A Change of Age: America and the West Stand at a Civilizational Inflection Point

BY JOHN SEEL, PH.D.
August 22, 2024

We are not in an age of change, but a change of age.

We are amid a 500-year historical geo-political inflection point. The world as we have known it is changing, so profoundly that our histories going forward are going to be altered.

We are not talking here about the accumulation of incremental changes, but the wholesale changes of assumptions, global actors, and personal experiences. We are facing a paradigm shift–the likes of the fall of Rome (475 AD), the collapse of Constantinople (1453 AD), and Luther at the Diet of Worms (1521 AD).

The issues facing the church are significantly deeper and longer lasting than the shift from a Neutral to a Negative World. We are shifting from a Negative World to an outright hostile world.

This hostility is not conscious or explicit but implicit, not personal but foundational, and not political but cultural. It is an invisible hostility that makes it even more dangerous. This makes the new social reality the church is facing far more significant than we have previously imagined.

The first step is to wake up to the depth of the situation facing the church and to get our diagnosis aligned to reality. In this process of diagnosis, you cannot trust the mainstream media or the normal purveyors of academic insight as the elite culture is complicit and sometimes even the source of the disease.

The Four Civilizational Shifts

There are four primary shifts that we are currently facing as believers: from Christian to post-Christian, from classical liberalism to Nietzschean nihilism, from Global West to Global East, and from Enlightenment rationalism to post-Enlightenment re-enchantment.

Shift One: Christian to Post-Christian. We are living in a world that is functionally divorced from any reference to the sacred. We have shifted from societies based on fate and faith to one based on fiction. Moreover, the foundational basis of society, namely traditional marriage, has been rejected. The fruit of marriage, namely the procreation of children, has also been rejected. Replacing these historic foundations to social life is an unchecked hedonism reinforced by a world without boundaries, that is unchecked license.

The late University of Pennsylvania sociologist Philip Rieff described our contemporary world in this manner: “No culture has ever preserved itself where it is not a registration of sacred order. There, cultures have not survived. This kind of society where the notion of a culture that persists independent of all sacred orders is unprecedented in human history.”

In the past cultural conflicts were between competing sacred symbolics. Not so today. What makes our contemporary culture war distinctive is that it is a negation against all sacred orders and the verticals in authority that mediate the sacred to society. This is an entirely new historical situation. What this means is that we cannot simply return to older approaches as they are no longer relevant to our cultural situation.

Shift Two: Classical Liberalism to Nietzschean Nihilism (Individual Rights to State Power). The assumptions of the Enlightenment which gave rise to the political ideology of classical liberalism have been rejected by the leadership class. There is a much-debated question whether a democratic society can survive when its underlying assumptions are no longer believed by those who are being governed by it. Social solidarity requires shared social beliefs. When these are abandoned, as is increasingly the case by the political elites, then politics naturally defaults and devolves to the will-to-power in a world where the leadership class believes in nothing.

This is the experiential definition of nihilism. We have today a competition between left wing and right-wing forms of nihilism. Classical liberalism is defunct. By elevating individualism and progress into guiding social values, liberalism destroys the traditions and norms that allow human beings to make sense of life and find their place in the world.

American Christianity is on the decline, small-town America is hollowed out, drug abuse rates are rising, suicide is an accept outlet for many, particularly men–all symptoms of a spiritual crisis brought on by liberalism’s philosophical assault on the sources of social stability.

This is the combined argument of Notre Dame political scientist Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed and University of Virginia sociologist James Davison Hunter’s Democracy and Solidarity. No one has yet provided a meaningful future political solution to this problem apart from doubling down on past assumptions in an ongoing culture war between populism and elitism. What concerned analysts have agreed on is that there is no easy or quick fix. This reality is going to be with us for some time.

Shift Three: Global West to Global East. The combined reality of these first two shifts is the growing global awareness of the spiritual and political demise of the West. This was illustrated for the world to see in the decadence associated with the opening ceremony of the 2024 Olympics. The West is no longer seen as a desired model for the rest of the world.

The church has tended to think in terms of North and South, with our missional focus increasingly being oriented to the global South, where Christianity remains vital. We must instead begin to think West and East.

Implications here are less political as missional. This may have enormous missional implications because the Western gospel is closely associated with colonialism in the 19th century and decadence and disenchantment in the 20th century.

If you are thinking spiritual, you don’t look first to the West but the East. The West is the spiritual problem not the spiritual solution. What was once only true of Muslim countries like Iran is now being joined with the Eastern communist axis of Russia and China.

The shift in the Olympics from Paris 2024 to Los Angeles 2028 is only a shift from decadence to spectacle, from baguettes to Baywatch, and from Thomas Jolly to Tom Cruise. What is promised is Western decadence with a happier, sunnier, commercial Hollywood face. The rest of the world knows this and is taking steps to resist it. We are amid a global realignment that is lost on the State Department because it is blinded by our own Western spiritual corruption.

Shift Four: Enlightenment Rationalism to Post-Enlightenment Enchantment. Finally, we are rejecting forms of Enlightenment rationalism in favor of a more enchanted form of spirituality. This is a big threat to the evangelical church as it is largely the stepchild of the Enlightenment.

Missiologist Lesslie Newbigin writes, “The churches of Europe and their cultural offshoots in the Americas had largely come to a kind of comfortable cohabitation with the Enlightenment, and there did not seem to be any contradiction in the combination of modern education, medicine, and technology with the proclamation of the gospel.”

With the rejection of the Enlightenment rationalism with its association with secularism and disenchantment, has come the rebirth of a wide variety of older and new forms of enchantment, i.e., neo-paganism and the occult. The church will need to counter the orientation toward dark enchantment with a God-infused enchantment.

If we react to the rise of the occult with more rationalism, more courses on apologetics and worldview, more abstract dogmatism, we will miss an opportunity and be further marginalized culturally.

Historically, evangelicals have liked their religious antagonists to be tweed-wearing, pipe-smoking, atheist evolutionary biologist in elite universities. We are far less comfortable with our religious antagonists being ex-evangelical, transgender Wiccan witches. Yet this is going to be the new norm we should prepare for.

Enchanted historically orthodox biblically grounded experiential faith is going to be necessary to counter the rise of dark enchantment.

Why These Shifts Matters

Though these shifts are happening on a global stage and may seem distant and irrelevant to our daily lives, they are not for three reasons. Changes in our world will soon change our lives.

Reason One: These realities are going to be context of discipleship for our children. If we are seeking to equip our children in kingdom service, then our children will need to be adequately equipped for the kinds of battles that they are going to be facing.

We owe it to our children to take these matters seriously. We may be dead before the full weight of these shifts are felt culturally, but they will be the lived reality for our children and grandchildren. We owe it to our prodigy to speak up and to shout a warning. If not now, when; if not us, who?

Reason Two: Our entire approach toward missions is going to have to change. The historic priority of foreign missions may need to shift to home missions. The West represents the most strident global unreached people group. It is also the most difficult mission field. Our bias toward pragmatic exports of missions to where it is easiest, where we get a bigger bang for the buck, may need to shift to those areas where it is most difficult, such as the Pacific Northwest in the United States.

Many of our support organizations are going to have to reimagine and reframe their vision to address these new opportunities. This demands organizational reframing, which is difficult. There is significant work to be done to equip visionary institutional leadership, to prepare boards for the kind of governance that will be required, and to educate donors as to these dynamics so that they will know how to invest their resources in a manner where it is most strategic–which does not mean most financially efficient. Almost every ministry organization is going to have to learn to reframe, explore, and network their missional strategy. The status quo is a failed strategy.

Reason Three: These changes will greatly challenge our collective sense of identity. Faithfulness to the gospel may increasingly put our political geographic citizenship in tension with our spiritual citizenship in heaven. We are kingdom people first. If the West (read: the United States) becomes increasingly seen as the source of the spiritual problem, then we may have to orient ourselves at home as missionaries have been doing over the course of the past decades. We’re going to have to develop a greater sensitivity to our Western and Enlightenment accommodation of the gospel.

The American evangelical church is ill-prepared for adapting to these shifts. The likelihood is that under sustained cultural pressure, it will resort to doubling-down on past approaches, wearing an anti-intellectual, anti-elitist, populist-fundamentalist resistance as a badge of honor. This is the equivalent of being in a foreign country and talking louder and slower. This will only serve to further marginalize the American evangelical church’s impact in the ongoing cultural conversation. By spiritualizing their resistance and demonizing the other, they will further the degree of polarization and potential for any meaningful impact.

We are as a Western Christian church at an historic inflection point. We are at a point of decision. To meet our moment, we will need the courage to face these realities, the humility to seek God’s leading, and the discernment to balance innovation with historic orthodoxy.

We must embrace the tension this causes, the cognitive dissonance to our faith, and move forward with enthusiasm for we have the opportunity of living in one of the most exciting moments in church history in the past 500 years.

We are being called to the breaches to make our stand. The circumstance we face are new. Our God and his kingdom resources are not.

John Seel holds a PhD in American Studies from the University of Maryland and M.Div from Covenant Theological Seminary. He is an Anglican cultural renewal entrepreneur and social impact consultant.

https://virtueonline.org/change-age