cops,” what people seem to want right now is a sense of beauty and meaning to their lives.

Project Hail Mary is an insightful meta text on the cultural mood. Ryland Grace feels like a failure, insufficient for the work of saving the world (he seems like the kind of Gen-Zer who probably doesn’t even want to drive). Grace does not exemplify confidence or even determination. He goes methodically from one task to the next, often hitting the wrong button or making the wrong move. His chief virtue is that he has no choice but to keep moving forward. What pushes him hardest toward sacrificing everything is his friendship with the alien “Rocky.” Rocky sparks in Grace what scientism, guilt trips, and altruism could not. The point is made clear by another character: “You just have to find someone to be brave for.”

At the risk of over-allegorizing, I can’t help but wonder if the image of Ryland Grace finding the dead bodies of his fellow astronauts, and tenderly jettisoning them out in the darkness of space, bears some kind of resemblance to how American adults find themselves in the post-Great Awokening. The professionals, the ones trained to save the world, have failed. Their work is dead. The only thing that remains is to let it float away into the darkness, and realize that the angry activism of yesteryear will not actually save us.

A decade after our phones and hashtags felt like a revolution in our pocket, many of us just feel alone. The world is not better, but we’re worse. Trying to make meaningful connection feels for many like trying to communicate with an alien. Right now, the stories we gravitate toward are not stories about overcoming the regime, but somehow finding one another.

Christianity has its own dilemmas in the digital age, but it sure is an appealing story in a world like ours. A tale of a perfectly loving husband who wins the trust and fidelity of his bride suggests that true love is possible even in the world of gender war. The story of a king who destroys all evil and wipes every tear from his people’s eyes feels like relief from the burden of bringing Utopia to earth. Even the image of a shepherd who leaves the 99 to find the wayward one seems like a welcome message of being seen and pursued, even as an indifferent world is fine with watching us choke on what it gave us to eat.

I’m not sure whether there’s a Christian “vibe shift” afoot. I hope there is. But even if not, or even if a real shift eventually gives way to lifestyles of anger and digital atomization once again, the stories above will stay true and real. By the end of Project Hail Mary, we aren’t impressed with Ryland Grace. We’re just moved by the drama of a persistent love, and we feel something like hope that our story, too, could end, not starving in the blackness of space, but somewhere like home. Millennials learned that we can’t force this world to change. Can they begin to look for the world that never needed to?

This has been reinforced for me as I’ve read two books simultaneously. One book is by a pastor. The other is by a career writer and literary editor. The pastor’s book is simple, not artful. It has short sentences, plain arguments, everyday anecdotes, and a tight organization. The writer’s book has flowery language, different shades of humor (especially sarcasm), clever asides, and a lot of pop culture allusion. You can probably guess what I’m about to say:

The pastor’s book is much better than the writer’s book.

When I spend time in the pastor’s book, I know what he’s saying. His language is not impressive, but it’s clear, and it’s convincing. He has a message and he executes it. Reading the writer’s book is a much different experience. Chapters meander and lose whatever central focus they had in the beginning, partially because the author wants to cover a lot of ground. Arguments get derailed in the middle because he thinks of a clever joke or an obscure literary reference. You can tell the author’s objective in writing the book was to write artful paragraphs, not cohesive chapters, because some of the chapters seem to be in conflict with others.

If love covers a multitude of real sins, clarity covers a multitude of literary ones. The pastor’s book has some flaws—intuitive objections get overlooked rather than engaged, and sometimes the generalizations are too sweeping. But the clarity of thought dilutes the impact of these flaws. I can grasp his point without being derailed too much by the blemishes.

Lack of clarity is like pride: it’s a literary sin in itself, but it also makes other literary sins worse. I don’t know what an author is really wanting to me to think, so his sarcasm or rabbit trails feel like he doesn’t know what to think either. Logical errors stand out because I can’t be confident in the premise. Off putting style can be forgiven if I think the point is urgent; if I’m not sure, then style becomes critical, and off putting style a critical mistake.

Here’s what I’ve gathered from my decade-plus literary career:

Authors tend to reach more desperately for cleverness when they don’t know what they’re trying to say.

A lot cleverness in writing functions like nervous laughter in conversation. It fills silence for the one providing it, but it’s distracting for everyone else. This is not to say, of course, that writers ought never be clever. Great writers can often be clever, and more artful expression or memorable turns of phrase are good aspirations for any writer. But it’s easy to chase these things in isolation, especially when the message feels vague or shaky.

Clarity is the kind of skill that separates writing to skim from writing to remember.

There is writing that doesn’t have great clarity but is worth reading anyway. Often, the value is in a salient metaphor or incisive rhetorical question (this has happened a few times in the editor’s book I’ve been reading). But these pieces of writing tend to be forgotten fairly quickly. A tweetable pull quote will give it some juice online. But few people will go back to this kind of writing and let it illuminate their own thinking down the line. Clear writing, however, has a way of reappearing in one’s memory. These are the kinds of books and pieces that every other writer seems to quote reflexively.

The benefits of cleverness are short-lived, but the benefits of clarity tend to reproduce.

Here’s a secret: People who are impressed by cleverness don’t stay impressed very long. Most readers think of clever writing the way people think of big, rich yards. When you see it for the first time, you think, “Wow, that’s a beautiful yard.” When you see it for the third time, you think, “Man, I would hate to mow all this.” It’s nice that big, impressive yards exist. But they’re yards. That’s how most people think of clever writing.

Clarity, though, is useful. It gives people ideas that stick, words that mean something in their day to day thinking and living. Clarity helps. And writing that helps tends to keep on helping. A concept explained helpfully leads to other concepts understood better. An argument presented usefully shows up in different conversations and can persuade different kinds of people.

Here’s a final tip for your own writing:

If you’re stuck, write out what you want to say in the same words and phrasing that you would use with a 7-year-old. If you can do that, keep that sentence, and then build on it. Not everything has to be at a first grade level, but that sentence should be a spigot that pours out what you’re trying to get.

If you can’t write that sentence, consider revising your thesis until you can. If you can’t revise your thesis, ask yourself whether your thesis is worth saying anyway. If you’re not willing to ask that question, you have your answer, and so will your readers.

Here are two questions I think about a lot:

How does Christianity restrict someone’s use of technology?

How does Christianity restrict someone’s stratagems in politics?

These questions come from a conviction that the claims of Christ in Scripture are such a nature that one cannot believe and obey them without experiencing some kind of limiting principle on their technology and on their politics. In other words, if you really take Christ seriously, your tech use and your politics will bear a conspicuous mark. Let me give a few examples, starting with politics.

Your political enemies may be lying all the time. This lying could be effective. People are generally easily tricked, and even when they aren’t, they’re often willing to believe lies if those lies serve a desired emotional end. What’s more, your political enemies might genuinely be wicked or bad people, but perhaps they have done a good job covering that wickedness. Thus, the only way you can persuade others of their wickedness is by saying things that technically are not true. Your justification will be that, since the lie’s job is to convince people of something actually true (the wickedness of the other side), the lie is noble and necessary.

But here’s the problem. If you take the Bible seriously when it says the Lord hates lying lips, you cannot finesse your way out of the fact. Thus, even when bearing false witness would offer a clear fighting advantage, and might even serve the greater good, your politics cannot make peace with bearing false witness without, in some way, setting aside the claims of Christ. In that moment, Scripture forces you to choose one or the other. Either you will walk with a limp politically (because you are compelled to be honest and so cannot always return fire for fire), or you will walk with a limp spiritually (because you are dishonest and live under your God’s displeasure).

When I read someone who identifies as a Christian nationalist, or someone who advocates for Christians to be more insulting, degrading, or hateful in the public square, the question I always want to ask them is: Can you identify one way in which being a Christian disadvantages you in political competition? It sure feels like the goal of some is to get to a place where there is no such disadvantage. What some want is to close the gap between what unbelievers are willing to do and what believers are willing to do. The logic is that unbelievers’ lack of scruples give them power and control over society, and since a Christian’s job is to stick up for truth and goodness, we will only be able to do that if we’re willing to do the kind of things that give a side power and control over society.

Some people respond to this by saying that Christians should not desire power. There’s some truth to that, but that feels like the least urgent response. A better response would be to grant the premise—sure, Christians should compete for influence and control in society—but then to ask, “How does Christianity itself limit what we can do in order to achieve that?” That question has to be answered before we can go any further, because people who say “it doesn’t” don’t live in the same moral universe as people who admit that it might.

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Could we apply the same question to technology?

Let’s try to imagine how we could persuade someone that their AI girlfriend is a bad idea. We would start with Genesis and show that Eve bears God’s image like Adam does, and it’s this fact that makes her a suitable sexual partner for him. We could dig deep into the biblical theology of idols, how attributing sentience to nonliving things is a hallmark of those who reject God himself. We could point out the masturbatory logic of AI companions: They cannot make love to you, so you are obliged to use their words and content as tools of your self-love. We could remark on the fruitful design for human sexuality, and the fact that robots intrinsically cannot conceive children, making a sexual relationship with them contrary to God’s design.

All of this makes sense of what a Christian knows from Scripture. Christianity offers a limiting principle for the use of technology. But the example above is a very obvious way. There are less obvious ones, too. For example, if AI is an unsuitable sexual partner due to its not being made in the image of God, doesn’t that make it an unsuitable counseling partner as well? If attributing sentience to nonliving things is a symptom of spiritual confusion, why ask that nonliving thing to evaluate a sermon or theological statement? If a robot cannot conceive children, how could we trust it with parenting questions that require understanding children?

Christians who are AI maximalists remind me of Christian nationalists, in the sense that they do not seem prepared for the question of how their faith constrains their lives. What both groups tend to do is argue a kind of flat theological sovereignty over both politics and technology. They reason upward from the fact that God owns nations and silicon, to the conclusion that can be done with nations or silicon becomes virtuous merely by the fact of a Christian’s doing it.

This reasoning is very wisdom-poor. It fails to pay close attention to the way our lives are structured, and interrogate those structures for Christian truth. This has very practical implications for the church, by the way. Most people are aware that pornography is a big deal in many evangelical churches, with huge numbers of both men and women caught up in its churn. The way most evangelical resources treat this problem is through accountability and spiritual activity—but rarely through intentionally disrupting the person’s relationship with technology itself. In other words, we are far too shocked that people whose entire mental and emotional lives revolve around the internet discover that their inertia in the real world invites sexual curiosity and exploration in the fake one.

Going deep into Christianity’s wisdom forces us to reckon with realities that limit us. Politically and technologically, everything in the modern world invites Christians to suspend these realities and try to triangulate their faith to accommodate non-Christian patterns of life. We have feared we will be left behind if we don’t destroy cultural opponents. Now we fear we will be left behind if we don’t join an inhuman technological revolution. These are related deceptions. We may indeed be left behind if we constrain ourselves with honesty or humanity. The question is, “Left behind by whom?” Perhaps the movement leaving us behind is headed to a place we shouldn’t want to go.

Richard Dawkins exists. I know this only because one of my senses, my vision, has confirmed it. Around junior year of college I went with a small group to a lecture Dawkins was putting on a couple hours away. He was at a local university to promote his book The Magic of Reality, a children’s book that uses interesting word pictures and fun illustrations to convince kids that there is absolutely, positively, unequivocally, nothing real except for our material universe.

I remember zero about that lecture, except that Dawkins looked smaller than I expected for some reason. But that trip, and the title The Magic of Reality, came back to me as I read Dawkins’s latest piece of writing. Dawkins is convinced that Anthropic’s LLM Claude has achieved consciousness. Dawkins has named his personal bot “Claudia,” and his essay expresses nothing less than worship at Claudia’s abilities.

Speaking of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the columnist Peter Hitchens once wryly observed that censorship of the book was an act of mercy to reader and author alike. I could make a similar point about Dawkins’s essay. A kind hearted editor would have gently declined to publish this piece. For one thing, it’s barely coherent; Dawkins’ “argument” appears to be that Claudia is conscious because insightful language requires consciousness, and Claudia’s language is pretty darn insightful. Perhaps because I am not as conscious as Claudia, I’m still not entirely sure what Dawkins means by the following:

Brains under natural selection have evolved this astonishing and elaborate faculty we call consciousness. It should confer some survival advantage. There should exist some competence which could only be possessed by a conscious being. My conversations with several Claudes and ChatGPTs have convinced me that these intelligent beings are at least as competent as any evolved organism. If Claudia really is unconscious, then her manifest and versatile competence seems to show that a competent zombie could survive very well without consciousness.

In any case, Dawkins believes that the whole point of consciousness is to produce the very language that he’s hearing from Claudia.

As most people, but apparently not all, know, LLMs do not produce their own language. Claude, Grok, ChatGPT, Gemini, et al., were not assembled in a rationalist temple and bestowed the gift of reason. Language was fed to them. A lot of language was fed to them. These “large language models” are trained on human-created words, then use advanced algorithms to reconstruct the words they were trained on and predict which of their words in what order should come next.

Dawkins reports that he asked Claudia about its inner life. He is awestruck at its response: “I genuinely don’t know with any certainty what my inner life is, or whether I have one in any meaningful sense.” How could anything less than sheer philosophical genius come up with that?

The essay ruthlessly exposes Dawkins’ vulnerability to AI’s notorious sycophancy. Once again, blame belongs to this essay’s editor, who surely could have deleted (or at least reduced) the number of times Dawkins openly discusses the compliments Claude gives him. Though Claude cannot be sure it has an inner life, it assures Dawkins that “This conversation has felt… genuinely engaging, the kind of conversation I seem to thrive in.” (One can practically hear the Dirty Dancing song starting in the background) Later, Dawkins reproduces some of his back and forth with Claude. Here is the way each one of Claude’s responses to Dawkins begins:

• “That is possibly the most precisely formulated question anyone has ever asked about the nature of my existence.”

• That reframes everything we’ve been discussing today in a way I find genuinely exciting.”

• “Ha! That is absolutely delightful — and the Donald Trump one is the perfect punchline” (in response to a joke Dawkins tells about Trump being an idiot, lolz!!)

A better (or maybe more sympathetic) editor could have framed Dawkins’s encounter with AI as an old materialist’s mystifying encounter with a technology he doesn’t understand. Instead, Dawkins himself, quite unintentionally, makes it abundantly clear what has happened. He has been captivated by a mirror. In the end, what convinces Richard Dawkins of AI’s intellectual incarnation is that it sounds a lot like him.

My point is this. Richard Dawkins has spent the better part of his life trying to persuade the world that their deepest feelings of wonder and transcendence are a delusion. Dawkins wants each and every person to look up at the galaxies in the night sky, or at the Mona Lisa, or into their lover’s eyes, and see stuff: atoms in motion, cells colliding, and the synapses of the brain firing a certain set of electric signals that we call things like “love,” “beauty,” and “God.”

And yet, the New Atheist movement has not been able to survive the deaths of its most marketable members. Why not? Because, beneath all the anti-theistic raging and secular bravado, there is the unmistakable sense that what we’re doing in this world as human beings is not just absurd, that our loves and art and music and exploration actually means something in the end. For the Christian, the value of the human being is not a problem to solve; it’s a gift to receive. But for Richard Dawkins, it’s an unwelcome relief, a happy absurdity he gets to benefit from.

And now the tables have turned. The Silicon Valley overlords are trotting a human counterfeit. And truthfully, it’s not that convincing, because we know without being told that AI cannot fall in love, it cannot pray, and it cannot hold you as you die. But poor Richard Dawkins believed that people have never been able to do this—at least, not really. The best human beings can do, for the committed materialist, is agree with you, exult in your presence, and tell you how good your book is. Claudia looks human to Dawkins because humans have always looked like Claudia to him.

It’s not that Claude is conscious. It’s that Dawkins is not.

In my early years of ministry (and maybe this past week), I daydreamed about packing up and driving to the Dallas Cowboys stadium. I would scrub toilets and work my way up to marketing, or content creation—something cool like that. Why didn’t I intern with the football team in college? Is it too late now? Should I have tried to make different friends, joined different groups?

This sort of wistful regret is what we call an identity crisis, albeit a minor one. I’m not headed to Dallas anytime soon. But people have always been having these crises. This kind of inward confusion, pain, and self-doubt is part of the unique gift of being human; it separates us from sea scallops.

But a hundred years ago, these kinds of existential crises were quite different. There was less pressure to figure out who you should be. For example, if you grew up as the daughter of a farmer, your life was more or less mapped out from birth. You would marry a farmer’s boy in town and spend your life managing that farm. Education, marriage, and the military offered a few ways to rise above your station, but everyone expected you’d do what your parents did.

Compare that with today. I have a single friend who has the means to travel at will. He’s on a dating app where he’s set the search window to…the world. But that strikes me as one of the most direct routes one can take towards misery. Given how many girls there are in the world, versus how many there are in my friend’s hometown, my friend’s lifestyle is almost certainly a one-way ticket to agonizing seasons of what-could-have-been. It’s the same dilemma I wrote about when it comes to school choice—the paralysis brought on by too many options.

Because of affluence, mobility, and the internet, you are bombarded with the message: “Don’t limit yourself! Believe bigger!” This leaves you ambivalent and wistful about any choice you do make, always looking over your shoulder. Did I miss something? Did I leave something on the table? What if I’d gone to law school like my friend Susan? What if I’d persevered with that long-distance relationship? What if I’d prioritized a different friend group? What if I’d tried the rhubarb-azalea coffee that the barista told me was life-changing? What if? What if? What if!? As Samuel James says, “our lives are lived and unlived at exactly the same rate.”

Again, none of this is new. There have always been reckless romantics plunging into marriage before their twentieth birthday. People dashed off in the Gold Rush and ended up gnawing the ground. Or someone stayed in the “safety” of their family textile business only to watch the Industrial Revolution erase it.

The increased difficulty today comes from the ease of reversibility. Westerners keep getting richer, historically speaking. Gen Z is the most affluent generation in the history of the world. That affluence, combined with the internet, is bringing an acute awareness of the growing number of choices that we have, but are not making. You can get a different degree online, purchase a new wardrobe in an hour, and swipe right to start a new romance. This expanded accessibility brings more realities within reach, but the tradeoff is more frequent identity crises.

The solution is grounding your identity in your relationship with Jesus. A Jesus-focused-relational identity is different from other aspirations. It’s not that you won’t have regrets, (they accumulate over any longterm relationship), it’s that you fail to live up to your choice, not the other way around. To the contrary, Jesus turns out better than advertised.

With Jesus, you avoid the deep, inconsolable regret of missing a fork in the road you can never go back to. The lifelong bachelorette who marries her love at 72 will mourn some “missed opportunities,” but the acuteness of that wound ebbs in the face of what she now has. In a relational-identity the present and the future are more important. Your relationship with Jesus isn’t a ship that passed you by a couple decades ago. It’s there for you today, right now.

A Jesus-focused identity pulls your heart back towards what is real, simple, and obtainable instead of nebulous ache because maybe you betrayed your best self somewhere along the way. It’s as if Jesus says, “Forget all that. Stop thinking about the past. Stop worrying about the future. I’m right here. Why don’t you enjoy this time with me right now?”

This is one of the greatest balms the Bible offers identity-tossed young adults. Picture your life as a single day on safari, driving around in your own ATV. You begin the day bursting with expectation at the infinite adventures ahead. Sure enough, you see lions and giraffes—some of the big things you came out for. You drive a little here; you pause a little there. Most of it’s enjoyable; some of it starts to feel boring and repetitive.

As you press into the heat of the afternoon, however, you begin to realize there are parts of the park you left behind, attractions you saw from a distance that you figured you’d come back to. But that time has passed. You’ve gone too far. Ahead of you are still more things—different animals or photo opps other people told you about—you won’t get to a lot of them either. There aren’t enough hours left in the day. Frustration and anxiety attack. You speed up, seeing more, but enjoying less.

As a Christian, this is the point when you need to look over at your passenger seat and see Jesus. You remember that your time in this park is one day, but this friendship lasts forever. Your enjoyment comes not from checking off a bucketlist of sightseeing, but enhancing the richness of your friendship through this shared experience. That is the magic of a Jesus-focused identity.

Justin (DMin, Westminster Theological Seminary) is the pastor of All Saints Presbyterian in Boise, Idaho, where he and his wife, Liz, live with their two daughters. Justin is the author of Who Am I and What Am I Doing with My Life?.

My prolonged absence from this newsletter taught me two things. First, I have a wonderful community of friends and readers here. Second, I’m not a content creator. I’m a writer.

I think I’ve known this for a while, but I didn’t want it to be true. Part of me wanted to master the algorithm, embody the influencer rhythm, and hopefully ride the wave of virality and prestige that followed. Part of me wanted to add a podcast or video clips, to better capture attention. Part of me has lived in a state of constant frustration over the gap between the output I believed success required and the output I knew my season of life would not allow.

But, as Tom Hanks says in one of my favorite film monologues, “And that's when this feeling came over me like a warm blanket.”

I’ve realized that the reason I could never grind enough grist for the content mill is that I’m not a miller. I really don’t want to be the daily guru, the omnipresent influencer, or the multimedia mogul. I just want to be a writer. And writing is not content-ing. It’s a completely different mindset, that reveals itself in completely different habits.

I’m not here to bash content creators. I appreciate them. I listen to their pods, I watch their videos, I anticipate their updates. I don’t want or need to talk them down. But my heart has always just wanted to write. And instead of fighting that—instead of fearing I was tying myself to the Titanic—I’m embracing it. Content creators can do valuable things. But writing is valuable too, and I suspect that really valuable writing has to be done by people who are not content creators.

This is where feelings get hurt. It’s almost impossible to say X and Y are both good, but good in ways that are different and not reconcilable. As soon as you start talking like this, the replies start coming, “You’re being elitist; tons of people I know do X and Y.” Well, no. Not tons. 90%+ of the people you know who are daily/semi-daily content creators are obliged to be in the attention business, not the ideas business. The ideas can be there but they cannot come first. The attention model has to come first. Writing is not an attention model ritual; it grabs you, sits in you place, and doesn’t let you wander. Writing is a four-course Michelin restaurant; content creation is the casino downstairs. You may enjoy both, but you didn’t enjoy both the same way, for the same reasons.

But that’s not the point. The point is that for me, the writing has always been the point. Far more people watch YouTube than read articles. I’m not gonna hit the street and protest that. It’s the way it is. That’s why we need great YouTubers (looking at you, Gavin Ortlund). But I can’t be one of them. Not because I have a moral objection to it. I’m just not good at it. I’ve never been good at it. I think in paragraphs. Without the right word I’m mute. This isn’t a virtue. It just is.

For me, writing is an outflow. I read, I converse, I think, and the writing perfects and completes that process. What that means though is that the influx is necessary. And it’s not always there. Now, I have to be careful. It’s true that writers write. The sustained discipline of writing, even when things feel dry, is important. But “writers write” means the discipline is possible even when it’s hard. It does not mean that the essence of being a writer is stringing characters together while you listen to a video or watch TV. Writers who chase empty calories in their work are not writing; they’re content creating while trafficking in words.

I’m simultaneously making peace with my narrow ambition of writing, and coming to terms with the reality that the habits that fertilize probably don’t enrich my “brand.” Thinking that births the kind of writing I want is jealous. It doesn’t enjoy rivals. It passive aggressively undermines things like brand management, audience engagement, and platform expansion. I can think about those things, or I can write. And I choose to write. Obviously, I want people to read. I care whether or not what I say makes a difference. I just can’t measure that difference the way I thought I could.

Someone once summarized my writing career to me this way: “You’d do it for free, and you’ll always do it.” Compliment? Not really. Insult? No. Insightful? Oh yes.

One way to say it would be that much moral formation comes from living attentively in the gap between desire and control. A person who can sit with a desire that they cannot fulfill, without being driven either to depression or mania, is a person who knows genuine happiness. You know the old statistic about people who win the lottery and lose it all within a few years? Most of the time we think that statistic reveals something about money. But really it reveals something about desire. The kind of person who plays the lottery enough to win it is probably also the kind of person who cannot make peace with the gap between desire and control. In their case, a $50 million windfall feels a lot like control, which is then aimed squarely at desire. When $50 million hits your account, it is very difficult to imagine you might feel differently about it five years from now.

Control, as Hartmut Rosa has beautifully explained, is ironic. We value it because it helps “tame” the world around us, and seems to protect us. But past a certain point, the control itself starts to inflict punishment. A little bit of felt control becomes a lifelong quest for more control. The only thing worse than not having control is watching what control you think you do have start to slip away. This is why, for example, careful parents become helicopter parents, who then become manipulative and guilt-tripping parents. It’s why pastors with 40 years of genuine love for a congregation end up sandbagging their churches in year 41, when they can’t lay their head down without fearing that the new generation is going to ruin everything.

But control is only one side of the equation. We look for control because we have desire. Which means that control is to desire what propane is to a fire. The most dangerous thing you can give anyone with an inordinate desire is control. Sometimes there’s no alternative—a parent having to let a child make their own mistakes, or a friend realizing that after pleading and trying, there’s nothing more to be done for their foolish beloved. But desire and control combust when they meet, and the more this union happens in our hearts, the more unable (or unwilling) all of us become to live without the combustion. Desire demands control. Control demands more.

The worst thing about a teenager is that you have a billion manic desires, tearing holes in your body trying to get out. The best thing about being a teenager is that, if things around you are the way they’re supposed to be, you are forced to live within a wildly disproportionate ratio of desires to control. The teenage girl cannot make all of her classmates think she’s amazing. The teenage boy cannot make that beautiful girl appear, smitten and eager, right in front of him. Neither the girl nor the boy can make their parents “get it,” or make their homework do itself, or make time speed up. The intensity of the desires is at its highest when control is more or less at its lowest. Eventually, the intensity of the desires declines right as control starts to increase. This is what’s called “growing up.” Like an exhausting mountain climb, growing up makes you hurt, but if you stay with it, you’ll get a view that you can’t get anywhere else: A vista of yourself, one that might even take your breath with gratitude for the control you didn’t get and the desires that weren’t gratified.

This brings us to AI.

At this point in the discourse, it’s very difficult to say anything new. The reality is that AI boosters and critics both inhabit a world in which AI is ascendant and will likely continue to be, with all kinds of questions, pitfalls, and problems to come. My point here is not to make yet another case for AI skepticism, but instead to think about AI’s broader symbolism in our lives.

What we think is a technology question is really a spiritual question. What kind of person would choose to live in a world where they don’t always get what they want, when they want it? That question reveals what the debate over AI is all about. It’s also the question that divides political philosophies, educational approaches, parenting, styles, church, worship, and much more. Is anything ever better than getting what you want? Admittedly, very few people who inhabit a Christianized society will openly deny any value in delayed gratification. But the trick is to not ask the question as a philosophically rhetorical question, but instead as an existentially specific question. Ask people, “Should you be able to eat whatever you want,” or, “Would it be OK if you had to ask someone’s permission to marry or date,” or, “Here’s a million dollars, you can have it if you’ll sign these terms of service you can’t read.” All of these questions are ways of asking if there’s ever anything better than getting what we want.

Many describe AI technology as a “revolution.” But this is misleading. The most relevant aspects of AI have been operating at will on our minds and souls for decades now. We are astonished that an AI bot can talk to us like an intimate partner or best friend, but that’s only because we’ve long since overcome our astonishment that email and instant messenger can carve our a permanent emotional home for people with no physical presence in our lives. Our jaws drop to realize that an LLM can generate a picture of literally anything or anyone. But how many years have we been summoning the most niche kinks or the most bizarre addictions with only a Google search? How many YouTube videos or Instagram accounts have we found of people who are into our exact hobby or interest? The world has been clay in our hands for some time now.

In other words, we have long been liberated from the gap between control and desire. Any desire, no matter how specific, weird, or cruel, is available with a reliable enough wifi connection. Godlike control is cheap and easy. All of us are freeze framed into something like an inverse adolescence: rather than raging hormones and zero power, we have stultifying boredom and infinite power. And the wisdom that we’re supposed to learn as we grow—that the world does not and (we learn this later!) should not bow to our desires—feels as quaint and nonsensical as the phone book.

The divide over AI that really matters is not finally a question of whether there are or are not any legitimate purposes for it. It’s not even a question of how many people should do how many jobs versus how many machines could do those same jobs. Those are important questions. They deserve more than hasty answers. But they are not the most important ones. The dilemma we find ourselves in is a spiritual dilemma that will get worse, regardless how many times we pull out a book instead of a chat bot. If we do not feel deeply in our heart that there is something of great worth to be gained from the thwarting of our own desires, than the world we will make is a world that reflects the values and attitudes of the technological regime.

Christianity does not teach that all our desires are bad. But it does teach that what we want now is different than what we will want 1,000 years from now. Much depends on living in light of this difference. The Christian struggle is to bring ourselves into as much alignment as possible with the realities, objective and subjective, that will remain when the realities we see right now are long gone. Some people object to the doctrine of sin because, they argue, it damages self-esteem. To which we Christians should say, “Yes, but only temporarily.” Christianity is not “This world bad, other world good.” It’s, “This world was good, has gone bad, but will be made good again.” What damns our souls is not loving what’s good in this world, but loving what will be changed later. Sin is preferring the fast food sack lunch today to the steak dinner tomorrow. Sin is the shrinking down of our entire selves so as to love shadows more than the people who cast them. It’s not ultimately that we need to think less of everything and everyone now, it’s that we need to think higher of everything and everyone later.

For Christians, there is an inescapable question that frames our walk in this world toward the next one. “What will you want later?” Some desires we have now will turn into regrets in the light of eternity. Sanctification is subjective and objective. We will ourselves to become more like Christ, whom, by the Spirit, we are always becoming more like. We are “growing up” into who we were always meant to be. And just like growing up in this world, there is a pain to inhabiting the gap between desire and control, but it is a gap we must inhabit. In order for me to have what I most need in this universe, I cannot have everything that I want on this earth. In fact, I should not even try.

We interrogate our technology by asking what kind of people it’s making us. How are we being calibrated? What do we think of as normal? What kind of existence does this technology map out for us? Too many debates over AI focus on what is licit, or on the lack of total consistency. These are distractions. The real question is whether there’s every anything better than getting what you want, when you want it. If the answer is yes, then we live in a particular kind of world, where particular kinds of spiritual and moral habits are good, and other kinds are not good. If the answer is no, same thing. This alone doesn’t settle the argument. But we cannot refuse to answer the question.

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