What Time Is It?

What Time Is It?

What time is it? This is one of the most important questions to answer correctly. There’s a season for everything. Too many people want a single approach that’s good for all times and all places. But having timeless principles doesn’t mean having one go-to strategy or action in every situation.

America is in a liminal space, where the old is increasingly decaying but the new has not yet been fully formed. While there is still tremendous uncertainty, now is the time to build for the future.

Back in the 2010s, forces that rendered many of our political and institutional arrangements increasingly unfit for purpose were already at work. Christianity continued to decline in America, but the implications of that decline were not fully understood. Globalization, especially offshoring to China, had seriously harmed many workers and communities, but economists still denied those impacts. It wasn’t until the 2016 “China Shock” paper that economists acknowledged what was happening. Family formation, fertility, and relations between the sexes in general had taken a turn for the worse. Mass migration, especially illegal migration, was unpopular and causing many problems, yet amnesty and ever greater levels of immigration had bipartisan political support and institutional consensus. Affirmative action, designed to remedy the unique historic injustices done to black Americans, had transformed into an expansive central organizing principle of American institutional life, later known as DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion). America remained mired in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that seemed like they would never end, while our defense industrial base was eroding. The effects of delayed generational transition were increasingly felt, as Boomers kept a tight grip on institutional power and doubled down on the approaches they were familiar and comfortable with while the world continued to change.

The net result was a society in which change was badly needed, but the existing political parties and institutions—including religious institutions—were not adapting. Indeed, they were often explicitly unwilling to change.

In this environment, disruption of our ossified systems and institutions became a necessity. It was, perhaps unfortunately, a time to tear down. Barack Obama campaigned on an agenda of change but delivered very little of it. (This was not entirely his fault, of course.) Donald Trump ran as an even stronger candidate of change. Many people rallied to his campaign because they thought he would take a wrecking ball to structures that needed reform. Undoubtedly, Trump widened the possibility space for the future, for better or worse.

There were other cultural disruptors. The left pushed to accelerate the change of norms in matters of sexuality and race. A form of neo-socialism, represented by people like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, gained traction in the Democratic Party. The dissident right began promoting ideas previously viewed as outside the boundaries of acceptable discourse, as documented by Angela Nagle in her book Kill All Normies. Various “red pill” and alternative-health influencers questioned official views in key areas of life. Exogenous events like Covid also had a massive disruptive impact on society.

A period of disrupting legacy beliefs, approaches, political views, and institutions was necessary to make room for those seeking to address the pressing new realities of the 21st century.

However, disruption itself cannot be the goal. And many of the disruptors were unsuited to building new institutions to address the problems they highlighted. It is one thing to read a manosphere blog to learn the truth about attraction that your parents, pastors, or teachers never told you. It is quite another to build a society on the morals of Andrew Tate. Questioning authority has led all too many influencers to become purveyors of conspiracy theories. Many people have also become captive to delusional futures, such as the idea of deporting all post-1965 immigrants and their descendants.

This has affected the religious world as well. Social media has become dominated by highly confrontational and ever more “based” takes. A variety of people are promoting unproductive ideas far outside the American cultural and political tradition. These range from Catholic integralism to the idea that non-Christians shouldn’t be allowed to build houses of worship.

In this environment—where disruption of ossified structures has been accomplished—what is needed is a shift from tearing down to building up. What is built needs to be based on truth, even where that truth is unpleasant or unpopular. It must be prudential. It should understand that perfection can never be achieved in this world, and that vision must be paired with a practical and long-term time horizon. It should be rooted in Christianity and the American cultural and political tradition. At the same time, it must recognize that America now has a post-Christian culture, and that America is the forward-looking, protean nation par excellence.

Today’s Christians should be working to articulate and create a new positive vision for America—one that benefits them and their community, but also the country and public at large. This includes looking for like-minded, serious people beyond our own political or sectarian borders whom we can partner with and learn from.

What does this mean practically? I will give a concrete example. Energy should be redirected from debates about the ideas and people of the past toward the future. It is not necessary to continually relitigate the approaches of Tim Keller. He retired from his church almost a decade ago and has been dead for over three years. Perhaps in 2010, trying to disrupt Keller would have been necessary for any evangelical who wanted different ideas or approaches to take hold. Today, that’s no longer relevant. Evangelicalism has significantly fractured, is institutionally weak, and no longer has people of that stature.

In this environment, fighting against legacy institutions and figures, some of whom are no longer even alive, is less productive than working to create healthier and stronger Christian communities and to find the right ways to relate to the current culture and society. Rather than reacting, often against things that are mostly in the past, we need to be acting. In fact, people today could learn from figures like Keller, who built an influential institution grounded in an expansive vision of the future. This is also what Christian—especially Protestant Christian—leaders have done throughout our national history. They largely created the institutions and norms that are absent today. We need to rediscover that spirit for this current generation.

Where is this positive work being carried out today? We see it in various Christian localism initiatives, like the work being done by the community around First Presbyterian Church of Battle Ground, Washington, led by American Reformer board member Camden Spiller and pastor C. R. Wiley. They are creating well-paying jobs and paying taxes, turning vacant downtown buildings into a farmers’ market and bakery, and building an architecturally significant new church that provides needed community and conference-center space. These initiatives are building not just the church but also the community around it. Or look at Coverdale House, the new Protestant study center being built at Princeton. Or the scholarship on Josephus being done by T. C. Schmidt, work that is drawing respect from the world’s leading academic authorities. These are examples of the kinds of things American Christians should be looking to create.

My hope is that American Reformer can be one of the institutions that help envision and create this future, for the good not just of Christians themselves but of all American society.