First off, I sincerely want to thank everyone who wrote an email, comment, or text checking on me after the PSA earlier this month. I got a lot of very kind, very concerned notes, and the amount of genuine friendliness and neighborly care was a blessing. Thank you to all who did that.

Second, I (who am perfectly fine!) owe a bit of an explanation. On July 4 weekend I published an article that, while not untruthful or un-Christian in any way, was not my best work. I wrote that article not because I was moved by a particular insight, or had been mulling something carefully and thoughtfully, but because I felt a compulsion to get some piece of content out there for the holiday. The result was an article that was “shooting from the hip"— which is one thing if you’re talking about pop culture or hobbies, and quite another if you’re making a point that people may and probably will read as politically coded.

I received no unkind comments in response to that post. I did receive some pushback. And the pushback made me realize that I had no good answer for it. It was at that point that I realized I had fallen into a trap I had long struggled to avoid:

I was trying to become a content creator.

The realization that I had put my name on something I wasn’t proud of, simply to make a splash in the online ecosphere, frustrated and embarrassed me. I pulled the article down from the site, and hastily put up a “Out to lunch” sign. Why? Not just because of one moment, but because the moment seemed to me a capstone of what has been a prolonged season of uncertainty and unfruitfulness in my writing.

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As I mentioned previously this year, after I finished edits on my forthcoming book this past winter, I felt something that was equal parts exhaustion, writer’s block, and depression. I was “tapped” in a way that felt unusually aggressive. Long story short, I think this season may be starting to lift, and a part of that lifitng has been some core realignments I’ve been thinking through.

One of those changes has been a deliberate change in how I relate to this newsletter, and to Substack’s ecosystem in general.

Substack has been a wonderful place to write and read. But it is not quite the same place it was when I joined. The roll out of the Substack app in early 2022 was a major warning shot about the kind of platform Substack was aspiring to become. I was an early adopter of the mobile app, and soon had stopped receiving most emails and instead was redirecting my subscriptions through the app. This alone was a radical departure from the very reasons I had embraced Substack in 2020. Email was, and (in my view) still is, a powerful antidote to the mess that has become social media. Asking people to subject themselves to algorithmic tyranny, with its attendant outrage and brainrot spectacles, just to read a particular writer, is outrageous. Email newsletters were and are a better way. But Substack’s app was a major step backward, toward algorithmic social media and the wild jungle it invariably forms.

My biggest regret as a writer is how deeply shaped I’ve been by social media my entire career. For someone who’s written at length about the need to resist digital formation, more often than not, I’ve relied on heavy social media use to both bring me interesting pieces of writing and tune the hum of my thinking. This, I’m sure, has resulted in my becoming a less deep, less interesting, less patient, and less confident writer than I might have been otherwise. I see a pattern of choosing short term algorithmic boosts over holding patterns where an idea can mature and words can season.

Substack’s app is a social media platform, plain and simple. The main Substack feed is a collection of short pieces of content that are, most of the time, attempts to go viral. Substack’s algorithm works just as tirelessly as Instagram or X’s to bring you posts you didn’t search for and accounts you don’t actually follow. The goal, as with all alogorthmic social media feeds, is to make the user feel perfectly content in Substack’s app, and unwilling to spend clicks anywhere else.

And the app has done its job. Substack’s social media feature is high-quality; the posts there are wittier, more interesting, and generally more positive than any other place. If there’s ever been an argument that you can build an algorthmic social media feed that doesn’t make you want to burn down America, Substack has got it. But, as Andy Crouch once wrote about technology, “can” tends to become “should." And the possibility of going viral, of getting a ton of new subscribers or followers, based on some pithy, zero-sum, or flesh-feeding piece of content, haunts the writer’s conscience. It did mine. And I think for a while I lost my way.

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For a long time I’ve tried to avoid looking at these facts in the face:

1. I’ve almost certainly accomplished most or possibly all of what I will accomplish as a professional writer.

2. My season of life—vocation, family, church, education, etc.—is, right now, forcing me to choose between quantity and quality.

3. My gifts and my abilities are from God, and it’s honor and his glory that matter more than mine.

If I put these facts together, what comes out is not radical or shocking. It’s just a simple, quiet, honest accounting of my life and my work that I was avoiding. The desire to go viral or become very famous is both a spiritually destructive desire, and a very silly one. That’s just not how the online writing economy goes. Writers do not blow up the internet anymore (and if they did, A.I. is already here to take that away from them). Content creators do, but only after (in many cases) sacrificing their convictions, their mental health, and their dignity. That’s not me. So the book of fame needs to be shut and not reopened. It’s not the goal, and it’s not going to happen whether it’s the goal or not.

By God’s kindness, my writing has found a small but dedicated corner of the Internet. What I want to do in this new season is cultivate this corner, rather than try to expand it. I want to make it better: deeper, healthier, and more vibrant. I want to break away from the demand for quantity and instead provide something of real value, even if it doesn’t map onto the algorithm or track with what’s trending. I want to focus on those topics that really matter and will really matter next year, and the year after that, and by God’s grace to write about those topics with a carefulness and substantiveness that is befitting their seriousness.

To get about this new season, I’m making a few changes. One of those changes involves pulling out almost entirely from the Substack social media feed. I’ve deleted the app and will not be present on it. I’ve redirected my subscriptions to once again come to me via email. While I am staying on Substack for now, I’m taking deliberate action to make the platform the way I want it, rather than the way it wants to be for me.

But one of the changes I’m going to make on the newsletter side is: Starting in August, all of this newsletter will be behind the subscriber paywall, with the possible exception of 1 free post per month.

I know how people feel about this before they tell me. So let me explain how this fits into everything I’ve just said.

First, I have to confront the reality that writing is work, and that continuing to produce massive amounts of free work is unwise from the perspective of a family breadwinner. Particularly if I am committed to doing the kind of work that will not attract cheap attention, I owe it to my family to amplify the value of my trade as much as possible. I want this newsletter to be an active place, but I can’t do everything. The paywall is a small but real way of keeping it active.

The paywall isn’t just a way for me to make money. The paywall is what its name implies: A wall. As a friend has eloquently put, what’s needed in the online world today are not massive commons like Facebook, but “little walled gardens” where people can pursue the true, good, and beautiful intentionally. The paywall is a way of focusing my attention and efforts in a way that frees from me the anxiety of whether my efforts will “grow my brand.” In a word, I am no longer writing for the entire world. I’m writing for those who find something valuable in this walled garden.

I understand that the paywall will, by definition, exclude a lot of people who enjoy reading. I also understand that right now is not a great time to ask people to pay for online writing. Let me assure everyone that I do not expect everyone to be able to do this. This is not a fund raising post. It’s a new direction. Of course, I really do hope many will consider subscribing, as many of you already do.

The new season of this newsletter will feature longer but less frequent content. I do hope for 2-3 posts per month at least. I also may add a link roundup to the regular schedule. My goal is to extricate myself from both the algorithmic impulse and the grind of content regularity. I’m not trying to get big. I’m trying to think out loud faithfully.

I deeply appreciate this space’s readers. And I’m very excited about what lies ahead.

SDJ

Thank you for reading.

SDJ

That’s what Disclosure Day is really about: How it feels to be in the dark, whether about government secrets, our neighbors, or ourselves. It’s a handsome and thrilling film, saddled with a frustrating final act. In hindsight, perhaps this is inevitable, because Spielberg’s movie is not really a childlike expression of wonder, like E.T. It’s an appeal to heaven, a cry for help for a world that is beyond helping itself. Whether Spielberg sees his extraterrestrials as replacements or metaphors for God is hard to say. The movie raises some interesting theological questions, but seems afraid to answer them. Spielberg is far more confident about his fellow humans. And what he knows isn’t good.

The world in Disclosure Day is on the brink of collapse. Emily Blunt’s character is a weather reporter for a local TV news station. Whenever we are in the studio hearing the news reports in the background, words like “war” and “crisis” are prominent. Blunt’s own relationship is floundering, and by and by we’ll learn about a childhood trauma that has broken her. The trauma left her with a special gift to see into the minds of the people she meets, even her enemies. What she sees makes them more human to her, and hearing it spoken back to them makes her less threatening to them.

At some level Disclosure Day wants to be a preachy parable about empathy. But what’s tricky is that the empathy it treasures does not actually come from people. It is literally out of this world. Using Brett McCracken’s observations about modernism vs. postmodernism vs. metamodernism, I’m inclined to think of Disclosure Day as Spielberg’s first truly metamodern story. Its distrust of military and government institutions are passingly modernist, but the otherworldly source of virtue interrupts the postmodern “us vs. them” dialectic. Disclosure Day is a story meant to resonate with people who are OK with admitting that we might not be able to change the world after all. Maybe it’s not us who can.

Soon after seeing Disclosure Day, I listened to Ross Douthat’s Interesting Times podcast with Christian Angermayer, an enormously wealthy “biotech engineer.” Angermayer is an eager proponent of “humanmaxxing,” slang for using science (both real and pseudo) and technology to forestall aging, accelerate human growth, and perhaps even defy death. It’s an absolutely fascinating conversation that covers everything from why men should inject testosterone to why everyone should go on magic mushrooms.

Ross’s great gift as a podcaster is letting his guests speak for themselves clearly and frequently enough so that eventually they (and the audience) have to own the logical implications of their worldview. In his dialogue with Angermayer, Ross gives listeners an opportunity to hear a gospel presentation from someone who very clearly believes that heaven is real and you’re standing right on it. Angermayer is not a BS’er. He believes everything he’s saying (even if, as he goes out of his way to remark a few times, he’s got a lot of wealth tied up in these products). Angermayer passionately lays out the case for constantly, relentlessly, and even sacrificially optimizing our bodies.

Angermayer’s biotech eschatology comes through clearest when Ross asks him about psychedelics. Angermayer says he has “met God” through his psilocybin trips and that users “cannot be a real atheist after” the experience. He believes they are so intensely renewing that they should be used in global peace negotiations. But Angermayer is very, very careful to go out of his way—at least five different times—to tell listeners to humanmaxx only with the consultation of their doctor.

By the end of the interview, I was struck how, for someone like Angermayer, the good life in a modern world essentially consists of a series of technological replacements. He believes these hacks are essential for happiness precisely because the things they replace are rendered implausible in the world today. Medications like GLP-1s replace self-control and moderation. Psychedelics replace religion. It’s not hard to extend the logic. You don’t need a lover if you’ve got AI bots. You don’t need books if you have autogenerated summaries. Our bodies and our minds haven’t and won’t stop wanting. But perhaps we can satisfy those wants with things more consumable, controllable, and customizable.

Both Spielberg and Christian Angermayer suggest, in very different ways of course, that the future of humanity is not human. To be fair, neither of them come off to me as cynical dislikers of the human race the way that certain technofuturists such as Peter Thiel or Elon Musk do. Spielberg is a great filmmaker precisely because he locates and centers the human soul in each story. Angermayer sounds to me like a genuinely optimistic person, a true evangelist for human (and transhuman) potential. But both the movie and the podcast feature urgency about fixing something broken with all of us. Both the genteel relativism of the 90s and the despair of the late 2000s are gone. In their place is spirituality. For Spielberg, it’s a spirituality of a mystical encounter with the Other. For Angermayer, it’s a spirituality of a biological revival of the Self. Either way, none of us are getting there on our own.

There is a moment in Disclosure Day that invites a ray of hope. When asked if God could really love both humans and alien creatures, a nun responds with cheerful confidence. “Why would God make such a big universe for only us,” she asks. Spielberg’s aliens are God’s children, too. But what about the other possible answer: That maybe, there is some vastness of the galaxies that isn’t meant to be useful to anyone? Maybe it’s just meant to bring pleasure and joy to the Maker who sees it, and humility to the creatures who don’t.

Imagine a small child wondering about the crawl space in his parent’s attic. There’s nothing in there for him—no food, no toys, no comfort. But the crawl space isn’t meant for that. The child’s inability to imagine why such a place would exist is about the child, not the place. He is too young and inexperienced to imagine why such a thing might be important to anyone not living there. While the child goes on blissfully unaware of the crawl space or its meaning, it serves the purpose its architect assigned to it.

This raises an uncomfortable question for the post-human futurists. How many different levels of reality may not actually exist for anyone’s usefulness? How much of life may be impossible to quantify or optimize? What if our imperfect, aging, sleepy, heavy, anxious, lonely bodies might not be problems to fix, but humbling truths to accept? What then? Does the un-maxxable human self become pointless or wicked? If human happiness depends on our escape velocity from our creaturely identities, the answer is yes. But Christianity does not think so.

It seems to me that only Christianity can love people as they really are. Only Christianity offers both the verdict that we know is true and the mercy our lives depend on. Christianity knows what to expect when it reads the headlines or opens the feed. It knows where human bodies go, how they decay and rot and are sown in dishonor. Christianity knows that the human heart wants more than this earth has ever or will ever give it. It knows that grace is everything, and that grace is only grace if it comes, like a UFO, from above.

“You are not your own; you have been bought with a price.” Turn this sentence over and it’s a kind of supernatural abduction story. “Therefore glorify God with your body.” There it is: God and the body do meet after all, through the incarnated Son. In the shadow of Christ, we are more than optimized selves. We glorify God, and the price he has paid to invade our world and rescue us. Righteousness turns out, in the end, to be the visitor we could never prepare for and the health we could never control. The hard part is the same it’s always been: Believing.

God has spoken. As the Book of Hebrews says, “Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son…” (Heb. 1:1-2a). We therefore come to Scripture to hear his voice—in the way he reveals himself and unto the end of knowing Christ.

But in a world in which we’re constantly being shaped in how to think and what to love, what is real and on what basis, this is easier said than done. We may think that to read the Bible well we start with nothing, open the pages and consider the plain meaning of the text. Yet we don’t realize that we pore over Scripture’s pages with already formed questions we think God is speaking to, assumptions about how the words work, and intuitions about what the Bible is for.

The result is that we treat the Bible as a self-help book, or full of models for how to be successful, or even as just a collection of data to be assembled for our systematic theologies. If we’re not careful, we will come ill-prepared to read and to hear.

As Brandon D. Smith points out, Scripture confronts us ready to teach (John 6:45). In late modernity, we are already shaped to be reluctant pupils in this school of Christ, whether we realize it or not. Our intuitions have been shaped to assume that the individual equipped with science and reason is the final arbiter of truth. Or, we might assume that our desires are a trustworthy guide for what is good and right.

Reading Scripture with the Great Tradition

In the Alexandrian Institute, we are convinced that theological education is no less immune from the formative pressures of late modernity. We have launched the Alexandrian Institute as a project in intentionally learning the logic of Scripture, normed by its inspired Words and its theological culmination in Christ, by reading Scripture with the Great Tradition. This is not to idealize the past, but to recognize that those who have gone before us don’t share our current cultural blind spots. In fact, for the wise reader, the consensus of the church’s confessions and ecumenical creeds, as well as the thinkers who shaped them, offer tried and tested convictions for us to receive with gratitude.

We take our name from the example of the Alexandrians, a tradition of theological study in North Africa in the first several centuries of the church that helped pave the way for the theology confessed at the councils of Nicaea (AD 325) and Constantinople (AD 381).

The Alexandrians don’t give us the pure doctrines of Nicaea to just memorize and parrot. Instead, when we read them, we embark on a journey of learning how to read along the grain of the whole canon of Scripture, seeing that the “pressure” of the canon pushes us to confess Jesus Christ is Lord—fully God and fully man, come down for us and for our salvation. To know God and all things in relation to God as he unsettles our sensibilities and reframes our reasoning and imagination—and graciously overcomes our sin—that we might find life together in the light of his self-revelation: that is the work of the Spirit’s inspired words coming to completion.

So, we want to walk the road to Nicaea with the Alexandrians, and with the wisdom of the church through the ages that helps us see the ways we have been conformed to the spirit of our own age.

Join Our Community

We are a global institution seeking to unite students and scholars from around the world while keeping them in their own communities and church contexts. We teach programs “from pew to PhD,” providing students opportunities to join our community through reading groups to advanced research degrees.

Our project in the Alexandrian Institute is to be formed for wisdom and virtue, that we might hear God’s voice and let the Words of Scripture read us. The late Anglican theologian John Webster calls this “theological theology,” that is, biblical reasoning that takes seriously the task of knowing God as he has revealed himself and for the proper ends of knowing him.

Join us as we seek to let our theology be worthy of the One who has spoken by shining “in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (II Cor. 4:6).

Dennis Greeson (PhD, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary) is Dean of the Alexandrian Institute. He writes and teaches on the theology of culture, and is the co-author of The Way of Christ in Culture: A Vision for All of Life (B&H Academic) and the forthcoming book Rooted & Grounded: A Parent’s Guide for Raising Kids in Today’s Culture Chaos (Harvest House, 2027). He lives with his wife and three kids in Nashville, TN.

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 …

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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…

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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…

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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, an…

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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 eit…

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Last month I finished edits on Scroll Less, Live More. The writing of that book took something out of me, and I’m not entirely sure why. I just k…

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This essay is my attempt to do three things.

First, I want to share some of my own experience growing up in the kind of conservative evangelicalism that’s been at the center of many fraught conversations about parenting, minis…

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This article is currently going viral. Multiple people sent it to me within the first hour I was out of bed. You can read it for yourself, but the takeaway is easy to summarize:

AI wins. You lose (if you’re not on team AI).

It’s a bad article. I don’t know why Matt Walsh thinks it’s good, but one guess might be that there’s a certain symmetry between apo…

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• I’ve been honored to become a contributor to Wall Street Journal’s new Free Expression newsletter. This is an eclectic space featuring great writers covering a wide array of topics. My latest piece celebrates the Super Bowl as a healthy civic ritual. Please consider subscribing to Free Expression!

• At World M…

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Video footage does not convince most people that their prior interpretation of something is wrong. It just doesn’t. That much has been apparent for more than a decade, as we’ve cycled through tragedy after tragedy, shooting after shooting, death after death, and acquittal after acquittal. Only in extreme cases where a narrative is completely and obviously contradicted by footage will people say something like, “OK I guess my first take was wrong.” And those extreme cases are rare.

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Whether we’re talking about “incels,” “America’s lost boys,” the alt-right, or something else, the bottom line is clear. There is a large group of American young men who are facing spiritual crisis. What’s more, they often seem to elude the strategies of Christian publ…

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On Sunday morning, a group of protesters associated with Minneapolis’ “Black Lives Matter” chapter entered Cities Church, stopped the service, and confronted pastors and members. I personally know two members of the staff there. David Mathis is a friend and a professional colleague. We saw each other just a couple of weeks ago in Louisville. Senior past…

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Justin Lee repeats something I’ve now heard quite a bit: anti-woman white supremacist Nick Fuentes is bad, but his fans (called “groypers”) need to be listened to and taken very seriously. Fuentes, writes Lee, symbolizes an entire generation of men who have been oppressed by an ambient feminist culture. His moral d…

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