I’ll say first: Glaude has occupied a special place in my own imagination. When I was a graduate student, he was someone I admired from afar and aspired to be like. Smart. Commanding. Clear. Erudite. His was a name I would have listed alongside people like James Cone and Cornel West. In fact, my regard for Glaude compelled me to pre-order his book Begin Again, and pre-ordering is something I’ve done maybe six times in my decades-long history of buying too many books.

Glaude’s place in the world and scholarly gravitas is not, in my judgment, unearned. He is where he belongs. But it is exactly because he should be taken seriously that I am so alarmed by his reaction to the professional and tragically literal demise of Jason Arday.

If you read his essay, you’ll see that he passes over Arday’s well-documented plagiarism and fantastical storytelling about his life. Instead, he directs his attention to the equally well-documented racism of Nathan Cofnas, who Glaude says “accused Arday.” From there, Glaude pivots largely to MAGA politics and the capture of public discourse by Republicans, which in his view Democrats have been incapable of retaking. In the end, a reader couldn’t be blamed for coming away thinking that Arday is dead because of the global power of MAGA-style politics and racism, and Arday is just one more victim of these monstrous forces, possessing neither agency nor responsibility.

What strikes me most is my young self, just beginning his journey as a scholar—now half my current age—looking wide-eyed and with unequivocal admiration to Glaude, hanging onto his every word. No, let’s back up. There is currently somewhere in America a ten-year-old boy who, like I did, will one day find himself drawn to the study of history and religion. And that boy will come across the work of Eddie Glaude. And that boy will be rightly impressed. And that boy will, as a consequence of all this, say to himself, “My god, our society basically lynched a university professor just ten years ago!”

That is, of course, exactly the sort of thought that precedes the broader mistaken judgment, “Racism is as much a problem today as it always was.”

But this kind of mistaken judgment is not without consequence. Most obviously, when the evidence wielded to indict this country of racism turns out to be flimsy, it undermines the credibility of any charge of racism. When people in Glaude’s position offer racial analysis and critique that is weak, the people it hurts are victims of racism whose complaints have lost credibility—people who don’t have academic jobs at Princeton University. Let’s remember: Glaude is paid to teach about racism, his published works and media appearances commenting on race have helped him advance professionally, and they help to secure his standing. That makes it all the more striking that Glaude complains of starting a new semester under the shadow of people who think he shouldn’t be at Princeton, thereby framing himself as a victim of racism even from his position of elite privilege. Cui bono?

Anyone with even cursory knowledge of Arday’s work and conduct and Cambridge’s complicity and misconduct understands that, Cofnas’s racism notwithstanding, Arday’s professional fall and subsequent death, and the vociferous criticisms of Cambridge, are not reducible either to racism or to Trumpism. And anyone with this understanding would rightly find it hard to believe that someone of Glaude’s intellect and erudition could possibly disagree. It is hard not to interpret his message more simply as an expression of racial solidarity—one that exceeds his commitments to integrity, academic and otherwise. Glaude flexes his scholarly muscles, but not in the service of truth: he invokes David Walker to “shift the frame,” but it turns out the shift is to redirect our attention from Arday and onto the Republican Party.

I am not saying race is irrelevant in American public life, or that racism is a reality of the past. I have experienced it personally, and at least in one instance—my rightful departure from my last post in church ministry, which was due to my own failings—race and racism were undeniable dynamics at play. It is precisely because I have a stake in the discussion that I am distressed by Glaude’s remarks. It would horrify me to have been excused from my own agency and responsibility because my skin is brown. It is precisely because I have clung to my full human dignity, which encompasses my freedom and responsibility, that I’ve been able to identify meaningfully the place and scope of race in my life experience—and to grow personally and professionally.

What Glaude is offering—and, to be fair, as are many others—isn’t humanizing of Jason Arday. His feigned indignation about what happened to Arday won’t change the facts. Recourse to the ad hominem fallacy about Cofnas, as though his racism invalidates the claim of Arday’s plagiarism, won’t change the facts either. And we should make no mistake: Glaude and co. are dealing a blow, but it isn’t a blow to racism; it’s to the actual victims of racism he ostensibly aims to protect.

I got to know the theologian Robert W. Jenson during the final years of his life. Like many people, I first met him on the page, starting with his Systematic Theology. But I soon discovered that he and I worshiped at the same church and, not only that, we liked to sit in the same south transept. One Sunday, I leaned over the pew in front of me to where he was seated in a wheelchair and asked, “Are you Robert Jenson?” He looked at me perplexedly and, after a long pause, finally said, “Well, that’s my name.” Soon thereafter, I was invited to call him “Jens,” and before long I was visiting him at his home about twice each week. As our friendship grew, I would sometimes keep him company while his wife, Blanche, left the house so that he wouldn’t be alone. By this time, he was unable to get himself a drink or something to eat or walk unassisted to the bathroom.

On one occasion, after assisting him to and from the bathroom, Jens frustratedly muttered something about being a burden. I insisted, “You’re not a burden.” At this, he looked at me and said very clearly, “Yes, I am. Everyone is eventually a burden.”

His surprise at my pastorally inept response, and my surprise at his candor, centered around the same problem: my politeness.

In many expressions of politeness in our culture, it is expected that we will be somewhat dishonest, and in some instances, we consider truthfulness impolite. When a friend has inconvenienced us, it is expected that we insist, “It’s no problem!” When someone takes us to a business lunch, even though it is customary for the one who did the inviting to pay, the invited is still expected to offer – knowing full well the offer is only a gesture.

The gentle untruths of polite behavior serve as a social lubricant, protecting our relationships from wear and tear. Politeness buffers us from the friction of day-to-day life with other people. And that buffering is precisely why effective pastoral care often requires impoliteness: the pastoral caregiver must deal with real life, in complete truthfulness, with precise attention to those aspects of life where there is resistance, which is to say, where there is friction. That is the only way to touch the soul. The polite easing of friction is antithetical to pastoral work.

My failure with Jens – with whom, it should be acknowledged, I was not officially in a pastoral relationship – was that he exposed his soul in a sense, and by my politeness I declined his implicit request for care.

I share this experience with Jens because I have been mulling over a parenting challenge, and I think the way I let Jens down that day points to a solution. As I have seen the slow advance of laws permitting medically assisted death, I have begun wondering how I can raise my children to grow into the sorts of people who would rather choose to endure the painful, humiliating loss of health and bodily function than to die by suicide. I believe that part of the answer to this parenting challenge is found by examining the problem of polite dishonesty when it comes to the ways we burden and are burdened by one another. These two experiences – being a burden and being burdened – are not the same, but for any who will resist the seduction of suicide as an escape from the reality that human life is burdensome, being a burden and bearing burdens must be taught and practiced. And I believe the first step is overcoming the polite dishonesty that denies people are burdens at all.

The question that generally goes unasked and therefore unanswered is: what happens to people who are a burden once they have been totally buffered from the acknowledgment of this fact?

Read the rest at Plough Quarterly.

On a recent Sunday morning, my five-year-old daughter asked me why she had to go to church. She didn’t feel like going. I explained that because God made her, she belonged to God, and though God had given her to our family, she still belonged to God, and he wanted her to go to church. Then she asked me how I knew God wanted her to go to church, at which point I said, “God told me I have to take you to church.”

Strictly speaking, that’s not true: I’m not certain God has ever spoken to me, but I do know God has never spoken to me about my daughter’s church attendance. Yet neither is what I told her a lie. If she could understand and pay attention long enough, I might have explained that the church’s worship is a unique and necessary way we commune with God, that communion with God is why we exist, and that Scripture instructs parents to raise children in the knowledge and love of God. But she’s a child. “God told me” will have to suffice for now.

But it cannot suffice forever. My daughter’s world must get bigger—big enough for it to seem strange that God would be mindful of us, big enough to notice the merits of religious perspectives outside Christianity, big enough for her to wonder whether there is God at all. Eventually, she will have to judge whether the faith she received measures up to the world.

The Christian faith is not a philosophy, but believing it does mean having a particular perspective on the world. And while we can’t verify or falsify what Christians believe—that God exists, that the God who exists is the God of the Bible, that Jesus rose from the dead—we judge whether the faith is credible by measuring the explanatory power of the Christian perspective. On the one hand, some recent public converts to Christianity, such as Aayan Hirsi Ali or Louise Perry, have explained how they came to realize that their moral and social convictions, which they once took for granted as Enlightened views, actually originated in Christianity and still depend on Christianity to make any sense. On the other hand, lots of people in recent years have disaffiliated from Christian churches and undergone faith “deconstruction.” They have found the Christian perspective wanting, unable to deal satisfactorily with, for instance, same-sex-attracted people or the equal dignity of women.

One simple way we can judge the explanatory power of a worldview—a term that has been so abused I’m slightly embarrassed to use it—is to ask whether it invites us into a bigger or smaller world. To illustrate: People who have undergone faith deconstruction might feel that when Christians insist on a literal six-day recent creation of the universe, they invite people into a smaller world that refuses to take in certain kinds of astronomical, geological, chemical, and biological evidence. Or they might deconstruct because, to them, a thought world without room for licit same-sex relationships and trans people is too small and can’t make sense of the actual experiences people have. For them, being “affirming” means occupying a position in a bigger world. Meanwhile, recent converts to Christianity feel that secular accounts of morality make the world too small, and they have come to believe that the Christian faith can take in a bigger world.

Claiming that something is true means claiming that it invites us to see the world more fully. If believing something requires you to exclude some part of the world, whether the findings of science or subjective human experiences, that belief or idea makes the world smaller, which means the belief is either false or inadequate. A worldview with a truncated range of vision is useless by definition. The “size” of one’s world is the principal test of a worldview. A perspective commends itself by exerting great explanatory power.

Read the rest at Comment.

The year before I got married, I moved back in with my parents. It was among the worst and longest years of my life. The arrangement was complicated by unforeseen circumstances: My newly divorced sister and her son also moved in with my parents, and my nephew stayed in what had once been my bedroom—with no remaining bedroom in the house. No big deal, I thought. I assured my parents I could just sleep on the couch for a year. I needed a place to stay, I was too religiously traditional to move in with my fiancé, and a year would be over in no time.

I was wrong. The mental picture I have of that time—of getting ready for marriage and trying to finish a doctoral dissertation—is of my car. Almost irresistibly, it became the “place” where I spent more time than anywhere else. Deprived of privacy, the car became the only place for my fiancé and I to talk, and—not really having an office or place to read or write—I was constantly on the go, migrating from coffee shop to library. The rest of my life that year was spent borrowing space from other people, permanently mindful of the time left on the parking meter. Notably, during that time, I couldn’t have told you what was going on in my local community, or who the mayor was, or what the city council was dealing with.

The Trump administration’s recent suggestion of a 50-year mortgage brought to mind that miserable time. There is much to say about what this would mean in financial terms. It would cost buyers tens of thousands of dollars in interest payments to lenders, drive up housing prices by increasing demand without expanding supply, and fail to create generational wealth while only making the monthly expense of home “ownership” marginally more bearable. But what is more easily overlooked but arguably more pressing is how this lifelong renting—in effect, what paying off a 50-year mortgage is—would condition life and what that conditioning would mean politically.

In a word, to introduce permanent renting is to take away political freedom, and not just because of economic disadvantages. More fundamentally, permanent renting conditions people in ways that are antithetical to political freedom. Not having a secure place in the world shapes you, and what it shapes you into is the kind of person who isn’t able truly to engage in politics, even if there are no explicit legal barriers keeping you from participating. Impermanence conditions people out of political life. So not only would the 50-year mortgage intensify and aggravate the problem it purports to solve—people’s ability to buy their own homes—but in the process it would also effectively disenfranchise the millions of people who would come to live under its antipolitical conditions.

We already see renters exhibiting the symptoms of this antipolitical condition. The New York Times’s Ezra Klein noted recently that one of the key political challenges with housing policy is that renters tend not to vote in local elections, especially in primaries, leaving political decisions to those who already own homes. This observation isn’t a new one. Tocqueville described the great political benefit of the chaotic American democratic system in which citizens had a patriotic sense of ownership of the decisions that affected them, in contrast to countries in Europe where “the natives consider themselves as a kind of settlers, indifferent to the fate of the spot on which they live,” and where “the citizen is unconcerned as to the condition of his village, the police of his street, the repairs of the church or of the parsonage; for he looks upon all these as unconnected with himself, and as the property of a powerful stranger whom he calls the Government.”

Read the rest at Compact.

Thank you for being a valued Microsoft 365 subscriber. To reflect the value we’ve added over the past decade, address rising costs, and enable us to continue delivering new innovations, we’re increasing the price of your subscription.

Effective February 14, 2025, the price for Microsoft 365 Family subscriptions will increase from USD 99.99^* per year to USD 129.99^* per year.

Let us set aside for now the more inspiring details, like this email going out on a holiday and the price increase going into effect on another holiday, and that the people at Microsoft deem themselves to have added 30% value to the work and perhaps lives of their subscribers “over the past decade.” My only response to these things is respect. In the words of The Wire’s stickup man Omar Little, “All in the game, yo. All in the game.”

No, I don’t exactly mind being robbed by having to pay movie-theater-level markup prices for a product, which is just the cost of doing business. What I do mind is the ever more frequent conversion of products into services.

I recently mused with a friend about where I thought this trend was headed: that in what feels like an inevitable future, we will find ourselves paying for a subscription to physical household appliances. It won’t be called a subscription, of course. More likely is that the cost of, say, a refrigerator will be set just high enough so as to be out of reach, and we will be offered a five-year usage plan that includes servicing and, for an additional premium, quarterly water filters, and before you know it, virtually no one will actually purchase a refrigerator. To own a refrigerator will either indicate great poverty— “They had to buy a used refrigerator”—or great wealth— “They were able to buy their refrigerator outright.” For everyone else, the physical object will no longer be exchanged for a definite price, but will instead be the sign of a larger, ongoing service relationship. And then one Good Friday, Whirlpool or Samsung will send you an email saying that, effective July 4, and to reflect the added value of keeping your beer cold, they will be increasing the price of your service plan.

It seems to me that the moral problems with this capitalist plot are obvious. While, indeed, people are free not to subscribe to Microsoft Office or Adobe Acrobat or cloud storage, the simple fact of that matter is that these subscriptions become a de facto tax extracted from people who wish to live and work in society. The subscription is the inverse and opposite tactic from “planned obsolescence,” which is the deliberate design of products to have a limited lifespan so that people will be forced to purchase replacements. If planned obsolescence is the real-world version of “enshittification,” then the conversion of saleable finished products into subscription services rests on the reality of perpetual need. When, after you’ve stored hundreds of gigabytes of photos and videos, are you really going to cancel that cloud storage subscription? And how about the added bonus, not just that you are selling personal data, but also committing to the ongoing sale of your personal data? This model slowly but effectively diminishes the freedom of free exchange between buyer and seller, and as a result corporations set up consumers as perpetual debtors.

One practical solution I’d like to see: legislation that compels companies to sell a finished product, digital or physical, access to which does not expire. And the law should make it impossible for manufacturers to coerce consumers into a lifetime of leasing refrigerators and ovens and microwaves.

Beyond the immediate moral and political challenge, the conversion of finished products into unending paid services represents a particular mode of existence. Hannah Arendt describes it with precision in her book The Human Condition. She describes “labor” as the activity of human life in our capacity as animals—it’s what we do as participants in the life process of birth, consumption, growth, eventual decay, and death. Think: making a sandwich, cleaning your body, cleaning your habitat. Things you must do over and over again as long as you’re alive. The first and necessary step towards a distinctive humanity and away from mere animality is to construct a world of relative permanence by producing durable objects; Arendt calls this latter activity “work.” Think: building a house, paving roads, installing plumbing. Each one represents a different “condition” of human life.

The distinction between a bread, whose “life expectancy” in the world is hardly more than a day, and a table, which may easily survive generations of men, is certainly much more obvious and decisive than the difference between a baker and a carpenter. […] Viewed as part of the world, the products of work—and not the products of labor—guarantee the permanence and durability without which a world would not be possible at all. It is within this world of durable things that we find the consumer goods through which life assures the means of its own survival. Needed by our bodies and produced by its laboring, but without stability of their own, these things for incessant consumption appear and disappear in an environment of things that are not consumed but used, and to which, as we use them, we become used and accustomed.

In the permanent world of human life, two other possibilities emerge for human existence: action and speech, which create the web of human relationships and shared life—specifically, creating the political sphere. This political sphere is where human freedom finally appears. Under the animal-like condition of labor, human life is bound by the necessities of the body; it is not truly free. And even under the condition of work, in which products may be bought and sold in an exchange market, human life is fenced in by the logic of “value,” in which things have no intrinsic worth, but only have value in relation to other things, until everything, including human life, is measured solely by its usefulness.

The highest possibility of human life, according to Arendt, is the establishment of freedom in the public by speech and action. And while Arendt was no Christian, here I believe the Christian must simply agree, adding that the primordial foundation of human existence was God’s speech to us, setting us among but above the other animals, and tasking us, not just with bodily survival like the other animals, but with naming the other creatures and tending to the world in which we would live. In other words, the human potential for speech and action is one way to describe what sets us apart as being made in the image of God. We are not simply the animal laborans, nor simply homo faber, but the imago Dei.

That today’s “labor” is largely digital does not change its impact as a form of life that conditions human existence into something inferior to the imago Dei. We are seeing it everywhere: those things that once were permanent increasingly become consumable garbage. In my own day-to-day life spent in the world of books, I see constantly that authors feel no choice but to throw themselves into the consumable garbage of social media to gain an audience, and must then somehow produce a permanent object—a book—that is worth reading, to be sold to consumers who are themselves being habituated into consuming shortform texts and videos, losing their capacity to sustain the attention needed to read. Even books are being swallowed by labor!

Today we are witnessing the realm of work being swallowed by the realm of labor, chipping away at the permanent world in which the potential for human life unfolds. The sale of objects becoming the sale of unending services is more than an exploitative tactic to satisfy capitalist greed: it is initiation into a mode of existence in which human speech and action become less and less possible, and by losing our grasp on that possibility, we lose also the possibility of our freedom. We beloved images of God are being invited to become homo subscribens, man the subscriber. Forget money: if we believe in our own humanity, we will resist.

One of the conditions of human action, including things like thinking, observing, wondering, and deliberating, is stillness, but boredom and stillness are no more the same thing than are holding one’s breath and being dead. Most fundamentally, frenetic activity, especially online, is an escape from taking action, and reaching for the phone in a moment of stillness is a decision against making decisions. Time spent consuming content leaves us similarly consumed, liberated from having to remember or anticipate, unburdened by algorithmic processes, personas, and infinite scrolling from being a self with agency. This kind of activity is more accurately called restless passivity. Most things that once might have taken their place as events of history are trivialized into what is trending. And somehow, because we cannot break the spell of the spectacle, we fail to notice that our fascination with its ceaselessness is in fact boredom.

By confusing restlessness with activity, stillness with boredom, and algorithmically directed attention with the recognition of historical significance, we have also fallen into an abusive relationship with time.

The time of restless activity slips through our fingers. What begins with a little notification becomes minutes and eventually hours. Time slips away because it has become time without bounds: an infinity of moments that are not grasped by any sort of eternity. Online it is always the present, but not the encompassing present of eternity. The timeline is everlasting but not eternal. The sense of what constitutes “now” shrinks more and more: one mustn’t be late to a trend. One must always be ready with smart commentary on the news of the moment.

This mode of existence is incompatible with permanence. Temporal things in this sphere do not find their significance relative to eternal things; there is no ultimate against which things are penultimate or preliminary. What Hannah Arendt said about entertainment, that it, “like labor and sleep, is irrevocably part of the biological life process,” that is, “a metabolism feeding on things by devouring them,” applies with greater force to life under the conditions of the timeline. To her observation that there “are many great authors of the past who have survived centuries of oblivion and neglect, but it is still an open question whether they will be able to survive an entertaining version of what they have to say,” we are in the awkward position of having to respond that the question has been unhappily closed.

The conversion of ultimate things into consumables fit for the metabolism of the timeline is, by definition, an abuse of those things. Neither the accuracy or inaccuracy of a theological or doctrinal point, nor the fidelity or infidelity of an interpretation, nor the rightness or wrongness of a moral argument overcomes this most basic problem. And despite our protests to the contrary, we already know this is the problem we face: whenever we work hard to ensure that a matter of self-evident importance is exciting or entertaining or catchy, we have already admitted, if only inadvertently, that the problem we face is that this important thing is, in the world of consumption, boring. And the tragic irony, of course, is that it is our willingness to convert ultimate things into consumables that has ensured any discussion of them with integrity has become intolerable to those whose mode of existence is consumption.

In response to this problem, Christians have retreated into online ghettos where they can maintain the illusion they are engaged in serious discourse, and the result is noticeable homogeneity of perspective that risks becoming so boring one fears it may kill its participants. In other words, Christian discourse under the conditions of the algorithm is inherently self-refuting sola forma, by form alone, regardless of its ostensible content: it is a performative contradiction because the implicit or explicit ultimacy of its claims is already excluded by virtue of turning itself into junk food for the internet’s insatiable hunger. Regardless of what side one takes in the culture wars, a Christian perspective offered in the form of a consumable for the metabolism of the timeline has already capitulated to the culture of the world.

Again, sensing this problem, the online Christian’s response has been to join in on the fun—and I can’t deny that it’s fun because, whatever else it may be, it’s definitely fun—of having something to say about what is trending, hoping in vain to reassert the relevance of the Christian faith after having subverted it. The algorithm dictates what the Christian has to say, putting the Christian message in a position of perpetual reaction. And it has spilled from social media into real life, ruining, among other things, Christian preaching, too much of which has become this same predictable commentary. The net effect is that the vast majority of Christian discourse has become only tangentially theological but overwhelmingly moralistic. Were, God forbid, a person to receive his or her Christian catechesis online, he or she might never get around to noticing that the ultimate horizon of the Christian life is the forgiveness of sins and the promise that the hell we’ve made of our lives is redeemable, the gift of knowing that despite the unpredictability and randomness of life and the evils we suffer, most especially death, God speaks the last word, and that word is his love for us and the resurrection of his Son, and therefore that this life is full of meaning despite its apparent absurdity. No, catechized online, this imaginary wretch would be fully armed with moral opinions on the algorithmically determined news of the day and would be an intolerable, predictable bore—like a parrot rewarded with crackers for saying “virtue” or “feminism.”

Lest I be misunderstood, I am not saying that Christians have nothing to say about what is happening in the world or that they should not say it online or on time—claims which would make this argument its own performative contradiction. Neither am I saying that I have not been guilty of the thing I am attacking. Rather, I am saying the Christian must recover a relationship to time and to activity that is not normed by the metabolism of the internet and must therefore also contradict this metabolism. The Christian must recover a more robust and longer lasting sense of “now.” The Christian must remember that frenetic, restless passivity of the internet is boring and confront boredom with a perspective that is actually interesting—rooted in a larger history, distinctive, not predictable, not offered for the sole purpose of exciting and eliciting the praise of other Christian social media users.

As with many tragic cases, the ostensible solution Christians have been running towards is in fact the very problem they ought to be running from. Christians have come to fear their irrelevance and marginalization, and so they’ve embraced a mode of existence that all but guarantees their worst fears will be realized. Conveniently, the solution is simple enough: embrace stillness, take time, think, read, deliberate, and then, when the moment is right, strike.

For days, I tried forcing her to eat and to hydrate. Each morning, I went looking for her, afraid that she had died and that my daughter would find her body. Finally, I needed to make a decision. And so, I decided she would die that day, pained with the knowledge that without this lethal intervention she might live another few days on her own and then die naturally. She died quickly, exhausted by living.

It is painful to revisit this memory. I felt and still feel unworthy of the power to decide, almost arbitrarily, when a life should end. We use euphemisms for what I did: that I had Cleo “put down,” or “euthanized.” I prefer to speak plainly. I had Cleo killed. And I made this decision because she was suffering immense pain and there was no way for her pain to be taken into some higher meaning of her life: her physical pain and decline were sheer contradictions of her existence, not conditions under which something special about her existence could reveal itself. When we agreed to take responsibility for Cleo, we were also taking on the moral burden as human creatures to be prepared to offer her, an animal creature, the mercy of ending her life at the appropriate time.

By the day of Cleo’s death, I had spent roughly two years reading and jotting down my thoughts on the difference between humans and animals. It is a notoriously difficult philosophical problem, and theologically minded people do themselves no favors by jumping to the theologically “right” answer: how and with what we answer the question of what differentiates us from other animals has implications for nearly all of life.

An aspect of life that I believe will become more pressing in the future is life’s end. As we experience population decline, our already overburdened systems of medical care and social service will face further shortages of labor and resources, and the inevitable rationing of finite resources will result in difficult choices about who should receive what sort of care. Under the conditions of such scarcity, those who are already undesirable will become less desirable. I expect the terminally ill, the elderly, the mentally and physically disabled, and the mentally ill to make up the majority of the undesirable population, and that these people will feel pressure to exercise moral and civic duty by killing themselves. I expect that we will hear more and more about suicide in terms of compassion, care, environmental responsibility, and social good.

But this kind of social change is not simply a consequence of material conditions. Prior to this age of unfathomable material abundance and modern medicine, it was a given that many people would be subject to the capricious fate of drought, crop failure, famine, starvation, and premature death. Under such conditions, there was no apparent need to systematize euthanasia. In other words, the steady march of progress towards legal assistance in dying has another driver than material conditions.

Early this year, prior to knowing I’d soon be faced with euthanizing one of my cats, I set out to think through this question: what’s driving the desire for assisted suicide?

I turned to a concept popularized by Francis Fukuyama: the struggle for recognition. Famously, Fukuyama argued that a “Marxist” account of material forces in history could account for the victory of capitalism, but that military, technological, and economic necessity did not account for the victory of democracy. To account for that, we needed to understand human nature, that people are possessed of a fundamental sense of their own dignity and that they struggle for others to recognize their dignity—that democracy is a political order in which each individual’s dignity is recognized. But, Fukuyama observed, this struggle for recognition has continued in the form of identity politics.

In recent years, as each of us knows well, the struggle of ostensibly marginal groups has become one of the most palpable features of cultural life. But unlike former struggles for recognition, I would suggest that identity struggles in the wake of the sexual revolution have a special quality: they each require the recognition of human dignity by requiring the non-recognition of some other feature of human existence. One might call it the struggle for non-recognition.

I believe the push for legal assistance in dying cannot be understood fully unless it is interpreted in light of this struggle for non-recognition—a struggle that culminates in a society that no longer recognizes the difference between humans and animals, between euthanizing our parents and euthanizing our pets.

I wrote a brief essay about this problem, which First Things has kindly published in their August/September 2025 issue. I encourage you to subscribe if you don’t already. Below a preview of the essay, “The Right to Be Killed.” If you have trouble accessing it, please email me.

In the days surrounding the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., leaders of the civil rights movement startled their white supporters with a change in direction. Their efforts had been toward desegregation, but then talk shifted to black power. There could be no integration, they argued, unless white people looked on blacks as equally and fully human. And this demand was worth dying for. As James Cone, the theologian of black liberation, put it: “When the black man rebels at the risk of death, he forces white society to look at him, to recognize him, to take his being into account, to admit that he is.” In effect: Either recognize our humanity and treat us accordingly, or deny our humanity and kill us like animals.

The mortal “struggle for recognition” propels social and political change. Originating with Hegel, Francis Fukuyama popularized this argument, observing that, from democracy and universal enfranchisement to the rights of women, gays, the disabled, and others, history is a story of social and political upheaval driven by people’s demand that others recognize their humanity. The desire for recognition is not just a symptom of our therapeutic culture. It is the first of our needs, once our animal needs have been met. The struggle for recognition of our humanity is the struggle to clarify our civil and human rights.

What about assisted suicide, now legal in Canada, the entire U.S. West Coast, and soon, perhaps, New York and additional American states? Must it be numbered among our civil and human rights, consequent upon the recognition of our humanity?

Let us first note that the demand for legal assisted suicide addresses not the legality of killing oneself, but the legality of assisting others to kill themselves. The suicidee (patient? victim?) is secondary. The primary object of the right-to-die movement is the living.

People may kill themselves at any time, without permission or even much pain. Even where it is not legally permitted, suicide, once accomplished, is beyond the reach of legal consequence.

No doubt people want legal assisted suicide for many reasons: the fear of being a burden, enduring poor quality of life, dying alone, dying in excruciating pain. We must nevertheless focus on the desire for someone else to do the killing. Alongside fear of a botched attempt or leaving behind a mess for others, I suggest that the desire for assisted suicide is a perverse expression of the need for recognition. People who wish to kill themselves also want their choice to be socially approved.

The need for social approval is bound up with the need for recognition. Humans are neither the fastest nor the strongest animals, and none of us can survive on our own. Social disapproval feels like a death sentence because, for most of history, it has been one. Beyond the evolutionary and civilizational need for social approval, there is the psychological and the spiritual: The approval we receive tells us who we are and who we ought to be. That our desires or behaviors may make us unlovable feels devastating. The yearning for social approval and authenticity with oneself has driven countless people into countless closets, fearful that they will come to be known and shamed rather than known and loved.

Read the rest here. And again, email me if you have any trouble accessing it.

We pray with Jesus the Son, by whose invitation and Spirit we are made children of his Father with him. As long as we remember that prayer is a response to God, we can say that our status before God and our communion with God are determined in this prayer: we know we are God’s children because we can pray in this way, and by so praying we are God’s children. And if this is true, then it follows that specifically common prayer is a central feature of Christian existence. To be a Christian is literally to live and move and have one’s being within the context of common prayer—to be in a communion of persons, human and divine, whose communing simply is prayer. It is precisely for this communion that God created us.

It follows that prayer is the sore spot of the Christian life. We do not, Saint Paul reminds us, know how to pray. And though the spirit is willing, the flesh is weak: we would rather sleep than pray, even though that means entering into the time of trial and doing so unprepared. To be a sinner is to have the urge to break free from this communion; that is, to hide from God as did Adam and Eve in Eden, to opt (impossibly) to exist for some other end than that for which we were created.

The affliction of common prayer reaches into the church. The commonness of prayer is elusive. The words we use to pray—most of the raw material of our communion with God—are variously contested, complained about, minimized, idealized, and subjected to abuse. Unasked for modifications to common prayer seem always to be the first weapon wielded in the wars against congregations that authoritarian clergy inevitably find themselves waging: liturgical creativity is frequently clericalism masquerading as an effort to meet an alleged pastoral need.

And in this way, the same sinful effort to live for another purpose than what we were created for is directed at common prayer: the end for which we were made is taken up as a means. Seizing the instruments of common prayer, we attempt to instrumentalize communion.

This tendency to instrumentalize worship is human, not a symptom of this or that theological camp. My people do it as much as anyone else. I’ve done it.

In recent years, more and more of my evangelical friends have discovered the joy and benefit of formal liturgy, often turning to The Book of Common Prayer as their go-to resource. Praise the Lord. And also, with their emerging interest in liturgy, I have noticed their unexamined tendency to make use of liturgy. So, in an effort to speak to this tendency, I wrote an essay on the subject, which Christianity Today kindly published last week. Below is a brief preview, along with a link to read the rest on the CT website.

Despite my yearning to lay down roots, over the past two decades I’ve lived in a handful of American cities. One consequence is perspective—and if I’m being truthful, strong opinions—about things some places do better (and worse) than others.

For example, you can buy tacos in Dallas and Los Angeles alike, but you’re better off getting a burrito in Los Angeles and a taco in Dallas. My wife and I have learned the hard way that pizza outside our native New Jersey is usually a disappointment. And infrastructure quality varies much more than you might expect: Reliable snow removal and coherent traffic patterns are not a given.

Without that kind of comparative perspective, it’s easy to assume local advantages and problems are more unique than they really are. In their excellent book How Big Things Get Done, Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner argue that this “uniqueness bias” is a recurring obstacle to our plans. We fail to see that our thing is also a member of some larger category or “reference class.” It may have unique features, but it’s still one iteration of many. This bias leaves us shortsighted, and as a result, many people are unknowingly stuck with poor snow removal, and Midwesterners persist in believing they’ve had pizza.

Christians are not exempt from this problem. We are isolated from one another by the grievous divisions of the church, so theological movements, denominations, regional church bodies, and individual congregations are highly susceptible to uniqueness bias. We are at risk of neglecting lessons we might learn from our reference class—that is, other church communities with similar experiences. Continue reading here.

One outcome of this effort to make sense of this contradictoriness is an essay I wrote, which Comment Magazine has kindly published. I hope you find it helpful.

A familiar story: At an adult faith formation class I was teaching at a church, a woman in her sixties raised her hand. She explained that she’s a pastor’s wife and that she felt devastated by the presidency of Donald Trump and couldn’t find her emotional footing. She was wondering if her long-time dedication to progressive politics contributed to the loss of faith suffered by her two adult daughters. They’re good people, she said, and they’ve done well for themselves. But they don’t believe—and they don’t seem to feel like they’re missing anything. One daughter calls herself an atheist, the other an agnostic. Do I think, she asked me, that her liberal Christian faith is partly to blame for this outcome?

When we listen to the stories of church members, one of the things invisible to polling data but obvious to anyone who has spent any amount of time in church is that the line between the church affiliated and the church disaffiliated is not at all sharply defined.

I hear these stories often. There are morally and politically conservative versions: it makes no difference; the major plot points are the same. Again and again, parents who have found meaning in faith and in the life of the church discover that their children want nothing to do with Christianity. They wonder where they went wrong.

What is usually unacknowledged in stories like these is that, very often, religiously disaffiliated children have not failed to inherit their parents’ faith; rather, they have inherited it all too well—they’ve merely discarded its accidental elements. If the Christian faith is understood as a motivator to support progressive political causes, nothing essential is lost if children grow up to be such good Democrats that they no longer need religious motivations.

Many parents grieving that their children are not Christians are also giving voice to another grief, deeper but unnamed: that there is something more to the Christian faith than they ever learned to grasp or express, but they’re not sure what it is. What they received from church was not the highest expression of purpose and meaning. The vital element of faith has eluded them.

Consider the inverse. I myself am struck by how much I identify with the experience of my non-religious friends. Except for rare and precious moments, I don’t feel like God exists and is present and active in my life. And even though I believe God is active and present, I also know that faith in God is more than metaphysical opinion. I have often wondered whether, if my Christian friends felt the way I feel, they would call themselves atheists or agnostics. To my relief, they report the same experiences. And yet, like me, my friends consider their faith in God to be the central feature of their lives—their “ultimate concern.”

When it comes to the state of faith today, the challenge is not just that the neat, measurable categories—religious believer, agnostic, atheist, spiritual but not religious, religiously unaffiliated, and so on—are inadequate. It is also that by focusing on such a narrow set of questions, we leave the most important matters unexamined.

My most profound flashes of doubt in the existence of God, for instance, have been at church. I’ve sat with philosophical arguments against the existence of God, but none have had the same force as sitting in church and being overwhelmed by the feeling that nothing being said matters, the feeling that the church’s very life screams, “We don’t take this stuff too seriously.”

Faith is more than belief. Coming to faith is like coming into a powerful gravitational field, being grasped and pulled into orbit imperceptibly, and requiring nothing less than that you entrust your whole life to its mysterious force. My flashes of doubt are not primarily intellectual doubts. They are, rather, a feeling that the centre of my life is without warning losing its weightiness, its gravity, and that it is therefore losing its hold on me, and I my confidence in it, that at any moment I will drift out into the darkness and cold.

To feel that something has lost its gravity renders the question of its existence secondary: Even if it exists, who cares? The social conflicts we experienced as children felt total and eternal when we were young, but age revealed how small these problems were. These problems lost their gravity.

When the object of our faith loses its gravitational pull on us, that means it either doesn’t exist or isn’t up to the job of centring our lives; in other words, the loss of gravity entails either atheism or idolatry. Since something always centres our lives, atheism and idolatry amount to the same thing—we all have an ultimate concern and are “atheists” toward the gods of other people, considering these gods idols.

The vexing puzzle of the Christian experience today is that our talk of God seems biblical and therefore difficult to indict for idolatry, but it has lost its gravity. We are theoretically in proximity to its object, but it exerts no force on us. Even if we keep showing up or keep identifying ourselves as Christians, we find it harder and harder to articulate the necessity and unconditional importance of this faith. It is as though we have settled for an idol.

Though there are surely exceptions, few people I know feel that they get much out of church, regardless of denomination. Many clergy I know would do something else if they could. They haven’t stopped believing. They haven’t stopped yearning to be grasped by the ultimate in faith. But what they are offered in the life of the church takes no hold of them, nor offers them anything worth holding on to.

What theological sense can be made of this experience of being adrift within the life of faith?

To answer that question, one must answer a prior question about where this gravitas that generates faith originates and how we experience it: What in human experience are we referring to when we speak of God’s faith-generating activity in us? That is, what are we referring to in our own experience that we interpret as God acting on and within us? Can it be described in mundane, everyday language? Can anything more be said than the mere assertion that God acts to give us faith?

Read the rest at Comment.

But I’m aware of the importance of evangelicalism within Protestantism and in American society. And despite my general silence about it, I care about its fate for at least two reasons. First, as a Christian I have a special obligation to other baptized people, whom I must learn to see as brothers and sisters: we have been born anew in the same Spirit, joined to the same Son, and adopted by the same Father. Second, I suspect the average person in our society thinks “evangelical” when they hear the word “Christian,” and I believe the average evangelical also thinks the same. This simple identification of the two is incorrect and hinders us from having coherent discussions about Christianity.

A direct result of this unconscious tendency to equate Christianity with evangelicalism has generated a problem that is causing strife in evangelical churches and confusing public discourse about Christianity. To get at the problem, I’ll illustrate with a very non-evangelical example: the denomination I grew up in.

In my upbringing in the Seventh-day Adventist Church, I quickly came to believe that its members put inordinate effort into preserving their own denominational distinctiveness. Immediately after the Great Disappointment of 1844, the nascent church reinterpreted its failed prophecy of Jesus’ Second Coming into an exegetically nonsensical and non-falsifiable doctrine about Jesus busying himself with priestcraft in heaven, and this doctrinal invention served to justify the group’s continued existence. Shortly thereafter, the group also came to believe that Christian sabbath observance was required, and that such observance must occur on the literal seventh day of the week—unlike those other Christians. Likewise, they soon adopted dietary restrictions, deriving from a selective reading of Leviticus and the pronouncements of the denomination’s prophet, abstaining from unclean animals, alcohol, and caffeine—again, setting themselves apart from other Christians. These beliefs and practices, combined with the Adventist conviction that God had called them out among the wayward churches as a faithful remnant, secured the denomination’s sectarian ethos.

None of this history is terribly surprising: these things happen. What is surprising is that today there are many Adventists who don’t believe any of these distinctively Adventist things: they don’t believe anything theologically significant happened in 1844, they are not literalists about the sabbath, they enjoy bacon and drink coffee and alcohol—and they consider themselves no less Adventist. In my (somewhat cynical) view, they feel unaccountable to what their church teaches, and with their attitude and behavior they are saying exactly what I’ve said here: that the theological particulars don’t particularly matter because these things are after-the-fact justifications for a distinctive, cultural group identity, and, at the end of the day, having a distinctive group requires no justification.

However, as a result of the implicit decision to eschew any explicit justification for existence or shared authority to norm the church’s existence, such people, whom I will call “cultural sectarians,” suffer from at least two ecclesiastical dysfunctions. First, they have a convoluted relationship with other Christian communities, and second, they are beset by an inexplicable denominational self-hatred.

In the first instance, the cultural sectarian looks beyond the boundaries of the sect and envies what he sees. Like ancient Israel clamoring for a king like the other nations, the sectarian who freely disregards the theological architecture of his own community believes he can copy and paste from outside—after all, the theological particulars are not in themselves consequential when all that matters is the community itself. Why can’t our church, he wonders, also…? Yet precisely because of his sectarianism he has no meaningful knowledge of what actually occurs on the other side of the theological fence: when, for example, he rails against what he calls “biblical literalism” in his own denomination, he feels no obligation to look honestly at the ways churches (like mine) tend, in their efforts not to take the Bible literally, eventually not to take it seriously. The sectarian fails to recognize his own community as just another instantiation of “one of those,” subject to the same human habits and foibles. And because he refuses to believe that the dividing questions of theology actually matter, and that people have come to their beliefs honestly, the sectarian can only conclude that his co-religionists are stubborn, backwards, bigoted, and ignorant. If only, he fantasizes, our church could be itself, only with all new members—it would be just wonderful.

The inevitable result is ecclesiastical self-hatred and resentment. Because the sectarian is not sincerely interested in the world beyond his religious-cultural bubble, he cannot see that his fellows are only human, and that their problems are not unique. If they are biblical literalists, he is convinced, then there must be something uniquely wrong with them. If they have a history of being racist, then they ought to have a deconstructive reckoning with their doctrinal assumptions: it never occurs to him that their historic racism is simply a consequence of being American, that these people failed in the same way the rest of the surrounding culture failed. No, the sectarian holds them to an impossible standard—the standard of not disappointing him with their pitiful humanity. In reality, the cultural sectarian is embarrassed by his fellows, and he is ashamed of what is sometimes his own cowardly unwillingness to break with the community and find a more suitable spiritual home. So he tells himself that he won’t be pushed out of his own church, that it belongs to him as much as it belongs to anyone else, that the reason he sticks around is so that he can be an agent of positive change.

In the end, the cultural sectarian has no other choice: he must think of himself, not as a steward of something precious and infinitely greater than himself, but as a proprietor. He is not capable of understanding the thoughts and behaviors of those others who see themselves as stewards. His attitude is the logical outcome a self-justifying sectarianism: it is the exact opposite of the obligations that come with being called out of oneself in the baptismal spirit of ecumenism, which puts us in the humble position of servants and demands that we take the people around us seriously.

In my judgment, this culturally sectarian sensibility is an affliction for evangelicals, and I think it helps to explain how the allegedly former evangelical remains in fact deeply evangelical. For decades, evangelicalism equated itself with Christianity, suggesting that Catholics or liberal Protestants are not really Christian. That disposition towards other Christians ironically eroded their ability to define themselves theologically, and so evangelicalism grew into a culture that included people with a wide array of beliefs, all of whom implicitly believed that Christianity simply is evangelicalism—and it’s clear from the ways that former evangelicals talk that they still think of evangelicalism as the defining form of Christianity. Former evangelicals speak of “the church,” but they are not talking about mine or the Catholic Church; yet neither do they believe that conservative evangelical theology is defining for Christianity. Sometimes Episcopalians and Catholics complain about some of the former evangelicals who join their churches, that they remain evangelical in exactly this way: they are engaged in religious role play, not making contact with the formative spirit of their new tradition. They remain culturally evangelical. They are caught in an ironically sectarian web.

Evangelicalism’s detractors—both those who remain in the community and those who have moved on but still feel compelled to criticize it—attack it for failing to live up to its theological ideals and for being a culture masquerading as a theological movement. That being said, they are hoisted with their own petard: they attack evangelicalism for being a culture, but by their theological revisionism they show that their own chief interest is the culture. That is, they are not actually upset that the evangelical church is a culture instead of a pure theological movement; they just want it to be a different culture.

I was struck by this fact anew when I read a post on Substack by the historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez, which I discovered through Beth Allison Barr:

Upon reading this note, I fumbled my way through a confused and incredulous response, which thankfully no one was around to hear: “Is she… suggesting… wait. Wait. Surely. No? Is she…suggesting evangelicals reinvent the ecumenical movement?”

But, of course, that isn’t the suggestion, and that much is stated in plain language for all to see: “Rather than a ‘Gospel Coalition’ that excludes huge swaths of the church based on patriarchal preference, what Christians could use today is a ‘John 17 Coalition’…”

I’ll interpret to highlight the contradiction: “My ecumenism is better than your ecumenism. My unity is better than your unity.” In the end, this sort of statement can only ever mean: my sectarianism can perform the appearance of ecumenism better than your efforts at ecumenism because your efforts limit the participants to those who share faith convictions. Du Mez does not seem to take her theological opponents seriously: their exclusiveness does not arise from theological conviction, but “patriarchal preference.” She does not offer a more compelling theological vision according to mutually recognized theological norms, but a different cultural preference. Maybe, from the vantage of her own way about the faith, she just can’t see anything other than cultural preference. (Worth noting: she is evidently uninterested in ecumenism with Roman Catholics and the Orthodox, who are “patriarchal” in the way she criticizes, and whose churches are home to the vast majority of Christians past and present. Who’s being more truly ecumenical here?)

I understand well Du Mez’s point and positive intention. Fine. Yes, people ought to treat each other with greater respect. But I would ask: who doesn’t think that? Which of her serious conversation partners honestly doesn’t believe that? Her remark is not directed to her theological opponents as an invitation, but is a message to her sympathizers. The rhetoric makes that plain. She has engaged in a performative contradiction, ostentatiously bemoaning the way people on the other side of an issue don’t want to get along, thereby securing the moral high ground and concealing a transparently sectarian exercise, indicating she has no intention of taking up the very ecumenical work she claims to want.

People like Du Mez are not nobodies: they occupy positions of power and influence in a movement within evangelicalism. Those who care for the church will take note of this fact, and note also when they deploy sectarian rhetoric. 

It is a mistake to believe that sectarianism is always more theologically conservative, though it often is. Indeed, serious evangelicals would do well to remember that the ultimate expression of sectarianism is called heresy—“to choose”—and very often, the thing chosen is a break with the “conservative,” consensus view of the church.

To end where I started: one of the primary reasons I am an Episcopalian is because of my denomination’s commitment to ecumenism, and one way to describe all of my criticisms of this denomination is to say that I am against our failures to be truly ecumenical. Baptism demands more of us. The same holds for evangelicals: take yourselves, your baptism, and one another seriously. It won’t look like everyone getting along, but it is the only path to authentic Christian unity.

I find both trends quite disturbing, but I must confess that what stands out to me most is the absence of any truly compelling reason for Gen Z women or young African Americans to participate in the church’s life. In most of the commentary I have seen, the religious affiliation of these groups is seen either as an epiphenomenon—“Men benefit from social and political conservatism, and so they are gravitating towards Christianity”—or as an instrument for some other, higher purpose—“The decline of the Black Church decentralizes black political power.” What the church is actually for? Few seem to remember.

In the past, I have asked friends, ministry colleagues, and church people if they believed people outside of the church lacked anything vital. “Does the pagan need what the church is offering?” As you’d expect, answers varied and the more theologically progressive Christians were far less willing to say that people who didn’t believe in Jesus needed to.

Of course, Christians are not a different species than other humans. If one can say, “My Muslim neighbors are, without Jesus and his church, in a perfectly satisfactory relationship with God,” then one is necessarily also saying about oneself, “The role played by Jesus and his church in my relationship with God could be played by someone or something else: they are replaceable.”

In my head I can hear my more progressive friends objecting that, no, they could never let go of Jesus. But we’re not talking about their feelings of attachment to him, are we? Jesus and the church may be very dear to these people, he may hold immense sentimental value and may be the embodiment of their highest moral and spiritual ideals, but nevertheless, strictly speaking, the theological reasoning is unavoidable: if Jesus isn’t needed by everyone, he isn’t needed by anyone. He may be chosen and even cherished, but he is not indispensable.

The same logic applies to whole communities. Churches are not immune to the implicit belief in Jesus’ dispensability. In the last few years, there has been no shortage of political commentary—much of which I agree with—that has argued that Christianity is needed for Western civilization and its guiding principles to survive. Famously, the essay in which the writer and activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali spoke about her conversion—the authenticity of which I do not doubt —focused on the role that Christianity plays in Western civilization. But one should be clear-eyed about this matter. If the point of Christianity is the survival of the West, then Christianity may be treated as a useful fiction or a necessary evil alongside things like police forces and the military. The place of Jesus in such a Christianity is clear: he is a mascot, a long-dead victim of Roman imperialism and religious zealotry whom we invoke when we need a symbol, so that we may display him for all to see, pinned to the cross by our highest values and current political aspirations.

The outcome is not a secret. The churches that live as though Jesus is optional have been, despite their best verbal efforts, saying effectively and forcefully to their members and to the world that what the church uniquely has to offer is not needed, and that the church is here to serve those realities which already exist beyond the church’s baptismal boundaries.

In my own context, this dynamic takes the acute shape of church attempting to play the role of unasked-for chaplain to progressive cultural and political movements: for example, Episcopal churches regularly participate in local Pride parades, as though LBGTQ+ individuals are begging for our acceptance, as though they have searched and searched in vain for a church to welcome them in. My point here isn’t the merit or lack of merit of LGBTQ+ acceptance; more basically, it is the absurdity of gestures like performing acceptance to people who are gathered to announce that they have accepted themselves, so that the end result is a church offering to give people what they already have—covertly asking them to accept us, to keep our church alive and relevant, long past our expiration date.

It will not suffice to say that the ethic of unconditional acceptance originated in Christianity, even though I agree that it did. The church gave birth to a culture that successfully extracted from Christianity moral goods, leaving behind the metaphysical and “mythological” baggage that helped define these secularized Christian values: universal equality, universal rights, acceptance of minorities, religious liberty, concern for the weak, the marginal, and the oppressed, and a host of other genuinely good things.

A church that holds up secularized Christian values as the point of the Christian faith is not a church worth attending—let alone giving money to. So I have great sympathy for those who have stopped going to church or who haven’t bothered to try it. Theologically, I am one of those people who believes that every person needs Jesus—that a person lacks true life without him.  But the evidence is in: the people have stopped going, and at the risk of saying the obvious, they have concluded they don’t need to go. They’re not getting anything out of church that they don’t already have. Who can blame them for quitting?

I have become convinced that one of the primary challenges for Christians today is to come to terms with the overwhelming success of secularized Christianity. It is a great comfort to a Christian to say to himself or herself that secularized faith doesn’t actually work: it is how we tell ourselves that secularism will collapse under its own weight and that we’ll be here waiting when it happens, ready to welcome the world back into our arms. But of course, this is a fantasy about our own relevance. We are the secular culture’s ex-girlfriend, and telling ourselves that the new girlfriend isn’t pretty and that the culture will eventually see that it needs us is a pathetic expression of our need, not the world’s.

Conveniently, the Christian has little stake in the success of Christianity, what Karl Barth sometimes called the Christian religion. It may even be that the crisis we face in the widespread rejection of the Christian religion is a doorway into rediscovering what Jesus alone has to offer. Perhaps the wildly successful project of Western modernity is Jesus’ way of saying to his church that he does not need us to exercise his lordship of the world, and that it is him the world needs and not us. Perhaps we should celebrate that the world has received these goods from Christianity, and rejoice that we still have our greatest gift to give. Perhaps the best way for the church to be of service to the world and to Western society is to risk our own irrelevance by being about our own life and the message the Lord has given us. Perhaps!

In the ancient church, Christians did something similar with the Jews. Not content to say that, through Jesus, God was now bringing gentiles into fellowship with Jews to worship the God of Israel, gentile Christians began to say instead, “God has replaced the Jews with us, and we are now his people.” While our society is now almost fully post-Christian, this theological judgment—what is termed “supersessionism”—still operates in our progressive culture and, I believe, is powerfully at work in liberal Protestant churches like my own.

The result of this “aha!” moment about contemporary supersessionism is an essay I wrote, which is now available in the October 2024 edition of First Things. Below is an excerpt, followed by a link to read the whole thing.

Leftist attacks on Zionism, which in many quarters have devolved into overt anti-Semitism, seem strange alongside the left’s cultural agenda of diversity and inclusion. But perhaps the contradiction is only apparent.

Today’s constant celebrations of diversity are meant to obscure a drive for total ideological homogeneity. The new guardians of our culture hide their agenda, even from themselves, because they cannot admit that they are exercising power—for in the moral rules they’ve laid down, exercising power is synonymous with oppression. Their status therefore requires them to conceal their power, and their talk of diversity works as camouflage. The ideologically defeated have a place in the new order in principle (“all are welcome here”), but not in fact. And when they express frustration about this fact, the powerful accuse them of refusing to cede power, thus ensuring that those who have driven them out appear to have clean hands. By pretending that the old regime still holds power, and creating an environment of permanent protest against it, those in power make it impossible to acknowledge openly that there has been a regime change.

But the metaphor of regime change goes only so far in making sense of today’s dominant culture and, by extension, its religion. In its place, I suggest the theological concept of supersessionism.

In biblical religion, one of the animating paradoxes is the belief that YHWH, the God of Israel, is also the God of all creation and therefore the God of all people. The Lord’s election of Israel and identification of himself as the God of Israel is the way he exercises his rule over all nations. The history of God’s dealings with Israel does not render obsolete or meaningless the histories of other nations; rather, the history of God’s relationship with Israel is somehow mysteriously also the history of God’s dealings with the other nations. Israel is God’s chosen nation, and yet every other nation is, in Saint Paul’s words, “without excuse.”

People of faith have often experienced this paradox as an intolerable contradiction. The Bible recounts, for example, ancient Israel’s temptation to reduce YHWH to a tribal deity. For Christians, the temptation has been to treat God’s election of Israel and God’s reign over all nations as sequentially rather than paradoxically related: that God rules over Israel until he rules over all nations in and through the mission of the Church, which replaces Israel, and the Lord leaves Israel behind. In this view, the Church of the nations supersedes Israel, and there is no longer a place for Israel as God’s elect.

Ironically, the attempt to smooth out the biblical paradox just creates another intolerable contradiction. For by rejecting Israel, the supersessionist denies that God is the God of all people. God is permitted to be the God of all people, just as long as he is not the God of those people. In order to avoid facing this contradiction, the supersessionist blames Israel: They cling to their special status, refusing to be one of us. Of course they have a place here, were they only willing to let go of their claim to be God’s covenant people.

Click here to read the whole thing at First Things.

It’s easy not to think much of it, but that little word means something: it means letting culture have a say in what gets said about God. Worse than that: while “God,” to use the language of Paul Tillich—the theologian of culture—is that which concerns us ultimately, the Unconditioned, theology of culture is devoted to what is conditioned, i.e., culture. Theology of culture is about what theology says to culture, how theological ideas can shape or challenge or make sense of a culture. It claims to be theology, but culture is its point.

That is: theology of culture falls into a performative contradiction. In practice, it treats the culture as the ultimate concern, putting theology in the service of culture or politics. It inadvertently treats God as a means to a cultural end.

But the creation—including human cultures—exists for God’s pleasure. Our culture is a means of service to God. And the living God is never “for” anything: God has no purpose higher than himself to fulfill; his existence is not in the service of something else. A Christian theologian of culture has to contradict the performative contradiction. One must make theological sense of the culture, attempt to discern what the gospel says to the culture, and then repent of the inadvertent but inevitable idolatry.

It has long been my conviction that Christian churches in America have failed at that final step. As a non-evangelical and non-Catholic, I try not to comment too much on evangelicals and Catholics, but it’s hard not to point to the displays of Christian piety at the recent Republican National Convention as a practical example of what I’m talking about. Contrary to a lot of handwringing about Christian nationalism (which seems always to imply that Christians need to leave their moral convictions at home and that faith has no place in public debate), the real problem with Christian nationalism is that it wields Christianity as a means to a national end, and it neglects this final step of repenting for putting God in the service of the culture. The Christian nationalists are right that there’s no total separation of religion from the state; their mistake is to think that Jesus can be put in the service of America’s “greatness.” And make no mistake: liberal Protestant Christians are doing the exact same thing, only we don’t call it Christian nationalism because the agenda is morally progressive. The point: it’s not a conservative or progressive thing, nor a religious or secular thing. It’s a means and ends thing.

Theology of culture is doing its job when it reminds us that God is our true end and that the culture is therefore not our end.

Tillich contrasts “ultimate” concern with those concerns that are “conditional” and “preliminary”: things that matter only relatively, and only matter up to a point—they are confined to life prior to the “limin,” the threshold that stands between this life and the ultimate. I have my disagreements with Tillich, but he’s correct on this issue. Being a person with faith—in Tillich-ese, being “ultimately concerned”—is synonymous with freedom. “Freedom is nothing more than the possibility of  centered personal acts…. In this respect freedom and faith are identical,” he writes. But this is only true as long as what claims our unconditional concern is actually the Unconditional. If our ultimate concern is directed to what is preliminary, if we are unconditionally concerned about conditional things, we are not free.

And that is the paradox of the Christian situation in the culture. The greatest gift a Christian can give the culture is to live in relative freedom from the culture, to remind people that the culture is conditional and preliminary, that there are higher concerns. It doesn’t mean that preliminary concerns don’t matter; they just don’t matter absolutely.

I’ve been thinking about this, of course, in relation to American politics right now. Like everyone, I’m compulsively checking the news. It also seems I may have been mistaken in comparing Joe Biden’s stubbornness to the hardness of Pharaoh’s heart. Almost immediately after reading about his departure from the presidential race, I was filled with compassion for him: every last one of us is a victim of our own foolish pride, but awfully few of us have this story play out in front of the whole world, suffering not only self-betrayal but also public humiliation. His tragedy is everyone’s tragedy. He’s just one of us—a human. I pray for him, especially as he enters a dark and disorienting chapter of his life as a consequence of his decisions, that God will give him freedom from all of us, which is to say, the peace of faith.

I’m susceptible to the temptation to respond to the news cycle with theology: the temptation to treat the culture as an end. I’ve been thinking about that temptation a lot, and trying to resist it. What I’ve written here is, in that sense, mostly for me; a reminder not to put theology in the service of The Discourse. I believe God speaks to our world by the gospel of Jesus, and I wonder if one of the ways the Lord may speak to American culture today is in the form of faithful dispassion—perhaps even silence. What good, hard news is it Christians might deliver to the world: The culture isn’t an end. It is just another creature. You’re just creatures.

It is fashionable for Christians, anxious to distance themselves from any alleged conflict between faith and science or faith and reason, to say that biological evolution presents no theological or biblical interpretive problems. Historically, those Christians who have rejected evolution for theological reasons have identified the problem with evolution as death before sin—millions of years of millions of animals dying. They reasoned that because death is an evil that results from sin (as Saint Paul teaches), God would not create the good world by this process of randomness, mass extinction, relationships of predator and prey, and enormous waste. Too often, the rest of the Christians who do accept evolution end up handwaving about the difference between biological death and “spiritual death”—a distinction that may be useful in some contexts, but one that I think fails to answer this problem satisfactorily.

While I am not a creationist, I do think the creationists were wrong for the right reasons. The scientific evidence really does present important theological problems, and it’s chiefly the one that the creationists have identified.

(As I said, the creationists are wrong, and it’s not only for scientific reasons. God imposing death and disease onto the whole world to punish the disobedience of two individual humans is a high theological cost to pay for creationism. The creationist thinks that rejecting evolution keeps God’s hands clean of responsibility for “natural evil,” but I am pretty sure it intensifies that responsibility. As I wrote last week, the problem of evil has no theological or philosophical solution. And that means creationism gives up scientific knowledge, and it gains nothing in return theologically.)

The way I’d frame the problem is that evolution makes it nearly impossible to differentiate creation from fall; that is, the creationists were right that the Bible teaches that God intends to abolish as evils death, predation, and extinction—all those things that Christians have gathered under the label “fallenness.” But Saint Paul promises that “the last enemy to be destroyed is death” (1 Corinthians 15:26). If the condition of creation is already the condition of fallenness, then it’s more difficult to say that the creation is good. But if we say creation and fall are the same thing, we’ve veered into Gnostic heresy.

While clearly one can say, theologically and philosophically, that creation is good because existence is better than nonexistence, that doesn’t satisfactorily deal with the afflicted condition of the creation. And again, while the problem cannot be solved per se, there may be theological ways to describe how we live with the problem.

One that occurred to me this week relates to the second biblical creation account in Genesis 2. In this account, the Lord creates the man and the woman, who are later called Adam and Eve. First the Lord forms the man from the dust, and then determines that it is “not good that the man should be alone,” and so decides to make him a companion. But God does not immediately make the woman:

“So out of the ground the LORD God formed every animal of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. The man gave names to all cattle, and to the birds of the air, and to every animal of the field; but for the man there was not found a helper as his partner” (Gen. 2:19-20).

The parade of animals before Adam has a theatrical quality. The point is not zoology. The man is looking for his partner, and among the animals, none are suitable.

I suggest that we may read this text christologically. Saint Paul teaches that Adam is “a pattern of the one who was to come” (Romans 5:14). It is not just that there is a similitude or functional similarity between Adam and Christ, but that Adam is a “type” whose existence anticipates Christ.

If we read Genesis 2 as an allegory of what occurs with the Incarnation, we may say that the parade of animals before Adam is the succession of species before the creation of the human species, and that God the Son chooses that he will be made flesh and that he will have a bride. It is the human creature who is helpful as the Son’s partner. Like Adam with Eve, the Son’s partner comes to him from his sleep and from his wounded side: Christ wins his bride, the Church, through the sleep of death and through his broken body and blood poured from his own side―the Eucharist that makes the Church.

“So the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; then he took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the LORD God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man” (Gen. 2:21-22).

This may help us think of the goodness of creation in relation to the parade of species and their extinctions in at least two ways:

First, the creation is good because, as Robert Jenson put it, it is good for the Incarnation. The human race that the Lord chooses as his bride is the human race that has sinned, that suffers death and the conditions of death. And the Lord wins his bride by taking up these conditions himself and defeating them. Which is to say: the Lord chose the Incarnation, and chose his death and resurrection, when he chose this creation in which it’s hard to tell the difference between creation and fall.

Second, the man and woman whom God creates in Genesis are tasked with caring for the creation. Insofar as this is a “pattern” of what was to come, we may say all the more confidently that the Lord takes responsibility for the whole of created history and that in some way not yet known, all of that history will be redeemed. Saint Paul insists that “the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed” (Romans 8:18), and the prophesies of Isaiah and Revelation alike look forward to a whole creation restored, with animal creatures somehow involved. This promise seems inseparable from the fact of the Incarnation, which I would suggest is God’s purpose for creation from the beginning.

While I think this problem is a valid reason for atheism, I do not think it compels atheism.

What I told my friend, which I’d like to revise a little, is that atheism doesn’t resolve the problem of evil, but rather dissolves it. Since “evil” is a moral judgment, it presupposes an objective moral standard of goodness from which it deviates, and since an objective Good is what is meant (in part) by the word “God,” denying that God exists entails denying that evil exists. 

In other words, the problem of evil is a problem within faith, and not outside of it. For this reason, a person with a firm conviction that there’s something radically wrong with the world could just as easily reason that there really is a Good that validates our judgments against the present state of affairs. From within faith, the problem is agonizing, but it’s only in that agony that we are free to confront the reality that evil really is a problem.

I stand by all of that. So here’s my slight revision, offered in a particularly Christian key:

Those who believe in God must take up as a cross the problem of evil. Denial of the existence of God because of evil is finally a spiritual decision, a judgment that the seeming contradiction at the heart of faith, that God asks us to suffer a cross, is intolerable. Atheism because of evil is a way of saying that this particular cross is unbearable—and I think those of us who do believe must be honest about the fact that we are indeed carrying a cross, and among the things that can be said when one is crucified is, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

I don’t believe any theological or philosophical argument can resolve this problem for the believer. My reading of Saint Paul is that there will be an eschatological defeat of evil, and that its defeat will be so great that evil can’t be compared to it. I would also observe that this eschatological hope does not involve saying that evil wasn’t all that evil after all, since it all ended well; I believe God will bring good from evil, and central to that good is a judgment against all the evils we have suffered and inflicted.

On Sunday, I heard a truly poor sermon, but what struck me about it was that there was almost nothing in it that I disagreed with. It was a supply priest who was covering for the rector, and the sermon focused largely on the benefits of practicing gratitude, the discipline of staying mentally present and mindful, and appreciating the experience of today. As one who has found great benefit in mindfulness practices that resemble what you’d learn in yoga or certain kinds of Buddhism, I can attest personally that what the preacher said was true and, if put into practice, probably helpful.

A situation like this one illustrates an important and, in my view, under-discussed problem, which we might call the problem of Other Good Things.

I’ve spent the last several years trying (and usually failing) to persuade church people that we must handle with great caution these Other Good Things, because these Other Good Things have a tendency to displace the One Good Thing that ought to be indispensable in the church’s life. Saint Paul wrote that “Satan disguises himself as an angel of light” (2 Cor. 11:14), which is at least a very dramatic way of saying that those things that sabotage us spiritually are not generally overt evil, but Other Good Things that we want rather than the One Good Thing that God has entrusted to us.

When, for example, a preacher tells a congregation something that they could just as easily hear in one of the guided meditations from the Calm or Headspace apps rather than elaborating the gospel, what the preacher is conveying is that he or she believes that a mindfulness meditation practice is more helpful than the gospel. Whenever the church puts before its members and the world something other than the word of God, the church is admitting to having lost confidence in God’s word.

Other Good Things take many forms: emotional wellness or pop psychology, social ethics and social justice activism, moral lectures that usually amount to the injunction  to “be nice,” and so on.

I call these Other Good Things because these things really can be good, and in key instances the church really should concern itself with them. But key instances are an exception. The rule of the church’s life is communion with God—being addressed by God in his word, responding to God in prayer and praise, and union with God in the sacraments.

The job of the preacher is to provide to the church’s members that which only the church can provide, equipping those members for their own lay ministries out in the world—ministries that in all likelihood revolve around Other Good Things. When the preacher decides to offer some Other Good Thing in place of the gospel, the preacher is also deciding to deprive the people of the spiritual resources they need carry out their own baptismal promises.

What I wish—and I say this with some desperation—is that the church would only ordain clergy who clearly trust that the thing they are asked to preach really is good enough. And I wish that if clergy have lost confidence that the word of God is enough, that they find some way to admit to this fact and find secular employment outside the church. I would fully support using church funds to cover temporarily the salaries and benefits of clergy who have lost their faith and who need time and financial assistance in order to transition into secular employment. Paying clergy who have lost their faith not to preach is far cheaper and far more humane than having them stick around. If money is what keeps them from leaving, I say we provide whatever they need to figure out where they really belong. And to be clear, when a clergy person is preaching mindfulness rather than the gospel, that is a clergy person who has lost their faith. Especially as churches are dying because of such leadership, we can’t really afford to equivocate about something this obvious.

The Christian faith is that among our many and various needs, the one need above all others is to know God in Jesus, and preaching ought to reflect that faith. The word of God is not the only good thing, but the church is the only community whose purpose is to proclaim the word of God. And again, preaching ought to reflect that.

I was 23 years old when I first believed that one day I would die.

By accident, or maybe by Providence, I found a copy of Michel Houellebecq’s 1998 novel The Elementary Particles while wandering the fiction section of a local bookstore. Both its title and cover artwork—human skin—roused my curiosity. I knew as I reached the end of the first page that I was about to begin a new chapter of my life, my “Houellebecq phase,” having had many other authorial phases. I would soon learn that this man is both celebrated and reviled, regularly charged with racism, islamophobia, misogyny, and a handful of other vices.

In this harrowing and sexually obscene novel, I met two half-brothers, Bruno and Michel, with whom I reluctantly identified. They each in their own way exhibited every major symptom of life in Western society since the sexual revolution: individualism and social atomization, failed intimacy, involuntary celibacy, sex addiction, the commodification of human persons, and the quest for transhumanist technological interventions. Born into the limitations of their particular place and time, they were already victims of history by the time they saw that their experiences and attitudes were socially conditioned. They never stood a chance. As I reached the end of the book, I saw that I, too, had experiences, beliefs, and attitudes that were socially conditioned in ways I’d not yet understood. The story I thought I’d been living was not the real story at all. That was when I saw what lay at the end of my own story.

I mourned, but I didn’t fully understand what I had lost and what I was grieving. That summer I visited my parents in New Jersey, and they, unable to ignore my mysterious sorrow, pled with me to share what was wrong. Before I could stop myself, I was sobbing. All I could say was, “I’m going to die.”

My response confused them because, of course, my mortality was not news to me. But I had lost confidence in something that I was too ashamed to admit that I’d actually counted on: Advent hope, the uniquely Adventist hope that the Lord would return before my natural death. I felt silly. Who really believes that Jesus will appear in their lifetime? Well, apparently I did. And I wasn’t conscious of this hope until I’d lost it. The irony was overwhelming: I was grieving this loss of hope after I’d already broken with Adventism.

This late coming-of-age experience is what I remember when I hear Adventism’s future questioned. Adventists rightly celebrate that Seventh-day Adventism has successfully grown and taken root around the globe. And because the denomination can reasonably expect to make a positive impact on people’s lives for years to come, I wonder if those Adventists who ask about the future of the denomination have also had a disorienting experience like my own. I wonder if they have come to see Adventism’s situation in history differently enough to interpret its story anew—specifically, in a way that makes spiritual and theological sense of the delay of the Eschaton.

While Adventism was born out of a painful reminder that no one knows the day nor the hour of the Lord’s appearance, it nevertheless remains that Adventism is—dare I say the obvious?—an apocalyptic interpretation of the Christian faith, whose historical center of gravity is the Second Advent. An Adventism that wonders about its future is an Adventism that has already endured a second and more prolonged Great Disappointment.

Perhaps, like the first Great Disappointment, the promise of and for Adventism today lies after this second Great Disappointment—that God is evidently more patient than we’d like. Unsurprisingly, the promise of Adventism for the world and for Adventism in the years to come both have to do with its commitment to the Advent hope.

The Promise of Seventh-day Adventism

But first, I owe you a word about where I’m coming from. I left Adventism for the Episcopal Church, and my years in Anglicanism have taught me to appreciate Adventism more fully. Without being a theological relativist, I acknowledge that there is never an ecclesiastical ideal. Whenever we have choices, we always choose the problems we can tolerate. Even when there is a correct choice, that right choice will involve problems. My move to Anglicanism is no exception. The problems in both churches are real, many, undeniable, and irresolvable without God’s help.

The most significant problem I’ve observed in the Episcopal Church, which I am especially sensitive to because of my Adventist background, is the general inability of Episcopalians to differentiate themselves from the surrounding culture. A defining feature of liberal Protestantism is a porous boundary between itself and the society in which the church exists. At its best, liberalism instills in Christians the sensibility of the church’s responsibility for the world around it. The liberal church may think of itself as a collective court prophet, like a community of Nathans for the King Davids of its time, or as a sanctifying presence, as the Black church has been for the Black community in America.

But when liberal Protestantism is not at its best—and churches are rarely at their best—thinking of oneself as H. Richard Niebuhr’s “transformer of culture” easily becomes a self-deceptive avoidance of the fact that the church’s message is little more than an echo of the general culture’s ethical values with some added religious language. Liberal Protestantism has shown itself unable to maintain a clear church/world distinction. We’re well past the verdict and have moved onto sentencing; churches such as mine have given themselves the death penalty by communicating clearly, especially to children, that being a member is optional and demands little more than what The New York Times demands.

Why did the Episcopal Church, whose principal theological and liturgical document, The Book of Common Prayer—one of the most beautiful and robust articulations of the Christian faith that a church produced in the twentieth century and one of the same century’s most significant ecumenical achievements—betray itself so fatally?

While surely there are multiple causes, I suggest that one cause is closer to the root than the others. Like liberal society in general, liberal Protestants have been prone to replace the promise that one day God will establish his reign with the belief that human society can make moral progress, that by our good actions and smart policy we can “build” the kingdom of God. Observe: the shift from God’s activity to human activity is necessarily the shift from worship to works. And while I think it’s obvious that the church should do good works in the world, the worship of God remains its primary reason for existence.

But that orientation toward God demands the humility of waiting for God to act and of acknowledging the woeful limitations of what humanity can achieve. In turn, this humility and waiting make sense only if we believe that God will act, if we trust the promise that “he will come again to judge the living and the dead,” as the Apostle’s Creed says. Only a robust eschatological faith, which teaches that God will not simply meet me when I die, but personally will bring to completion this history that he alone has made, can sustain the church’s identity. Only an eschatological faith that God will judge can uphold the conviction to stand when the world says to kneel—and to suffer the furnace, because death is better than life if death means being in the company of the Son of God. This eschatological dimension of the Christian faith is precisely what my church has lost. But this dimension of the faith is what I received from Adventism.

Adventists, like all Christians, are prone to beating themselves up and feeling ashamed of the more peculiar habits of their community. Thoughtful Adventists often try to distance themselves from the hyper-apocalyptic wing of their church, and that’s understandable. But resisting the abuse of eschatology should never mean eliminating eschatology. The whole Christian faith stands or falls on the veracity of the promise that “he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ” (Phil. 1:6, RSV). Christianity without eschatology is merely an ethical system with religious language and the hope that we’ll tithe. When those of us within my denomination have tried to sell it to our children, they have rightly said—let the reader understand—“No thanks.”

One of the challenges, therefore, that Adventism will face in the years ahead (should the Lord tarry, as they used to say) is how to sustain and nurture this eschatological dimension of the faith without handing over the denomination to what Jurgen Moltmann called “apocalyptic arm-twisters,” that is, those who keep promising that the Eschaton will be in our lifetimes, that this pope is the antichrist, and so on. Adventism must grow up without losing hope.

If Adventists can speak plainly and credibly about the hope all people have because of the gospel’s promises, then Adventism has much to promise this world. Our world is desperate for hope, and it has never been easier to preach the gospel than it is today. The state of our culture has reminded everyone of the limitations of what humanity can achieve. All Adventists have to do is pick up where the brutal realism of experience has left off: “Yes, we have failed to save ourselves, but our labor is not in vain! Jesus lives, and he will bring perfection to our miserable efforts.”

The world, including both Christians and Christian churches outside Adventism, needs the courage that only God’s promise imparts.

The Promise for Adventism

Just as God began in us a good work that he will bring to completion, we have the hope that the God who made this world has not abandoned it and will bring to completion this whole creation. In other words, the eschatological promise of the gospel is not only for those of us who believe, but it is a promise for all. Adventists have historically understood the universality of the gospel with regard to individuals but have tended not to think about what the promise of the gospel means for entire communities.

When I was attempting to find my place in Adventism, one of the stumbling blocks for me was precisely this problem: that Adventism tended not to have much interest in other Christians. I suspect that the Adventist aversion to ecumenism has to do with the particulars of its inherited apocalyptic eschatology, seeing the prospect of unity with other Christians as a threat of compromise. But perhaps after a second Great Disappointment, plus coming to terms with the reality that God is continuing to exercise patience for this world, Adventists may revisit the question of their relationship with other churches.

I once wrote for the online edition of Spectrum Magazine that the besetting sin of Adventism is that it sees its own distinctiveness as an end for its own sake, rather than a consequence of its own faithfulness. I confess that I regret the tone I used in that piece years ago—after I’d left the denomination for the Episcopal Church—and made an uncharitable judgment of motives that are far beyond what I could possibly know. Yet, the fact remains that Adventism has isolated itself institutionally in practice, to its own detriment. The commitment to faithfulness and to a realistic eschatology that motivated Adventists to remain set apart ought to be the same commitment that empowers Adventists to take meaningful relationships, personally and institutionally, with other Christians. As a person who left Adventism on good terms and who hangs around Adventists and still pokes and prods at the church (as I am doing at this moment), I say plainly: an ongoing relationship with Adventism has made me a better Episcopalian and a better Christian. More forcefully: in my relationships with Adventist Christians, I feel the pain of our separation, which I experience as a judgment of God against the division of Christ’s church. I invite you to feel this pain with me, trusting that only in this place of pain can we discover all that God has to offer us.

Adventists should trust that they have something to offer other Christians. And by this I do not mean an unreflective confidence that other Christians, with enough time, will abandon their denominations and become Adventists—although I expect that some will. Rather, I mean that a relationship with Adventism can prove to be the thing that revitalizes dead and dying churches, and that being introduced anew to the gospel’s eschatology will transform people whose faith is anemic because of its absence. Likewise, meaningful contact with other Christians will clarify for Adventists who they are and what their church is about, helping them to get past internal wars and learn to master the difference between what is central and what is peripheral to a living faith. That is the promise of Adventism: that its own Advent hope can lead it into unknown places, where God surely will not disappoint.

When I was about ten years old, I was especially rude to my dad one day after he’d been nasty to me. I can’t remember what I said. What I can remember is that he—not a particularly religious man, while I was a particularly religious child—reminded me of the biblical commandment that I was to honor my parents. I was stunned. I told him that honor is earned and that I would honor him to the extent that he was honorable. He laughed. I had already developed a demythologized understanding of authority. As far as I was concerned, the whole idea was basically made up. I would try to imagine primitive man trying to organize the first society; some guy trying to convince his neighbors that he had the right to govern their lives. There was nothing in nature that put that man in charge; that guy was full of shit. As for democracy, it was just a convincing, large-scale game of make-believe.

Unlike my father, I grew into a religious man, and I thought I’d found in the church a community where authority was more than coercive force or make-believe—that even if nowhere else, at least here authority hinged on truth, on the allegation that there is a God and that he has authorized these people to say and do these things. I thought I’d found an authority that even I would respect and freely obey. And so I felt a little misunderstood a few years later when, undergoing psychological examination for ordination to the priesthood in the Episcopal Church, the psychologist noted that “Matthew has some issues with authority.” How I hated being called Matthew. Despite the note in the report, the Bishop of New Jersey sent me to seminary, where there were only a few rules, which, it turned out, I tended to disregard.

At the center of General Theological Seminary’s campus, an enclosed little paradise in the Chelsea neighborhood on the west side of Manhattan, is the Chapel of the Good Shepherd. Except for perhaps the arched, bronze double doors that are united under an engraving of Jesus finding the one lost sheep, the exterior is relatively simple—red brick, unornate buttresses. Within, however, this little chapel is transcendent. Designed in a collegiate, gothic style, the wooden choir stalls are divided by a stone floor aisle overlaid with tiles that spell out, in Latin, virtues leading to or perhaps from the altar: courage, justice, mercy, temperance, and so on. On one side of the nave is a small but intricately carved wooden pulpit, from which professors or students or visiting preachers made their own contributions to the chapel. Too often these sermons offered a dismaying note of contrast to all that this holy place represented; the proclaimed Word of God in perhaps the same way that Taco Bell is proclaimed Mexican food. And then there is the bell tower. Throughout each day, a seminarian rings the bells: calls to Morning and Evening Prayer, celebrations of the Eucharist, or Anglican hymnody in the afternoons. Someone walking by on 19th Street might not notice the chapel, but the neighborhood did experience the sound of the bells, which, in my judgment, was perhaps the last attempt of this institution to offer something to the world that the world didn’t possess already.

The seminary had posted signs forbidding anyone from climbing to the top of the bell tower—for insurance reasons, I assumed. But one night, restless to get out of our little apartment, I told my wife, Evie, I was going out for a walk. I could not have understood what compelled me to climb the tower. Scorn for the institution? My own need to act out?

The way to the top, formed by narrow steps and, eventually, even narrower ladders, was in fact unsafe. Each step felt less secure than the last. Would I fall? Would Evie find me dead? I considered that I’d eventually tell her about this adventure, and she’d be angry, but she’d probably be angrier if I died. Or became permanently disabled. I reached the top and climbed out onto the small roof that overlooked the seminary grounds and the neighborhood, perplexed that the tower was still standing and dreading the return trip to the ground. How much longer would this thing stay standing before bricks would begin to fall?

The deterioration of the tower was not simply entropy, nor just gravity and weather over the years. It was the bells. Each day, these bells rattled the very air and sent vibrations down layers of load-bearing bricks and cement, imperceptibly but no less effectively unsettling each one and loosening the bolts and screws that held in place the steps to the top. Left untended for enough time, and it would be the very praise to God that would ensure that not one stone is left upon another.

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The matter only seemed financial. Nor was the problem unique. Across the United States were thousands of churches whose attendance had steadily declined in the last several decades, and those few people who continued to show up most weeks were left responsible for the upkeep of old buildings, graveyards, parking lots, and grounds. These were communities that once had the capacity to buy property and to construct buildings.

Somewhere beyond where I could see was the church where I was serving half-time, St. Ann and the Holy Trinity, in Brooklyn Heights. Originally intended as the cathedral for the Episcopal Diocese of Long Island in 1847, this beautiful church, which is home to the first complete set of figural stained-glass windows made in the U.S., was built to host a few thousand people. When last I checked, average Sunday attendance was 55. I once wondered aloud to the rector, John, that it would be nice to see the church filled with worshipers, and wouldn’t it be wonderful if this became a place where people in the neighborhood could discover the Christian faith, and so on. He laughed off the quaint suggestion. “Those days are over.” Maybe he was right. The gates of hell might not prevail against the church, as Jesus assured his disciples, but that didn’t mean that it would flourish. Perhaps the church would just barely cross the finish line of history, gasping and wheezing. And what did it mean for me and the other few dozen seminarians to admit that we were preparing to give our lives to an institution that had lost all vitality?

One professor at the seminary would say, in a moment full of promise, that seminarians are the handful of people for whom this otherwise failing system has worked, which means that the things seminarians hold most dear about the church may be the very things that the church needs to let go of.

Most of my classmates were a peculiar ecclesiastical species; part revolutionary, part wounded bird. They were people who grew up in churches that didn’t work for them, who spoke of experiences of  “church trauma”—though by this language they never meant that they’d been sexually assaulted by clergy, but rather that the church’s teachings put them on the social margins or even outside the church’s boundaries. And rather than abandoning Christianity, my classmates decided to do something more courageous. They would fix the church. More than that: They would fix the Christian faith itself. They would revise and reinterpret and redraw its boundary lines, and those who formerly had been drawn out would be drawn back in. And as for those who had been inside the boundaries already, well… you get the idea.

My classmates failed to notice that they already occupied the center and not the margins, that, at least in our denomination, they represented institutional power and not an insurgency. They may have grown up as gay Catholics or sexually repressed Baptists, or they were women in denominations where women don’t preside, or they didn’t believe in the virginal conception of Jesus or in his bodily resurrection or that Jesus is really God Incarnate—and they found welcome in the Episcopal Church. All that this welcome required was ignoring or creatively reinterpreting the documents that mapped out the Episcopal Church’s own theological boundaries. Over time, this well-intended blurring of the boundaries made for a church that couldn’t make peace with its authoritative texts and the dead saints who authored them.

At the seminary, one result of this shift was that no one could say for sure what a priest was for. With a few exceptions, seminarians miscellaneously hoped to become a priest as: therapist, social worker, community organizer, social activist, property manager, executive officer, and life coach. They seemed unwilling or unable to imagine what it might mean to embody the priestly vocation on its own terms—the priest as priest. I found it utterly depressing. And yet I didn’t look at them and wonder why they were pursuing ordained ministry: with only one exception, I looked at my colleagues and could see what their bishops saw in them. They were called to ordained ministry. Or so I’d have said, even as I thought, looking down at their residences from the bell tower, that it really was no great mystery why our church was dying.

The vocational perplexity of those being ordained had a trickle-down effect. These were, after all, the ostensible experts. Churches, after decades spent under the care of such priests, had also become unsure of their reason for existence. Aren’t we just supposed to be kind? Loving, liberating, and life-giving? Affirming of our LGBTQ+ siblings?

In one sense, the seriousness with which a person takes their faith can be measured by the discomfort they are willing to endure for its sake: willingness to get a toddler fed and dressed to make it to church on time, to abstain from something during Lent, to make time to pray, to skip soccer practice on Sundays, to fight with the teenager about attending church, to give away a tenth of one’s income, to be known as a Christian among friends and neighbors, to suffer other people, to suffer scorn or persecution or even death. We’d already lost the competition with soccer practice. Team sports, our people reasoned, teach many of the same values as the church—and looking around at actually-existing Mainline Protestantism, it was hard to disagree. Plus, it’s not like you’d put church attendance on a college application. Well, maybe as volunteer experience.

///

Of course the seminary didn’t have the money to renovate the tower. Every ring of that bell hastened its demise, just as so many of the seminary’s graduates were hastening the decline of the church. However else one might explain the church’s decline, it was a story that couldn’t be told without putting the seminaries at the center. What was the right metaphor? Ground zero? Patient zero? The first domino to fall? Saint Paul wrote that Christ alone was the chief cornerstone of his church, the sole foundation upon which everything else was built; in that metaphor, seminaries represent some other core feature of the church’s spiritual architecture. A column—with a fracture.

The seminary had no shortage of people who believed that Christianity, and not just Christian people, was itself the problem to be fixed. Christianity was not a good and true faith that had been badly practiced and misunderstood, and which required reform to become itself more fully. No, Christianity was a centuries-long conspiracy to perpetuate patriarchy and sexual repression; the Apostle Paul needed a therapist; Jesus didn’t realize when he sent out the apostles as missionaries that they would create a church of colonizers and cultural imperialists.

But if historic Christianity’s commitment to male-female sex difference was the real source of misogyny, if the traditional family patterned around marriage and reproduction necessarily resulted in oppressive patriarchy, if the belief that Jesus is the true self-disclosure of God that all people ought to receive by faith necessarily led to colonialism, cultural destruction, and white western supremacy—if what the church has taught from the beginning was the mother of such a multitude of social evils, then it also followed that the church lacked the internal resources to recognize or contradict these evils. What the church needed to become a force for good in the world would have to come from elsewhere—feminism, queer theory, Marxism, postcolonialism, and so on.

It wasn’t, for example, that queer theory helped Christianity to discover something as yet unrecognized about itself that it already possessed—which is how Christianity had always related to other faiths and philosophies—but rather that certain elements of Christianity were tolerable to queer theory, and queer theology would make use of these parts. But didn’t that imply that queer theory was somehow better and truer than Christianity?

This approach went far beyond “liberal Christianity.” It was something else. These aspiring clergy were saying that Christianity was not allowed to be itself.

///

I understood that belief wasn’t a matter of choice, and that belonging isn’t a mere matter of belief. My colleagues at General could not easily have walked away. And in a church where inclusion had become a fetish, even to hint that there were people who didn’t like or believe what the church espoused and that perhaps, maybe, possibly they shouldn’t seek ordination and that the church shouldn’t ordain them—the very question was a cruelty. Only the meanest, most regressive fundamentalist would suggest that. And under the cover of such caricature, everything was permitted.

I looked down at the library on the east side of the campus, full of books that basically no one would read. The church, if it really was what it claimed to be—a community whose sole reason for existence was the salvation of the world—deserved better. Better than me, certainly, and better than my classmates.

///

From the tower, you could see the Highline Hotel—once seminary housing, sold to keep the seminary afloat financially. The Highline, a city park just beyond the hotel, also used to be something else—a rail line. The elevated walk stretched a little over a mile, beneath which were several art galleries, and at the bottom of the park was the Whitney Museum of American Art. That year, for its 2017 Biennial, the Whitney featured Dana Schutz’s painting Open Casket, which depicted the mangled face of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till, who was beaten to death by two white men for allegedly flirting with a white woman. His death helped to spark the civil rights movement, and the only problem with Open Casket was that Schutz, like the woman who accused Till in 1955, was white. The painting, as well as its maker and the museum that should have known better, was the object of outrage. There was an open letter demanding that the painting be removed and destroyed. There were opinion articles that denounced Schutz’s unasked-for empathy and her white woman’s tears. It was not her trauma to depict.

The absurdities of this outrage were too many to keep track of. But what troubled me, and I think many others, was the fact that there were other artists who joined in denouncing Schutz. If art was expression, were they saying that certain people don’t get to express certain things? They never said that the painting was ugly, or that it failed to meet the standards befitting that museum, or that the painting misrepresented the subject matter. Instead, it was that the painting de facto instrumentalized the murder because white eyes were not capable of seeing black suffering. And setting aside the sinister moral implications—a total rejection of empathy or solidarity—it meant vocational suicide. If Schutz did break a rule, it was a rule without limits: In the end, it would mean that artists could only have themselves as subjects, but because no one but the artist could understand the artist’s experience, artists would also have to be the only audience for their art. The principle driving the revolt against Schutz’s painting was one that wouldn’t tolerate the existence of art—any art.

Which is to say: Just down the street from the seminary was another institution dealing with the same question of whether it could choose to be itself, whether it would choose to have a future, whether it would endure the shouts of those within its ranks who insisted on death. Among artists, too, were those who would “fix” art, since art itself was the problem.

But then, it wasn’t just the church or the art world. Whatever “it” was, I began to see that it was everywhere. Politics, journalism, medicine, gay rights organizations, women’s rights organizations. Everywhere I looked, I felt like I was seeing an institution that had given up on itself. Historians and classicists were beginning to reject the idea of civilization and classics, speech was now harm, every question worth asking already had pre-approved answers, and even the hard sciences were playing along when they weren’t weaponizing or monetizing their research.

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In the story that theologians sometimes tell about the history of their place in the university, the modern scientific revolution unseated theology from its throne as queen of the sciences. In the medieval period, “science” was not synonymous with “empirical,” but was understood as knowledge. Theology was the “science” of God, the discipline that sought to understand what we may know about God, and theology was the highest science for the simple reason that God was the highest truth—Truth Itself. And if God is the one universal Truth, then every particular truth we could possibly discover will not only point to God, but also cohere harmoniously with what we know of God. The university, which had come out of the church’s monasteries, was the place where disparate truths would be studied and where they would come to discover how they fit together—hence the “university,” the place of the “whole truth.” Like the role of the pope in the Catholic Church, theology was to be the guarantor of the university’s identity as the place of the whole truth, the principle of unity among the academic disciplines.

What we have come to call the Copernican Revolution, which unseated the Ptolemaic model of the universe, was also the beginning of a revolution within the university. Within two centuries of Copernicus, theology was no longer queen of the sciences—and where it still clung onto its throne, it did so in name only. It would not take long for Enlightenment figures like Immanuel Kant to fence in religion “within the bounds of reason alone,” banishing God into the sphere of moral motivations or self-help. In place of theology, empirical science came to define the modern university, freed from the ecclesiastical authoritarianism and superstition of the past. Modern science would fix the university and unleash all of the potential of scientific research. The result was not only the fastest and most dramatic advances in empirical knowledge and applied science in human history, but also the reshaping of the university itself: increasingly, like the capitalist market, the university came intuitively to place higher value on newer, rather than older knowledge—not truth, exactly—and it became ever more important, therefore, for university faculty to publish, publish, publish. Liberal arts disciplines within the university that would have focused on their goal of realizing human potential and freedom, drawing on truths about the world and about human life, came to shape themselves around scientific research. They pulled back the curtain and thought they found that the human soul was nothing more than neurons firing. Where the university kept the humanities alive, it did so as an act of mercy with limited funding and unlimited indifference.

The only problem with the modern university was that human beings kept insisting on being human. The yearning for truth, and not just the knowledge of disparate facts, persisted. And while it was neither possible nor desirable for theology to reign again, it became clear that physics and chemistry and biology could not hold together the university as a university. The university became like Frankenstein’s monster, stitched together by budgets and administrators. Relativism was inevitable. Physics made it possible to destroy the world, but it couldn’t tell us whether or not we ought to. We could alter the chemicals in a person’s brain, but chemistry had nothing to say about what it meant to live a good life. Biology showed us that we are not so different from the other animals, but it was powerless to show us that we are not merely animals. God would not fill these gaps, but neither would they be left void.

Having pushed the old religion to the margins, the only real church left to a society that thought of itself as secular was the modern university. And while they weren’t up to the task, it was the philosophers and physicists of the university who had become this society’s real priests. As for the Christian church and its clergy: they largely accepted their new position, content to promote the faith as one does a rewarding hobby or club membership.

///

On the day I took my ordination exams, I ran into two of my classmates during a break. We had nine exams to take, and we’d just finished the ethics exam. They were smoking cigarettes and discussing what they’d written for their answers. We’d been instructed to articulate a theology of the good life in view of the declining quality of life in old age, and told not to give a pastoral care answer.

The first said, “I couldn’t answer the question without talking about pastoral care. I said people need community.”

The second agreed: “Me too. It’s also why I believe in assisted suicide. No one should be forced to suffer.”

And then the first again, “Absolutely.”

I didn’t say anything.

///

The theologian’s version of confirmation bias is that every problem is a theological problem. It was maybe too simple and too convenient, the story I’d been telling myself about the decay within the university that sent cracks through every segment of society. But then, what if it wasn’t? What if it wasn’t the whole story, but it was enough of it? That apart from a plausible confidence that there weren’t just facts, but truth, nothing could be permitted just to be itself, nothing could be left alone to its integrity? And if that was the case, then the crumbling all around me beyond the seminary walls originated here—in the church’s institutions, its seminaries, its members like me who couldn’t reconcile ourselves to authority.

The view from the tower was beautiful. The breeze was cool, and the city was somehow quiet. Below were my colleagues, some of them my friends, people whom I would soon call brother and sister priests. People who probably wouldn’t fail in ministry the ways I would. A few of them would probably be elected bishop one day. God help us. Evie was probably wondering where I was. It would be pointless to think of an excuse.

Hopefully no one saw me up here, I thought, climbing back down the ladder.

Moral conservatives, with whom I find myself agreeing quite a lot these days, might say we are seeing the mainstream feminist hoist by her own petard: the fight for women’s interests has contradicted its own goals by insisting that men and women are interchangeable. In the case of transgender politics, it’s hard to fight for women-only spaces if you won’t define “woman.” Fighting for the right not to be confined to a socially normative gender role is perfectly compatible with the need for women-only restrooms and homeless shelters and prisons—if that fight is waged by arguing for the dignity and freedom of women, not the meaninglessness of the entire sex category. So also with sexual activity: freedom for sex was also freedom from it, and since for most people sexual desire is aroused by sexual difference, it’s no surprise that feminized norms for men and masculinized norms for women have resulted in a decline in sexual activity all around.

Another approach is to say that our culture slid down a slippery slope. Having made an accommodation for one thing we desired, we were no longer able to avoid other things we hoped to avoid. If the primary purpose of sex is to reproduce, and the survival of our children requires us to establish, define, and maintain families through marriage (in whose bonds there is a secondary purpose for sex, mutual enjoyment), then causing a woman’s reproductive system to malfunction by messing with her hormones—i.e., introducing hormonal birth control—in order to unpair sex and reproduction means making pleasure the primary goal of sex and making reproduction secondary and optional. The outcome is the unpairing of sex and marriage, and the creation of a sexual marketplace where the physically attractive have more capital than the physically ugly, and where, because the goal of sex is freed from familial obligations that require selflessness, selfish sexual behavior dominates. So, of course, the result is involuntary celibacy for those without much sexual capital, a declining birth rate as children are seen as a costly and inconvenient lifestyle choice, and the acceptance of sterility for trans-identified individuals. The French novelist Michel Houellebecq was prophetic in this sense, that he saw in 1998 how the end of the sexual revolution was isolation and the related quest to overcome human biology. It seems like there is no connection between “I just want to have sex without impregnating my girlfriend” and “I think I’ll have my testicles removed by a doctor and identify as a eunuch,” and yet…here we are. 

Another way to talk about how we got here is a sort of Hegelian account of history. An idea takes hold, but the idea has internal contradictions, and so the outworking of the idea takes the form of a back and forth, a “dialectic.” A slightly different example is the idea that romantic love is the goal of marriage. The romantic account of marriage has the internal contradiction that romantic love is at odds with what marriage actually is—an unconditional commitment until your spouse dies—because  romance will wane or disappear for stretches of time, and the institution itself does not reliably promise to deliver on romantic yearnings. This contradiction leads its adherents to broaden the moral conditions of permissible divorce to include things like prolonged unhappiness; but then the widespread fact of divorce, and the reality that so many of those who are married are romantically unsatisfied, drives others to pursue romance or sex without the burden of marriage; but love that is free from structure creates emotional instability, and so long-term relationships form where people perhaps cohabit and try marriage-lite until the thrill is gone, or they become sexually active but do not commit, or remain isolated in fear…. And so on.

What these options fail to explain is why we tolerate this hell, or how it affects most of us. Lots of married couples with children use contraception. Lots of couples got together because of romance, and they’ve had long, meaningful marriages. There are lots of individuals for whom love, sex, marriage, and raising children have been just fine after the sexual revolution. 

What may help is an account of social cognition, both dissonant and consonant. 

You’ve probably heard the phrase “cognitive dissonance.” It’s when a person finds themselves holding two or more contradictory beliefs, or engaging in behavior that contradicts what they believe. Such a contradiction creates distress because the human mind tends towards cognitive consonance—towards harmony among our thoughts and behaviors. If we experience the distress of cognitive dissonance, we try to eliminate the distress and return to consonance. There are different ways to do eliminate distress: modifying our behaviors; changing our beliefs to agree with the one that is causing dissonance; rejecting the dissonance-causing belief or practice; or getting other people around us to play along so that we can more effectively suppress the feeling caused by the dissonance. A concrete example related to my last post: if you believe that biological sex determines gender, but you behave as though you affirm the reality of transgender identity, you will experience some degree of distress, and in response you may come around to believing in the reality of transgender identity or you may decide to change your behavior. 

Insofar as communities hold some beliefs in common, and I think it’s hard to deny that they do, it’s possible to apply (carefully) the same analysis of cognitive dissonance and consonance socially. Given that no society is in total agreement about anything, I think societies are always in a situation of dissonance, and that a society’s laws and norms represent one place where that dissonance is very visible.

To illustrate: As recently as Barack Obama’s presidency, many political progressives, like Obama, opposed same-sex marriage. But by that time, the idea of opposing same-sex marriage had already begun not to make sense to most people. The average person could not understand why it was even a question in the first place; the best that could be said was that religious people long ago were bigots and that we inherited their bigotry. The dissonance created by the sexual revolution, that our society believed both that marriage is an inherently procreative endeavor and that marriage and sex are romantic and that procreation is optional, needed to be resolved. 

The new understanding of sex does not require the notion of male-female sex difference: any two people enjoy each other and find romantic fulfillment in their relationship. The children born into the sexual revolution could not continue believing that sex was normatively procreative, and so we could not continue believing that marriage was normatively procreative either. To reject same-sex marriage and yet to affirm the need for child-free sex creates psychological distress. In other words, same-sex marriage alleviates the distress caused by a belief in the institution of marriage and the contradictory belief that people should be able to have sex with anyone without consequence. 

It is worth exploring the pressure points in our current cultural conversation. Where is the dissonance that will need to be resolved? Many people have correctly observed that allowing, for example, minors to receive so-called “gender-affirming care” entails rethinking what else minors can consent to. After all, if a child can choose not to go through puberty, why can’t that child have sex with an adult? The point isn’t that one necessarily leads to the other; rather, it is that believing children can consent to body-altering interventions about gender but not other sorts of decisions about their bodies is dissonant—and while we may be willing to live with this dissonance today, we shouldn’t be so stupid as to think our children will continue living with this dissonance thirty years from now.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing that the sexual revolution has taught us is that what is good for us is at odds with what we are physically. The claim that contraception is what freed women from the oppression of domestic life is, unavoidably, the claim that the greatest threat to a woman’s freedom and dignity is her own body, that getting her body to malfunction is what is required for the good life. The sexual revolution has made us drive a wedge between the Good and the True. After all, it’s true that your reproductive system is for—well, you guessed it—reproduction, but we’ve been convinced that it’s allegedly good for the reproductive system not to work. And that claim, that the life we want to live is one that requires us to overcome the givenness of our physical bodies, is a claim that encompasses the simple goal of not getting pregnant and the more unexpected outcome of sterilizing children.

The original dissonance, it seems, comes back to this basic and deeply theological question: Is this creation, including my body, good?

The way knowledge supposedly works is taking on an authoritative structure. All forms of identity politics are susceptible to this epistemology, and the one example that illustrates this epistemology most thoroughly and forcefully is transgenderism. 

According to the tenets of transgenderism, a person’s gender is known only to that person, which means once that person announces their identity other people should affirm it—no medical interventions required. The epistemological consequences are worth unpacking: Your sensory experience, which tells you that, for example, the person in front of you is a man, must be set aside as a reliable way for you to know the world. And now your knowledge of (at least this part of) reality depends on an authority (in this case, the “woman”). Moreover, the authority on which you must depend to understand the world is one that is absolute: this authority’s claims are not an appeal to an already-available truth that you simply failed to notice, but rather an appeal to their own inner experience, an experience to which you have no access and that you have no standing to challenge. In other words, it is an authority that understands its own power in zero-sum terms: the more power you have to determine what is true on your own, the less power this authoritative person has to make their own truth claims. For that reason, this authority requires you to submit; you cannot freely concur because you have no independent, immediate access to the truth. All that you can do is submit your intellect to receive as absolute truth what is otherwise unintelligible, by which I mean that you would never come to such a conclusion apart from submitting to this authority, and it is only sensible to you because the authority tells you that it is.

By collapsing a subjective experience into an identity, and by abolishing the conceptual difference between who a person is and what a person is, so that a person’s subjective experience is now the truth of what that person is—this conceptual move is captured in the trans-affirming slogan “believe people when they tell you who they are”—transgenderism has asserted an authoritarian epistemology. 

Logically prior to any authoritarian tactics that activists may use to discipline people into going along with social change (e.g., job loss, or being labeled as transphobic, as though trusting your own senses instead of what someone says to you means that you hate them), there is the authoritarian shape of the person-to-person relationship that this epistemology enforces.

Because politics is the deliberation and decision-making involved in determining common life, epistemological authoritarianism proposes effectively to disenfranchise those who must submit by confining their moral and political reasoning to “solidarity” with those who possess the special knowledge that gives authority. (“Believe what I tell you to believe. Now go vote accordingly.”) That is: every person who consents to describe themselves as “cisgender,” who participates in pronoun-sharing rituals, who uses the “preferred pronouns” of people whose gender identities aren’t empirically discernable, who recites the creed that “trans women are women”—these people are not exercising their political agency, but abdicating it and handing it over to the one who knows best. “Trans women are women” is the authoritarian political version of “Jesus take the wheel.”

While I think transgenderism exhibits this epistemology most thoroughly and with the farthest-reaching social consequences, this authoritarian structure of knowledge is not limited to the trans movement. It is present in every identity politics right now. 

Two quick points of clarification: I am not saying that society is free from moral obligation to trans people or women or racial minorities or the disabled, etc. I’m describing a particular posture that identity movements have been taking. Second, precisely by rejecting zero-sum epistemology, I am affirming epistemological humility. Of course, for example, I have no idea what pregnancy is like, but that doesn’t mean I’m disallowed from holding opinions about abortion. Each person and each group of people has insights and blindspots. Denying the absoluteness of someone’s point of view is threatening only to a fragile absolutist.

This epistemological absolutism of the DEI regime and the “experts say”-ideologue journalists is recognizably religious in nature. In the story that the modern sciences like to tell about the Copernican Revolution and the subsequent Enlightenment, religious authority is understood as authoritarian—as making claims that cannot be challenged, but only submitted to. Faith, so the criticism goes, makes knowledge into a passive activity: only reception, only submission, an act of the will instead of an act of the intellect, or, in the words of Mark Twain, “believing what you know ain’t so.” 

And indeed, many critics of “wokeism” and trans in particular have made just this point, that it expresses a religious fervor and a religious immunity to facts. Yet what is generally unacknowledged when this critique is made—and often enough, people correctly observe that wokeism is a child of a specifically Christian ethics—is that this religion-like ideology arose in a deeply secular environment. More to the point, this religion-like ideology has wielded incredible authority in the very institutions that have most notably broken with religious authority: the university, medicine, psychotherapy, law. 

The flip-side to epistemological authoritarianism is that scientism is failing. There’s no such thing as physics without metaphysics. The people who claimed they were just doing science were totally susceptible to metaphysical and epistemological demagoguery. 

Modern science reacted against the authoritarianism of the Catholic Church by insisting that truth claims must be tested and that truth is publicly available, not realizing that attempting a totally non-metaphysical  account of reality lays the groundwork for superstition. But the solution is not simply submission to ecclesiastical authority for scientific truth—and to be clear, no church wants that. 

In the Christian tradition, there is a double-commitment: the belief that total authority of the truth, and the belief that the human mind is ordered to the truth. We don’t decide what to believe with our wills, but rather truth takes hold of our intellects. The truth is not ours; we belong to the truth. All truth coheres because God, the author of truth, is one. These commitments make the Christian the real intellectual populist, unafraid of the radical authority of the truth. Christianity (at its best) trusts the intelligence and ability of everyday people to discern truth from falsity, right from wrong because Christians believe that the truth makes itself known.

A person does not need to be a Christian to be an intellectual populist. Intellectual populism is what makes science possible. But maybe this is a gift that Christianity can give once more to our decaying culture. I don’t know. One thing I do know is that the alternative to intellectual populism is the tyranny of “experts,” a situation where the cost of peace is the suppression of truth, and the abdication of basic human dignity to worship at the altar of identity.