Kathryn Paige Harden. Original Sin: On the Genetics of Vice, the Problem of Blame, and the Future of Forgiveness. Random House, 2026. $30.00. 320 pp.

Somewhere deep inside each of us is a germ. Well, not a germ exactly. It’s more like a piece of code that entwines itself into every cell of our bodies. This piece of code determines how we live in the world. It determines how we make choices, whether we harm others, and whether we feel guilt or remorse when we do. Though it does not specify exactly how we may harm others, it most definitely predicts whether we will. 

This code is genetic, not chosen. If you have it, your ability to freely choose to do good is severely limited—maybe rendered impossible. You cannot be called “free” if you have it, because what you choose is already determined by this tendency. Your will, you might say, is bound.

This account is not science fiction or religious. Instead, it is the main question that spurred Kathyrn Paige Harden to write her book Original Sin: On the Genetics of Vice, the Problem of Blame, and the Future of Forgiveness. Harden is a psychologist and behavioral geneticist who studies vice. She also studies twins. She is especially interested in those cases where twins, either one or both members of the sibling set, seem prone to vice. 

Harden is comfortable to define vice as simple “badness,” and it ranges in her work from addiction to more serious issues, like murder and violence. Her work has arisen from a gap in the psychological literature surrounding why it is that some people do bad things. Religious reasons for this question have long predominated. The concept of sin was the pat answer to this question for a long time. But Harden is part of a school of behavioral geneticists who noticed patterns in family trees that seemed to connect certain people within families to certain negative behaviors. Upon genetic screening, behavioral geneticists have been able to identify differences both in people’s genomes, as well as chemical differences in their DNA that affect how their genomes work (their epigenomes). “We are interested,” Harden writes, “in how people’s genes connect with their environments to affect their thoughts, feelings, and actions in the world”.

All of this genetic research helps Harden to answer an important theological question: “Does what we inherit physically from our ancestors undermine our agency, and limit our freedom to choose right from wrong, as Augustine argued?” Bad behavior, it turns out, can be genetically influenced. 

The questions that Harden has identified are some of the thorniest in Christian theology. When you add a layer of genetics, they get even juicer. If there is a “biological mechanism for badness,” is sin portioned out disproportionately? If some people have more of a predisposition toward vice, doesn’t “original sin” just reinforce inequity? Does confidence in someone’s moral responsibility shift if there is a biological determinant? And doesn’t the disproportionate parceling out of predisposition toward vice demand a lessening of blame toward those afflicted?

To our modern ears it seems that what is lucky cannot be moral and what is moral cannot be luck. But Harden’s thesis cuts against this assumption. Some of us, it seems, are damned even before birth.

Harden is correct that the question of inherited vice is a Christian one. But the doctrine of original sin does not map exactly onto the version of genetically inherited vice that she draws. For one, sin and vice are not identical concepts. Though this might seem pedantic, it matters quite a bit. Vice clearly refers to bad or immoral things that individuals do. Sin has a wider semantic range, referring to a knot in the will that makes a person unable to do the good they might desire. Instead of a simple choice (or predisposition) to do bad, a Christian doctrine of sin speaks about damage to the will. This damage precedes any possible action. 

There is a fine distinction I liked to teach my students when I talked about this; to cut it short, what the Christian doctrine of sin affirms is that the brokenness in the will means that humans after the fall are unable not to sin. Christian traditions differ on how exactly the will is healed through the work of grace. But fallen humanity, after the fall, is “bound to sin,” with the double meaning of that phrase intended.

For the Christian, the concept of sin also extends far beyond vice. It includes social systems and false beliefs like prejudice. The Fall even implicates our ability to know the good. Such an expansive view of sin does not affirm total badness, as you hear caricatured from time to time. Rather, it can be a way to affirm the way all of us are implicated in our proclivity towards evil. You can affirm such a view without affirming a mythic Fall, though that is probably a story for another day.

A Christian doctrine of sin affirms that are all in this together, with our knowledge and our wills bound and limited—and yet, together, also offered the possibility of grace. It is a beautiful vision that ought to prevent one sinner from looking down too much on another. The cure is shared, just as is the disease. I find the Christian doctrine of sin very conducive to forging a collective vision of humankind and our debt to each other.

Suffice it to say, Harden doesn’t share this vision. Harden often reflects on the teachings of the “Bible church” that she grew up in—teachings she has now left behind. This church taught her that “virtue” is transcending the animal nature and vice is giving into its demands. But what if the animal nature predicts virtue, and what if its demands cannot be resisted? She asks questions like “Christians teach that you need to modify the soul to avoid the vices of the body—but what if you can instead modify the body? Does this change our view of what sin is?”

She wants to reconstruct our views of sin so that guilt does not apply—because how can someone be guilty of what they did necessarily? She opens her book with a story of taking LSD and reflecting on how drugs themselves seem to impede or force certain actions. It’s clear that she is pressing hard against the tradition she has received.

Though she has stumbled exactly onto the Christian question, unfortunately, Harden hasn’t given enough credit to the Christian answer. We have long needed a book on the moral question of guilt and accountability, as genetics casts new light on human susceptibility to sin. To succeed, however, a book would need a much more nuanced understanding of the Christian doctrine of sin. The good news is that there is room, and a need, for such a book.

Ian Marcus Corbin. To Arrive Where We Started: Belonging in the Modern World. Yale University Press, 2026. $32.50. 200 pp.

There has been much public buzz of late about Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey, a story that has homecoming clearly at its center. The title of Ian Marcus Corbin’s new book, To Arrive Where We Started, would make a fitting subtitle for The Odyssey. But while Odysseus’ mission is to return home to his wife and son, to his island of Ithaka, Corbin’s book suggests that we are on an even grander journey—the “human quest to be at home in the world.”

Drawing from his own life and wider culture, Corbin argues that we are afflicted with a type of homelessness. Odysseus could find peace after returning to Ithaka (and killing the suitors), but even when we are in our homes and have material abundance, it all feels somehow “like an exile.” Corbin describes this spiritual and material crisis and some possible solutions, working through the themes of belonging, loneliness, alienation, at-home-ness. He puts much of the blame on the modern conception of the self with its distorted ideals and expectations. We may be changing the climate and spending too much time indoors, but our problem is cultural, not natural—"It is precisely our interpreted world that feels like less than a home.” 

Uneasiness in the world is not a new topic, but To Arrive Where We Started has an interesting approach. Corbin emphasizes “life as cognition and metabolism,” an idea that “is indebted to a school of thought that sees life as an autonomous process of autopoiesis, or self-making.” From single-celled organisms to us, we all need external input, and we all interpret as part of existence. Corbin believes humans need collective cognitive energy to reckon with our complex environment. Unfortunately, loneliness has become “a way of life.”

Loneliness and inadequate friendships weaken our ability to practice good judgment. The problem is, though, that “the cognitive energy required to confidently, consistently span the distance between concept and reality does not seem to be the kind of thing that individuals can generate for themselves.” Our poor “cognitive metabolism” also leads to an inability to craft a well-formed understanding of the world. This is a significant problem because “world-tending… is the cardinal human task, the way we make our way here and make our way toward at-home-ness.”

If our cultural Greek chorus is telling us anything these days, it is that our culture is unwell. To Arrive Where We Started contributes to that chorus, but it brings its own distinct voice with its focus on homecoming and belonging. Like many others, Corbin blames the Enlightenment and “Newtonian cosmic nihilism” for many of our ills. Our alienation from each other and the world around us is closely connected to our obsession with the autonomous individual and our belief that we can best be at home in the world through owning parts of it.

But, like Odysseus, Corbin believes that homecoming is possible. He emphasizes relationships with others and tending a world together, drawing heavily on Socratic dialogues and Aristotle’s thoughts on friendship and wisdom. Virtuous friendship helps us expand the self and blur our boundaries in healthy ways. Contemplation takes us further in our efforts to get away from an exclusively autonomous self. Through contemplation, we observe that the world around us—and our own inspiration—seems driven by “some mysterious subjectivity, some agent with awareness and intention.” For Corbin, this connects to Christian belief, but he gives examples to demonstrate that this conclusion can be drawn by others, too. Ultimately, we develop a sense of “at-home-ness” not from aligning our views well with other humans, but from aligning ourselves well with the wider universe (and its Creator). 

We need a “friendship with the whole.” Corbin writes:

It is here, in a world suffused with subjectivity, interaction, and reciprocity, where things are valued not only by humans, but in some sense by reality itself, that we can be called into creative participation in the world. We can be truly at home.”

This is not only possible, there are models we can use to develop practices for sustaining a home in this world. Corbin suggests that we can learn from “cultures of participation,” including the Lakota. We can also learn from the Romantics and works like Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. 

In The Odyssey, Telemachus is as uncomfortable in his home as we often are in this world, if not more. Telemachus’s tale emphasizes filial piety and the importance of his father’s presence in his ability to inhabit his home and, ultimately, his own manhood. Christians have long emphasized the need for a kind of filial piety in our loyalty to God. Without negating that, To Arrive Where We Started looks at home from a different angle, directing our attention to developing a sense of fraternity both with each other and with the world God created and inhabits. After all, God is not absent like Odysseus.

Corbin’s diagnosis of our ills is expected, but his cure is distinctive. Though he sees a problem with ownership, he does not focus primarily on economic distribution or redistribution. Rather than contrast consumerism and the common good, Corbin emphasizes seeing ourselves as participants in the world, not just in society. He writes that, in contemplation, “I cease to hunger because I see myself as a co-participant, brother to everything that is, lacker of nothing.” The final chapters of the book almost quietly echo the words of Clarence the angel in It’s a Wonderful Life: “Remember, no man is a failure who has friends.” In this case, we can have a sense of friendship with the world, fallen as it is. That can make us at home, however little land we own.

In most books about loneliness, we receive recommendations for restoring institutions and communities. Yet Corbin looks beyond church membership and bowling leagues, to virtuous friendship and primordial experiences. He worries less about our associations than what he perceives as our ultimate goal—to “truly belong in our reality.” The sense of belonging that Corbin recommends seems like the “oceanic feeling” Freud dismisses at the start of Civilization and Its Discontents. Freud believed that feeling was a remnant of the infantile experience and an infant’s inability to distinguish itself from its mother and the world. Corbin identifies that feeling as a remnant of an earlier way of relating to the world, one which we should pursue again. 

Corbin’s biggest claims may be some of the most contested aspects of the book. Is our primary problem a lack of belonging in our world? Some Christians believe we ought not to see this world as our home. Is world-tending our cardinal human task? Is life best explained through cognition and metabolism? Some historically-minded readers may question how well humans felt we belonged in the world in earlier times—after all, our ancient and premodern forebears sometimes saw the world as a very hostile, antagonistic place. Some others may find the book too religious, or insufficiently religious. Corbin does not disguise his Christian position, but he also includes examples of non-Christians coming to a sense of understanding about the intention behind the universe and the subjectivity that has shaped it and he supports many of his arguments with classical thinkers. 

Despite some disputable claims, much of Corbin’s analysis is appealing and plausible. To Arrive Where We Started relies on a helpful blend of classical thinkers, literature, and other cultures. Corbin’s description of the role of interpretation in shaping our experience of the world is compelling and takes into consideration the human condition, not just human nature. He gets beyond headlines and troubling statistics. We are not just lacking generic connections with others, but are missing virtuous friendships. And despite opposing the autonomous self, Corbin is not recommending some form of collectivism. He encourages “a robust sense of self and world.” He also believes that “we can be called into creative participation with the world.” 

To Arrive Where We Started joins a long line of works about belonging and homecoming. The homecoming in The Odyssey fulfills the hope of reunion, but it also involves slaughtering the suitors. To Arrive Where We Started suggests a more peaceful homecoming is possible, built on the belief that there are ways of living with others that get beyond the idea that we are always and only autonomous individuals striving in a dark and empty universe, capable of securing things for ourselves best (and perhaps only) through money and ownership. It is possible to achieve friendship with the whole, and in the process, take our part in a world that extends beyond us—a world “charged with the grandeur of God,” as Gerard Manley Hopkins would say.

The stories a culture chooses to tell — and how it chooses to tell them — are among the more reliable indexes of what a society actually believes about the world. Often the form of retelling says as much as the substance. To that end, this is not a review of Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey so much as a review of the moment in which it arrives — an attempt to ask why this story, why this filmmaker, and why now.

In 2004, Petersen made a film that gave America exactly what it wanted. Troy featured Brad Pitt, Eric Bana, and Orlando Bloom and grossed handsome profits — nearly $500m worldwide. Petersen delivered blood and beauty without even an echo of the transcendence which permeates the Iliad. Homer’s gods were reduced to stone figures cast down by men without consequence whilst Peter O’Toole grieved in the background. The Trojan War became devoid of myth and explicable in purely human terms: pride, lust, fortune, and fame. Divinity was an embarrassment the serious filmmaker had outgrown.

The irony is that Petersen was not a man ignorant of what myth requires. Two decades earlier, he had directed The NeverEnding Story, a film whose entire premise is the crisis of a world that stops believing in stories. “The Nothing” that threatens Fantasia is not a monster but an absence — the encroachment of a disenchanted world consuming its own imagination. Petersen understood this intimately. He made Troy anyway. That is not a contradiction so much as a confession: twenty years later, the disenchanted telling felt the more commercially responsible option, even philosophically sophisticated.

The gods in Homer’s Odyssey are present from the first lines — not as decoration or metaphor, but as actors in the drama, playing a direct role in whether a man will make it home. The human story is held, from the outset, inside a divine one. That is the story Christopher Nolan has chosen to tell now.

—

Nolan is a filmmaker who has most successfully held artistic seriousness and mass commercial appeal in tandem over the last quarter-century. His choices are not eccentric; they appeal to broad audiences while telling deep stories. When he turns to a foundational story of Western civilization and decides to make it strange rather than smooth, that decision is itself a cultural signal.

His own account of how he depicts the gap between worlds is insightful: “One of the things I needed to crack,” he told Empire, “was how to approach mythological elements in a sort of real-world way. The big breakthrough creatively in thinking about the gods was that everything that is now explained by science was once supernatural. Lightning, thunder, earthquakes, volcanoes… people are literally seeing gods everywhere.” Nolan is not explaining the gods away — he is asking what it felt like to inhabit a world in which they had not yet been explained away. He is saying that we have been so thoroughly conditioned to explanation that we have lost the capacity to feel what the ancients felt: a world in which the overwhelming is also the personal, in which nature does not merely cause but addresses. His method — the real ocean and a CGI-less set designed to achieve total immersion — is an attempt to return a modern audience to that felt experience. Whether it fully succeeds is a question the viewer will answer, but the plausibility of such a proposal is a key indicator to our societal appetites. 

Nolan has flirted with the transcendent in Inception and Tenet, coming to the edge with Interstellar, framing for his audiences a window to the cosmos only to ultimately reveal a mirror of human self-salvation. The immanent frame swallows the transcendence in the end. The Odyssey may be the furthest he has traveled in that direction — a story whose gods are not explained away, whose drama cannot be collapsed into mind-bending psychology. It is worth asking what might have changed in the twenty-two years between Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy and Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey. 

—

Charles Taylor published A Secular Age in 2007, three years after Troy premiered, and its central argument was not simply that the modern West had lost its belief in God. It was that the West had reconstructed itself so thoroughly around immanent explanations that transcendence had become a personal option rather than a shared horizon. The stories we told ourselves no longer required divine scaffolding. Taylor called this the “buffered self”: sealed from the possibility that anything outside it might make a genuine claim on it – or that there was even anything else to make a claim. The cosmos was now a system of causes and effects in which the experience of transcendence had to justify itself as subjective feeling rather than objective encounter. What Taylor raised, without quite resolving, was whether the frame could hold — whether the hunger it generated would eventually press against its own walls.

Marvel understood this appetite even if it couldn't fully satisfy it — growing bolder from a secular superhero like Iron Man to entire franchise voyages into Norse mythology. The gods are aliens. The magic is technology. But the hunger for something beyond the imminent kept pulling the stories further out.

The same pressure appears in quieter auditoriums. Mainline Protestant denominations — those that spent the latter half of the twentieth century making themselves culturally legible, trimming the strange and supernatural edges of Christian faith in pursuit of relevance — have been in freefall for decades. The Catholic story is different in its particulars but not in its logic. Adult baptisms and receptions into full communion rose sharply in recent years, and the converts themselves are consistent about what drew them: the unapologetic supernaturalism — the very liturgical strangeness that modern Catholics were once encouraged to grow past. Ross Douthat, whose recent Believe argues that religious experience is “much weirder and more destabilizing” than secular accounts predict and that the world is “much stranger than the secular imagination thinks,” would recognize the pattern: the societal hunger is not, apparently, for a faith that accommodates the buffered self. It is for one that presses against it — which is precisely what Kevin Vanhoozer’s Remythologizing Theology had argued theology itself needed to recover.

—

Vanhoozer’s theological project was to resist the long habit of modern theology — running from Feuerbach through Bultmann — of accepting the secular age’s terms for what religious language is and does. Bultmann’s celebrated demythologizing program made a generous offer to the modern reader: keep the existential kernel, discard the mythic shell. Vanhoozer’s counter is that the shell was the point.

It was, Vanhoozer argues, an error to say the strangeness of biblical discourse is the problem rather than the point. Remythologizing is not, in his phrase, a fall back into myth but a spring forward into metaphysics: a refusal to translate the irreducibly personal, dramatic texture of Scripture into something thinner and more philosophically manageable. The strangeness is not incidental. It is the form the truth takes.

Daniel Mendelsohn’s 2025 translation of the Odyssey made the same wager in classical scholarship that Vanhoozer made in theology — deliberately preserving what he called the poem’s archaic grandeur, refusing the smoothing impulse of mid-century translations like Robert Fitzgerald’s. The Washington Post had praised Fitzgerald’s 1961 edition for giving readers not “the sense of reading an ancient classic” but “a great and timeless narrative.” What passed for a compliment then now reads as an admission. Mendelsohn’s decision to maintain the distance — the Greek spellings, the heavy six-beat line, the refusal of the modernizing gesture — rests on the same conviction Vanhoozer brings to Scripture and Nolan brings to IMAX: the otherness is not an obstacle to the poem. It is the poem. 

That is not coincidence. It is pressure applied to the immanent frame.

—

It is too soon and too much to say we are witnessing a reversal or revolution in the repeal of secularism. The buffered self does not crack so easily. What can be said is that the pressure is visible, and that it is appearing at the center of culture rather than its margins. The hunger for a thicker world, a world in which the journey is more than miles and minutes and the homecoming is real. A century of demythologizing — in theology, in literature, in film — has not managed to replicate or remove the appeal of enchantment. 

What the secular age cannot supply, and what Nolan’s film will not provide, is the name of the one who speaks from the storm. The ancient world Homer inhabited was not simply a world of awe and immanent wonder. It was a world of address — where the storm had a name, where the journey was supervised by divine attention, where the drama was intelligible because it was held inside a greater story. 

God makes himself known largely through speech acts that seem strange and chiefly through the Word made flesh — Jesus Christ. The flat world built by a century of demythologizing is generating its own dissatisfaction — and the stories our culture is reaching for are changing in tone. Perhaps this signals a willingness to hear the foundational story not of Western civilization but of the world itself — the most enchanted story ever told, in which the winds obey, the sea yields, and death itself is undone. Nolan’s reintroduction of Odysseus’s world may help reawaken our inborn awareness of this enchanted cosmos.

The following excerpt from James M. Patterson and Thomas D. Howes, Why Postliberalism Failed, is published with permission from Acton Institute.

After taking conservatism by storm with his 2018 book Why Liberalism Failed, Patrick J. Deneen spent a November afternoon with what was then a surprising host and at a significant locale: Prime Minister of Hungary Viktor Orbán at the Carmelite Monastery in Budapest. There, Deneen spoke highly of Orbán’s postliberal family policies. As a press release has it, Deneen’s praise “underlin[ed] that the future belongs to local communities resting on national and family values, instead of liberalism which still continues to prevail in many places.” Four years later, upon the launch of his most recent book Regime Change, Deneen sat with then-Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio. Vance declared himself to be a “postliberal” like Deneen, and Deneen said of Vance, that he was a “a man of deep personal faith and integrity, a devoted family man, a generous friend, and a genuine patriot.” Postliberalism was not just mainstream but international in scope, forming a potential new basis for conservatism across America and Europe.

Over the past few years, the subject of postliberalism has gone from a small corner of Catholic conservative academics and journalists to a major force in the West. When we began our efforts to critique it, many of our colleagues warned us not to waste our time on a marginal, largely online debate. As it turns out, postliberalism is an important and rapidly growing area of scholarship and one with major implications for the future of conservatism at home and abroad. 

What is postliberalism? We answer in more details in a later chapter, but for now a brief definition is that postliberalism is the name for an authoritarian ideology dedicated to using state power to impose a reactionary Catholic vision of the Church, family, and labor. In this respect, we focus on one among three strains of postliberalism described by Julian Waller. The first comes primarily from conservative Protestants primarily from the United Kingdom like Adrian Pabst and John Milbank. According to Waller, their approach “engaged broader ideas about the needs of a healthy, re-enchanted society with thick community bonds and reduced social and cultural alienation” along with “general critiques of so-called neoliberal economic and social orders.” In sum, they are “Blue Labour” or “Red Tories.” 

Another “postliberalism” is a rebranding of what American conservatives have historically called, “the Old Right” or “Paleoconservatism” pioneered by Paul Gottfried and Patrick J. Buchanan. These postliberals argue, “that the classical tradition of liberalism, properly understood, died long ago with the advent of mass politics, universal suffrage, mass immigration, the welfare state, centralized managerial governance, internationalism, and the dissolution of the public-private distinction in law and custom.” Whereas the first group of postliberals focus on localism and communitarianism, these “paleoconservative” postliberals are decidedly nationalist in scope. They work to define the American people by ethnic terms to disqualify most immigrants and seek to use political power to insulate American business from foreign competition (such as with tariffs or domestic industrial subsidies). Today, those carrying the torch for this kind of postliberalism are Christopher Caldwell and Daniel J. McCarthy.

However, the focus of our book is on a third group of postliberals. Their postliberalism has its roots in “Catholic integralism” or “political Catholicism.” Waller defines it well when saying:

This new Catholic postliberal approach to political action asserts the necessary and inevitable connection between religion and politics, largely grounded in the Catholic tradition, and asserts a counter-framework that moves away from a strict secular reading of the idea of church-state separation in favor of greater integration and alignment between the two. It is characterized most importantly by an emphasis on the use of assertive government activity to pursue ideological goals, interest in economic protectionism to support community cohesion, reasserting the role of the natural law in jurisprudence and governance, and broad-based moral-cultural reaction against 21st-century progressive assumptions about the family, gender, sexual relations, procreation, secularism, in alignment with other social-conservative issue sets.

This version of Catholic postliberalism is something of a combination of the other two with a Catholic twist. On the one hand, Catholic postliberals offer a Christian critique of liberalism for what ideological alternative should come next; on the other hand, that successor ideology is not so much about localism or communitarian as it is about a powerful, centralized government imposing from the top down a theologically informed vision of the public good on all national subjects regardless of their faith. 

Postliberals portray themselves as “traditionalists,” in that they want to reverse a civilizational decline they see beginning at the Reformation. For postliberals, the Reformation was an exogenous shock, something that happened from the outside in, because the “sacral kingships” of the period were themselves the best regime. The Reformation spoiled this by introducing a division in the Church, and the division in the Church prompted the Wars of Religion that gave rise to secular states deciding religious matters on their own. These states discarded religion as anything other than a political tool; otherwise, religion was a private matter. Instead of prioritizing spiritual salvation, secular states focused on expanding material wealth, giving rise to capitalism in the economic sphere and liberalism in the political sphere. Because there can be no going back to the Middle Ages, postliberals aim to use existing “liberal” state institutions against liberal purposes, annihilating individual liberty, economic opportunity, and freedom of conscience to establish a postliberal order that is even better than the sacral kingship of yore.

Initial reactions to postliberalism were dismissive. After all, there is no way that Americans or anyone in Western Europe would vote for such an ideology, and yet here we are with postliberal politics achieving political success without the support of public majorities. The reason is that postliberals have engaged in a kind of an elite coup of political conservatism in America and abroad for the past decade, one enabled by the surprising inability of more established conservatives to meet new political realities with any sense of urgency or originality as well as the patronage of figures like Orbán. 

This book aims to explain three things: first, how postliberalism became an important ideology with international implications; second, how contemporary postliberalism has its roots in similar reactionary and clerical fascist movements of previous centuries; and third, that the ideology of postliberalism is entirely wrong in what its proponents argue in terms of politics, economics, and theology.

This is not the first book-length treatment of postliberalism, or its stricter iteration, Catholic integralism. Jerome Copulsky groups American Catholic postliberals with a minor American religious tradition opposing the American Constitution and the development of a mainstream liberalism into the twentieth century. He details how contemporary postliberals stand on the shoulders of earlier critics like L. Brent Bozell Jr. and those who wrote for a small but influential magazine, Triumph. Kevin Vallier offers a comprehensive critique of Catholic integralism, illustrating how the effort to impose a postliberal order would violate Catholic social teaching and undermine the very ends postliberals believe they are serving. Laura K. Field has examined postliberals as part of the emerging political coalition hoping to control the Republican Party during and after the presidency of Donald J. Trump.

While these are excellent contributions to the field, we hope to add some more philosophical, historical, and theological contexts for postliberalism that they are missing. Copulsky is certainly right to group postliberals as part of the American anti-Constitutional tradition rooted in a concern that the republican Constitutional frame lacks an overt service to the Christian religion. What is missing is how postliberals had to import their critiques from reactionary and clerical fascist theorists from Europe and Latin America to make their arguments. 

Vallier argues from an analytical philosophical frame, positing that the imposition of integralism requires political injustice to transition, govern, and resist opposition. What we show is that Vallier’s arguments are not just grounded in reason but in fact. Integralist and postliberal regimes have over a century-long history of political injustice of the highest order. These regimes run the gamut of right-wing authoritarianism from António de Oliveira Salazar’s Estado Novo in Portugal to the Nazi collaboration and genocide of Ante Pavelić’s Independent State of Croatia. Field is right to include the postliberals as part of the new Trump coalition, but to do so she spends less time with the errors postliberals make in nearly every position they take on policy, governance, and even religion. 

Our book is divided into three units. The first covers the history of contemporary postliberalism in America and the intellectual sources from which postliberals draw. There are two major traditions, the papalist and the reactionary. The papalist tradition is one that treats the Catholic Church as the spiritual authority over Christendom and, subsequently, an institution that possesses extensive political or “temporal” authority over governments. The reactionary tradition is the European and Latin American conservative opposition to the French Revolution and its effects. At its heart, the reactionary tradition depends on the “Judeo-Masonic” conspiracy theory to explain how liberalism became a powerful ideology and how its ultimate purpose is to annihilate Christian monarchies and ultimately the Catholic Church Herself. 

The second unit covers historical postliberal regimes that adopted the same two traditions as the basis for their rule. The two political inspirations for these regimes are Charles Maurras and Benito Mussolini. Maurras and his party Action Française illustrated to historical postliberals how to organize a monarchist party with the aim of overthrowing parliamentary government. Mussolini provided the template for how postliberals can govern by way of a dictatorship directing bureaucratic administration, the police, and the military to impose a postliberal order. These postliberal regimes surfaced during the “Interwar Years” between the end of the First World War and the end of the Second World War.

We group them into two categories. The first are right-wing authoritarian governments in which postliberals attempted to join a coalition of support but failed. These include Portugal, Brazil, Argentina, and Belgium. The second are clerical fascist governments explicitly grounded in postliberal politics. These include Vichy France, Austria, Spain, Slovakia, and Croatia. 

The third unit illustrates how contemporary postliberals draw from these same papalist and reactionary traditions and favorably refer to historical postliberal regimes from the Interwar Years. Contemporary postliberals make repeated reference to key papalist texts like Unam sanctam, Singulari Nos, and The Syllabus of Errors. They also draw inspiration and directly rely on reactionary political thinkers like the aforementioned Maurras, but also Joseph de Maistre, Louis Bonald, Louis Veuillot, ex-Cardinal Louis Billot, Carl Schmitt, and many others. Some contemporary postliberals, like Deneen, try to “structuralize” liberalism into a blind historical force rather than as an avatar of the “Judeo-Masonic” conspiracy, but they too often lapse in these efforts and refer sometimes even directly to notable advocates of this conspiracy theory, such as Bonald and Veuillot. We then explain how their account of politics is essentially no different from those of the historical postliberal regimes, all of which failed in their efforts to create anything except human misery.

Next, we explore the subject of Catholic integralism in theological terms by engaging the work of Thomas Pink and his efforts to read integralism into Dignitatis humanae. Specifically, Pink offers the interpretation that Dignitatis humanae is a change of policy for the Church to discard integralism but still regards the arrangement as ideal. We should note that the Church has progressed beyond a backward-looking ideal for restoring Christendom in favor of a better understanding of the place of the Church in a pluralistic, democratic world. Finally, we review the history of Catholic corporatism, the political economy both historical and contemporary postliberalism favor. The legacy of corporatism is that of grim failure to produce even basic necessities, let alone the well-managed economic order for the common good. The problem was not that corporatists economies were badly managed but that there is no way to manage them well at all.

Here is the bad news: postliberalism is nothing less than authoritarianism dressed up in Catholic vestments. Its history is one of religious scandal, poverty, starvation, religious persecution, genocide, and Nazi collaboration. The good news is that postliberalism has always failed. Unfortunately that failure has historically come at a tremendous human and spiritual cost. Not only have hundreds of thousands died under postliberal regimes, but in their aftermath were left empty churches, dwindling numbers of priests and religious, and the very spiritual ennui that postliberals dare to blame on liberalism. Indeed, the Deceiver himself could not have developed a weapon more onerous to the faith than postliberalism.

As a final note, this book is not a defense of liberalism. One of us is comfortable calling himself a Catholic liberal and the other prefers to think of himself as a Catholic republican (“Republican” here refers to an advocate of constitutional, representative government, not the American political party). Our purpose here is not to serve liberalism but the Catholic Church and Her mission to provide material relief to the suffering and spiritual salvation to all who choose it. We do not wish to see postliberal regimes come into being because we wish to see people live full lives both materially and spiritually, something we show that postliberalism cannot offer.

Glen Scrivener, a pastor and evangelist who serves in the UK, says "yes":

Scrivener's argument, which is worth hearing in full in his video, is that the defining aspect of the post-World War II settlement that has defined western life for 80 years is a certain universalizing impulse that tended to establish common cause by relativizing and minimizing differences between groups. Within the Christian church, the work of C. S. Lewis offered a relatively easy way to justify that intellectually through invoking the idea of "mere Christianity" as a kind of trans-ecclesial unifying concept.

So we had an era of "mere Christianity," Scrivener argues, in which the distinctive beliefs of specific church traditions were minimized or relativized. During that era, a great deal of the work done by Christians of all types was aimed at solving the problem of how to create an intellectual and cultural system that could ground our political life while credibly minimizing our theological differences. So for Rome we saw documents like Dignitatis Humanae promulgated by the Vatican. Amongst evangelicals, we saw the ascent of figures like Billy Graham. The hard edges that divide separate Christian churches were sanded away in the name of preserving a system founded on universalism.

Scrivener says that system is now dying. Younger people who have grown up without tradition or custom and often strapped to a screen for hours every day desire belonging, desire to enter into something that offers moral direction, identity, and a fixed way of life they don't have to generate for themselves. But the only way to have something like that is through particularity and even some hard edges. So, Scrivener argues, Mere Christianity is out. Orthodoxy is back. Rome is back. Distinct Protestant traditions are back. In short, denominationalism is back.

In one sense, I think he is obviously correct. Certainly, the number of people interested in Orthodox and Catholic apologetics online is quite high, although there is not a lot of broader sociological data (yet?) to suggest that this movement has translated into broader society. Likewise, as Scrivener himself notes, the fact that Gavin Ortlund set out to create YouTube videos defending Christianity now finds himself regularly drawn into Protestant apologetic work is notable.

That being said, I have two quibbles with Scrivener's argument, or perhaps an extension of his argument and a quibble. One point is actually quite adjacent to the direction Scrivener eventually goes and I imagine he would agree. The other is a point that he doesn't develop in the video but on which I'd be keen to hear his thoughts.

To Speak of "Mere Christianity" at all is to Speak as a Protestant.

First, the adjacent point: One of the ironies of the way C. S. Lewis has been received by American evangelicals is that Lewis himself was never really a "mere Christian" in the way Scrivener describes it in the video. Rather, Lewis was a rather ordinary lay person in the Church of England, as I argued in these pages 12 years ago. Indeed, if you read his work more closely or read a bit about him, you'll be struck by how deeply Anglican he really was. (Scrivener is fully aware of this, of course.)

The point of "mere Christianity" for Lewis was not to minimize ecclesial distinctives, but rather to help people make useful distinctions as they think about their relationship to faith. Yet, and Scrivener himself develops this point in his own way in the video, to even conceive of such a project as being legitimate is itself to be committed in some limited way to Protestantism. It is not really possible for a Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox Christian to separate belief in "mere Christianity" from membership in and submission to the ecclesial life of Rome or Constantinople. To imagine that there is a set of cardinal doctrines that transcends ecclesial divisions and unites all people as "Christian" is inherently to speak and think as a Protestant.

So in that sense the best way to read what Scrivener calls the era of "mere christianity" is probably to regard it as a period of deficient Protestantism in which people presupposed Protestant conceptions of the church without understanding that they were doing that. They mistook their implicitly Protestant commitments for a kind of broadly Christian and ecclesially indifferent set of commitments. That is never what Lewis was trying to do in his own work, but it is how his work was received by highly democratic and anti-institutional American readers.

Again, I think Scrivener and I agree here and I found his discussion of this point in the latter part of his video quite beautiful. But whereas Scrivener is making this point in an evangelistic register, I am trying to draw out the same idea from a more analytical perspective with an eye on movement dynamics.

The Danger of Factionalism

The second point is more challenging. On the one hand, Scrivener is obviously correct that interest in distinct ecclesial traditions and the differences that divide Orthodox from Catholic or Reformed from Lutheran are of greater interest to many today than they were 20 years ago. However, that does not mean it is correct to say, as he does several times, that "denominationalism" is back. Denominations are essentially administrative containers for groups of Christian congregations that are bound by the distinct practices of a particular ecclesial tradition. But they remain distinct from the tradition itself and, to my eyes, show little evidence of being "back." Rather, what we seem to have is growing theological factionalism existing alongside denominational decline.

Given recent trends, it is probable that we will continue to see a broad decline in associational life, including denominational life in churches. Virtually all the numerical growth in American Christianity over the past several decades is in non-denominational contexts. It is hard for me to see how that trend would be reversed. Protestant denominations aren't doing great either and Rome is in a pretty bad spot too, while American Orthodoxy is too small to be cultural or statistically significant in American public life. In other words, all the actual institutional vehicles that exist to help someone actually live as a thick Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox or Reformed or Lutheran or Baptist Christian are struggling significantly.

Yet Scrivener is correct to note the increased interest in the theological distinctives that separate one ecclesial tradition from another. The problem, at least so far, seems to be that even though many seem to feel an impulse to study theological traditions and distinctives more deeply in order to place themselves in a particular tradition, these people are still mostly relating to those traditions in consumeristic and highly online ways, which is why the interest in theological distinctives doesn't seem to be translating into actual growth in denominational membership so far. (The other possibility, of course, is that the interest in these theological debates is still a highly online problem and one that doesn't have much real world import yet.)

Given that, the likeliest outcome seems to be that our non-denominational churches will continue to grow, but their membership may shift. The de facto system we had is that our non-denominational churches tended to be full of people who were implicitly Protestant but didn't really know it. As a result, they were actually able to get on well with most people since they did not think they have strong and highly specific theological commitments.

If theological factionalism is back but denominationalism isn't, then what we are heading for is a church world that swaps out those types of members for new non-denominational members who are more exercised about theological distinctives and more inclined to fight about theological topics that divide, say, Baptists from Catholics or Calvinists from Orthodox.

If you are the media you consume or the information ecosystem you live in, then we may be headed for a scenario where pastors in non-denominational settings are being confronted by congregants who are, in terms of information intake, basically Catholic or Orthodox or Calvinist, and yet they remain as members in churches that are none of those things.

What should happen is that people with a sharper interest in these more defined and narrow theological traditions should move into denominations governed by those traditions. So far, however, that doesn't seem to be happening very much. And that likely means one of two things:

One possibility is that Scrivener and I are overstating the point about resurgent interest in theology and really the thing we're seeing is a largely online-only phenomenon and the non-terminally online are much more like the boomers in their relationship to Christian distinctives. There is some evidence to suggest this is true. It may be that the factionalism danger is a predominantly online thing that doesn't translate much into local churches. If Burge is correct and the majority of young churchgoers today don't know what "Protestantism" is, then that suggests the factionalism angle that so interests Scrivener and I is not as widespread as we think.

The second option is that there is an actually significant resurgent interest in narrower, more particular theological traditions. But so far that resurgent interest is not translating into growing denominationalism, but merely in more sectarian Christians who are still attending non-denominational churches. If that is correct, then it raises many questions about the future of non-denominationalism in the American church: Is it possible for independent churches to essentially place themselves within a theological tradition but not within a denominational vehicle that typically protests and promotes that tradition? And if it is, how do they do that in healthy and sustainable ways?

That being said, my fear is that the task of non-denominational pastors is about to get harder as they face more and more congregants with wildly different information diets and, therefore, wildly different relationships to the Bible and theology.

If my analysis is right, then it may well turn out that the best case scenario for us is that Scrivener and I are wrong and the borderless "mere Christianity" of Graham persists while the trends pointing toward greater factionalism remain confined to the internet. I do not think that is what will happen. But as outcomes go, it is probably preferable to the scenario I have described.

Cassandra Nelson. A Theology of Fiction. Wiseblood Books, 2024. $10.00. 116 pp. 

In the March/April 2015 issue of Books & Culture, Catholic essayist and poet Joseph Bottum proposed that the modern novel is a Protestant art form, particularly in how the form developed in the post-Reformation Anglophone world. The novel, as Bottum saw it, is “the device by which, more than any other, modernity tried to understand itself.” It is no accident that the history of the novel runs parallel to the development of the modern idea of the self.

It’s a fascinating proposition. Bottum contrasted the “clean, moral” nature of the quintessential Protestant novel to Catholic literature. The latter, as Dana Gioia’s essay on “The Catholic Writer Today” puts it, “is rarely pious. In ways that sometimes trouble or puzzle both Protestant and secular readers, Catholic writing tends to be comic, rowdy, rude, and even violent.”

But then what makes Catholic fiction Catholic? And do these terms have merit? Is there a small-c catholic vision of fiction that encompasses Jane Austen and J. C. Scharl, Kenneth Grahame and Graham Greene?

Cassandra Nelson’s A Theology of Fiction, a little-book version of her essay of the same name published in the April 2022 First Things, adds to the faith-and-fiction conversation by presenting the ideas of Sr. Mariella Gable, English teacher, editor, and critic, who also promoted the work of Flannery O’Connor. (Side note: More presses should follow Wiseblood’s example of publishing meaty little books; not every book needs to be 200-300 pages!)

It is significant that her book is published by Wiseblood Books, the indefatigable little press helmed by novelist Joshua Hren, who penned Contemplative Realism: A Theological-Aesthetical Manifesto, which could be read as an apologia for recovering a robust literature rescued from the blinkered metaphysics of the B.F. Skinners, and of those who have a paper-thin metaphysics that denies spiritual and sacramental reality. The manifesto’s signatures include those of poets and novelists who have been published by Wiseblood: Sally Thomas, Katy Carl, Glenn Arbery, and James Matthew Wilson. Wiseblood is a publishing house of recovered and translated classics (e.g., Dana Gioia’s translation of Seneca: Madness of Hercules and the double feature of novella and libretto of Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Woman Without a Shadow) as well as of contemporary fiction and poetry. It also sponsors a writer-in-residence as well as, through editor Joshua Hren’s leadership, cultivates promising new writers through the MFA program at the University of St. Thomas–Houston. All of this makes the publication of Nelson’s book appropriate. Both the Wiseblood team and Sr. Mariella have set themselves the task of not only cultivating but also advocating for great literature informed by a sacramental view of the world.

I intentionally did not use the term “Catholic literature” or even “Christian literature” above, since the question of how to apply such terms is itself part of the question Sr. Mariella tackles. And her answer is paradoxical.

First, she says that a piece must be a work of art. Slapdash pieces do not qualify as art, and thus hardly as Catholic art. But what counts as a Catholic novel (fiction being Sr. Mariella’s focus)? Disagreements on this question stem from “overemphasis on one part of a complex truth. To bring into focus the whole of truth about Catholic fiction,” she writes, “it is necessary to keep in mind three facts”:

Each one of the following statements is true; without a grasp of their coexistence, no satisfactory definition of Catholic fiction can be formulated.

1. Strictly speaking, Catholic fiction does not exist.
2. All the great literature in the world is Catholic fiction.
3. Fiction which artistically communicates through the use of Catholic symbols something of the spiritual and moral mystery of the human condition may properly be designated Catholic fiction. 

Why the paradox?

If Christianity is true, then it seems two things follow. First, our reality is one huge story of redemption; second, any art that we create that has any truth in it will reflect the metaphysics of redemption. So a Christian story, in one sense, would be redundant: we might as well simply say that it is a good story. To say that a story is great is to say that it is true and beautiful, and therefore good stuff indeed. All truth is God’s truth; all good art is God’s art.

This doesn’t mean at all that art created by non-Christians has no value. It remains true that goodness and truth partake of Truth Himself. To get at the truth of things through art in the world God made is to align oneself with God’s truth. To make bad art and to do bad metaphysics will always be un-Christian.

At the same time, sinners do make good and great art—and thank God! Or else we would be exceedingly poorly off, living constantly like castaways. But this doesn’t let the Christian artist off the hook. One could put it this way: Just as aiming at heaven, we will get earth “thrown in,” as Lewis says, if we aim at holiness, maybe we’ll make some good art along the way.

Perhaps this is how a Catholic sense can redeem the more austere Protestant form of the modern novel, if we accept the analyses of Joseph Bottum and others, while also taking up the modern psychological form, knowing that every good story is the story of a soul’s journey to God—and all the metaphysical and mystical richness that entails. Here Pilgrim’s Progress meets the Way of a Pilgrim.

Nelson mentions Caroline Gordon telling her mentee Flannery O’Connor of the “first principles” for “Catholic fiction writers,” which she can “name outright” to O’Connor but which she has “to approach cautiously with my secular pupils.” It comes to this:

There is only one plot. The Scheme of Redemption. All other plots, if they are any good, are splinters off this basic plot. There is only one author: The Holy Ghost. If He condescends to speak at times through a well-constructed detective story, which I think he does, he certainly will condescend to speak often through Flannery O'Connor. 

So then, Christian writers (and readers) are simply in on the joke. “Stories will save the world,” says Angelina Stanford of the House of Humane Letters and the Literary Life Podcast, echoing Gordon’s words. Every other story is a version or a splinter of that one story. Every story is a version of the drama of the soul’s salvation.

*

But what about other religions? Isn’t there also, say, Islamic art, as Paul Pastor points out in “Can Christians Write?” Also, isn’t “the essential quality of personal fatalism that is the core of Classical narratives” exclude such narratives from the domain of great art? Can Sophocles be Catholic?

Let’s take a small-c catholic view of things now. Sophocles may not be Catholic according to Sr. Mariella’s third axiom (at least not simply speaking), but is if we begin with axiom 2. The theology of a culture will certainly affect the kind of stories told, just as, Pastor points out, Islamic art is recognizable in its calligraphy and geometric patterns and conspicuous lack representation of humans. But also, even as the artist drawing from the Islamic tradition may be making marvelous calligraphy, he remains in a world in which Christ is the Logos. He can’t get away from it.

But then, what about those artists who do not wish to get away from the Logos? What assumptions does Christian art have? Paul Pastor summarizes these features of Christian and Catholic art that were earlier articulated by Dana Gioia:

• human struggle in a fallen world
• the sacramental sacredness of nature
• the redemptive quality of suffering
• a sense of continuity between the living and the dead

Pastor himself adds “the profound value of the individual person as the locus of the image of God” to the list and notes that “with minor caveats, these are true of all Christian writing, far beyond the Roman Catholic”: “It has a great regard for overlooked things and people and considers no subject to be too high or too low for the attention of the artist. One can find God in a potato by Van Gogh…. In this artistic tradition, as in our faith, nothing and no one sits below our sacred attention, for they are held (like even the smallest seed or sparrow) in the gaze and love of God. Nothing and no one are beyond redemption, for ‘all things’ will, in the end, be caught up in Christ.”

In Nelson’s analysis, the novel perhaps uniquely focuses on the journey of individual souls toward God, but even here there is room for all manner of complexity, for each soul is unique, irreducible. No path of redemption will be quite the same as another. One of Sr. Mariella’s students, the novelist Betty Wahl, proffered that the way the “artist fit[s] into the Church” is as a prophet. An artist, said Wahl, must aim “to see and to make others see.” Sr. Mariella herself tried to do her own work in helping others see by writing about fiction as well as teaching it: Nelson writes of Gable’s anthologies as well as criticism, in which work she explained how different kinds of fiction—not only stories with, say, clergy or monastic characters and stories by Flannery O’Connor and J.F. Powers, but also the fiction of Aldous Huxley and George Orwell—can be enlisted “to the cause of the Catholic Church.” Both Huxley and Orwell’s famous satires are razor-sharp in their vision of what happens when humans lose their freedom to an omnipotent state. That they do not offer any solution to their terrifying allegories, “Sister Mariella suggests, is tied to their lack of faith.” But such “negative fiction” can inspire the search (as Walker Percy called it): the search for meaning, for being found in the cosmos and not forever lost. And one’s own search will not be quite the same as another soul’s.

But also, no encounter between text and reader will be quite the same. Nelson offers that “the meaningful unit of a novel or story is each time that a specific person sits down to read it, usually alone, or that a specific group of people comes together to discuss the work.” The story is instantiated when the reader becomes present to the story, and vice versa; what is eternal in the work meets with the eternal soul that is encountering it. Just as a play does not truly live till it is performed; a story read, chewed on, communed, we might say, is truly alive.

Let us remember what Emily Dickinson wrote? “A word is dead, / When it is said / Some say. / I say it just /Begins to live / That day.”

*

Arguably, what is perhaps most needed in contemporary fiction, however, is a vision of goodness. Nelson notes that David Foster Wallace’s short story “Good People” is “the closest thing I have yet found to Sister Mariella’s vision for contemporary fiction.” The story “gives insight into what she called the psychology of goodness and into the kind of heroism needed for family life today.” And Nelson’s perusal of this story is one great gift of this little book: How do we both read well, but also how do we write? Can we write contemporary fiction that avoids easy truths and sentimentality, and that retrieves the realm of reality and realism from the cramped metaphysics of mainstream novels?

What Sr. Mariella and the Contemplative Realists offer is a pathway of writing fiction that is contemplative—meaning, a way of writing and seeing that demands that the writer be constantly challenging himself with Rilke’s dictum that “you must change your life.” In other words, the writer should strive to be a saint.

Hren cites St. Bonaventure, who says no one “arrives at contemplation except through penetrating meditation, holy living, and devout prayer.” In addition to the practical work of developing artistic skills—facility with the materials and skills and tricks of the trade of storytelling—we artists need to develop our souls, and this means recognizing, with St. Teresa of Avila (the Contemplative Realist’s patron saint, says Hren), that “God moves amidst the pots and pans.” Further:

We commit to the daily hard work required to train our souls to ascertain the action of Grace in and around the contests of the human spirit. 

This side of the beatific vision, the contemplative realist is content to do lowly tasks, sweeping the floor of a decrepit cave to make room for some roofless travelers afoot. Fed by the majestic poverty of the Word he will write another novel of the nameless nobody who happens to be made in the imago Dei, numbering the hairs of her head very carefully, surprised to find in her insignificance some of the deepest drama in the cosmos. 

The educational philosopher (and Anglican) Charlotte Mason also noted this truth in School Education. She cites Michelangelo, who wrote that “good Christians always make good and beautiful figures,” but a higher standard was needed for those who would “represent the adored image of our Lord”: “it is not enough that a master should be great and able. I maintain that he must also be a man of good morals and conduct, if possible a saint, in order that the Holy Ghost may give him inspiration.”

If possible a saint. This language would not be intelligible to the evangelical world I grew up in. Then, being a saint was simply to be a Christian. Now that I’ve leaned more deeply into Christian tradition—that great tradition that includes the greatest works of art in the world, as Paul Pastor points out—I see this language of “being a saint” as pointing to the goal shared by both Catholic and catholic Christians: to be a saint is to be in communion with God, for our souls to be so a part of Him that our will and heart are as one with His. It means to become Christ-like in our very depth. Is this not what every Christian longs for? Is not this journey the fulfillment of “the search”?

So while there seems to be a clear distinction between sacred art (art proper for liturgical use) and secular (that is, not necessarily for liturgical use) art, both must be good to be worthy. And perhaps we could say that part of the goodness of good stories is that they help us on the way to God.

As Angelina Stanford of The Literary Life podcast reminds her listeners: “Stories will save the world”—stories understood as an art form that aligns with metaphysical, and hence also theological, reality. Stanford echoes Sr. Mariella: There is only one story, that of Redemption. Every other story is a version or a splinter of that one story. This is why Frederick Buechner could describe the gospel as “tragedy, comedy, and fairy tale.” Every good story is a version of the drama of the soul’s salvation.

Medical Assistance in Dying is opposed by people of sound conscience for many reasons. Matthew Loftus capably distinguishes between allowing people to die and killing them. Jonathan von Maren notes its especially perilous potential for those who suffer with mental illness. The conference of Canadian Roman Catholic bishops have declared “euthanasia and assisted suicide (MAiD) have always been, and will always be, morally unacceptable because they are affronts to human dignity and violations of natural and divine law.”

An interesting, parallel development has been the searing criticism of Canadian MAiD laws in the pages of Jacobin, hardly a bastion of conservative theological ethics, denouncing on democratic socialist grounds the ways MAiD gives the vulnerable liquidation rather than care, and is being used to systematically euthanize the poor and disabled. 

But despite its diverse critics, MAiD now counts for 1 in 20 deaths in Canada, and since its legalization one decade ago, its toll surpasses the number of Canadian lives lost in World War II. 

Recently, the Anglican Church of Canada approved trial liturgies to be used before and during euthanasia. The introductory pages acknowledge that a variety of support and opposition is held about euthanasia in the denomination, and attempt to describe how heartbreaking and nuanced the circumstances often are surrounding it. 

The animating principle driving its authors is that the church must provide some kind of pastoral support to its people, including those who opt for medical assistance in dying. Because I am an Anglican priest who actively serves every week in pastoral care, I am far from indifferent to or unaware of the complexities of moral reasoning in times of unimaginable pain and dire circumstances. But precisely due to that awareness and experience, it is manifestly obvious to me that these liturgies are not only a catastrophic failure to provide pastoral care that is normed and enlivened by the word of God, but are also a grievous evil. They take the Lord’s name in vain, putting to diabolical use something holy and sacred.

In Fyodor Dostoevsky’s masterpiece The Idiot, Prince Myshkin recounts having nightmares after seeing a public execution by guillotine in nineteenth century Lyons. The valet he spoke with replied “it’s a good thing there’s not so much suffering… when the head flies off.” The prince then hotly responded with a harrowing and insightful reply:

Everybody makes the same observation as you, and this machine, the guillotine, was invented for that. But a thought occurred to me then: what if it’s even worse? To you it seems ridiculous, to you it seems wild, but with some imagination, even a thought like that can pop into your head. Think: if there’s torture, for instance, then there’s suffering, wounds, bodily pain, and it means that all that distracts you from inner torment, so that you only suffer from the wounds until you die. And yet the chief, the strongest pain may not be in the wounds, but in knowing for certain that in an hour, then in ten minutes, then in half a minute, then now, this second—your soul will fly out of your body and you’ll no longer be a man, and it’s for certain—the main thing is that it’s for certain. When you put your head under that knife and hear it come screeching down on you, that one quarter of a second is the most horrible of all.

In these trial liturgies, the certainty that horrified Prince Myshkin is adorned with the blessing of Christ in the liturgical commendation of an Anglican church. It is not terribly surprising that the church’s vocation in this instance has become so determined by meeting the felt-needs of its constituents, of supplying religious goods and services that the customers demand, that the church’s worship and witness has become theologically compromised. 

This is only one of many things downstream of mainline and progressive denominations becoming untethered from, and drifting away from, the authority of Holy Scripture and secondary confessional and historic liturgical norms for ecclesial life. As such, these trial liturgies in Canada are not so much a bellwether portending future problems to come, as a symptom downstream of the prior commitments that J. Gresham Machen so powerfully contrasted with orthodoxy in his powerful and prescient Christianity and Liberalism. The publication of these ghastly trial liturgies forces us to ask: is Christianity in general — and the Anglican pastoral and liturgical expression in particular — an authoritative account of truth and goodness to which we must assimilate ourselves, or a technique that people can use to establish their own sense of meaning derived from other sources?

Today, 103 years after Machen’s book, a range of criticisms have been offered of GAFCON’s call to reset the Global Anglican Communion. I can hardly respond to these wide-ranging criticisms here. But one especially misguided criticism has been aimed at the confidence placed in Scripture where the Abuja Affirmation claims that “The Bible is God’s Word written (Article XX). It was breathed out by him and written for us by faithful messengers. It carries God’s own authority and is its own interpreter – it is clear, sufficient and true for all times. God’s Word is the final authority in the church and in the life of discipleship.” These critics not only neglect how obviously integral Sola scriptura is to the history of the English Reformation and the theology of the historic Anglican formularies, but have also failed to recognize, as Kevin Vanhoozer puts it, that “Sola scriptura is not the answer to the question ‘How many sources should one use in doing theology?’ but instead is about the supremacy of Scripture over doctrinal norms,” namely, that Scripture alone is the norma normans non normata (‘the norming norm that is itself not normed’).

Similarly, one writer critiques the Abuja Affirmation for its confessionalism, for allegedly reducing the basis of the church’s unity to mere assent to propositional truths. Certainly there is more theologically and scripturally to the basis of the church’s unity than that, but arguably there is not less, evident in the authoritative role the Articles have played throughout Anglican history, even American Anglican history, contrary to popular myths. The 2008 Jerusalem Declaration is hardly an innovation; confessional clarity is charity, and guardrails make the highway a better place to drive. The church has long believed there are things worth clearly articulating in order to commend truth and safeguard against error, from the time of the ecumenical councils to the primary author of the classic Anglican Prayer Book and Articles of Religion putting his hand in the flames. 

We need a continuing witness to faithful, historic Anglican worship and witness whose liturgy and pastoral care is answerable ultimately to the word of God as its final judge and animating power. Paul’s epistle to of 1 Corinthians is particularly significant in this regard, that to tolerate or give approval to those who refuse clear calls to repent is to become “arrogant” (1 Cor 5:2), particularly because the church is expressly tasked not with judging the conduct of outsiders but indeed of summoning its own members to repent (1 Cor 5:12–13). If the animating power in the church’s sails is less the living voice of the word of God, but the shifting winds of human whims, especially in an institution committed to little more than institutional continuity detached from meaningful doctrinal guardrails, we will soon drift into the chaotic currents Yeats’ wrote about: “Turning and turning in the widening gyre/The falcon cannot hear the falconer;/Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;/Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”

As Carl Trueman notes in the closing chapters of his incisive The Desecration of Man, there is an extremely rich and deeply scriptural approach to theological anthropology in the historic burial rites of the classic edition of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, not least the 1662 edition. Those hallowed words solemnly and helpfully acknowledge that life is fragile, death is devastating, God is holy, we are sinners, but Christ is a merciful and comforting Redeemer who gives us hope of sharing in his death and resurrection. That theological anthropology has not only been eclipsed in the modern world’s turn away from traditional Christian funerals to secular ‘celebrations of life,’ but is now perverted in these trial liturgies for MAiD. 

One of the most beautiful liturgical moments I have had the privilege of participating in is at life’s end. In the ACNA’s 2019 Book of Common Prayer, immediately after anointing the dying with holy oil and praying a blessing upon them, a canticle is offered: the Nunc Dimittis, the song of Simeon from Luke 2:29–32. That setting is astonishing in its beauty and power; it has moved me to tears and nearly stunned silence every time I have had the privilege as a priest of leading that rite in those most holy of moments with a dying saint and their gathered loved ones, especially at the lines: “Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace: according to thy word.”  I often think about those moments every night during Evensong when the Nunc follows the last reading of Holy Scripture and I ask for God’s blessing to depart in peace to rest for the night, that awake we may watch with Christ, and asleep we may rest in peace. 

It is a distortion of this liturgical heritage to superimpose it upon medical assistance in dying; the pastoral care that is needed instead is something altogether different, something that resists a throwaway culture, something that defies rather than deifies the culture of death.

Daunting as it is to imagine, pastoral care in such circumstances might require calling profoundly troubled people at an existential brink to turn back, to change their minds — the root meaning of ‘repentance.’ Raising such a weighty and solemn word, ‘repentance,’ in this context could be horribly misunderstood, as though it were tone-deaf and detached or confrontational towards people who are profoundly suffering in already devastating circumstances.

But if the church’s shepherds are to love precisely such people, we need to be wary that what we conceive of as loving them is actually love and shepherding as it is determined by God through his saving action in Jesus Christ. Left to our own devices and whims as to what love demands or entails, pastoral care in this instance can become distorted into becoming a supportive and reassuring accomplice in a permanent mistake. 

If we are to invite someone in utterly dire straits to ‘choose life’ (Deut 30:19), to decide to continue living, and we help them somehow begin to imagine continuing their life in fellowship with Christ’s sufferings in hope of sharing in his resurrection—even amidst the deepest possible pain—perhaps such mind-changing pastoral care simply consists of being present. Maybe pastoral care could look like persisting in regularly sitting with people who are deeply suffering in a ministry of presence, active listening, prayer, the private ministry of the Word of God, and faithful administration of the sacraments for an unknown length of time—rather than giving not merely a passive approval but an officially pronounced, sacrament-like, holy oil-anointed blessing of the church upon an irreversible decision.

The day this essay was composed, June 24^th, notably is a red-letter feast day for Anglicans: the Nativity of St. John the Baptist. As St. Augustine noted, John declared about Christ that “He must increase, but I must decrease,” and accordingly the daylight lessens from this point onward in the year, while the light increases after the nativity of our Lord Jesus Christ at Christmas. The collect for today in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer reminds the church of its Advent-like vocation to testify to the coming of the Lord, particularly by summoning others to repent, even if that incurs suffering like that of John in his martyrdom. St. John did not serve as Herod’s personal chaplain for having Herodias, pastorally supporting Herod in his moral deliberation and invoking God’s blessing upon it. 

Instead, St. John called the monarch to repent, and he suffered martyrdom for it. All who personally appropriate this collect would do well to contemplate our similar vocation today, even as it might prove costly:

Almighty God, by whose providence thy servant John Baptist was wonderfully born, and sent to prepare the way of thy Son our Saviour, by preaching of repentance: Make us so to follow his doctrine and holy life, that we may truly repent according to his preaching; and after his example constantly speak the truth, boldly rebuke vice, and patiently suffer for the truth's sake; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Spencer Sunshine, Neo-Nazi Terrorism and Countercultural Fascism: The
Origins and Afterlife of James Mason's Siege (Routledge, New York,
2024), 453pp.

Spencer Sunshine's Neo-Nazi Terrorism and Countercultural Fascism: The
Origins and Afterlife of James Mason's Siege (Routledge, 2024)
describes how America's early Cold War neo-Nazi movement reacted and
adapted to the late 1960s American youth counterculture. The story is
told through the person of James Mason, a Boomer neo-Nazi heavily
influenced by Satanism, who, in 1966, at 14 years old, affiliated with
the youth wing of George Lincoln Rockwell's American Nazi Party (ANP).
Sunshine describes how Mason brought the 1960s counterculture into the
movement's strategy, tactics, and its branding. The book is also a
production and reception history of Mason's magnum opus, Siege, which
is a compilation of his 1970s-1980s neo-Nazi writings. Solicited and
edited by alternative publishers and musicians operating in neo-Nazi,
ethnoseparatist, and Satanist circles, Siege was initially released in
1993 and later retrieved and popularized in the mid-2010s through the
now-defunct online forum Iron March and by the neo-Nazi group Atomwaffen
Division.

Let's get some preliminaries out the way. Sunshine is an unabashed
leftist. His 2013 Ph.D. from City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate
Center was on the history of post-1960s anarchism in the United States,
and featured anarcho-primitivist John Zerzan and Bullshit Jobs's David
Graeber.^[1] Since 2014, Sunshine has written about facets of the
American right-wing for publications like The New Republic, the
Southern Poverty Law Center, and The Daily Beast --- the kind of
outlets that make many conservative Christian believers auto-roll their
eyes, say "Nope!," and slam their laptops shut. Even so, I'd caution the
skeptical and the wary to keep their tabs open a little longer. Years
ago, I assigned one of Sunshine's longer reports on Oregon's Patriot
movement to my Patrick Henry College undergraduates because Sunshine is
what I call a "digger" and he knows his subject matter in ways many do
not.^[2] And if you desire insights about the origins of the alternative
and dissident American right that existed before the "alt-right" and
dissident right we've all heard about over the last ten years,
Sunshine's book will be a key text for many years to come.

You likely didn't hear much about the American Nazi Party (ANP) in your
US history classes, but for almost five years in the 1960s, George
Rockwell and his party knew how to draw headlines. Established in the
late 1950s, the party didn't garner much public attention until 1962. It
was the ANP's Roy James who, that September, charged to the front of a
church in Birmingham, Alabama and repeatedly punched Martin Luther King,
Jr. at a Southern Christian Leadership Conference event.^[3]

Rockwell's ANP saw local battles over integration and fair housing as a
way to build its brand. For instance, throughout 1962 and 1963, as the
Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) held "Freedom Dweller" pickets,
sit-ins, and "dwell-ins" at newly-built, racially segregated housing
developments in the southern California cities of Torrance and
Carson/Dominguez Hills, the ANP's "Western Division" organized and led
counterprotests.^{[4], [5]} In 1966, Rockwell and his Chicago Division
had appropriated Stokely Carmichael's call for "black power," and had
rallied local "white power" to fight off housing integration in
Southwest Chicago. On August 5, the group attacked a march during which
King himself was struck by a rock. King commented afterwards that he
"[had never seen in Mississippi or Alabama] mobs as hostile and as
hate-filled as [he'd] seen in Chicago."^[6]

Sunshine's story really takes off with the assassination of Rockwell in
August 1967, just eight months after re-christening his own organization
as the National Socialist White People's Party (NSWPP). The name change
reflected Rockwell's desire to tone down the group's explicit Nazi
features, transforming it into a wider, "white power" umbrella
coalition. Indeed, Rockwell had already made efforts to construct a more
"Americanized" Nazism, one in which "Aryan" was replaced with "white,"
where adherents of the Christian Identity movement were made more
comfortable, and where Holocaust denialism had a more "central" role.
Rockwell had even tried to start a "front" --- the Fighting American
Nationalists (FAN) --- he hoped could attract more whites by minimizing
the ANP's "Nazi trappings."^[7]

Despite his best efforts at building some form of unified party system,
however, local chapter priorities, strategic and tactical disagreements,
and commonly held frustrations over the leadership style of Rockwell's
successor, Matthias Koehl, split the

the post-Rockwell party along geographic lines by the mid-seventies.
Koehl desperately tried to maintain authority over a rump NSWPP, but
Sunshine relates --- in startling detail --- how that remnant and other
NSWPP splinter groups in northern California, southern California,
Chicago, Virginia, New York/Buffalo, and parts of Ohio evolved,
competed, further divided, changed names, and tried to outbid one
another for personnel, recruits, funding, and market share through the
rest of the 1970s into the 1980s.

Enter the Ohio boy, James Mason, and his assessment of how the 1960s
counterculture impacted the neo-Nazi movement's recruiting, strategy and
tactics, and how, going forward, that counterculture could be
beneficially appropriated.

Mason well understood his era's "vibe shift": the youthful energy; a
new, outside-of-the-home political/advocacy role for women; "free love,"
sexual laxity, and public acceptance of pornography; an anti-law
enforcement bias ("anti-pigism"); and a replacement of the tired, mass
politics-as-usual with militant vanguardism, direct action, and
guerrilla warfare. Mason's writing highlighted the structures and
actions of violent leftist groups such as the Weather Underground,
Symbionese Liberation Army, May 19th Communist Organization, and the
Black Liberation Army. He argued how a "few" could accelerate a collapse
of the "Jew Capitalist system" through bombings, "expropriations,"
street battles, and murder/assassinations. And, like these leftist
groups, Mason believed the "few" included women in more operational
roles, which was very distinct from Rockwell's older, more "stag"
approach.

Unsurprisingly, Mason found his closest allies among the California
splinter groups; that is, from the post-Rockwell factions that were
operating well within the counterculture's ground zero. In the mid
1970s, Mason tried to construct his own above-ground, combined Klan-Nazi
umbrella organization using southern California's National Socialist
Liberation Front (NSLF) as a tandem, underground "armed wing" or
"liberation army." In fact, until the early 1980s, Mason would regularly
look to the NSLF as a seed group, even with that group's various
leadership changes and despite Mason having a short stint of cooperation
with the National Socialist White Workers' Party (NSWWP) in northern
California.

Keeping with the zeitgeist, Mason's own religious beliefs and personal
spirituality were also in flux. In the 1970s, he adhered to Christian
Identity, which Rockwell himself had believed compatible with Nazism. As
time went on, however, Mason transitioned away from his heterodox
Christianity into Nietzscheanism and atheism, decrying any forms of
Christianity as "weak" and "alien." By the 1980s, Mason thought one
could support Christian Identity, but at best, only as a utilitarian
"conveyor belt" into non-Christian racialism.

Mason's spiritual moves and his continued fascination with late 1960s
counterculture also led him to his most controversial stance --- the
assertion that Charles Manson and his followers ("The Family")
represented a tactical and spiritual model for the post-Rockwell
Neo-Nazi movement. In some of Mason's earlier musings on the use of
assassination as a tactic, he lauded Manson Family member Squeaky
Fromme's unsuccessful attempt on President Ford's life). Mason's
personal interactions with Manson Family members and his direct
communication with Manson himself only served to enhance his praise of
the jailed murderer.

The Family, to Mason, was akin to the Weather Underground. It was a
non-monogamous, sexually promiscuous, drug-friendly, countercultural
community of "free love" in which women had an active role in violent,
anti-system plans and operations. The 1969 Tate-LaBianca murders, he
argued, were a solid example of direct action and "redemptive violence,"
aimed at accelerating an American race war. The Family's rural outpost
was a place where, if needed, an intentional, white racial community
could sit out the coming societal apocalypse, engage in "mutual aid,"
and establish a new, white racialist, antisemitic polis as the
existing "system" was toppled. Moreover, Manson's "gnosticism," says
Sunshine, guided Mason's eventual move into what he [Mason] described
as "universal order," a "new kind of revolutionary National Socialist
consciousness," that transcended all boundaries between Christianity and
Satanism and identified world-historical "Christ figures" in Jesus,
Hitler, Rockwell, and Manson.

While his promotion of Manson and The Family severed many of Mason's
relationships to older neo-Nazis, it made him very attractive in the
mid-to-late 1980s to the Abraxas Circle, a coterie of
alternative/dissident book publishers and editors, Holocaust deniers,
industrial and deathrock musicians, Nazi skinheads, and, lastly, various
friends, relatives and associates of Anton LaVey, the head of the Church
of Satan.

Over five dense chapters, Sunshine recounts Mason's personal and
professional relationships with the Abraxas Circle, and, in particular,
how Mason's longevity in the American neo-Nazi movement and the access
he had to Charles Manson endeared him to four men within the Circle's
innermost ring (what Sunshine deems the 'Abraxas Clique'): Boyd Rice,
Adam Parfrey, Nikolas Schreck, and Michael Moynihan. Describing itself
as "a sort of Thule Society for the 90s," The Abraxas crowd and Mason
hit it off well, particularly in light of the group's focus on the
occult, fascism, natural inequality, dysgenics, and Social Darwinism.
Schreck, LaVey's son-in-law and one of the founders of the
goth/deathrock band Radio Werewolf, at one time described the group's
aim as introducing young men and women to "the western European
tradition" in order to provide them with a "firm alternative" to the
"dysgenic ocean of mud that has swept the [western] world."

Parfey, who was Schreck's publisher and was Abraxas' conduit to
numerous Holocaust deniers associated with the Institute for Historical
Review (IHR), told James Mason in early communications that they
believed Charles Manson was an "important figure [to save] the white
race from a dysgenic condition."^[8] Schreck, Rice, and Parfrey would
use Mason's stories, recollections, and arcana for The Manson File
(1988) and the related documentary,"Charles Manson Superstar." (1989).
Released by Parfrey's Amok Press (now known as Feral House), The Manson
File is one part of a book catalog that includes Joseph Goebbels' novel
Michael: Pages from a German Destiny, assorted LaVey volumes, and two
of Parfrey's own neo-Nazi anthologies (Apocalypse Culture I and
II).^[9]

Like many even today, Schreck and Parfrey played the "ironic aesthetics"
card when it comes to their brandishing of neo-Nazism. Sunshine
dismisses their attempts. Regardless of whether Schreck's Radio Werewolf
viewed the use of Nazi and Satanic symbols or references in ironic
terms, Sunshine argues the band had attracted real neo-Nazis by 1988
– the year the mainstream media declared as "the year of the Nazi
skinhead." Schreck's overt relationships and associations had also by
that time moved him well away from mere aesthetics. And Parfrey's Feral
House continued to publish works on Nazi occultism and insider
recollections of the Nazi skinhead music scene. In fact, Sunshine says,
Parfrey was much less reticent about his white racialism near the end of
his life. Parfrey died in 2018, and Feral House is releasing a
posthumous "Apocalypse Omnibus" later this summer.^[10]

It was, however, the fourth member of the Abraxas Clique, Michael
Moynihan, who would take on the greatest importance for James Mason's
continued popularity. Moynihan is the one who first pitched Mason with
the idea of compiling a "best of" anthology to get all of his neo-Nazi
materials from the 1970s and 1980s into a single volume. It took longer
than expected, but the Moynihan-edited, first edition of Siege came
out in April 1993. The volume was dedicated to Charles Manson, who Mason
called "the Son of Man." Throughout 1993 and into 1994 --- which was the
year Moynihan was made a Church of Satan high priest --- Mason's Siege
generated serious buzz across the neo-Nazi and black metal worlds. It
was advertised in music fanzines, in Black Flame, the Church of
Satan's regular newsletter, and was the subject of evangelical "shock
jock" Bob Larson's radio talk show. It also had a rare media breakout
moment when mentioned on an episode of the McLaughlin Group.

And then, suddenly, Mason and Siege all but disappeared.

In May 1995, Mason went to prison. While Siege had been making the
rounds, Mason, who was then living in Colorado, had taken up with the
15-year old daughter of a fellow neo-Nazi. Sunshine relates how Mason
had long been into pornography (including an interest in CSAM, or child
sexual abuse material), and it wasn't long before he was arrested,
released, and then re-arrested for CSAM-related crimes, contributing to
the delinquency of a minor, and for menacing the 15-year old's
subsequent boyfriend. Mason would be in and out of prison for the next
four years.

Once released, Mason continued to produce content and worked in retail
security. He had rediscovered a heterodox Christianity in prison. His
prison and post-prison writings are a cafeteria-style bonanza of
(ostensible) Christianity, antisemitism, white racialism, "ancient
aliens" (a la Chariot of the Gods), "alien DNA," and a divine
elevation of Hitler. Between 2001 and 2003, Mason worked with a
different set of alternative, white racialist publishers --- Greg
Johnson and Ryan Schuster --- to release the second edition of Siege
under the imprint Black Sun (now Counter Currents Publishing).^[11],
[12] Mason's initial publisher, Moynihan, on the other hand, moved to
editing new English language translations of Italian occultist
philosopher Julius Evola, French New Right thinker Alain de Benoist,
and, most recently with Arcana Europa Media, works by "Germanic
Revival," pagan, Odinist, and Asatru writers.^[13]

It was fairly quiet for Mason until Iron March and Atomwaffen Division
(AWD) retrieved and popularized Mason's counterculture-inflected
neo-Nazism for online-savvy Millennials and early Zoomers in the mid
2010s. Those interested in Siege's second reception period will want
to pay very close attention to Sunshine's opening chapter, the
concluding parts of his chapter on Nazi Satanism, and portions of
Chapter 17 ("From Prison to Revival"). Iron March released a third
edition of Siege in 2015, which caught the eye of the Atomwaffen
Division. According to Sunshine, Atomwaffen Division was enchanted by
the entire Mason package: the long-standing white racialism and
antisemitism, the turning-away from Rockwellian-era party building, his
loathing of run-of-the-mill conservative culture-warring, the
comfortability with California "drop-out" drug culture, the love for
Charles Manson and the Family, his connections to Satanism, and, most
importantly, his anti-system accelerationism and the call for direct
action and "cleansing" violence. It took very little time for Mason's
Siege to become Atomwaffen's "Bible" and for Mason to become the
group's guru. And it didn't take long for others to catch on. Sunshine
reports that by July 2017, Siege had approximately 16,000 downloads from
the Iron March forum.

And even more young men and women have "Siege-pilled." Mason's
anthology has been updated and re-released multiple times since its
third edition. As Sunshine attests, one can easily research Mason's
influence on Atomwaffen Division's domestic and international affiliates
or splinters --- groups like Feuerkrieg Division, Sonnenkrieg Division,
and AWD Russland. Or --- and I solemnly warn you, this part gets even
darker --- you can read through available news stories and legal
documents involving the Siege-inspired Order of the Nine Angles (O9A),
the National Socialist Order of the Nine Angles (NSO9A), Satanic Front,
MKY/No Lives Matter (NLM), and 764, the child predator online occult
network.^[14] None of this is Sunshine's leftist fever dream.

This book isn't a comfortable read. It isn't an easy read. But it is to
be respected. Sunshine is refreshingly unafraid to show his work. He
offers nine pages of dramatis personae, charts/graphics, a rundown of
the archives he used, a full periodical list of Mason's writings,
granular footnotes, and, for his final hundred pages, eleven full
appendices covering various individuals, groups, and concepts associated
with Mason. I heartily recommend it. Not only that, I strongly recommend
the Routledge series of which Sunshine's book is a part --- the
Routledge Studies in Fascism and the Far Right series. I own a number
of the now over 100-volume series.^[15] Together with Brill's free
online Fascism: Journal of Comparative Fascist Studies^[16] (which was
discontinued in 2025, but involves many of the same American and
European scholars), the Routledge series offers some of the best,
up-to-date work on interwar fascism, the interwar, Cold War, and
post-Cold War transnational right, and more granular assessments of far
right phenomena.

Sunshine's Neo-Nazi Terrorism and Countercultural Fascism clearly
establishes that the counterculture of the "long 1960s" is not merely
a left-wing or so-called "cultural Marxist" story, but that its
appropriation and its impact is also discerned on the political right.
Moreover, at a time in which neo-Nazi, white identitarian, and/or
European New Right outlets are finding their way into vendor tables at
conservative Christian conferences, it is high time for conservative
Christian believers to have a clear, historical perspective on this
entire ecosystem.

David Goodwin. Forging the American Mind: A Year-by-Year Guide for Classical Christian Education (Broadside Books, 2026). 

In 1996, as a new immigrant to America, I started my study of Latin at a North Carolina public school. Fifteen years later, as an adult with a PhD in Classics, I came to Christ, and my academic study of the ancient languages played an instrumental role in that conversion. Reading the Gospels in Greek moved me in ways for which I do not quite have words—this was reading that truly touched the soul. 

I have spent the years since then homeschooling my children, and the study of Latin and Greek has been an important part of the program I have adopted. But also, we have generally followed the precepts of what many now refer to as classical Christian education. The term is admittedly nebulous and overused—sort of like every grocery store of late jumping on board with the protein craze to cram protein into the most unlikely things—protein bread, protein cookies, protein pasta, or protein iced coffee. So it is that every private school now claims to be “classical,” simply because that is the buzz word for good education, and if you’re a good parent, obviously you want the best education you can get for your children, right? But what actually is classical Christian education, at its core? And what makes it so good?

These are questions that David Goodwin has thought much about of late, and his new book, Forging the American Mind provides answers, moving from the elementary grades through the end of high school. Goodwin’s own education, he admits, was spotty: “I was about thirty years old before I heard of classical education, and forty before I started my own trek to get one. The payoff is great. I went to state college and got all the way through without even reading a real classic work. I believe anyone can get a classical education if they want one.”

The book is heavy on the prescriptive—for each grouping of grades, Goodwin offers the essential learning outcomes and ideas that classical Christian education would offer for that age, including an essential reading list. In grades K-1, for instance, the key is “cultivating order and memory.” Kids learn how to behave in a particular setting, and they memorize vast quantities of information, because their young brains are naturally wired for this kind of learning. For example, my two older sons were enrolled in Classical Conversations, a classical Christian co-op, for many years. For each child, the early grades were a time of memorizing an astonishing amount of history facts, math facts, and much more. My oldest son skipped a grade in elementary school, because his memorization of math made multiplication and division “click” right away, so we ran out of one grade’s material in the middle of the year and figured we’d go on to another one. The same child later did have to repeat eighth grade, reminding us that children’s learning progression is not steadily linear, but there are developmental leaps and bounds involved.

For grades 2-4, Goodwin emphasizes “introducing history as God’s story” as well as perfecting literacy skills. Then in grades 5-6, students are beginning dialectic training while continuing to cultivate the imagination through the reading of good books. “We should read our children the stories that motivate them to love what God loves and hate what God hates,” he reflects. “This is as true of chemistry as it is of history. It’s as true of math as it’s true of the Bible. Everything has a story, and so everything must be told in a way that leads our kids to love what Christ loves, so they will desire what He desires, so they will live like He lived. Without stories, facts are meaningless.” This is a beautiful and holistic vision, harkening back to the integration of all fields of learning in the Medieval university under the reign of theology, the chief of all disciplines. 

While the early grades are the “grammar” stage of education—the building of key foundations—grades 7-12 are where serious learning can happen precisely because students have the building blocks in mind and can retrieve all of these facts they’ve been memorizing all along to put together a more sophisticated picture of the world. It really is fascinating to watch, for instance, a child who has read a novel set during a particular period make connections to the period in question and go on to discuss and analyze the text more deeply. Reading the Chronicles of Narnia, my eleven-year-old can talk about Britain during WWII, and C.S. Lewis’s public evangelism on the radio. His understanding of the historical place and time when Lewis wrote enhances his understanding of the novels, as does his knowledge of Lewis’s broader apologetic writing.

At all stages, Goodwin emphasizes surrounding students with things that are good, true, and beautiful—especially in the literature that they consume. Classical Christian education is rooted in the virtues, he reflects early in the book—“the look and feel of school” has to be built on the cardinal virtues, the faith virtues (also known as the heavenly virtues). These overlap with the fruits of the Holy Spirit, and the code of chivalry could also be useful to discuss with young children. Such foundation of the virtues and discipline is the essential sine-qua-non for learning is what sets the attitude towards learning in classical Christian school apart from public schools, whose students may never hear mention of the virtues, for instance. And that’s a pity. As writers from antiquity to a fairly recent period of modernity openly recognized, virtuous citizens are better for any state than ones who are not. Prioritizing an education in the virtues, therefore, is a political exercise of supreme importance for the wellbeing of any state. Classical Christian education today certainly aims to recover this mission—thus the emphasis in the book’s title on “the American Mind.” This education, in other words, is a key civilizational enterprise for our country’s future.

In making these arguments, Goodwin’s book is not innovative or earth-shattering. Rather, it is a thoughtful, straightforward, and readily usable reference tool for a parent who is new to classical Christian education and is looking for a clear philosophical explanation of what to do with students, when to do it (level-wise), and (most important) why. 

And yet, I opened the book with a feeling of unease. Yes, this is a book on classical Christian education—what it is, and why it is good for America. I found myself nodding along a lot as I read. But why does this book boast a foreword from Pete Hegseth, a man whose own life both before and after his entering the political sphere exemplifies none of the virtues that we hope our children will acquire from classical Christian education? Are there no better role models to invoke in this important task? 

Indeed, the present book is a sequel to Goodwin’s earlier collaboration with Hegseth—The Battle for the American Mind, which thoroughly criticized the present state of American public education. That criticism was well deserved, yet any talk of discipline and virtues and wisdom from Hegseth, a man utterly lacking in all of these areas, rings hollow and disingenuous. I understand that publishing is a business, and publishers need to sell books. But I also find it alarming that this seems to be the way to sell classical Christian education in America right now—by connecting it to individuals like Doug Wilson or Pete Hegseth, whose public witness is less than savory. With friends like these, who needs enemies?

America does need classical Christian education, but I hope that those who choose this educational method for their children do not overlook the importance of truly following the virtues that this education promises to instill in us no less than in our children. 

In R. J. Snell’s Acedia and Its Discontents, he compares the difference between living in the world of pre-modernism and the world of postmodernity.

The pre-modern person lived in an enchanted world where meaning was thought to reside in things themselves—the world was full, sometimes frighteningly full, of meaning. A bone fragment from a saint retained the sanctity and curative power of the saint…for things possessed their own meanings and powers and humans lived alongside those meanings rather than creating them…Things are quite different for the contemporary Western person occupying a disenchanted world where things mean only what we assign them.

…If one was irritated at the order of the cosmos in 1066, one was irritated, in a very real sense, at the ordering chosen by God; postmodern irritation is directed at nothing, just a coldly impersonal set of forces.

Much has been said about a cultural “vibe shift” away from cynical pessimism, about leaving the postmodern mood behind for something more aspirational. Metamodernism, what allegedly comes after postmodernism, is not a wholesale rejection of the irony and skepticism of postmodernism, but a decision to not make your home there, to dare to believe that there is something of meaning, beauty, and truth out there. Backrooms, A24’s latest box office gamble on a 20-year-old YouTuber-turned-director has paid off big time, mostly by rejecting this “vibe-shift.” The movie’s message is deeply postmodern.

The Loop of Trauma

The plot of the movie centers around two main characters set in the early 90s: a despairing middle-aged alcoholic, Clark, and his therapist, Mary. Both bring a long train of trauma with them. Clark’s dreams were set aside to help his wife pursue law school. Instead of becoming an architect, he runs a failing cheap furniture store to make ends meet.

But his drinking has pushed his wife away and so we meet Clark cocooned in despair and resentment, pursuing therapy but obviously not making much progress. He is trapped, Mary reminds him, in a “loop of trauma.” Bad things happened to him which lead him to spiral inward, rehashing the injustices of his past rather than forgiving and moving on.

Mary, his therapist, reminds Clark he must escape this loop. Yet, she seems to be caught in her own. She pensively hides behind a mask, as if the real Mary is a thousand miles away. Her mind ruminates on her childhood when her mentally ill mother kept her trapped in her home.

At one point, we see Mary as a child furtively attempting to crack open a papered-over window, only to have her mother rush at her in a maddened fury. Her home is a cacophony of debris littered hither and thither. The door is barricaded with a pile of furniture. Why, the mother asks, why would you do that Mary? We can’t go outside, it isn’t safe. Mary, not unlike Clark, is trapped. Even as an adult, her mind constantly is tugged backwards, stuck in the loop of her childhood trauma. Her book is aptly titled: Now You Can Open the Window Within.

Parsons is tapping into the existential dilemma that defines his generation. The stories of pre-modernity revolved around man at war with dragons, monsters, or gods. The stories of modernity wrestled with man at war with ideas, the state, the market. The stories of postmodernity spiral inward: man is at war with himself, at war with meaning–that is to say, at war with realizing that there is no meaning beyond the agony of self-discovery, self-expression, and therapeutic self-salvation.

Deconstruction

In the basement of Clark’s furniture store, he finds a mysterious portal to an alternate dimension that is somehow both infinite yet parasitically dependent on the real world. These sprawling labyrinths of rooms seem to be copied on snippets of our world, but done with an amateur’s hand, “Like you were describing a dog to someone who had never seen one,” Clark explains, “and then asked them to draw it.”

The rooms appear to be man made, feel familiar, but are “off” enough that one feels unsettled just staring at them. Doorways are too small, off-center, or in the floor. Angles run incongruously. Sloped floors lead inexplicably nowhere. Piles of furniture, or signs emerge halfway out of a wall. It is like someone digested our world and then puked a simulacrum of it back out. Or, perhaps more apropos for us (and what I think Parsons intends to evoke), it is like you asked AI to generate an infinite corridor of rooms similar to our own and it hallucinated a number of misshapen, inhuman elements.

The chaotic amalgamation of signs, rooms, doors, and other detritus push you into an uncanny valley. It is similar enough to reality that the dissimilarity and crookedness of it all feels unbearable. Who made these rooms? What is going on here? It evokes a similar but more disturbing sense of Alice stepping through the looking glass into a reality that seems to be upside down, void of meaning.

There is no particular reason why this hallway leads to that empty, windowless, beach-themed wallpaper room because in this world there is no reason for anything at all. Signs are gibberish, houses emerge halfway through walls, and stairways extend over vast chasms. In our world, for signs or houses or stairways to exist someone must build them. And therefore, must be built on purpose. But here? No one builds and therefore there is no purpose. It simply emerges and what emerges is meaningless.

A recurring scene in the film is Mary’s childhood home being deconstructed. The liminality of the backrooms has a similar deconstructionist motif. At one point, one character while fleeing for his life inexplicably finds an illuminated Christmas tree in one of the rooms. What is it doing here? A Christmas tree is a culturally rich symbol loaded with meaning: the story of Christmas, family, joy, festivity, traditions, etc. This is what French philosopher Jacques Derrida would call a cultural “text.”

But take that “text” out of the context it is normally set in, and what does it mean here in this bizarre, liminal space? Does this sign still bear its meaning? The character who finds the tree in the film does not see it and read “Christmas” from it. He is baffled and terrified: What is this doing here? What does this mean? The terrifying rejoinder that lurks just beneath the surface for the entirety of the film is: Nothing, none of this means anything, everything is facade. Derrida famously wrote: “There is nothing outside of the text.” That is, it may seem like there is a reality, meaning, that exists in of itself behind our cultural texts, the way the idea of “Christmas” exists apart from a Christmas tree. But Derrida argues that reality does not give us our texts, but it is the other way around.

And herein is the genius of Parson’s attempt at an existential horror movie. The greatest fear that lurks behind all fears for human beings living on the other side of modernity is not the presence of monsters or ghouls or serial killers. It is the fear that behind all the edifice and custom of our life, there is a great void of meaninglessness. I do not know if Parsons intended to evoke 20th century deconstructionism through his film, but the interaction with this symbolism demonstrates that this postmodern critique of reality is something that still has cache with the social imaginary of Westerners today.

But, Parsons doesn’t totally believe that “nothing matters.” Like a good postmodern, Parsons fixates on the “realest” thing he knows: our feelings.

Bad Therapy

Eventually, both Clark and Mary–who are psychologically attempting to stop the loop of trauma–are pulled into these “backrooms.” The rooms seem to generate based on poor copies of memories from who is there. Clark and Mary, both of which bear monstrous pain within, quickly find monstrous creatures lurking around the corner. Earlier in the film, Mary performs a method of role play therapy with Clark, having them act out the night that Clark’s wife left him. She is trying to delve deep into his repressed feelings with the hope that venting them will provide relief from Clark’s anger and resentment.

But down here, she has in some sense literally descended into Clark’s psyche and found that the expression of feelings doesn’t always bring health, but can summon something sinister. Earlier, Clark claims he wants to “escape the loop of trauma.” But down here, in the deepest recesses of Clark’s mind, we find something different. Mary has sincerely tried to help Clark, but in the backrooms she does not find a good but misunderstood man, but (at root) a deeply selfish, cruel, and sinful one. And here, Parsons seems to land a legitimate shot at the worst iterations of therapy culture today. We cannot blame all of our problems on the trauma inflicted upon us. Unless we are willing to take responsibility for ourselves and move beyond the past, we will be trapped in the loop.

The Monster Within

The question of Backrooms is “What does the great human drama of man finding himself look like in a meaningless world?” The kaleidoscope of debris and architecture-on-LSD is an uncomfortable assault on the familiar customs of purpose and meaning. But the real horror emanates from the one load-bearing beam that postmodernism has for meaning: what if the truest thing about you is not that you are misunderstood or traumatized; what if, deep down, you are responsible for the hurt and pain? In a world that has flushed metaphysics down the toilet, the only “real” thing we have is our experience, our feelings. And if we fail to find salvation within, if we “open the window” and find not light, but darkness, then nothing remains. Our only hope is snuffed out.

As a Christian, I find movies and stories that expose the price of postmodernism to be both deeply unsettling and when done well, (as Backrooms is) deeply satisfying. It is similar to reading Friedrich Nietzsche or early French existentialists. Here we have someone who is willing to pay the full fare of a materialist worldview with total honesty, even if the cost is agonizing to the mind. It is a bracing slap of reality against the cheery atheism of those who celebrate God’s death without realizing the price of unchaining the earth from the sun.

There is a kind of internal slingshot experience I have as I watched the film. I am pulled into the despair and meaningless of the story, only to be shot back into my own worldview suffused with a metaphysics that extends far beyond my inner world of feelings or cultural world of signs and texts. God exists, has ribboned this world with meaning, and has prepared a salvation for me that is thicker and more durable than any thin soup therapy-culture is eager for me to drink. My hope isn’t that the further down the rabbit hole of my psyche I descend, the more I am able to find inner peace. My hope is in a Savior who dies to redeem monsters and sinners, and transform them into beloved, forgiven saints. Perhaps the more honest people are about the cost of a life without God, the more eagerly they will seek after the Truth.

Each year at the Presbyterian Church in America's (PCA) General Assembly a group of younger pastors gather for the annual Next Generation Forum, which creates a space for rising leaders in the church to talk about the issues facing the PCA and the church more broadly. We are honored to publish the talks presented each year. Today we are running Robert Hasler's remarks. We published Derek Rishmawy's yesterday.

The subject of tonight’s event is addressing the question of what the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) can and might do about the challenge of generational turnover. Of course, that challenge includes the passing of the torch from Boomers to Gen Xers and Millennials as well as reaching new generations of men and women with the Gospel. 

Where I want to start, however, is by reminding us that ours is not the only institution facing down the uncertainty of generational turnover. All throughout America, institutions of every sort are bracing themselves for the fallout.

With that in mind, I want to frame my talk by asserting what I believe are twin realities.

First, that the PCA is already grappling with the challenges of generational turnover and that it is no small contributor to the restlessness we feel as a church right now.

The second is that we have no more idea of what will happen when the Boomers, by force of nature, finally pass on the torch of ecclesial governorship than what will happen when they no longer wield the same influence in politics, markets, and the culture. If what we feel now is any indicator, all we might be able to say with certainty is that the future has never felt so uncertain. 

As I prepared my remarks, the greatest temptation was to try and offer some all-encompassing diagnostic that would explain these generational fault lines and illuminate the future for us. I’ve tried, instead, to internalize the lesson I learned from my old seminary professor, Dr. Jack Collins: I am not a prophet and I’d be crazy for wanting to be.

But that won’t stop me from making some educated guesses about what the future landscape of ministry might look like, and I think that starts by accounting for two key trends in the broader culture. 

First of all, we know that the U.S. fertility rate is well below replacement level. People in America have not – and are not – having as many children as previous generations. That a declining population will have to be counteracted either by massive reforms in the economy or through higher levels of immigration in a country already fraught with populist sentiment raises questions and concerns that go far beyond technical solutions; they inspire existential questions of national identity.

This is not so different from what we face in the PCA. In staring down the challenge of losing a large percentage of our membership roles as our fathers and mothers in the faith ramp back their involvement and eventually pass on to glory, we face immediate questions of resourcing and leadership which in turn inspire the kind of existential wrestling that leads to questions like, “What kind of PCA do we want to be?”

Secondly, there’s also the matter of the so-called “vibe shift” — or what some people call Gen Z’s seemingly higher appreciation for religion broadly and Christianity in particular. While I think the vibe shift is real, it remains a far cry from the kind of national “revival” we heard so much about in the wake of the Charlie Kirk assassination. There’s also the question of whether the vibe shift has a Roman or Eastern flavor to it. 

I suspect a lot of you here, like myself, have anecdotal evidence that something is going on. The data gives the story a slightly different shape. My best read of it is the precipitous climb of the “nones” has reached its zenith, for now at least; Gen Z is probably attending church at higher frequencies than previous generations; and that church is far more likely to be nondenominational than anything else.

As I’ve thought about these trends in my own ministry context, I’ve come to subdivide the challenge of generation turnover into three distinct but interrelated challenges – challenges I think we’ll have to face in our individual ministries and as a denomination. 

Those three challenges are a resource challenge, a leadership challenge, and an evangelism and discipleship challenge, and they’ll be a roadmap of sorts for the rest of my talk.

The Resource Problem

The first challenge that the generation turnover poses for our denomination is a resource challenge. Now, there’s a very conventional and perfectly legitimate way to think about the resource problem, and that’s to focus on finances and manpower and addressing possible shortages in both. But let me offer another way to think about the resource problem. 

Like I said before, I don’t think we can really predict how extensive the disruption caused by generational turnover will be. Interrelated contractions in the economy and in population pose civilizational challenges that extend far beyond the doors of our churches and the pocketbooks of our members. 

So, let’s just suppose it’s way more disruptive than anything we can imagine. At the expense of sounding overdramatic, what if the level of freedom, prosperity, and stability we enjoy today isn’t permanent or inevitable? After all, “there is a time for everything,” Ecclesiastes reminds us. 

Now, I could be wrong. Maybe in the face of an even larger, more existential, social, and political conflagration than anything we’ve experienced in our recent history our civil authorities will learn from their past errors and lead with prudence over ideology, Americans of all stripes will link arms, and everyone will overcome their individual passions and prejudices for the sake of the common good. 

But what if that doesn’t happen? What if instead we see things that will make us pine for the good ole’ days of 2020?

Let me put it this way: We can’t limit ourselves to thinking about the resource challenge as only a drop in giving or volunteers without taking too many ancillary social and political conditions for granted. History hasn’t stopped. We must recognize that the benefits and privileges churches have historically enjoyed under an older political consensus could radically change under a new one. What would you do, for example, if you and your elders and deacons woke up and suddenly had no access to your church bank accounts because you transgressed the new cultural orthodoxy by preaching biblical truth? How would you keep diaconate resources flowing to those who needed them? Is your church resilient enough to keep ministry going when your lease at the school or your agreement with the campus administrators is torn up, or your tax-exempt status revoked? How would accounting for that kind of contingency change, not just your budget, but your whole philosophy of ministry resources?

I’m not trying to be a doomer. I’m simply trying to convey that there are resource challenges and there are resource challenges; and we have to be ready for both, even if preparing for the latter feels a bit unsavory. “Be wise as serpents and innocent as doves,” our Lord says. 

Ask yourself: What is your church doing right now to be resilient enough to weather a significant resource challenge caused by generational turnover, even if we don’t feel its full effects for 25 or 50 years from now?

The Leadership Challenge

The second challenge that comes with generational turnover is a leadership challenge. Again, I believe this is something we’re already experiencing and it goes far beyond the sort of friction caused by different groups in the PCA vying for leadership roles in churches, presbyteries, and permanent committees. 

I’m talking about the challenge of facing new paradigms of pastoral leadership that are emerging with this generational handoff. Often, evangelicals adopt and defend these paradigms on the basis that they are corrections from the perceived errors of older generations and so meet the demands of Zoomers. 

The most popular fad right now is an evolution in what I’ve heard described as a kind of “guru” model of pastoral leadership. It’s a newer version of the evangelical leadership style supercharged by a new technological landscape where pastors are not so much expected to offer a regular foretaste of heavenly life through the ministry of Word and Sacrament as they are supposed to participate as one more voice among a host of evangelical leaders who provide unimpeachable solutions for emotional, spiritual, intellectual, vocational, and (unfortunately, we’ve all heard the Mark Driscoll clips) sexual wholeness.

For better or worse, many in younger generations believe legacy evangelical institutions and leaders proved themselves anemic throughout the controversies of the last ten years. Some are gravitating towards “guru” pastors who will tell them with “Thus saith the Lord” certainty not just what the Scriptures say about the magistrate’s divinely ordered office, but also things like who you should vote for (or, at least, who not to vote for); not just that it is the parents' duty to train up their children in the fear and admonition of the Lord, but also exactly what kind of school you should send your kid to; not just what godly womanhood looks like, but that you have a responsibility to undo the nineteenth amendment.

How did we get here? As we all know, it’s not that the subject of politics, education, or gender are totally beyond the scope of ordinary ministry. But I think because evangelicalism already suffers from poorly distinguishing the church from other kinds of institutions, and as those other kinds of institutions that would normally address those subjects have suffered or betrayed their own core mission, it’s the church that’s been put in this position of picking up the slack. 

Today, younger generations, for better or worse, expect their pastor to have answers to these questions and more, and plenty of less responsible men have taken advantage of the market demand to peddle their own personal or political agendas. 

Now, what I find personally striking about this new development in pastoral leadership is that it’s actually quite old. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that on this point modern evangelicalism has “horseshoe’d” so hard that it’s become a kind of uniquely American form of Roman Catholicism – a simple, but not ordinary form of Christianity where adherents participate in a strange “new way to do church” all the while “guru” leaders who wield bishop-like power issue non-negotiable edicts telling you how to think and what to do about the most pressing matters.

As pastors and elders in the PCA, we have the unique challenge of pointing people to a different, uniquely Protestant way of pastoral leadership and about the Christian faith – leading people toward a form of Christianity that is ordinary, but not simple. 

It is ordinary because our “way of doing church” continues to center the priorities we find in the early church of Acts 2: word, prayer, and sacrament within the embodied, covenant community of God’s people. But it is also not simple, because we believe Christians are called to something quite amazing, something extraordinary even, something I think we might take for granted sometimes: disciplined lives of ongoing maturity into the image of our Savior.

We, as pastors and elders, have to lead people to understand that there is no shortcut to the good life nor any way to offshore the working out of their sanctification. 

And that will require confident, bold preaching concerning the things the Scriptures principally teach. We have to be bolder about God, bolder about man, bolder about sin, bolder about the Gospel, bolder about worship, and bolder about the duties required of man. But also bolder to lead men and women to work out for themselves those things Scripture leaves to individual conscience. 

That’s our calling. And it is not one which we can afford to be ambivalent about. Our flocks, empowered by the indwelling Holy Spirit, and ministered to through a life of embodied participation in the local church, still have to do the hard work themselves – to pattern their thoughts after God’s thoughts, to grow in wisdom, and act for the good of others and for the glory of God in all the unique circumstances of their lives. 

The Evangelism and Discipleship Challenge

Finally, I want to end with the evangelism and discipleship challenge. Here, I want to try and offer one reading on what’s going on with public sentiment among younger generations towards religion broadly and Christianity in particular. 

I think it’s fair to say that most of our evangelism and discipleship resources of the last few decades have been oriented towards a “spiritual-not-religious” audience of upwardly-mobile, young professionals who were stakeholders in a globalized, small-l liberal, world order. These were de-churched, individually-minded people who, despite their hangups with organized religion, largely wished to retain its moral and ethical framework even if it took the work of a good apologist to show them that.

It was Tim Keller who so excellently exposed their hypocrisy in The Reason for God: You can choose to personally value things like justice and toleration and reject the worldview upon which they’re built, Keller preached, but there’s no integrity in that.   

I think our challenge will be adapting the resources we’ve inherited to reach a completely new generation with completely different ideological assumptions about the world and their place in it. 

Whereas the “spiritual-not-religious” were primarily fascinated with Christianity as a means of preserving what they liked about the current world order, I want to suggest to you that our future might be one of “religious-not-spiritual” men and women (and men in particular) fascinated with Christianity because of its potential to fix what they perceive are modern liberalism’s failures.

Just a couple months ago, The New York Times reported more and more people are finding themselves attracted to the idea of concrete, religious rituals to combat their sense of loneliness and detachment. Ross Douthat, in his new book, suggests the folks who at first embraced a choose-your-own-adventure spiritualism, mixing and matching spiritual practices from a diverse array of religious traditions, are exhausted and might be ready to accept the idea that the way to truth and wholeness means submitting your individual identity to a single, coherent religious tradition and community that’s bigger than yourself.

This is what I’m encountering in my ministry context, especially in the Army. And more and more, I’m noticing a subtle but important distinction in the way seekers and skeptics are framing their questions. 

Whereas the “spiritual-not-religious” were drawn by the prospect of achieving personal moral integrity; the “religious-not-spiritual” are far more interested in Christianity’s prospects for civilizational integrity and renewal. 

And it manifests itself in two different ways. Elite-aligned individuals are inclined to Roman Catholicism, its aesthetics, and the lure of something that, at least from what they’re told, is much older, more stable, and therefore more capable of resisting modernity and postmodernity than anything Protestantism can offer. 

At the same time, there is the more populist form embodied in the aspirational message of Charlie Kirk who included going to church alongside getting married and having kids as essential responsibilities for anyone serious about making America great again. Many of these folks are naturally inclined to the low-church, nondenominational expressions of Protestantism.

And the question that I’m wrestling with is simply this: How come they’re not coming to us?

Two quick thoughts and then I’ll wrap up. 

If I could be so bold, I think elite expressions of evangelicalism (and the PCA, insofar as we swim in those waters) tend to treat the stereotypical Zoomer who walks through the doors of a church for what I’ve called “civilizational” motivations with far more cynicism than they deserve. I heard Glen Scrivener talk about this recently on a podcast and I think it’s brilliant because he perfectly encapsulated what I’ve come across.

None of us, I suspect, would ever be as suspicious of the person — the addict or the criminal — whose life is crumbling around them and walks through the doors of the church because he or she believes Christianity can “fix” them. Yet, we seem to keep at arm’s length the person who expresses the exact same sentiment only about Christianity having the moral infrastructure to “fix” their society. My sense is that too many in our tribe automatically assume such a sentiment must come from a dangerous place of triumphalism when oftentimes it reflects a poignant discovery about secularism’s empty promises and the humble acceptance of man’s powerlessness in the face of such overwhelming brokenness. 

But here’s the second thought: With the willingness to receive these folks comes the responsibility of straightforward and long-suffering discipleship. 

We must be willing to extend far more grace even with the conviction to say, as I think Keller would, that you can choose to commit yourself to the defense and preservation of the West’s fundamentally Christian ethos, and not embrace the plain teaching of Scripture, or be personally humbled by an encounter with the living God, but there’s no integrity in that. 

Conclusion

Just yesterday I preached from Psalm 11 to our small church plant in Abilene, and it struck me afterwards how much the passage speaks to this challenge in particular.

“If the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do?” This is the question posed to David — one that expresses the sense of hopelessness in the face of physical, emotional, moral, spiritual, and, yes, civilizational uncertainty. It’s not that dissimilar to the question Gen Z is asking.

How does David respond? He starts by orienting his heart to God’s heavenly throne. He finds refuge in God and in the memory of God’s righteous judgement on the wicked. God has not been blind to injustice and wickedness in the past. Surely, he is not blind to it in our world today.

Importantly, Psalm 11 doesn’t besmirch utilitarian motivations for seeking refuge in God. It just won’t let you stop there. Listen to the last verse: “For the Lord is righteous, he loves righteous deeds, the upright shall see his face.”

Psalm 11 directs us past the important desire for earthly safety and justice and peace and order and to that which all things are properly ordered — to the ultimate telos of human life itself: the beatific vision, to see our God and Maker face to face, without a veil, and to enjoy him forever. 

If we preach that. If we confess that. If we lead people to that, regardless of whatever generational turnover may bring us, I have no doubt the PCA of the future will be as strong as ever.

In my growing up years I was blessed to travel often. Regular beach vacations; various youth group camps and even a missions trip taken with other young teenagers; a school trip to Greece and Italy; trips to England, Austria, the Bahamas, and other bucket-list spots before I was eighteen.

I learned many good things from these trips. But I learned certain mental habits, too: I learned to anticipate the excitement that colored my life as a trip approached. I learned to think about seasons and years as pathways to some more riveting place than my local suburbia. I learned to expect a certain pinch of homebound despondency.

Meanwhile, in all the years of my youthful travels, I attended a rigorous Christian school and participated in various extracurriculars and club sports such that “normal life” was a bustling one. All that I participated in was due to the generosity and hard work of my parents. But without anyone’s conscious intention or alarm, I, together with my peers, was treading as a teenager the waters of upper middle class American culture: the pursuit of excellence, the Protestant work ethic, constant busyness. A busyness whose best respite was vacation.     

The time between Memorial Day and Labor Day is, for many, the time of vacations. As spring approaches its close, vacation becomes a primary topic for small talk. “Do you have any travel plans for the summer?” the dental hygienist asks, as does the acquaintance one chats with after church. 

Around this time, too, refrains resound about the unshakeable busyness of the season and the great need for a break. Or one will hear church leaders promote various spiritual summer getaways—whether youth group camps or marriage conferences or women’s retreats—with similar language: let’s all depart to [some peaceful place by the beach or mountains], and there we can have fellowship and spiritual growth!

How we talk about our lives and desires is telling. Our speech about vacations and retreats reveals that Americans both in and outside of the church have accepted a particular mindset about work, life, and time. The mindset could perhaps be summed up this way: we are (and ought to be) busy all the time, and as such, we need a getaway from our ordinary lives in order to refresh ourselves and connect with others, particularly family members and close friends, or even to connect fruitfully with God. 

The problem with this mindset is not that it rests on false claims. Our busyness hardly needs to be proven: according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, in the average American married-couple family, both parents work. Meanwhile, most American children attend school for about eight hours a day and give their evenings and weekends to sports and activities. It’s not surprising, then, that many American families don’t have (or make) time enough to eat dinner together. 

Still, the “getaway” mindset represents a departure, though a covert one, from the Christian understanding of rest and time. As such, Christians would do well to be wary of it, even while  appreciating opportunities to vacation. 

Our consumerist culture would have us believe that true rest requires spending money to abscond several times a year from our given places and vocations and revel in some other good (whether a legitimate good, like the beauty of the seaside, or not). Rest is, in this framework, to be pursued and purchased, not to be accepted as a gift. Rest and peace are always out there, away from the banality of the ordinary, not woven into it. Rest is perpetually incompatible with our callings and the consequent rhythms of our weeks and months—and our callings and routines are themselves perpetually burdensome, in part because rest is not a regular part of them. 

What we need for rest, however, is not a weekend at an isolated mountain Airbnb or at a conference away from our children, listening to the most engaging Christian speakers, though these things can have their places as blessings from God. What we need, rather, is the divine rhythm of the Sabbath. 

The getaway mindset echoes the concept of the Sabbath in its recognition of the human frame: we are limited; we require respite from our work. But the echo is only a faint one. The getaway mindset, unlike the Sabbath, flows from the pressures of a consumeristic and workaholic culture more so than from Scripture or tradition, and it proposes no limits on or order of acceptable restful activity and no clearly defined purpose for it. 

The Sabbath, meanwhile, springs from God’s Word: after exemplifying and instituting a day of rest at creation, God ordered the life of Israel around the worship and rest of the Sabbath, and he included the injunction to “remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy” among the moral laws of the Ten Commandments. Ever since the apostles began to worship and fellowship on the first day of the week in honor of Jesus’ resurrection, the church has in some fashion understood and taught that the “Lord’s Day” was to be a holy day of worship, fellowship, and rest distinct from the Jewish observance of Saturday. Different traditions deal with the specifics of the day differently, but a thread runs through historic Protestant and Catholic teaching: God still orders the time of his people such that one day in seven—now Sunday—is set apart for his purposes. 

Many modern Christians have no concept of the Lord’s Day as the Christian Sabbath. Or they apply the fourth commandment individually, maintaining that they can choose a day for personal rest or that they can celebrate it on Saturday apart from the gathered people of God. Others insist that because “the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath,” we ought not burden ourselves or others with the concept of a moral injunction to cease. 

If only we took that language seriously instead of using it to support our favored conclusions. The Sabbath was made for man, which means that it is a gift. And, as Jesus’ interactions with the Pharisees show, it is a gift which God designed to bring life. Gifts cannot be recast into whatever we would like them to be. Gifts are defined by their giver, even though recipients may enjoy them in different ways.    

As a gift, the Sabbath asks of us reception, not ignorance. It does not require purchase either, unlike the vacation. In fact, many in Christian history would maintain that it requires us to not spend money—to be entirely free from the world of commerce and consumption for the sake of worship. 

The gift of the Sabbath is, in some ways, a paradoxical one. The Sabbath principle requires the devoted action of man, yet that action is one that looks like inaction to the world: the actions of ceasing and of worshipping seem entirely useless. It enjoins us to rest yet prescribes how we ought to rest: “not going your own ways, or seeking your own pleasure, or talking idly,” but by delighting in the Lord, as Isaiah 58 teaches.

The Sabbath is a routine, one day in seven, yet it is an invitation into things that are decidedly not routine but sacred: the sacraments, the preached Word, the fellowship of believers, and other things which fall into the category of what the Westminster Catechism calls “holy resting.” 

Where the getaway is an occasional, temporary departure from ordinary life altogether, the Sabbath, as an ordinary departure from otherwise ordinary commitments, orders our lives in a sacred rhythm. 

Theologian Alastair Roberts discusses this aspect of the Old Covenant Sabbath as follows: 

The daily cycle of work and rest, the weekly cycle of six days of labor followed by the Sabbath, the annual cycle of feasts, and the larger cycle of sabbatical years both punctuated and variegated Israel’s time. Time was meaningfully articulated, structured, ordered to new ends, and differentiated in its character. Through such an articulation of time, Israel was granted the possibility of transcending a flat quotidian grind. Time was “redeemed”... In such a manner, work could be bounded, differentiated from rest and leisure, flowing from a higher source and being ordered toward a higher end. Bitter toil and cruel bondage could become good work and sacred service…

Sabbath presented work with an end, being both a cessation of otherwise unrelenting toil and a purpose: an orientation of work to something greater that upholds its goodness.

By placing the Lord’s rest at the heart of Israel, the entire realm of man’s times and labors was reordered.

Though the calendar of the New Covenant church is appropriately different from that of the Old Covenant, our time is still “meaningfully articulated, structured, ordered to new ends.” To us, too, God graciously extends the “possibility of transcending a flat quotidian grind.” Here the possible becomes actual not if we are wealthy enough to afford a beach house or if we are “spiritual” enough to take a silent retreat but if we are humble enough to submit ourselves to God and accept, through Christ, his gifts.  

It goes without saying that some vocations such as those of firefighters or emergency medical personnel regularly require Sundays to be taken up with, in the words of the Westminster, “works of necessity and mercy.” But most of us can in fact submit our Sundays to this divine order if only we have the courage to welcome certain limits. If we were to allow our lives to be ordered by the Lord’s Day, we would not feel the overwhelming need for a break from them. A life that is centered around and satisfied in the transcendent worship and festivity of the Sabbath cannot be subsumed by the busyness our culture presses on us. Neither can it be overcome with the desire to flee from one’s given place. 

In his famous work Leisure: The Basis of Culture, philosopher Josef Pieper contrasts the world of total work with that of religious festivals like the weekly Sabbath. He writes: 

It is in the nature of religious festival to make a space of abundance and wealth, even in the midst of external poverty in material things... Thus in the very midstream of worship, and only from there, comes a supply that cannot be consumed by the world of work, a space of uncountable giving, untouched by the ever-turning wheel of buying and selling, an overflow released from all purpose, and an authentic wealth: it is festival-time. And it is only within such festival–time that the reality of leisure can unfold and be fully realized. 

Perhaps this year, as summer wends on with its various gifts, we should not so yearn for our getaways and inwardly mourn when they are past but instead seek after that “space of uncountable giving… and an authentic wealth” that flows from the worship and rest of the Lord’s Day.

Each year at the Presbyterian Church in America's (PCA) General Assembly a group of younger pastors gather for the annual Next Generation Forum, which creates a space for rising leaders in the church to talk about the issues facing the PCA and the church more broadly. We are honored to publish the talks presented each year. Today we are running Derek Rishmawy's remarks. We will publish those of Robert Hasler tomorrow.

To begin, I want to set the stage to frame up the “advice” I am going to give.

Boomer Apocalypse

First, we need to begin by acknowledging the demographic challenges facing the PCA, which we might refer to as “the boomer apocalypse.” (This term originated with the Australian pastor and podcaster Mark Sayers.)

Essentially, in about 15-20 years or so, when the Boomer generation is set to recede from the scene, we are going to see a massive demographic shift that will impact (a) raw numbers, (b) culture and institutional knowledge, forms, and leadership, and (c) pure dollars coming into fund the ministry of the church. 

The shape of the PCA is set to change radically no matter what we do.

Obsolescence and De-Churching

Connected to this, I want to add a related phenomena: the massive dechurching of America and the obsolescence of American religion. I won’t rehash this at length, but most of you have heard the stats from Ryan Burge, Michael Graham, and Jim Davis, or heard a podcast about Christian Smith’s work on the obsolescence of religion. In the last 25 years, 40 million people stopped going to church—and actually, Graham and Burge’s new book argues that it’s closer to 60 million. Beyond that, traditional religion has continually lost market share, not to atheism, but general non-traditional spiritualism, or nothing in particular. While the Boomers were actually key to this movement, their loss from the scene can only seem to accelerate and amplify that dynamic across the landscape.

Never-Churched? 

Third, while we all know about the de-churched, we must recognize that an increasingly large segment of youngsters that campus ministers are meeting are the “never churched.”

Anecdotally, at UC Irvine if I run into a student who is not currently attending a church and doesn't identify themselves as religious explicitly, I am less likely to find somebody who is formerly religious than in past years. This means they’re not Christian and they don’t typically have religious baggage. But it also means they have no context for Christian doctrine, truth, or practice.

Vibe Shift and Quiet Revival? 

Finally, some of you have heard about the Vibe Shift and the alleged “Quiet Revival.” I’ll say that, briefly, the Vibe Shift is very real, but the Quiet Revival basically has no data for it. On the ground, things have shifted politically, and I think even created an openness to spiritual conversations broadly among the younger generation and, yes especially among young men. That said, statistically speaking, there is no data telling us that we should be banking on any kind of quiet revival to come save us.

I mention these realities, not because they change our call as ministers of the gospel to reach and shepherd the coming generations—the call is the same. Nevertheless, we answer the call under the conditions of history and to my mind it does two things: the boomer apocalypse and dechurching of America lends urgency to the task and perhaps gives shape to some of how we go about it. 

Thankfully, the PCA is not doing bad comparatively. We are one of the only denominations to see any growth in the last few years and anywhere from 25-30 percent of our denomination is under 30. I attribute that last fact largely to two things. First, thank God my church has lots and lots of babies. Second, to the work of RUF. 

Admittedly, I am biased, but given that RUF reaches about 20,000 students across 160 or so campuses right now, it’s not crazy to think that starting RUF was one of the most forward-thinking things our founding fathers did when starting the PCA 50 years ago. When it comes to reaching the next generation, I am sure Andrew Rein would want me to say: Keep partnering with RUF, keep funding it, keep encouraging it, and keep making your churches welcome to RUF students. And I am saying that.

But I'll say more than that. On the practical side I want to make three suggestions that I will categorize in two boxes. RUF’s tagline is “reaching students for Christ and equipping them to serve the church,” and so those will be my boxes: Reaching Students and Equipping Them to Serve the Church. 

Then, I will end with one meta-comment on how this relates to some of our vibe-related denominational tensions. 

Reaching 

Preaching has to be Exegetical, Catechetical, and Apologetic. 

This is another way of saying that when it comes to reaching Gen Z, both in college and post-college, much of the post-Christian, un-churched, religiously pluralistic, spiritual-not-religious landscape needs to be consciously borne in mind in our preaching. 

To break that down, preaching needs to be exegetical–a clear exposition of the text we have in front of us, because what else are we doing when giving people God's Word? One of the most important things I've learned over the years in working with college students is that while there is absolutely a place for understanding and humility and giving space for differing views as people come into your ministry, sheer confidence in the Word of God and an unflappable drive to apply it and expound it directly and unashamedly is essential for actually reaching them. And you just need to believe that. You need to believe that Gen Z is not the unique species of human upon whom the Spirit of God cannot work.

Here’s the thing, Gen Z is burned out on cynicism. Some have heard about the metamodern moment—that after cynical postmodernity, we have a longing for a post-ironic turn to belief, to earnest faith, to the embrace of identities more solid than deconstruction alone can offer.

As Paul Anleiter has noted, Creed made a comeback, Top Gun: Maverick and even the recent Superman moved past grimdark cynicism. Why? Everybody is being constantly bombarded by this take, and that YouTube video and that TED talk and that influencer TikTok and it is tiring to be constantly being sold and then seeing through grift after grift. And the most important thing you can do for an 18 to 30 year old is to declare to them clearly and directly what God's Word has said for thousands of years, unchanged because that's where the Spirit works. The Spirit and the Word are not a gimmick.

Second, preaching needs to be catechetical. Younger folks—both Christian and non-Christian—increasingly have no prior Christian architecture of belief metaphysically, ethically, or narratively. Reaching them requires a lot of Paul’s Acts 17 mindset of being willing to clearly teach in a way that is aimed at regularly instructing outsiders and beginners in the faith from the text at the same time. It means coming to the text not with advanced dogmatics questions or advanced biblical theology questions at the forefront, but often Nicene Creed and Apostles’ Creed and basic Ten Commandments questions as part of how you frame your preaching and teaching. In other words, the Confessions and Catechisms are evangelism tools, not roadblocks!

Third, it actually just does need to be apologetic. Not in a scared, embarrassed, fearful way or even in a needlessly offensive and aggressive way. But you should be attuned to showing how God’s Word and the Good News of Jesus can answer the defeaters, objections, and assumptions of the pagan hearts of our Christians and our non-Christians. This is Charles Taylor, right? Everybody is “cross pressured”, meaning your Christians have pagan objections, and your pagans have some Christian longings and so speaking to one audience is speaking to both. And this isn’t selling out the text because these texts were written to a people in missional contexts! This is Acts 17 stuff.

This year, I walked through the Apostles’ Creed, the 10 Commandments, and the Lord’s Prayer. I used the Confessions at key points, answered questions, gave out books, pointed to good podcasts and did not shy away from having a Protestantism book club that was one of the most successful things we did. It feels basic to say this, but if we are going to be aggressively reaching and evangelizing the next generation, our regular Sunday preaching and small groups needs to be consciously and consistently pitched at them in that way. 

As a side note, all of this applies in similar measure to younger ages like high school and junior high. The best way to reach the next generation is to produce them, baptize them, and keep them.

Hospitality

The second point here is also a very basic one. Hospitality needs to be core to your church or local ministry’s philosophy of outreach. One of the most important things I do as a campus minister is buy kids Chick-fil-a and Chipotle and get them into random families’ homes at church. 

Obviously, the church is a hospitable place and in liquid modernity, we should do this for everyone. 

But this is especially the case for Gen Z, whom Jonathan Haidt calls “The Anxious Generation.” They are most on their phones, most online, most unchurched,  and the absolute loneliest and disconnected generation in America. They are struggling with severe mental health issues, anxiety, struggling with agency, and hopelessness. They also have lower social skills across the board, they are failing to launch, and by several measures are just behind. So while they are safer (ie. less drinking, more exercise, less sex), they are less social, less able to date, and make connections. They are also more divided politically by gender (young men leaning to the right and young women leaning strongly to the left), and more suspicious of each other.

But this is part of why providing regular avenues of embodied engagement, in homes, at church, over coffee, over service projects, or other ways is not just being an event coordinator, but doing real outreach.

We are Presbyterians so one of the easiest ways is actually to go all out Sabbath-maxxing. Our church doesn't own its own building, so we can't do an evening service but there are frequently small groups that meet at those times. And the family from church that opens its home on Sunday afternoon that has over my interns and staff and several of my students has been a core avenue of welcome to this deeply disconnected generation.

Incarnational ministry was a buzzword about 10 years ago, and I have criticisms of it theologically. But the basic point about breaking bread and sharing community together on a Sunday afternoon where you get a student to log off,  and maybe touch some grass, or providing avenues for families with kids to do so is going to be so important and so countercultural in the coming decade or more. The churches that have elders, deacons, and families who are aggressive about inviting them into their lives and into their homes along with the preaching and the programming and the worship are going to be the ones that are doing the work here. 

Equipping

When it comes to “equipping” the next generation to serve the church, on campus I try to focus at least on having a decent ministry team with plenty of places to hand off responsibility to students, such as small groups, Bible studies, and event planning. But I don't really want to talk about that, beyond saying that our churches got the Boomers involved a couple of generations ago by risking and allowing them to make choices and handle important things in the church. We'll need to do the same in our ministries. 

Risk and Pastoral Pipeline.

This willingness to risk is not unrelated to the point I want to focus on, which is mainly the need to build up the pastoral recruitment and training pipeline. Over the last few years there's been a lot of discourse around the upcoming problem of empty pulpits, drop-offs in church plants, and declining enrollment at seminaries. The OPC just said they had 40 pulpits open—which is a lot for the OPC.

Now, some of this is due to basic demographic realities: there are just fewer members of Gen Z and Gen Alpha. Beyond that, though, there is a general layer of anxiety and fear and an unwillingness to risk among young men that goes hand in hand with some of the broader cultural trends that we have already named.  

Again, I’ll say that one of the best pastoral pipelines we have in our youth in the PCA is just RUF. Just two years ago we sent four students to seminary to enter Presbyterian ministry and I don't think I'm remarkable as a CM. The RUF internship generally has something like 80 interns, half male, most of whom are thinking of seminary. Proportionally, that’s not bad.

But that said, I don’t think it should be the only, or even the main pipeline. I think the men in this room (Gen X pastors, millennial pastors, and even the Gen Z pastors) in our local churches need regularly keep their head on a swivel within your congregations for young men to disciple who you specifically think have talents, capacities, and the shapeable character of a future minister. Which is to say, we need to up our game at embodying the external call of God upon men for the ministry. 

To that end, I think as a cohort we must ditch the mindset that tells young men that if there's anything else they can do and be happy besides being a pastor, to go do it. I don’t believe that’s proper to our understanding of internal and external calling. Even if this is somebody who could plausibly go out into the field and do something else, if we see in young men the qualities, capacities, and gifts for the pastorate, we ought not be scared to say something to that effect. 

I have a firm grasp of the Reformed doctrine of vocation. It is right and good to teach our young men to glorify God in their callings in business, politics, law, the arts, construction, and so forth. These are not lesser jobs. All the same, there are young, capable, thoughtful men who the contemporary world is telling to focus on grinding, earning cash, securing their lives, while at the same time pouring fear into their heart about cancellation and misunderstandings, and cultural opposition. These men are being driven away from ministry. Yet some of these are young men upon whom God has placed a call. They need to hear from us that entering into pastoral ministry is one of the greatest jobs a man can have. 

Alongside that, we probably need to actually provide these young men what my friend Chris Colquitt has called a “pastoral theology of strength” or agency. I'm a millennial and we grew up on the brokenness and authenticity beat that set us up to hear the beautiful news of justification by faith beyond our works. What a lot of our students need is beyond a strong theology of justification, however, is a correspondingly strong theology of sanctification where the empowering Holy Spirit in union with Christ actually equips you to move beyond the sort of learned helplessness that is endemic to this generation.

And what they need is actually the voice, the belief, and the authoritative insight of godly older men who see something in them and call them into the field, and then are willing to dedicate the requisite time, energy and risk to allow them to succeed.  In other words, we need to be Fathers and Brothers. 

And this itself is risky, messy work that will possibly reshape and reform a young man's future. What’s more, it is risk to us. Some of us fear sinking time, energy, and focus into a “hunch” that might not pay off and maybe distracts from other important tasks within the church. Handing over responsibilities to an untested, unknown leader can go beautifully or terribly. All of this requires risk on our end. 

Relatedly, it will also mean risking a bit financially on internships, fellowships, two-year pastoral apprenticeships, and so on. This is especially the case at the larger churches who may be choosing how to allocate some funds.

But this is crucial if we are going to disciple and reach the next generation. The reality is the people who are most likely to reach the next generation are those that we call and equip among that coming generation. But this needs to be a priority for us because it is a priority in the New Testament. 

Remember, when Jesus was preaching and ministering, what did he do? As an RUF buddy of mine pointed out, he spent three years walking around with the equivalent of 12 teenage to young adult interns. And in Paul’s corpus, nearly 1/6 of his written material is directed to guiding the young pastors Timothy and Titus, whom he had trained. This has always been the way and it must be again.

Meta-Reflection on the Ecclesial Vibes

And with that, I want to make one, last, final meta-comment having to do with some of the broader ecclesiastical challenges we’ve had in the PCA having to do with culture: “Beware the temptation to ride the Vibe.”

Be cautious about trying to leverage cultural vibes too much in our intramural debates about confessional identity and reaching the next generation. 

A couple of examples by way of memes I have seen: 

Crossing the Tiber or Bosphorus. 

Right now, in our rootless, liquid modernity, with the threat of creeping Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox apologetics coming for our young folks, there is a temptation to think “what these rootless, identity-less kids need is thicker, confessional, Presbymaxxing, not softening ‘missionalism.’” It’s basically confessionalism as pragmatism to reach the kids.

Reaching Based Young Men. 

Or again, post-vibe shift, as my friend James Wood has pointed out, there are a bunch of reality respecters, especially young men who are turned off by the excesses of critical gender and racial theories, who are interested in the sanity of a Christian moral view and not being unfairly demonized for being a white guy. What we need, then, some have thought, are bold churches that push back on wokeness, get more explicitly political, explicitly right-wing, etc., which then also get bundled with a certain vibe and ethos so as to not lose our based young men. 

What do we make of this? 

Elevation Still Sells. 

Well, to the first point about Rome and Eastern Orthodoxy, anecdotally and at the meme level, the conversion train might be a real thing. But the data just isn’t there to substantiate it in any kind of real or large-scale way. 

The only group consistently winning or growing are the non-denom charismatics, who are eating the Orthodox and Catholic numbers for lunch. So while you should definitely bone up on your Protestant apologetics, my gut currently tells me this is mostly about keeping your future pastoral pipeline strong by keeping your nerdy readers on the team.

On the West Coast, though, I’ll just say I don't have many Presbyterian students showing up at my ministry. I only have non-denom kids, non-Christians, and random Catholics. They know I am a Presbyterian because I teach Presbyterian things and baptize them into Presbyterian churches. But when they show up, they are not Presbyterian.

You know who is the hardest group to get to show up to our liturgical PCA church? It isn’t the non-Christians or the Catholics. It’s the majority of non-denominational Evangelical kids who are used to the big rock concert worship services and just do not get liturgy and have no concept of confessions.  

Reformed Catholicity or Presbyterian Marines 

Now, I want those students to join PCA churches. I want them to be Reformed. 

One way of inviting people into the PCA, and into our confessional heritage and Reformed worship is to draw them into a broad, reformed catholicity (to use a hot buzzword). An alternative approach comes off as a call to join the elite Presbyterian Marines (the Few, the Saved, the Chosen). In this case, you either get with the program or get out. 

I'm going to suggest a certain amount of flexibility of spirit, and even some practice, for the sake of on-ramping the non-denominational kids is likely going to be necessary in these times if we are going to continue to reach out and grow.

Reaching Young Men 

Next, speaking as a guy whose ministry for the last seven years has been anywhere between 60-80% male in a given year and who really cares about reaching young men: Yes, challenge them. Yes, be direct. Yes, push back on much of the ideology out there that is contrary to God’s Word and has beat these young men up before they’ve even gotten out the door. Pour in the time. Mentor, pursue. Speak to their needs. 

But if you are one of those who think that some over the last 10 years have made the mistake of feminizing and emotionalizing churches to keep the young women happy, or tried far too hard to equate the Larger Catechism to a more center-left, even progressive political order, it stands to reason that running the same operation of coddling unbiblical or ungodly attitudes or winds of social doctrine in the opposite direction for the sake of catching the current vibe could also conceivably go wrong, right? I think the last few weeks and months have shown us a few ways that project could go wrong, right? 

Let me put it this way. One of the young men I baptized this year was someone I met lifting weights, took through a book on masculinity, and have offered a distinctly male form of mentorship to. And yet, another was a young woman who found it refreshing that when she showed up at church on Sunday, it wasn’t about right-wing politics all the time. 

Now, does this mean I didn’t preach about abortion for 20 minutes in my sermon on the 6^th commandment? No. I did so clearly and directly. But I did it on the assumption that I actually had more people than just those disaffected young men in my room. I still had the young, increasingly progressive women, who need the gospel just as much, who still have their own questions, whom I want to persuade about the goodness of God’s Word.

What I'm saying is that when it comes to reaching the next generation, being highly online, letting your ministry be governed by the contemporary algorithm and the quick shifts of vibes and moods, could, in the long term, be very counterproductive for faithful ministry to the coming generation. 

What the next generation needs is not our ability to catch a vibe, a wave, a revival, a trend, etc. Vibes shift and shift again. What they need is our continued commitment to ministering, yes, in culturally wise ways, but more fundamentally out of a bedrock of biblical conviction.

Does it matter how we arrive at outcomes? 

I’d argue that Christianity says yes. Much of the Bible is demonstrating and emphasizing that not only is God intent on creating a particular kind of people for himself, but that we actually cannot arrive at the end Scripture envisions for us apart from certain and specific means and processes. The processes and means through which God uses to create and transform a people for Himself is an intentionally painstakingly long and arduous one. It requires the slowness of history slowly unfolding through the seemingly mundane moments of birth and death of generations upon generations of one family, and which now extends to us who have been adopted into the family of God living faithfully day by day the time allotted to us on earth. God in grace and wisdom commits to us in the slowness of the process, for to create the type of people who will be able to partner with him to bring about the redemption of this world requires, quite frankly, time and struggle. 

This is opposite of what is often valued today in our society – efficiency, productivity, ease, and convenience. And while it is not necessary that we must always choose the difficult in order to be on the path of formation that uniquely creates the type of person God intends for us to become, I believe that given the abundance of options of convenience before us, it is especially crucial for us to be prudent and intentional with our choices because our choices form us. 

It is an understatement to say that AI has revolutionized our current time and culture. The opportunities and possibilities it opens up to people (just about anyone can create an app now), the convenience and ease it offers to us (we essentially have a digital assistant for our daily needs), the accessibility of information (research is revolutionized with how many papers can be digested and summarized for any topic of your choosing)... it may be our Prometheus’ fire. As with all new technologies, AI, whether directly or indirectly, is already forming us into a certain type of people. If we are not careful, we as individuals and the broader church will be swept up in its currents and develop habits, inclinations, and ideologies that will put us farther away from the path of formation God has intended for us. 

So how does AI usage impact our formation? There are many ways to consider. It can shape us in ways that devalue embodied persons and presence. It can shape us to value productivity and speed above all else, teaching us that the ultimate value of a person is in what they can produce, not who they are. But I’d like to focus on just one that I recently experienced: the eroding of our ability and desire to undertake and endure (or even appreciate) hard things, especially if doing so requires time.

Outcomes Without Effort

After five years of being a manager in a tech company, I recently went back to being an individual contributor. Having been out of the coding game for so long, I was nervous about my ability to relearn coding and meaningfully contribute, especially in the company’s high pace culture with an emphasis on productivity. But those around me assured me that with AI tools, coding had become much more accessible and the learning curve no longer so steep as when I had initially started out. And they were right.

The ease and convenience was exhilarating – with a few lines describing what I wanted to do, Claude was able to generate for me entire notebooks and production pipelines that would implement my idea and even test components of it for me. What would have taken me hours to ramp up and outline working code, now took me but a few minutes to set up and get nearly production ready code. The ease and the immensity of capabilities accessible to me through the AI tools made me feel that I myself were capable, and that I had the ability to implement anything that I wanted to. It was exciting and honestly, a lot of fun, but I also felt uneasy. Why? I couldn’t quite identify what led to the unease until I read this passage from The Lost Tools of Learning by Dorothy Sayers: 

They learn everything, except the art of learning. It is as though we had taught a child, mechanically and by rule of thumb, to play “The Harmonious Blacksmith” upon the piano, but had never taught him the scale or how to read music; so that, having memorised The Harmonious Blacksmith, he still had not the faintest notion how to proceed from that to tackle The Last Rose of Summer.

Here was the articulation of my discomfort. I had all the exciting outcomes but did not need to do any of the hard work to get there. The more I did that, the more I knew my personhood would be formed by that experience. I was doing the equivalent of what Sayers says – memorizing how to play a song, but did not learn the fundamentals to know how to play all songs. I had all the excitement of the outcomes of learning (working code), but had experienced none of the difficulty and hard work that would have typically been required to get there. And so something felt amiss. One may argue that I am learning to use the AI tool – the optimization of prompts and such – but this is vastly different from learning to actually write code, which I had to do when I first joined the company. 

Under the latter type of learning, when working code was produced, it elicited within me a kind of satisfaction that was rooted in having undertaken, persevered, and succeeded at something difficult and new. In short, I was training and cultivating something in my personhood and character more permanent than the feelings or the outcomes – the ability and the habit of persevering through the struggle and challenges required to learn something. This ability – the ability to submit and endure the difficult for what will be gained through it, and the ability to do so even if it involves an uncomfortable slowness – is necessary in my formation into a person who can submit to and faithfully walk in the costly discipleship Christ calls me. Without it, we will not be able to root ourselves deeply into the grace, love, and truth that meets us in the inevitable challenges that we must choose to walk through with God, though there may be plenty of opportunities to find alternate, easier paths. And that is what true learning entails – that it forms us into the type of people God intends for us to be. 

So what do we do then in this tension of knowing that the process matters, but surrounded by the allure of tools that allow us to easily and with such convenience sidestep the challenges of such processes and yet still obtain the intended outcomes? What do we do as the ease of AI creates within us a drive for the immediate, and an undervaluing of learning processes, of doing hard things that take time, of sitting in situations that are awkward and uncomfortable because we have yet to learn fluency or competency? In short, what do we do to not inevitably become, (though we are likely already becoming) people who want all the ease, speed, and information without any of the work to get it? How do we lean into habits and situations that train and prepare us in what we need for discipleship to Jesus – a willingness to slow down our pace, endure difficulty, and wrestle with uncomfortableness – where the objective is not obtaining information, but growing in relationship with Jesus to be like Him?

I do not believe the answer is to avoid AI usage entirely, but what I am convicted and convinced of is that we are all called to have wisdom in determining when to use AI and when not to, and what counter-formational habits we must develop so that our formation is intentional, rather than accidental. For determining when to use AI and when not to, I have not found a better framework than the one put forth by Andy Crouch. 

As for counter-formational habits, I propose for consideration two habits that would form us in the ways that AI will not – to be people who can not only endure but be comfortable with the slowness, struggle, and hardship that is required of us in our life of discipleship to Jesus

Reading Long Fiction

First, we can read long fiction that has stood the test of time. Reading fiction does not increase our knowledge, rather the objective is for the forming and shaping of our souls. This is precisely why the reading of fiction is so counter-formational. We read not to be productive or increase intellect, but because of what it does to our souls. By reading long fiction, we become habituated with the time-consuming nature of formation, and the resilience and endurance needed to sit through the long build-up of good, soul-satisfying stories so that we may deeply enjoy the story’s culmination. This habit forms and challenges us to undertake and commit to time consuming endeavors for our good.

Write Without AI

Next: We should write without AI. Since the beginning of the year, all the documents I had produced for work had been done through freeflow, stream-of-consciousness style talking to AI (speech-to-text) and having it organize and structure my thoughts and proposals for me – practicality and efficiency at its best as I juggled back to back meetings all day with the needs of developing statistically rigorous methodologies to enable partner teams to do their work. 

But in undertaking this writing project, by purposefully not using AI, I have felt within myself the uncomfortable yet formational inconveniences and work of having to remember again how to write with clarity, structure, and logical coherence. At the same time, it has been deeply satisfying to re-train and re-exercise these writing muscles. It has forced me to slow down, to think of what is the right word to use, what is the right thought and idea to draw out, and it has done something wonderful for my soul and formation, something all together different and not replicable through AI usage. 

In essence, the nature of this writing project has blessed me, and while I hope this piece has inspired that longing within you, I am grateful nonetheless for what it has allowed me to rediscover – the beauty of leaning into the process of being fully human in creativity and distinctiveness in this slow, time consuming, and, at times, challenging journey of everyday formation into who God is making me into. 

Recently, I was invited to the Jack Miller Center’s National Summit on Civic Education to give a speech about my book on the Declaration of Independence, Finding the Founding: Meditations on the Theology of the Declaration of Independence (Front Porch Republic Books, 2026). This was my first trip to Philadelphia, and having arrived a day early, I made sure to visit Independence Park. The visit didn’t disappoint, but it did cause me to tear up my speech and write a new one.

An exhibit at the American Philosophical Society featured a series of memorial engravings documenting our country’s history of the Declaration. The evolving significance of the Declaration grew clear as these engravings changed with each generation. I was struck by a pattern: In all the earliest engravings in the 19^th century, each of the Declaration’s references to God (“Creator,” “Supreme Judge of the World,” “divine Providence”) was enlarged and emphasized, along with many of our now-hallowed ideas. But as the years went on, only the ideas (equal, life, liberty, etc.) remained emboldened. Finally, a 2026 artist’s annotated, “re-interpretive” engraving placed at the end of the exhibit made a striking choice: It deletes each mention of God from the Declaration, and it adds a parenthetical question mark to every ideal.

I’m not alone in worrying about this trajectory. In 1798, John Adams warned, “our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” In explaining the principles of the Declaration 154 years later, Dwight Eisenhower said, “our form of Government makes no sense unless it is founded in a deeply religious faith, and I don’t care what it is.” In 1973, Elton Trueblood wrote, “the Declaration makes sense in a theological context, but fails to make sense in any other.” They would have been neither surprised nor comforted by this exhibit in Philadelphia.

We are now experiencing a renaissance of American civic education, especially in our public universities. Last summer I found myself, as a theologian, now somewhat unwittingly part of this renaissance. I didn’t understand how I belonged to this endeavor. But I did think that in this 250^th anniversary year, the question of what it means to be American is alive again—thanks to debates over liberalism and postliberalism, globalization and its retrenchment.

In this year, I thought, the Declaration might have new answers to these deepest questions, if read in a certain way. So, I put pencil to paper, and over four months, I wrote a line-by-line meditative commentary of the Declaration, treating it as a theological document with its own voice—that is, as if the term “Nature’s God” mattered just as much to its integrity as the “Laws of Nature,” as if “divine Providence” was not accidental flourish, but the cornerstone which founds the declarations of this founding document and its people. If so, then the Declaration’s theology would hold a timely answer to who we are as “one people,” in this broken time.

Finding the Founding is the product of this meditation. It is a close reading of the Declaration—compacted into 126 pages and focused on the political theology that is crucial to the document. Within our renaissance of civic education, I offer this work as an invitation to a forum to meditate on the question of American faith.

What is that faith? For only a brief, apparently un-theological example, take that most beautiful and confusing clause of the Declaration: We hold these Truths to be self-evident. Now, as humanity before and since 1776 has shown, it’s hardly obvious that, say, all human beings are equal—if it were, so many wouldn’t have failed to see it. So “self-evident” can’t mean “obvious.” As many have argued, the definition of “self-evident” must be closer to something like a premise that cannot be proved but only assumed, like the claim that all triangles have three sides. But we don’t need to “hold” a geometric truth. Yet we do “hold these Truths,” the Declaration claims. Therefore, I found that the Declaration is, in fact, making a statement of mutual faith—not a claim to common sense or rational principle. We are basing our peoplehood on our holding of these Truths as our foundation. And the truths that follow are much deeper than mere propositions. The very words of the Declaration already demand something like a faith commitment, both in the founders who signed it and the “one people” the Declaration claims is America itself.

As we revive the conversation on civic education, I do not think we can repeat that aforementioned artist’s omission of God. Our ideals are worth holding without question marks, but only if we don’t erase the God of the Declaration. Therefore, we cannot ignore the fraught matter of American civic religion and theology, no matter how hard either side of the sacred and the secular may try. As Adams, Eisenhower, and Trueblood—as well as two of my personal favorites, Reinhold Niebuhr and Stewart Udall—all argued in their own ways, American self-government depends on a deeply religious sensibility. 

Many fear we have lost that pre-political disposition. Perhaps we cannot revive it. But we can regain the conversation to revive it. (I should not have to mention that others are already having that conversation, and in ways less than charitable.) I know how important the works by the Niebuhr brothers have been to my own sense of faith and civic responsibility. I am jealous of how freely and deeply they could write on faith and America, with a public audience ready to read their reflections. I hope this book may do for our time, if only in small part, what these earlier writers’ works did for theirs.

I hope you will read and converse with this book. Not for the book’s sake, but for the sake of what this book is about: our common deliberation on faith, solidarity, freedom, and belonging, face-to-face with the transcendent. If we can regain this, then whatever we will make together of “divine Providence,” I believe we will become closer to pledging each other “our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.”