Why the Church Matters More Than Ever

New Atheists like Richard Dawkins spent the better part of two decades preaching that science, not religion, was our key to unlocking the mysteries of the universe. Disenchantment was supposed to free humanity from believing in “fairy tales” like Christianity. 

But this worldview has proven unlivable. People are still searching for spiritual meaning. The rise of artificial intelligence has ushered in an era of reenchantment, with AI proselytizers using unscientific, mystical, and even religious language to describe the technology’s transformative potential for humanity. They have likened their role as midwives birthing a nonhuman supersentience or as prophets summoning gods.

This reenchantment is not value-neutral. AI is not being developed in an ideological vacuum. Rather, its design is indelibly shaped by quasi-religious beliefs rooted in digital gnosticism—a dualistic worldview that seeks transcendence over the material world by leveraging digital technology.

Ancient Greek Gnosticism viewed the material world as a cosmic mistake, a prison from which to escape and ascend to a more true spiritual existence by divining “secret knowledge.” For digital gnostics, the limitations of embodied life are existentially vexing. Every inefficiency, from the ordinary frictions of community to the inevitability of death, must be overcome through technology. And the downstream implications—for both the church and religious belief in America—are legion.

More than 80 years ago, C. S. Lewis issued this warning in The Abolition of Man:

“There is something which unites magic and applied science [technology] while separating them from the “wisdom” of earlier ages. For the wise men of old the cardinal problem of human life was how to conform the soul to objective reality, and the solution was wisdom, self-discipline, and virtue. For the modern, the cardinal problem is how to conform reality to the wishes of man, and the solution is a technique.”

AI is the digital gnostic’s messiah. It offers every user the gift of knowledge and power, untethered from wisdom and virtue. So much so that artificial general intelligence (AGI) has been called humanity’s “last invention,” after which it will supposedly be able to do all future inventing for us. If so, our “technological Rapture” is just around the corner.

Digital gnosticism then, is the “good news” that we will be saved by merging with the machine, allowing AI to optimize us for eternal life (as in Bryan Johnson’s “Don’t Die” movement) or using AI to project our consciousness across the universe.

I wish I could say this was science fiction, but these are genuine beliefs flooding a culture now lacking the gravitational pull of Christianity at its center. 

This is why the church is needed more than ever. As I wrote in The Reason for Church, “the church is not merely the sum of individuals who believe the same thing and live in the same geographic area. Every church is a living, breathing embodiment of the gospel story” (emphasis added).

As such, weekly worship is a “strange, thin place between a fallen world and the God who helps us make sense of it all.” It’s no wonder that widespread dechurching has only made people more desperate for meaning and less discerning in where to search for it.

Recently, a Google employee at our church who works with AI asked the students in our youth ministry, “Where do you go when you have questions you don’t think your parents will be able to answer?” About a quarter of them said ChatGPT. We already trust online influencers more than institutions, and 42 percent of adults use AI for emotional support. Digital divination—trusting a chatbot to tell us the truth about reality—doesn’t require a leap of faith.

But what if our divining isn’t a digital facsimile? What if there are ghosts in the machine? Scripture reminds us that the spiritual world is just as real as the material one. God exists, miracles happen, and angels and demons are at work. Because we wrestle “against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places” (Eph. 6:15), we can’t categorically dismiss reports that, as Rod Dreher put it, “evil discarnate intelligences use [AI] to communicate with people.” If the cardboard and plastic of a Ouija board can be a gateway to dark spiritual forces, why not digital ones and zeros?

Whether AI is merely reflecting our superstitious hopes and fears back at us or there is a ghost in the machine, Deuteronomy 18 wouldn’t list using mediums, divination, and necromancy as “abominations to the Lord” if there were no spiritual risks.

Digital gnosticism will ultimately prove just as futile as secular materialism. We are creatures made of dirt and breath. We will never transcend our need for the fullness of existence. And in Christ, we have it. 

Because American individualism has always been more than a little gnostic, we often see our union with Christ as  a merely spiritual reality. We treat church as optional, but it never would have occurred to Paul that one could be spiritually in Christ without fully and physically abiding in Christ’s body. It is only in the church, Paul says, that “the manifold wisdom of God should be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places” (Eph. 3:10).

If we want to be reenchanted by the gospel and inoculated to digital gnosticism, we will need a rechurching even greater than our dechurching. We can start by devoting ourselves to a local church and participating in the ordinary means of grace—Word, sacrament, and prayer. In our gathered worship and witness, we rehearse the drama of redemption. In serving our neighbors and loving our enemies, we resist artificial intelligence with otherworldly love. 

AI may offer “a shadow of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ” (Col. 2:17, ESV). God loves us too much to let us go on existing without him. That’s why I believe reenchantment will include a greater openness to the gospel. It is therefore the church’s task—nay, privilege—to welcome digital gnostics into a true and better enchantment.

Brad Edwards is the lead pastor at The Table Church in Lafayette, Colorado. He is the author of CT’s Book of the Year, The Reason for Church, and cohost of the podcast PostEverything.

 

Edwards' book The Reason for the Church is Christianity Today's 2025 Book of the Year

Facing Death, Ben Sasse Points to Life

Two days before Christmas, former Nebraska Sen. and University of Florida President Ben Sasse
announced he has been diagnosed with Stage 4 pancreatic cancer. His tweet was a gut punch to anyone who knows Sasse and to the many around the nation who have admired his presence in public life. A statesman through and through, Sasse embodies an aspirational politics that even those who viscerally disagree with him seem to admire. Well wishes came from across the political divide, as bitter ideological foes united to pledge to pray for a gifted political talent fighting cancer at age 53. 

Yet, despite his years of public service, it’s the way Sasse announced his diagnosis that might be his most important contribution to American political life. It reflects the deep and serious theological beliefs that animate the former senator’s life. 

“Advanced pancreatic is nasty stuff; it’s a death sentence,” he wrote. “But I already had a death sentence before last week too — we all do.” This is the undeniable reality that Christians such as Sasse embrace. Death comes for all of us, and few know when their last breath will be. The New Testament book of James reminds us, “Yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes” (James 4:14). To be sure, Christianity isn’t mere nihilism, for believers also understand death to be an intrusion on God’s original created order, the final foe that Christ, in his resurrection, defeated. The Apostle Paul says that the Christian faith allows believers to look at death and say, “Where is your sting?” (1 Corinthians 15). 

Sasse echoes this, attaching his announcement to the season of Advent. “As a Christian, the weeks running up to Christmas are a time to orient our hearts toward the hope of what’s to come.” What’s to come, he says, is the real Christian hope of a new world, a world devoid of the pain and tragedy of this one: 

Not an abstract hope in fanciful human goodness; not hope in vague hallmark-sappy spirituality; not a bootstrapped hope in our own strength (what foolishness is the evaporating-muscle I once prided myself in). Nope — often we lazily say “hope” when what we mean is “optimism.” To be clear, optimism is great, and it’s absolutely necessary, but it’s insufficient . . . A well-lived life demands more reality — stiffer stuff. That’s why, during advent, even while still walking in darkness, we shout our hope — often properly with a gravelly voice soldiering through tears. Such is the calling of the pilgrim. Those who know ourselves to need a Physician should dang well look forward to enduring beauty and eventual fulfillment. That is, we hope in a real Deliverer — a rescuing God, born at a real time, in a real place. But the eternal city — with foundations and without cancer — is not yet. Remembering Isaiah’s prophecies of what’s to come doesn’t dull the pain of current sufferings. But it does put it in eternity’s perspective.

To many, this may come across as pie-in-the-sky, a comforting myth that helps you get away from the cold, hard reality of death. But Christians really believe there is another world coming, that this broken reality will give way to a world made right by the one who made it. Christians really believe that because Jesus rose again after his death, we too will rise again, body and soul. This is the hope about which pastor Tim Keller wrote in his final days. It’s what allowed Dietrich Bonhoeffer to whisper, before he was executed by the Nazi government, “This is the end, but for me it is the beginning of life.”

The hope of the eternal doesn’t erase the reality of cancer in a fallen world. True Christian hope is not flippant about death. The 11th chapter of the Gospel of John tells the story of Jesus, standing before the rotted corpse of his friend Lazarus, weeping and overcome with rage. Christian theology teaches that death is an aberration, an intrusion into God’s good creation, the work of an unseen enemy. It is an attack against God himself, who fashioned humans in his image. Even the most devout Christian doesn’t welcome a terminal diagnosis, doesn’t shrug when loved ones are taken early. Because we see humans as God sees them, we are repulsed by death, sickened by violence, and must be defenders of human life. 

Sasse rightly pledged to fight his cancer and we should all pray that God, through the human instruments of advanced medicine, heals his body and gives him many more years. Death isn’t natural—to fight death with the materials of God’s creation—is the natural thing. Yet, the inevitability of what comes for us can be faced with an otherworldly kind of joy. 

Keller writes:

"Christians have a hope that can be “rubbed into” our sorrow and anger the way salt is rubbed into meat. Neither stifling grief nor giving way to despair is right. Neither repressed anger nor unchecked rage is good for your soul. But pressing hope into your grief makes you wise, compassionate, humble, and tenderhearted. Grieve fully yet with profound hope!

"The Christian resists a culture of death–a cheapening of human life through violence of any form–yet accepts as reality that Christ, in his life, death, and resurrection, has defeated it and offers himself as a promise of new and eternal life."

This is why Sasse, the college professor, might be offering the world perhaps his greatest lesson: how to face the prospect of death well. Sasse, whose discourses on civics on the Senate floor still inspire and whose books on American cultural maladies are widely read, is now offering his life as a template for millions of Americans who might walk a similar path. 

Nobody, including Sasse, chooses to sign up for such suffering. Nobody would, as Sasse wrote, want to think that they may miss the milestones of life. Even among believers, few, if any, among us understand the complex mysteries of a God who allows cancer to take hold of some of our best people in the prime of life. Yet, such a sober reality can help clear the mind and focus the heart on the things that really matter. It can give us a gratitude for each day we are granted, for the little blessings we overlook. Our petty disagreements, our nonstop partisan bickering, our junior-high level social media dramas seem to melt away when faced with our own mortality. 

Sasse’s thoughtful announcement comes at a time when Americans have few models of suffering well. On the one hand, tech entrepreneurs publicly muse about transhumanist utopias, where the body is mere hardware to be upgraded and extended indefinitely. On the other hand, there is the advancing Orweillian horror of “death with dignity,” where the sterile answer to a less-than-ideal life is no life at all. Governors in New York and Illinois recently signed expansive legislation that mirrors Canada’s expanding Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) regime.

To fight against cancer with joy and hope, to suffer well in the face of his own mortality, is a kind of counter to these insidious social movements that seek to deny our humanity. And Sasse offers the rest of us the perspective we need to live with purpose for however many days we have left on this earth.

As a middle-aged man not much younger than the former senator, I read his words with much grief. I wondered how I’d face a similar future, with my own children in high school and college. I wept, not only for him and his family, but for an America that desperately needs his voice. 

Yet I was inspired by a man who, facing the worst days of his life, is meeting them with true Christian hope and joy. I’m moved by a husband and father who will fight this disease with courage and yet will cling to the Christian hope of the life to come. In facing death so publicly, Sasse may teach us, if we listen, how to really live.

By Daniel Darling, director of the Land Center for Cultural Engagement at Southwestern Seminary 

Reorient Your 2026 With These Questions

What Do You Fit Into God's Story

We ask good questions in the Christian life. But are they God-centered? Here’s a look at how turning our
questions around can reorient us toward God’s glory.

Is the way you view your life truly God-centered?

Is the gospel a part of your life? Or does the gospel frame your life?

In his update of his classical work on the mission of God, renowned bible scholar Christoper Wright summarizes the biblical storyline stretching from creation to new creation. It’s a story grounded in the reality of God and his mission to redeem the world: “He is the originator of the story, the teller of the story, the prime actor in the story, the planner and guide of the story’s plot, the meaning of the story and its ultimate completion. He is its beginning, end, and center.”

Once you grasp the radically God-centered nature of reality (and the Bible’s account of history—past, present, and future), you can’t help but rethink the kinds of questions we instinctively ask about the Christian life. We get demoted. God gets exalted.

Turn Around These Questions

Below, some challenging questions that might help you reorient your thinking toward God and his purposes.

We often ask: Where does God fit into the story of my life?
Better to ask: Where does my little life fit into the great story of God’s mission?
The first question assumes my life story is the baseline into which God must somehow fit. But God’s mission is the frame for our lives, not the other way around.

We often ask: What is God’s purpose for my life?
Better to ask: What purpose does my life have within God’s purpose for all life, wrapped up in his mission for the whole of creation?
The first question assumes we should be looking for a tailor-made purpose designed exclusively for ourselves. The better question places our individual callings within the larger, sweeping purpose God has for the world.

We often ask: How can I apply the Bible to my life?
Better to ask: How can I apply my life to the Bible?
The first question subtly assumes my life is the central story, to which Scripture must somehow apply. But the Bible is the reality—the true Story—to which we’re called to conform ourselves. The goal isn't merely to apply disjointed bits of the Bible here and there but to inhabit the whole biblical story, embracing both its demands in the present and its hope for the future.

We often ask: How can we make the gospel relevant to the world?
Better to ask: How does God intend to transform the world to fit the shape of the gospel?
The first question assumes the gospel must be adapted to fit the world’s frame. The better question recognizes that gospel proclamation and demonstration are meant to display God’s redeeming work as it unfolds in human history.

We often ask: What activities and priorities make up the mission God expects from his church?
Better to ask: What kind of church does God desire for his mission?
The first question narrows “mission” to a set of tasks or programs. The second recognizes the church as the people of God, chosen and called to extend and embody the mission of God in all its biblical fullness, in both word and deed.

We often ask: What kind of mission does God have for me?
Better to ask: What kind of me does God want for his mission?
The first question shrinks the notion of mission down to an individual’s calling. The better question starts with God’s overarching mission, so that we then assess our lives—our character, gifts, and obedience—in light of his worldwide purposes.

God-Centered Frame

Reframing our questions places us where we belong. The Christian life isn't less meaningful when God is at the center but more so. We discover our significance not in seeing ourselves at the center of the story but by inhabiting the grand narrative the Scriptures set before us.

When we stop treating God as a supporting character in our personal story and instead see ourselves as participants in his great redemptive drama, our questions begin to change. And when our questions change, so does our orientation. We learn to ask not “How do I fit God into my life?” but “How does my life fit into the story of God’s glory?”

By Trevin Wax --  who is vice president of resources and marketing at the North American Mission Board and a visiting professor at Cedarville University. A former missionary to Romania, Trevin is a regular columnist at The Gospel Coalition and has contributed to The Washington Post, World, and Christianity Today. He has taught courses on mission and ministry at Wheaton College and has lectured on Christianity and culture at Oxford University. He is a founding editor of The Gospel Project, has served as publisher for the Christian Standard Bible, and is currently a fellow for The Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics. He is the author of multiple books, including The Gospel Way Catechism. 

When the Creator Came He Found Dead Men Walking

No, it wasn’t a zombie apocalypse. The Creator and Giver of life came to the world he had created and
found dead people walking around everywhere he looked. How sad it must have been for Jesus, who breathed life into humanity, to be face-to-face with dead humanity. And how sad it was for him to recognize that although they were dead, they didn’t know they were dead, and because they didn’t know, they didn’t hunger for the life that he had come to give them. How sad it is to have the one thing people desperately need, but they’re not interested in what you have to offer.

Life was born in that manger; it’s what the Christmas story is about. Life was born among the dead so that the dead would come to life. Now, I’m not talking here about physical death, but rather spiritual death. But consider the power of this word picture. This may sound crass, but it confronts us with what it means to be spiritually dead: the one person you expect nothing from at a funeral is the deceased. Because the person is dead, he is unable to relate to you, let alone rescue himself from his sad state. Consider that:

 1. A dead man has no awareness that he is dead.

2. A dead man has no ability to cry out for help.

3. A dead man can’t breathe life into himself.

4. For a dead man to live, a divine miracle must take place.

Listen to the description in Ephesians 2:1–9 of every sinner apart from the life-infusing grace of the Messiah, Jesus:

“And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience—​​​among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind. But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—​​​by grace you have been saved—​​​and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.”

Because we were dead in our sins, we were completely without any ability to rescue ourselves. We were stuck in our sins and trapped in a cycle of rebellion against God, slaves to our passions and objects of God’s wrath. Not only were we dead, but we were also doomed, and not only were we doomed, but we were also helpless. Here you find the essence of the Christmas story. Here is where it preaches to us about God’s abounding love and his amazing grace. Because we were not able to act for ourselves to change our condition, God acted on our behalf. And because he is boundless in love and plenteous in mercy, he acted for us and not against. If God had acted against us, his judgment would have been right—​​​we deserved his wrath. But the birth of Jesus told the world of dead people that God was not going to act in anger but in mercy. He was not going to mete out punishment but rather grace. He wasn’t going to strike us with his holy sword of vengeance but rather gift us with his life-giving Son.

The birth of that baby tells you that the story of humanity would not end with the walking dead. It would not end with slavery to sin and separation from God. The birth of Jesus is God acting radically in human history to give life to dead people. How would that happen? Well, the One who was life would take on all our sin and die so that we would not only have life right here, right now, but fullness of life with him for all of eternity. The One who is life died for the dead so that the dead would have life forever.

The birth of Jesus tells you something else. Because of what Jesus would do in his life, death, and resurrection, because he was willing to die to give life, we will live, but death will die. The birth of the ultimate life-giver, Jesus, guarantees the death of death. In the life and work of that baby in the manger all the effects of sin will be defeated, the worst of them being death. As the children of God, we will not only live, alive in heart and alive to God, but we will be invited to the one funeral we’ll actually want to go to. We’ll be invited to the funeral of sin and death, because sin and death will die because of the redeeming work of the One born in Bethlehem.

So at Christmas remember that beneath the angels, the shepherds, the wise men, Mary and Joseph, and that rented barn is this amazing story of life and death. And because it’s a story of life and death, it’s a story of amazing grace. The birth of Jesus is a sure sign that God will act where we cannot act, and he will act with life-giving grace. Celebrate that Jesus came to give life, because it’s the one gift we could never, ever give ourselves.

 

By Paul Tripp, Come Let Us Adore Him Devotional (December 27) 

The Longest Night of the Year

The darkness has been gathering for a while now. It wasn’t particularly obvious at first—a lengthening
shadow here, a loss of an hour there. But as the weeks progressed and the hands of time were set forward, an undeniable gloom has settled in and with it, a chill. Things that once flourished in light now lie dormant. We go to sleep in darkness and wake in the same.

To be fair, the night has been coming due for a while now. Those high days of summer when we were carefree and daylight seemed to stretch on forever were always going to exact a price. But the loss of light was so gradual that we didn’t really notice it until we were sitting in darkness. And now, those of us in the Northern Hemisphere find ourselves facing the longest night of the year. 

Meteorologically speaking, the winter solstice is easily explained: It is the moment when the Earth’s poles are tilted to their most extreme positions in relationship to the sun, resulting in an exaggerated gap in sunlight between the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. While the global South basks in the light of summer, the tilt of our planet’s axis places the North in darkness. The further north you go, the greater the disparity so that Oslo, Norway, will experience only six hours of daylight while Fairbanks, Alaska, will have less than four. Closer to the Arctic Circle, there will be no discernible sunlight at all—full days of darkness for places like Murmansk, Russia, and Utqiagvik, Alaska.

Those are the facts anyway. But the existential reality of the winter solstice is less reasonable and at least for me, deeply portentous. There’s a heaviness to it, and for some, a visceral despair as the loss of sunlight prompts physiological imbalances in the form of Seasonal Affective Disorder As a child, I remember my father speaking of the encroaching night with a sense of reverence and even humility. My father spent most of his day working outside, so for him the loss of daylight meant the loss of working hours and, to some degree, productivity, which in modern life also implies meaning.“The shortest day of the year is coming,” he’d warn as if he were a prophet and it was his solemn duty to prepare us for what was coming.

So like the Earth preparing for winter, I find myself shutting down as darkness descends. It is harder to wake in the morning, and I’m less eager to venture out in the evenings. My mind tells me that I should be active and engaged, fighting against the chill, pushing back the boundaries of the night. Conditioned for productivity and abundance, I flood the house with lights, crank up the heat, and push through. And yet, I also find my body telling me to wait. To accept that there are dark forces beyond myself and that all my energy and efforts cannot stop them from cycling through.

In such moments, I take comfort in the particularly propitious alignment of the winter solstice with the liturgical season of Advent. 

At least in the Northern Hemisphere, these weeks gradually bring us to the year’s darkest darkness even as they also deliver us to Christmas. Modern observances often treat Advent as an extension of Christmas, with celebrations and feasting beginning immediately after Thanksgiving, but Christians as far back as the fourth century have prepared for the coming Christ child by sitting in the darkness. Much like the season of Lent, these weeks are for fasting, prayer, and repentance. Strangely enough, we’re supposed to feel unsettled and lost.

In her book length treatment of Advent, Fleming Rutledge puts it more directly:

“Advent is the season that, when properly understood, does not flinch from the darkness that stalks us all in the world. Advent begins in the dark and moves toward the light—but the season should not move too quickly or glibly, lest we fail to acknowledge the depth of the darkness. As our Lord Jesus tells us, unless we see the light of God clearly, what we call light is actually darkness … Advent bids us take a fearless inventory of the darkness without and the darkness within.”

In this way, the Earth may be better attuned to the purposes of darkness than we are. While we insist on revelry and abundance, nature is content to receive such seasons and sit in night. What for us can be the busiest time of the year becomes for her a time of patience and quiet—a time dedicated to the hidden work of decay, the breaking down and dissolution of the past year’s excesses in preparation for future life.

But as much as Advent is a season of darkness, it is also a season of expectation and it is vital that we remember that the night delivers us to the morning. 

“Advent” derives from the Latin word, adventus which means “coming” or “arrival.” Something—Someone—is coming and we are waiting for that coming. Christians are waiting for the One whose justice and kindness far outpaces our own. So that even as the shadows lengthen and night descends, even as the things that operate in darkness feel like they grow stronger each moment, hope is not lost. For just as you cannot see the glory of the stars at noonday, it takes the chill of a winter’s night to clarify what is Light and what is Dark. And it is by these same pinpoints of light that we will be guided.

In the final book of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, J.R.R. Tolkien describes such a reality. As the heroes Sam and Frodo are engulfed by the ever-deepening shadows of Mordor:

“…there, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty forever beyond its reach.”

Today, we may sit in darkness, but we wait in hope. Whether you’re feeling the weight of strained relationships, economic pressures, or civil unrest, the invitation of Advent is to know that you are not alone in the darkness. There is a Light beyond us, and that Light is coming to us. So we entrust ourselves, our neighbors, and our world to the God who is Emmanuel–who has and is and will come. And soon we will celebrate.”

- by Hannah Anderson: A Dark Season at Advent

 

A Christmas Message for the Post-Christian

C.S. Lewis once pointed out that Christianity does not begin by telling us how to behave, but by telling us
what is wrong.

There is a particular kind of person who feels most irritated by Christmas. Not the outright unbeliever, not the pagan who senses a mystery he cannot name, but the one who has already “been there.” The post-Christian knows the story. They know the carols, the manger, the angels. They have opinions about it all. They have moved on.

Or so they think.

This is the person C.S. Lewis had in mind in “A Christmas Sermon for Pagans” when he spoke of those who are sick and do not know it. Not because they are immoral, or foolish, or uniquely corrupt, but because they have lost the ability to feel their need. They once heard the diagnosis and now believe themselves immune.

The post-Christian does not usually say, “I reject Christ.” They say something softer and far more dangerous. They say, “I know all that already.” They believe the faith has been outgrown, like a childhood coat. They remember the rules more clearly than the mercy, the prohibitions more clearly than the promise. And so they assume the cure was nothing more than a moral program they have since replaced with something more flexible, more adult, and more reasonable.

Christmas arrives and irritates them because it refuses to stay in the past. It insists on returning every year like an unanswered question. Lights go up. Songs drift through grocery stores. Old words reappear. “Prepare the way.” “Watch.” “Wake.” The post-Christian tells themselves it is nostalgia, or marketing, or cultural debris. But something underneath them stirs anyway.

Lewis once pointed out that Christianity does not begin by telling us how to behave, but by telling us what is wrong. That is precisely what the post-Christian resists. They do not want to be told they are unwell. They prefer to believe the trouble lies elsewhere. In systems, structures, history, bad actors, anything but the human heart.

So they trade sin for psychology, repentance for self-expression, forgiveness for explanation. They learn to narrate themselves endlessly. They understand their wounds. They trace them carefully. They name every fracture in the family tree. And still the ache remains.

This is the quiet irony of the post-Christian life. They have thrown off guilt, yet cannot find rest. They have rejected judgment, yet live under constant accusation. They have abandoned absolution, yet they continue to rehearse their failures in their heads. They have learned all the language of healing except the one thing that actually heals.

Christmas does not argue with them. It does not try to win them back by force. It simply stands there and tells the old story again, slowly, stubbornly, like a bell that refuses to stop ringing.

It says the problem is not that you lacked information. The problem is not that you failed to try hard enough. The problem is not that you grew up in a bad church or heard the faith poorly explained. The problem is older, deeper, and far less flattering.

The world is sick. And so are you.

Lewis was blunt about this. He insisted that Christianity only makes sense if something has gone seriously wrong. Not slightly wrong. Not inconveniently wrong. Fatally wrong. Christmas dares to say the same thing without raising its voice.

The post-Christian bristles. They do not want a savior. They want a solution. 

It tells us that no amount of education, therapy, reform, or self-curation can mend what is broken at the root. It tells us the reason we cannot save ourselves is not that we have not yet discovered the right method, but because we are the problem we keep trying to solve.

This is where the post-Christian bristles. They do not want a savior. They want a solution. They want improvement, not resurrection. They want Christmas without the confession that makes Christmas necessary.

But Christmas refuses that bargain.

It insists that the cure comes from outside us. That help does not rise from within. That the center of the story is not human potential but divine interruption. A God who does not wait for us to climb toward him, but comes down into our confusion, our fatigue, our self-justifications, our well-polished unbelief.

This is why the incarnation offends modern ears. A teacher we can admire. A moral example we can adapt. A spiritual insight we can integrate. But a God who enters the world as a child because we cannot rescue ourselves? That is harder to dismiss and harder still to accept.

Christianity insists, stubbornly and repeatedly, that something had to die before anything could live.

Christmas does not shout this. It whispers it. Candles instead of spotlights. Silence instead of spectacle. A pregnant pause in the year that asks one uncomfortable question: What if you were wrong about what you needed?

Not wrong in the sense of ignorant, but wrong in the sense of misdiagnosed. What if your restlessness is not boredom, but hunger? What if your cynicism is not wisdom, but exhaustion? What if your distance from the faith is not maturity, but grief you never finished grieving?

Lewis once noted that Christianity does not promise comfort first, but honesty first. Christmas follows the same order. It tells the truth before it offers joy. It names the darkness before lighting the candle. It waits.

And then, quietly, it says this.

The cure is not an idea. The cure is not a principle. The cure is a person. A person who does not recoil from your doubt, your resentment, your past church wounds, or your practiced indifference. A person who enters history precisely because history cannot fix itself.

Christmas does not exist to make you feel nostalgic. It exists because without intervention, the story ends badly. Christmas is the season that remembers this without apology.

If you are post-Christian, Christmas is not here to drag you back. It is here to ask whether you ever truly left the question behind. Whether the ache you keep managing might actually be an invitation. Whether the cure you dismissed is still standing at the door.

The lights will come on soon enough. The songs will swell. The Child will arrive, unarmed, unguarded, unimpressive by every modern metric.

And Christmas will have done its work if, even for a moment, you wonder whether the faith you thought you outgrew might still know something about you that you have not yet dared to face.

The night is long.

The world is unwell.

And the cure does not wait for our approval.

by Donavon Riley, pastor, author, and writer at 1517

Masculinity Is Self-Rule Before World Rule

Masculinity is self-rule before world-rule. That idea used to be obvious.

Across civilizations, religions, and generations, men were not first measured by what they could conquer, command, or correct. They were measured by what they could restrain. Anger. Appetite. Ambition. Ego. Before a man was trusted with authority over others, he was expected to demonstrate authority over himself.

That assumption ran so deep it rarely needed to be explained.

But something changed.

When Anger Started to Feel Like Strength

Periods of cultural instability always produce the same temptation. When order collapses, anger begins to feel like clarity. Volume feels like courage. Aggression feels like masculinity.

It’s understandable. Weak leadership provokes reaction. Feminized institutions invite revolt. Men who have been ignored, mocked, or sidelined start looking for something solid to grab.

Anger offers that solidity. It sharpens the edges. It simplifies the world into friends and enemies. It feels decisive.

But Scripture never treats anger as a qualification for leadership. It treats it as a liability.

“Whoever is slow to anger is better than the mighty, and he who rules his spirit than he who takes a city.” (Proverbs 16:32)

That verse doesn’t deny the value of strength. It reorders it. Taking a city is impressive. Ruling your spirit is rarer.

The Reversal We Barely Noticed

Somewhere along the way, masculinity quietly flipped its order of operations. Instead of self-rule leading to authority, authority became something to seize first, with character expected to catch up later. If it ever did.

Reaction replaced formation. Outrage replaced discipline. Confidence became a posture rather than a pattern of life. That reversal feels powerful in the moment. But it produces men who are brittle rather than strong.

A man who cannot govern his temper cannot govern a household.
A man who cannot receive correction cannot be trusted with command.
A man who must stay angry to feel strong is already confessing weakness.

How Authority Has Always Been Tested

Long before platforms and comment sections, institutions that actually lasted operated on a simple assumption: authority is entrusted, not claimed.

Across households, churches, armies, and trades, men were evaluated by a few basic duties. They weren’t edgy. They weren’t complicated. But they worked.

Care.
Does this man steward what has been placed in his hands, or does he burn through it to prove a point?

Obedience.
Is he visibly submitted to lawful authority, or does he only respect power when he holds it?

Accounting.
Can he give an honest account of his actions and their fruit, or only defend his intentions?

Loyalty.
Is he anchored to real people and real obligations, or to a tribe that exists mostly online?

These aren’t soft virtues. They are stabilizing ones.

A man who fails here may still sound confident. He may still be right about many things. But he is not yet trustworthy.

The Trap of Performative Masculinity

One of the great dangers of the moment is mistaking posture for power.

Rhetorical aggression can look like leadership. Contempt can masquerade as discernment. Constant opposition can feel like courage.

But Scripture does not define masculinity by how sharply a man critiques the world. It defines it by how faithfully he orders his life. Elders are required to be sober-minded, self-controlled, gentle, disciplined. Not because those traits are weak, but because authority without them destroys rather than builds.

Anger might rally a crowd. It cannot shepherd souls.

Christ as the Measure

This is where everything clarifies.

Christ did not inherit authority because He seized it. He did not rule by outrage. He did not posture for dominance.

He obeyed the Father. He ruled Himself. Then He was given all authority in heaven and on earth. That order matters.

Any vision of masculinity that cannot survive that comparison is not biblical. It is brittle.

A Harder Path Than Outrage

It is easy to be angry online. It is hard to be faithful in obscurity.

It is easy to identify enemies. It is hard to rule your spirit.

It is easy to demand order from the world. It is far harder to submit yourself to real authority, real accountability, and real responsibility.

But that harder path is the only one that produces men fit to lead.

Masculinity is not proven by how loudly a man resists cultural decay. It is proven by the order he maintains over himself, especially when no one is watching.

Self-rule comes first. World-rule comes later, if at all.

And when that order is honored, authority no longer needs to be announced. It is recognized.

 

By Virgil Walker who serves as a Teaching Pastor at Redeemer Bible Church in Gilbert, Arizona. He is also the co-host of the Just Thinking Podcast and is a featured writer at Sola Veritas, Standing for Freedom Center, and TPUSA’s BLEXIT movement.

“Nothin’ From Nothin’ Leaves Nothin’.”

Without a savior, sin always rules

In his book “What Americans Believe,” George Barna points out that 87% of non-Christians and 77% of
self-described born-again believers agreed with the statement “People are basically good.” In other words, our culture, by and large, has discarded the idea of original sin.

The sophisticated among us roll our eyes at the concept of innate human corruption. We snicker at the notion that certain actions, thoughts and behaviors are still deemed to be sinful. The very idea of sin seems a bit too Victorian to us. “It is judgmental and prudish,” we say, and we are quick to condemn anyone who dares suggest that we are anything less than good people.

The whole idea of sin has gone the way of the horse and buggy. It is an outdated and useless concept that has been replaced by more modern ways of understanding the human being and human experience. Men and women are born good, and suggesting that anyone comes into this world with a corrupted nature and is guilty of sin is, well, a sin.

The irony, however, of denying this biblical understanding of human nature is that if you boil it all down to its basic premise, it is really nothing more than the celebration of what Scripture calls the “fall.” That is, the fall of everyone wanting to “be as God” and thereby deciding for themselves what is right and wrong, just and unjust, and true or false. It’s the fall of us declaring who is male and who is female and even presuming to define life and death.

Such autonomous power is to become our own God, for we no longer need him to know the difference between good and evil.

In our denial of a sovereign, we have, ironically, found one. We are the ultimate ruler. There is only one king, and it is us. We will bow to no one else.

St. Paul warned of this 2,000 years ago in his letter to the Romans. He told us the danger of worshipping the created rather than the Creator is that it inevitably leads to bondage rather than freedom. Elevating ourselves over God always leads to slavery to sin, either ours or someone else’s.

The lessons of history have proved repeatedly that when men make this mistake, the consequences are dire. Millions have suffered in the prisons and died in the furnaces from such idolatry.

The paradox in all of this is that admitting the existence of our depravity is the only bulwark against it. As G.K. Chesterton famously argued, “Original sin … is the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved,” and the best minds in human history (such as Jefferson, Adams, Washington and Monroe) “all took positive evil as the starting point of their argument.”

In other words, our Founders understood that “when there is no king in the land, everyone starts doing what is right in their own eyes,”(Joshusa 17:6) and culture collapses under the weight of human depravity. They did believe we needed a king, and his name was Jesus. Or, in the words of Thomas Paine: “Where, say some, is the King of America? I tell you, friend, he reigns above.”

At its core, the “No Kings” movement is really nothing more than a repeat of the millennia-old cycle of the original sin. Eating the fruit of the forbidden tree, these people become their own monarch as they haughtily rise and shout, with the maniacal confidence of Diderot, “We will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest!”

We dare not, however, forget that if the French Revolution teaches us anything, it is this: When you take God out of the public square, it creates a vacuum that will quickly be filled with despots and demagogues. Shouts of “No Kings” always lead to someone who is only too willing to use the guillotine to secure his reign.

Back in the 1970s, Billy Preston sang, “Nothin’ from nothin’ leaves nothin’.” He was right. Sooner or later, “you’ve gotta have somethin’” to fill the void. Chaos always demands a correction. We all will have a king. It will either be the one we see in the Bible or the one we see in the mirror.

Without a savior, sin always rules.

Dr. Everett Piper (dreverettpiper.com, @dreverettpiper), a columnist for The Washington Times, is a former university president and radio host. He is the author of “Not a Day Care: The Devastating Consequences of Abandoning Truth” (Regnery). He can be reached at epiper@dreverettpiper.com

Cellphones: Blessing or Curse

Recently, writer Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist, posed this question to ChatGPT: 

“If you were the devil, how would you destroy the next generation, without them even knowing it?” 

Here’s a bit of the answer he shared in a Free Press article:

“I’d keep them busy. Always distracted” and “I’d watch their minds rot slowly, sweetly, silently. And the best part is, they’d never know it was me. They’d call it freedom.”

Mr. Haidt wrote, “It seemed to be saying, if the devil wanted to destroy a generation, he could just give them all smartphones.” He came to this after studying why Gen Z, the kids born between 1996 and 2012, experienced an increase in mental health problems beginning in the early 2010s.

Sometimes, truth also comes packaged in unorthodox places.

The Babylon Bee online satire site had a recent headline, “Jesus Heals Demon-Possessed Man by Taking Away His Cellphone.” “Multiple reports indicated that the man’s rages, convulsions, and foaming at the mouth were instantly healed as soon as Jesus removed the man’s smartphone from his hand,” the story reads. “At publishing time, witnesses had reported that Jesus had told the man to go and scroll no more, or something worse might happen to him.”

Christians familiar with biblical accounts of Jesus’ miracles, plus his admonition to the woman caught in adultery to “go and sin no more,” will get this immediately.

Yet you don’t have to be a Christian to question whether smartphones have been a blessing or a curse. Clearly, they are both. Remember what it was like trying to connect with someone arriving at an airport? Or losing written directions on the way to a destination? Or not having change for a pay phone? Scratch that last one if you’re younger than 40.

The convenience has been astonishing. The world’s accumulated knowledge is at our fingertips. You can talk face-to-face with friends, loved ones and business acquaintances around the world, but the price has been steep.

A story broke last year in The New York Times about a remote Amazon tribe getting internet access and cellphones and developing social pathologies within two years. The tribe says the paper exaggerated, and it has filed a defamation lawsuit.

Nonetheless, the social effects of ubiquitous cellphones are obvious. Every weekday, on a nearby corner, middle and high school kids wait for a school bus. Every one of them has his or her head down, engrossed in a cellphone. No one is talking. No girl is flirting with a boy. No boys are comparing sports scores. At least not in person.

When we encounter these teens on neighborhood walks, we’re often surprised and saddened that they won’t even return a friendly “Hello.”

Apple founder Steve Jobs introduced iPhones in January 2007, and by the 2010s, they were everywhere. With instantaneous communication, Big Tech has created an environment in which kids are fed constant opinions and, often, dark themes. They can become victims of scathing psychological attacks or become part of a peer group assaulting another student. They can watch videos ad nauseam on TikTok, access pornography, create deepfakes and read posts that make their parents out to be ogres if they exert any discipline whatsoever glued to their phones angels” or make them subject to “spiritual degradation.” All too often, he writes, it’s the latter.

Personally, I have no doubt that God exists, came miraculously in human form 2,000 years ago to save our souls, and is still doing so. In any case, Haidt is on to something important. He offers “four norms” that could help: No smartphones before high school, no social media before 16, phone-free schools from kindergarten through 12th grade, and more independence, free play and responsibility in the real world.

Children, he says, need “to do hard things, over and over, and suffer setbacks and losses, in order to become strong, independent adults.” In other words, they need to develop character, something about which the Bible has much to say. For example, “Whoever walks in integrity walks securely, but whoever takes crooked paths will be found out.” (Proverbs 10:9)rampant. Throw cellphones into this mix, and you have a perfect storm.

A committed mother and father can make an enormous difference. For those lacking such a foundation, faith in a loving God goes a long way. “He will heal the broken-hearted and bind up their wounds.” (Psalm 147:3) The Apostle Paul offered a timeless antidote to angst and cynicism that could apply even to overuse of cellphones: “Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.” (Phil. 4:8)

Robert Knight is a columnist for The Washington Times. His website is roberthknight.com.