Judeo-Christian civilization performed three great conquests for humanity: the idea of universal truth (hence, the development of science in the West), progress in history (which leads to improvements), and the sacred dignity of the human being (which made us the first civilization to abolish slavery and emancipate women). I believe that the results of these three conquests are in danger with the collapse of Christian civilization. We see the decline of universalism and even attacks on science. We see the rise of apocalyptic fears, in ecological activism, for example.

Once Christianity faced off with modernity, says Chantal Delsol, the handwriting was on the wall. And even though a handful of elites deluded themselves into believing in the future of atheism, most people need gods—and soon the old gods began to creep back in.
In his 2020 book, The Final Pagan Generation: Rome’s Unexpected Path to Christianity, Edward J. Watts details daily life at the end of an age. It was the early 300s, and the final pagan generation, he writes, “was born into a vast sacred infrastructure that had been built up over the past three millennia.” The gods were everywhere, woven into the language, commerce, daily rituals, and the very landscapes of every city and town. The gods were an omnipresent and accepted assumption. Many of the Roman elites no longer believed in the literal existence of these deities, but they were seen as necessary myths—a foundational part of the social order. Nobody could anticipate how swiftly everything would change.
Watts begins by describing a face-off in Alexandria in which pagans, enraged by the conversion of their ancient shrine into a church, rioted in the streets, killed and wounded several Christians, and barricaded themselves in their shuttered temple until the emperor promised them a pardon. When they left the Serapeum, the Christians tore it apart, triggering a wave of idol-smashing across Egypt in the weeks that followed. It was a watershed moment in which many pagans finally realized that their empire was being remade and that “Christian attacks could reach the most permanent and impressive elements of the urban religious infrastructure.” By the “final pagan generation,” Watts is referring to the last of the elite Romans, both pagan and Christian, “born into a world that simply could not imagine a Roman world dominated by a Christian majority.” None could grasp that they stood at the dawning of a new age and that all the old things were passing away.
Many now argue that we stand at a similar threshold today. In the West, we are at the end of 1,600 years of Christian civilization. The culture—and the foundational underlying assumptions—have all changed, and people have passed from Christendom into a new world.
The French philosopher, historian, and novelist Chantal Delsol believes that we are not simply becoming post-Christian; rather, we are re-paganizing. In her 2021 book, La Fin de la Chrétienté (The End of the Christian World), she observes that we have yet to fully understand what we are living through: nothing less than the death throes of a civilization that lasted 16 centuries. This slow-motion death began with the French Revolution, she argues, which—unlike the Dutch and American revolutions—produced the first civilization that did not rest on Christian assumptions. Once Christianity faced off with modernity, Delsol says, the handwriting was on the wall. And even though a handful of elites deluded themselves into believing in the future of atheism, most people need gods—and soon the old gods began to creep back in.
Our new society, in fact, still has ‘saints’ and ‘sinners.’ They have simply swapped places. Christians who condemn unbiblical sexual behavior are damned as ‘wicked’ for their intolerance, while the gilded homosexuals of our celebrity elites are instead celebrated for ‘being who they are.’ This change seems to have happened rather suddenly, facilitated by the fact that even those who no longer believe in Christianity have continued its cultural practices—even as the end of the age was approaching. When the end finally came, it seemed to happen overnight. In 2008, U.S. President Obama ran for office opposing same-sex marriage, but a mere decade and a half later, in 2022, most Democrats wouldn’t dare question the ritual mutilation of children in the name of transgenderism. And much like the pagans of the 4th century, Christians have simply been caught off-guard.
Unlike the majority of Christian intellectuals, however, Delsol does not believe that the collapse of Christianity will necessarily be accompanied by darkness and chaos. I would argue that this depends on how one defines “darkness and chaos.” For example, Delsol does not think abortion should be banned in a non-Christian society; but in my mind, any culture—whether explicitly Christian or not—returning to the infanticide practices of paganism is already living a dark, bloody nightmare filled with obliterated children.
The 4th century has lessons for us here as well. It was the Christian condemnation of abortion and infanticide that brought about a prohibition of these practices by Emperor Valentinian in 374 AD. Even a secular conception of human rights, however, ought to recognize that abortion is unjust to all those involved, above all the unborn human whose life is being ended. Indeed, one may reasonably argue that human beings possess human rights from the beginning of their lives, which science has incontrovertibly established begins at conception. You don’t need Christian eyes to read an embryology textbook or view an ultrasound.
Among the various examples of alternative religious systems that have filled the vacuum left behind by the decline of Christianity, Delsol notes that even environmentalists have their liturgies and, in many ways, are engaged in a form of worship of Mother Earth. As Delsol noted in a 2021 essay:
We are at a stage where, in the vast field opened up by the erasure of Christianity, new beliefs waver and tremble. Disaffection with dogmas, or with a decreed and certain truth, brings about the triumph of morality. It stands alone in the world. We see philanthropy at work, a love for humanity directly inherited from the Gospel, but without the foundations. Late modernity takes up the Gospel, but strips it of all transcendence. …
[I]n pagan societies, religion and morality are separate: religion demands sacrifices and rites, while the rulers impose a morality. This is the situation we are in the process of rediscovering: our governing elite decrees morality, promotes laws to enforce them partly through insults and ostracism. Our morality is post-evangelical, but it is no longer tied to a religion. It dominates the television sets. It inhabits all the cinematography of the age. It rules in the schools and families. When something needs to be straightened out or given a new direction, it is the governing elite.
In short, Delsol writes: “We have returned to the typical situation of paganism: we have a state morality.” However, she does not believe attempts at cultural transformation by Christians will be successful. The die is cast and the wheels of ‘progress’ grind forward. Instead, she suggests, like the pagan communities that struggled to survive for centuries after the rise of Christianity, we have to find ways to live in this new society—as strangers in our homelands. Christians, says Delsol, must become witnesses to another way of living—salt and light, as the Scripture puts it. “The experience of our fathers brings us certainty,” she says. “Our business is not to produce societies where ‘the Gospel governs states’ but rather, to use the words of Saint-Exupery, to ‘walk very slowly towards a fountain.’” Recently, Delsol was kind enough to answer additional questions about her thesis.
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To combat fear, we must trust and confide in God’s character and promises. Scripture is replete with God’s promises to be with us, provide for us, protect us, comfort us, care for us, resource us, redeem us, sanctify us, and bring us into eternal glory. Hoping in God means knowing His promises and relying on them daily.

“Then God spoke all these words, saying, ‘I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. You shall have no other gods before Me.’ – Exodus 20:1-3

As we reflect on the first commandment, we must understand what it truly means to have no other gods before our God. This commandment is not a mere suggestion to avoid placing idols above God in a hierarchical list. Instead, it demands the total eradication of idolatry from our lives. We are to bring no idols, unclean desires, rogue emotions, or sinful affections into His presence. Given that all of reality falls under “His presence,” this commandment calls for the complete and eternal abolition of idolatry.
This understanding teaches us how to approach our thrice-holy God. We cannot enter His presence boldly with our idols in tow, expecting grace to abound despite our blatant disobedience. Instead, we must approach Him in purity, with undefiled allegiance and perfect loyalty—a feat impossible without the justifying work of Jesus Christ. For those justified by faith in Christ alone, we must also embrace the necessity of repentance. To enter and commune with our King in an idolatry-free manner, we must abandon our petty idols and refuse to carry them even a step further. Why? Because He is utterly holy!
The Idol of Fear
Today, let us focus on one of the most pervasive and insidious idols: fear. Fear must be mortified so we may live abundantly unto God and in His presence (Romans 8:13). When we fear anything other than God, sin festers within our hearts, eroding our faith and destroying our trust in the Almighty. Fear indicates a lack of confidence in God’s sovereignty. If we truly believed that God controls all things, what would we ever have to fear? Unchecked fear leads us to question God’s goodness, doubt His promises, and indict His character and love for us.
Fear drives us to disobey God’s clear commands, avoiding where He calls us and neglecting His directives due to the anticipated cost of obedience. It erects idols of self-preservation and control, preoccupying us with our circumstances and making us functional narcissists.
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Evangelicals require a new strategy for understanding whether a theological “meeting of the minds”—that is, fellowship in the truest and deepest sense—can be possible between those who disagree about political and cultural issues. 

Two Questions on Authority
Over the last several years, American evangelicalism has become increasingly divided. And while that claim is certainly nothing new—particularly for readers of American Reformer—what’s particularly striking about this rift is how ambiguously defined the core concern still seems to be. Political commentators, to be sure, have been keen to lay the blame at President Donald Trump’s feet, arguing that the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections were crucial litmus tests.1 But that causal story does little to explain why these disagreements have lingered into 2022, with Trump no longer on the ballot. Whatever is driving this cleavage within the evangelical movement, it is something larger than electoral politics.
The obvious answer to this question, for many, would be the rise of “wokeness” or “cultural Marxism” or “progressivism” or something similar—a novel “successor ideology”2 diametrically opposed to Christianity in critical ways, and now spreading like a virus through congregations and other institutions. This ideology, for its part, is understood in terms of the distinctive complex of political beliefs and values dominant within secular white-collar environments in contemporary America: a strong emphasis on the salience of race, valorization of marginalized or “subaltern” groups on the basis of the fact that they are the subaltern, an embrace of “intersectionality,” and so forth.
There have been many efforts in recent years to nail down a workable definition of this thing called “wokeness.” And those efforts are entirely understandable. After all, to define a thing is to wield power over it. (A familiar trope of horror literature is that a demon can’t be exorcised until its name is known.) Defining “wokeness”—and in particular, defining it against Christian orthodoxy—allows a clear line in the sand to be drawn between Christians and the “woke.”
But it is time to confront an important fact: these efforts have largely failed, because no one actually agrees on what counts as “wokeness.” There is no catch-all definition of the term that can do the work that many evangelicals want it to do. Indeed, the quest for such a definition—at least within a Christian context—may be futile in principle.
Now, that observation certainly isn’t meant to suggest that the concerns of many evangelicals about the trajectory of their denominations and institutions are misguided. They are not. Rather, ongoing efforts to distill a fixed “essence of wokeness,” which can then be used as a criterion for categorizing individuals as either “woke” or “Christian,” are probably destined to fail, for reasons that are distinctive to the Christian tradition.
Without a better understanding of what is actually meant by “wokeness,” evangelicals concerned about the disintegration of their institutions risk stumbling into the dynamic that writer Samuel James has called “the hamster wheel of anti-wokeness,” in which “[m]istakes and misjudgments by major evangelical institutions galvanize the anti-woke into periodic mobility, which lead them into their own overstatements and exaggerations, which in turn give credibility back to mainstream evangelical leaders.”3 No progress in understanding is made, relationships are damaged, and the Church suffers for it.
Accordingly, evangelicals require a new strategy for understanding whether a theological “meeting of the minds”—that is, fellowship in the truest and deepest sense—can be possible between those who disagree about political and cultural issues. This strategy must be one that takes the how of theological reasoning every bit as seriously as the conclusions reached through that reasoning. And it is a strategy that relies on just two very simple questions.
But first, some groundwork must be laid.
In his popular recent volume Christianity and Wokeness, Owen Strachan defines “wokeness” as “[t]he state of being consciously aware of and ‘awake’ to the hidden, race-based injustices that pervade all of American society; this term has also been expanded to refer to the state of being ‘awake’ to injustices that are gender-based, class-based, etc.”4 For present purposes, this definition will suffice as a reasonably representative one.
Arguments against this “wokeness” tend to rely heavily on origin stories, which often look something like this: First, there was Western civilization, in all its strength and glory. Then came an evil influence from outside, an intellectual poison that ensnared the minds of the unwary. And it was a one-way train from there to the toxic, cancellation-happy culture that predominates today.
But there are at least two different historical stories, or genealogies, of “wokeness.” And assuming there are certain elements of truth in each, one is left with a messy intellectual account that does not make for effective polemics, and left without a stable criterion for maintaining doctrinal boundaries in practice.
The first narrative—the “discontinuity narrative”—lays the blame at the feet of 1960s-era academics, many of whom were disillusioned Marxists, who are accused of introducing a disruptive poison into the West.5 According to some versions of this narrative, Marx’s account of economic oppression was transposed into a “cultural” key, honed and refined by the Frankfurt School, and mainstreamed in Western universities.6 Where this narrative controls, those opposed to “wokeness” tend to think of it as a kind of heathenism, an anti-Christian rival faith. (The best-known version of a narrative like this one is probably Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay’s Cynical Theories.)
The second narrative—the “continuity narrative”—locates the seeds of “wokeness” within the Christian tradition itself. Friedrich Nietzsche was keen to point out that Christianity has always been particularly concerned for the oppressed—and indeed, the faith’s care for the vulnerable and downtrodden was one of the key factors that distinguished early Christianity from its Roman pagan surroundings. As Joshua Mitchell argues in American Awakening, it is not difficult to see echoes of this concern for justice—for a final eschatological reckoning and the casting down of the mighty from their high places, one might say—in contemporary political discourse that often gets characterized as “woke.”7 Where this narrative dominates, critics of “wokeness” see their target less as heathenism—a rival faith—than as heresy, a “sub-Christian” deviation ultimately springing from a common root.
The difference between these two narratives can be summarized simply: Is “wokeness” a self-conscious subversion of the Christian tradition, or a conscious extension of it?
And here the definitional problem comes into view. For one thing, whenever “wokeness” is formally defined, that definition inevitably tends to be overinclusive, implying opposition to efforts to become aware of, and to fight, injustice in general. Was the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s really “woke” in the modern sense? Intuitively, it feels anachronistic and wrong to project this definition backwards into the past.
More importantly, the Christianity/wokeness dichotomy that underpins Strachan’s book—and others like it—is a dichotomy that depends on the premise that “wokeness” is, in its essence, something anti-Christian. But identifying and fighting injustice is clearly a significant element of the Christian tradition, historically speaking. Indeed, those Christians who would advance “woke” arguments—who would allege, for instance, that the deconstruction of oppressive power relations lies at the heart of the faith—simply reject Strachan’s dichotomy on the basis of the continuity narrative (they would, of course, also reject any characterization of their views as “heresy”).
In short, because there are two dueling narratives about the origins and nature of “wokeness”—one of which happens to be a plausible account of “wokeness” as an extension of Christian ideas about justice and inherent equality—it simply doesn’t work to label some cluster of concepts and priorities as “woke,” and assume that this can self-evidently mean “anti-Christian.” Or, put differently, it is hard to question the influence of “wokeness” on theology in a context where both parties self-identify as Christians, because all one needs to do is label themselves as such. And given the continuity narrative, there’s at least a plausible “hook” for both parties to do so.
The crucial flashpoint is what it means to address an alleged injustice Christianly. And this question is a “how-question”—a matter of the way in which a Christian makes his or her case for a revision of existing teaching or practice, rather than being about any single teaching or practice as such.
When conservative federal judges interview applicants for law clerk jobs—one-year positions, in which young lawyers serve as research and drafting assistants for sitting judges—one of the most important considerations is whether the applicant is an “originalist.” Originalism, generally speaking, is the judicial philosophy that the original public meaning of the Constitution—in all its historical particularity—ought to govern how present-day judges interpret the text.
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