Disappointment can be refined for good use. If our present reality teaches us to lament and to seek, we are well on our way through this long, steady disappointment. And in the unbroken world that awaits us, we will solidly arrive at disappointment’s end.

Life is one long, steady disappointment.
This dawns on most people by their thirties. Childhood is all potentiality. The teenage years are all angst—but even angst betrays some hope, since it is only quiet outrage that things could be better. A person can still carry into his twenties the illusion that the world will soon blossom. Not until his thirties does a person realize that much of what’s coming won’t be better than what has come. The forties, fifties, and on often only reinforce Alexander Pope’s infamous beatitude, “Blessed is the man who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed.” To live is to be disappointed.
So cheer up. Oddly enough, disappointment can be an indicator you are seeing the world correctly. No one enjoys feeling disappointment. In itself, disappointment is akin to the sadness of loss, and ultimately we were not designed for it. But like all emotions, disappointment is a gauge of how a person perceives his life—what he believes about it and wants from it. When you’re living in a broken world, sometimes believing and wanting the right things means you’ll be disappointed.
The Experience of Disappointment
Human beings are capable of disappointment because they are capable of having expectations. We were made to dream of better days. Every Cleveland sports fan knows this. So does every acne-faced teenager, every sleepless parent of a newborn, every young professional clawing for a career, every recent divorcée sitting in a house now quiet. All of us cast in our minds a widescreen projection of a better reality to move around in, free of the most painful parts of the present. We live in a desert but imagine a garden.
Disappointment is what we experience when that garden never blooms. Of course, we know it won’t blossom immediately. But maybe it will incrementally? Maybe in the next phase of life? Maybe around the next bend? All of these maybes are the projectors on the screen of the mind. What they project we could call expectations.
We experience disappointment as a sense of loss when reality fails to meet our expectations. The key words there are reality and expectations, and both of these terms are charged with theological meaning.
A Theology of Disappointment
Reality is the world that surrounds us, a world that existed before any of us first took in a lungful of oxygen. The world is a given component of our experience, the context we are born into and move around in. It is beyond our control, it is outside our determination, and it operates according to laws we had no say in laying down. Reality is, well, reality. And it constantly fails to match the Eden we love to inhabit in our minds.
Reality is the world in which God placed us. It’s easy to overlook the theological significance of Genesis 2:8: “And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and there he put the man whom he had formed.” God made Adam to be an embodied image of Him in a physical location. This world preceded Adam. It was outside his determination yet under his dominion to be the context of his obedience (1:28). Adam could not have simply lived in his head; he had to traffic in a reality outside his head.
Expectations, on the other hand, are a human response to reality; and as responses, we do have a say in them. Expectations are part hope, part prediction of what reality will be. They are part hope in the sense that they are an expectancy of good. No one is disappointed when something bad they were expecting fails to come about; instead, they experience relief. Hope is the anticipation that reality will be characterized by greater joy, greater provision, greater accomplishment, greater peace.
Adam lost his spot in an ideal reality by disobeying God, who sent him and his wife out of Eden and into the ultimate disappointment of a world stalked by death and decay (Gen. 3:8–24). A world that was once generous with fruit became hostile with thorns.
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Black holes are formed when stars die. They become like Dyson vacuums, sucking up all the mass and matter around them, exhibiting a gravitational pull so strong that even light particles cannot escape. A black hole’s existence is dependent upon the consumption of everything around it. Likewise, humanity’s selfish heart sucks up everything God created good in and around it and uses these created goods to sustain its life. But what the heart usually fails to see is that this insatiable hunger is precisely what will kill it.

We see then that the two cities were created by two kinds of love: the earthly city was created by self-love reaching the point of contempt for God, the Heavenly City by the love of God carried as far as contempt of self. In fact, the earthly city glories in itself, the Heavenly City glories in the Lord.1
The past forty years have seen a few writers—from philosopher Charles Taylor to historian Carl Trueman—declaring that people in the Western world answer the question Who am I? in fundamentally distinct ways compared to history past.2 Christians have been caught up in this shift as well, often unwittingly, and have found themselves together with the rest of the West in the midst of an identity crisis.
The claim of Jesus that no one can be his disciple unless he hates his own life (Luke 14:26), and his call to deny oneself, shoulder a cross, and lose one’s life to find it truly (Matt 16:24–25) descend on clogged ears. We hear him, but only as though muffled by our passions, dreams, and desires for this life, which still functionally serve as determinative of our sense of who we are and where we are going. Lulled into lethargy, we would do well to shake ourselves awake to the call of Christ—or find someone who will do it for us.
Created as Stars
The church fathers give good shakings.3 Ignatius’ Letter to the Romans, which is too often dismissed due to his uncomfortable-to-us desire for martyrdom, is typical of how the Fathers thought about true discipleship:4
Neither the ends of the earth nor the kingdoms of this age are any use to me. It is better for me to die for Jesus Christ than to rule over the ends of the earth. Him I seek, who died on our behalf; him I long for, who rose again for our sake. The pains of birth are upon me. Bear with me, brothers and sisters: do not keep me from living; do not desire my death. . . . Let me receive pure light, for when I arrive there I will be a human being. Allow me to be an imitator of the suffering of my God.5
Ignatius sees the call of Jesus in Matthew 16 as turning inside-out the world’s view of life and self. To find our life here is to build our homes in death; true life, rather, comes through death.
The patristic theologians are always trying to get Christians to see that to be truly human—a human being who images God well—is to follow the God-man, Jesus, the true image of the invisible God (Col 1:15), in self-sacrificial death for the love of God and neighbor. God’s design for the human being is to live like a star, lighting and blessing the people and creation around us in representation of the love and glory of God.
The Lord promised to make Abraham’s offspring like the stars in the heavens (Gen 15:3). Jesus called his people to be salt and light, to shine like stars in the world in their obedience to him.6 And throughout the Bible, stars function as symbols of, among other things, earthly rulers and the people of God.7 Humanity is, like the sun and stars, to radiate as patterns of God’s glory and sovereign rule through their loving, beautiful dominion over the earth. But, since the fall in the garden, human beings have become like black holes instead.8
On Black Holes
Black holes are formed when stars die. They become like Dyson vacuums, sucking up all the mass and matter around them, exhibiting a gravitational pull so strong that even light particles cannot escape. A black hole’s existence is dependent upon the consumption of everything around it.
Likewise, humanity’s selfish heart sucks up everything God created good in and around it and uses these created goods to sustain its life. But what the heart usually fails to see is that this insatiable hunger is precisely what will kill it.
Recent quantum research, pioneered by Stephen Hawking, has shown something previously thought to be unlikely—black holes die.9 The prior consensus was that black holes may exist into eternity as they gobble up more mass, but with the progress of quantum physics and its insight into matter and anti-matter particles, the scientific community has changed its mind.
Even the blackness of space is teeming with life. If we could see into the quantum realm, we would see particles popping in and out of existence. These particles come into being as matter/anti-matter pairs (positively and negatively charged, respectively), which then are annihilated instantly as the matter and anti-matter particles cancel each other out.
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Losing Our Religion would be more persuasive if—instead of affecting to be a simple piece of pastoral counseling—it straightforwardly acknowledged its own agenda. Moore has an argument to make, and he wants to advance his project and defeat his opponents. But his book frames the gospel as some pure, otherworldly abstraction that has little to do with power or politics. 

Southerners have a way of burying their actual thoughts under a welter of pleasantries. So it is perhaps worth asking what lies beneath this apparently straightforward morality tale by Russell Moore, the editor-in-chief of Christianity Today. As Moore presents it, Losing Our Religion is a guidebook for Christians in troubled times. Drawing on his own disillusioning experience, Moore encourages his readers to put the gospel before the false pursuit of credibility, authority, identity, integrity, and stability. “This book will consider all the ways evangelical America has sought these things in the wrong way,” he writes. “Along the way, I will suggest little choices you can make, not just to survive this dispiriting time, but in order to envision a different future.” The chapters are structured with self-help-style subheadings such as “Prioritize Long-Term Integrity Over Short-Term Success” or “Pay Attention to Means, Not Just to Ends.”
There is much truth in what Moore says. I, too, worry about our overly partisan society and the loss of a vibrant center. I, too, see Christians becoming consumed with the burning issues of the day and losing sight of God’s grace and providence. I share Moore’s dismay at Pentecostal preachers and certain Christian leaders who misrepresent the faith or use it in a cynical fashion. But the book also contains a rather sharp-edged polemic. Moore castigates “culture warriors”; he contrasts Christians who follow the gospel with those who would tie the church “to forms of power.” And he portrays the evangelical church as under assault from all directions by wolves and “hucksters.”
The book therefore sits easily alongside the genre of anti–Christian nationalist, exvangelical memoir, which has arisen in the last couple of years (though Moore himself does not claim such a label). There are clearly many readers who wish to see the sins of evangelicals repeated over and over again. Whatever else these books do, they make Democrats feel better about their disdain for conservative Christians. Or, to put it more generously, they meet the need of liberals for interpreters of the scary world that exists outside of the coasts and major urban areas.
Moore presents himself as a prophetic outsider, but there is a paradox here. Anybody who remembers the evangelical politics of the pre-Trump era will recall that Moore was at the pinnacle of the movement. For many years he held a very influential position within the Southern Baptist Convention, as leader of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. Moore wants his audience to denounce and reject the culture and group that he for so many years reigned over and shaped. We are not to think of Moore as the political Christian he has been the past couple of decades. We are not to think of Moore as an operator. No, those epithets are for all those Christian nationalists, theobros, cynical Baptist churchmen, pagans, Trumpists, fake Christians, and everyone else who would array themselves against Moore and the true Christians whom he claims to represent.
But Moore is inescapably political, not least because of the context that has shaped his career. Though I am not a Southern Baptist, nor a native Southerner, I currently live in the Baptist kingdom of the Southern United States. To those outside this world, the internal politics of the Southern Baptist Convention are hard to comprehend. Baptists need to air their grievances because corralling majority support on questions of doctrine and policy is necessary to the functioning of their church. This imperative, combined with a Southern penchant for high drama, gives Southern Baptist culture an energy that can appear distasteful and brutal to church denominations that keep their disagreements more private. Thus Southern Baptist ministers become very effective politicians. Moore rose to prominence in this world largely because of his political skill and his calm, confident style.
Given this background, Losing Our Religion would be more persuasive if—instead of affecting to be a simple piece of pastoral counseling—it straightforwardly acknowledged its own agenda. Moore has an argument to make, and he wants to advance his project and defeat his opponents. But his book frames the gospel as some pure, otherworldly abstraction that has little to do with power or politics. Moore calls on Christians to lose respectability and authority; this may seem a little strange from the editor-in-chief of Christianity Today and a former fellow of the prestigious Institute of Politics at the University of Chicago.
The leitmotif of the book is one of conversion: the altar call. Moore tells us evangelicals are in need of one. At root, the problem is that those who claim to believe the gospel actually don’t. “We see now young evangelicals walking away from evangelicalism not because they do not believe in what the church teaches, but because they believe the church itself does not believe what the church teaches.” Those who leave the church, in Moore’s view, do so because the church itself “would disapprove of Jesus” if he were among them. Many evangelicals are more concerned about the culture and power than about the gospel; they shout down faithful preachers and leaders. Their own leaders are “narcissists and psychopaths and Machiavellian power seekers,” to be contrasted with the real Christians, who exhibit “winsomeness,” “persuasion,” and “gentleness.”
This would all be more plausible were Moore not so one-sided in his treatment of his opponents. At one point, he holds up for our disapproval a supposed “fundamentalist Calvinist,” who appears to be the theology professor James Wood. In 2022 Wood, of course, wrote a thoughtful article for First Things praising Tim Keller, while also gently criticizing the limitations of Keller’s ministry, its “winsomeness” and emphasis on “public witness.” In Wood’s words: “‘Public witness’ most often translates into appeasing those to one’s left, and distancing oneself from the deplorables. I didn’t like what this was doing to my heart and felt that it was clouding my political judgment.” Moreover, Wood wrote, “If we assume that winsomeness will gain a favorable hearing, when Christians consistently receive heated pushback, we will be tempted to think our convictions are the problem.”
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