Over the past while there has come upon us an awareness of something shifting across Western societies. The atmosphere is changing. Underlying assumptions of late, modern societies are no longer holding. At Davos, the Canadian Prime Minister, Mark Carney, spoke of a moment of rupture. But it is more, even, than the drama of geopolitical shifts, economic realignments, power moves in high places or the maneuverings of oligarchs in an emerging post-liberal feudalism. These are all manifestations of a deeper disruption, even though they control our attention through social media and may keep us awake at night. What is happening can’t be captured in the 30 second clips or panels of experts on 24-hour news cycles, YouTube videos or X. This change of atmosphere is beyond these in-your-face realities. Something more fundamental is shifting. A friend recently commented: “The situation we’re in politcally…is treacherous, but it is rooted in centuries rather than a few missteps in the last couple decades.” An Anglo-Catholic friend in London describes his sense of what’s happening through the comments of Cynthia Bourgeault, a modern day mystic and Episcopal priest. She proposes that a whole way of looking at the world, its rationale and mental structure of consciousness is breaking up.” Western societies turned from the story of God’s reality to embrace modernity – that set of rational structures and methods initiated in the Enlightenments that formed a new way of being human and understanding human agency. In the language of Alan Seligman, modernity is the wager that life can be lived without God inside what Charles Taylor calls the immanent frame and the buffered self.
More and more people have stopped trusting the political, economic and social institutions formed after WW II. Getting at what’s happening, however, invites larger questions than politics or economics. Something is happening at a more fundamental level. In part, it is a response to globalisations’ effects on local communities and people’s sense of identity. A discontent is present across all classes. Working, and under class, young men, who’ve felt derided and cast aside by educated elites, are making their voices heard. Loss of livelihood and sense of a future are stirring primal imaginations that the elites can’t comprehend. These young men are expressing resistance to the status quo, to the meanness of life in cities. Growing numbers of these young men are turning to Christianity. These movements are entangled in complexity. Clarity of meaning is not present at this moment. There aren’t simple straight line directions here. Such primal imaginations are expressed in a variety of narratives. Some see society caught in a spiritual malaise, in loss of tradition, of belonging and spiritual roots. They’re cognizant of spiritual powers at work and, thus, read ours as a time confronted by spiritual warfare. For others it’s about ethno-nationalism and racism. We must resist knee jerk reactions that come from easy dismissals or concluding its revival. We must be open to the fledgling signs of the Spirit in it all. What does it mean that working and underclass young men are turning toward pentecostal and independent evangelical churches but not Anglican, Methodist, URC, etc.?
It’s too easy to dismiss these movements as the return of superstition or the co-opting of Christianity for political ends. Before writing these young, working class men off, note that we’re seeing much the same in the very middle class re-engagement with Orthodoxy and in the writings of a very middle class journalist like Rod Dreher in his recent book, Living in Wonder. Grassroots movements from both the edges and the middle tell us that the ground is shifting. It’s more than reactions to our political ideologies even though this turning to Christianity involves the political and seeks ways of replacing what they view as a failed liberalism. This turn to Christianity, across the classes, is a search for identity in a failed social narrative.
At the same time, a small but growing number of Gen Zs are turning to transcendence. Some call it a “Quiet Revival”. This is a short sighted reading of our moment. Some of that may be needed. Younger people want institutions to take a role of moral leadership in a dysfunctional society. But revival language isn’t about that. Signs of return to church are read as hope for churches anxious about their loss of place. “Revival” sounds like the sigh of relief from anxious churches wandering in cultural wilderness. I don’t think we are in a time of revival. In Carney’s words, it is a time of rupture where the old arrangements aren’t coming back.
What if we read what is happening among Gen Z and working class men through this lens of rupture and ending rather than revival? We know something is happening that’s creating lots of reactions. Along with the talk of a return to Christianity, there is a rejection of the new atheism among educated elites. Cultural tectonic plates are shifting. In a recent NY Times essay, David Brooks mentions George Packer’s novel, The Emergency. It’s about the fracture of a society as the empire comes apart. Managerial and professional elites are disoriented, at a loss around what to do. Chaos is camped on their streets in the form of rural migrants with no homes. Democracy gives way to crowd totalitarianism. The book expresses the underlying disease and confusion of elites across Western societies. So much disruption all at once. It all feels too much and too threatening to those who’ve had power, lived well and stopped paying attention to their streets.
The landscape has become chaotic. In a rupture, groups emerge that refuse to accept narratives we’ve taken as normative (there is, for example, a refusal to accept norms of success, individualism, or even the secular frame). On another level, modernity was supposed to have tamed “nature”, but that nature has become a dark, threatening force. The Australian novelist Charlotte McConaghy’s book, Wild Dark Shore, paints a picture of an island between Tasmania and Antarctica being, literally, torn apart by storms and overwhelmed by water as the only family left comes to terms with what it means to be human and have community.
What do we make of it all? Is the Christian “revival” response shortsighted and misguided in a rupturing world? Gen Zs are seeking God, they want to connect with the mystery of transcendence. But what is that about? At one level, accelerating tech revolutions add layers of upheaval to the picture. One Gen Z, a graduate from a top-flight US university, reflected on her future with an engineering degree (Boomers have urged and funded young women getting into the high status, high paying STEM programmes). As a newly minted engineer she reflected on the coming of AI into her field. She’s not bullish. As a high performing programmer, she took up AI for efficiency. What she’s discovering is disturbing. AI is displacing people like her at the ratio of 1-5. She believes this is just the beginning. Another recent graduate said: “I’ve done everything my culture said I needed to do to succeed, I got the degree, but now I’m realizing I am screwed”. As one friend noted: “There is a sense that it is out of control…there are no constraints – no ethical framework to protect the human being. There is a general acceptance that you just allow the animating force to go where it will and figure out how to handle it later. These young people are experiencing a system driven by its own logic, with no concern for its effects on human beings”.
American journalist, Sohrab Ahmari, describes the experience of Nalin Haley (Gen Z son of former US ambassador to the UN and Presidential candidate, Nikki Haley) who recently converted to Catholicism. Speaking of his generation, he stated how his friends (graduates of Ivy league schools) have been unable to find jobs. The experience of this generation is that the deadending of their future has been caused by the state’s overreach in terms of open door immigration and abundant foreign aid. Whatever one’s opinion about the level of blame to lay at the foot of the state, this, too, is animating Gen Z’s loss of faith in the promises of modernity.
These are but instances of a fundamental loss of trust in the prevailing story of modern societies: You can make the world you want. You’re the agent of your future. Do the right things, earn the degrees and step onto the ever ascending elevator of progress. For most Gen Zs the elevator isn’t going up any more. That story is a non-starter. A majority don’t believe the dream their parents and grandparents sold them. For them, the state aside, too many elements of the modern story just aren’t true. What about other elements of this story?
This rupture goes deep. Gen Zs and working class young men have lost faith in the secularism around which their parents and grandparents framed their lives. On the streets and outside the churches are reassertions of primal imaginations that go back past the modern era. Emerging generations are no longer content with the immanent frame gifted to us by the Enlightenments. The churches came to accept it as a fact. After W.W. 2 a new middle class emerged as working class children went to universities. These universities incubated new generations (Boomers to the present) in the modernity project and, therefore, within the imminent frame narrative. This included, over the past eighty years, those who became the Protestant church’s leadership.These churches and their leaders are middle-class elites (albeit aging) shaped within the immanent frame. When elements of our culture desire to return to pre-Enlightenment forms of mystery and transcendence, they are read by these churches as returning to superstition and weirdness or as revival (younger generations finally returning to where they should be).
Is Charles Taylor’s “immanent frame” (a way of seeing the world where everything is explained within the bounds of human reason and the transcendent is treated as optional for those who needed) a worldview that can no longer hold the imagination or convictions of GenZs or the working class young men? Is that pervasive reading of our time now off the table except for university educated, middle-class, affluent Boomers and their children. For many Gen Zs and working class men, the secular as a framework for meaning has failed. For them it tells lies about reality. It has left them empty of purpose, floating without anchors in a world whose promises of the good life are proving empty. They’re searching for another story and they’ve had to be their own guides.
A desire to reconnect with the primal imagination of transcendence is underway amidst the rupture of modernity’s story with its promises of progress and a self without God. Protestant churches, anxious over their implosion, misread it all as “revival”. This interpretation leads churches down a cul-de-sac. This revival language is about the church, not about the movement of God among people. The Holy Spirit is disrupting these conclusions. We shouldn’t read what’s going on from within the echo chambers of an anxious church. These transformations aren’t about revival, Gen Z and working class men never left because they were never there. They are signs of a hunger across for transcendence that can transform the nature of modern societies?
All kinds of people are without a future, without work or hope, the connections of family or community. Many anticipate the loss of whole industries for which they are trained. People tribalize when such breaks happen out of fear and loss of rootedness. The stranger becomes my enemy. Men and women begin living in separate universes (young men returning to church, young women going in the opposite direction). Christian communities that rise above the fear of survival learn to attend to what the Spirit is doing among Gen Zs and working class young men in their communities, if they lay down the search for revival to participate with God beyond their walls. In the language of one Gen Z – we need to “touch grass”. This is a time to listen to the pain of how our political economies and the reduction of all things to the immanent frame are destroying generations. Chasing revival misses what the Spirit is orchestrating.