Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Wednesday, March 13, 2024
Ours is a time of anthropological crisis when we as a society cannot agree on what it means to be human. In such a context, theologians who faced that issue in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s are obvious dialogue partners upon whom we can draw.

Twice in the last ten days my dear friend and colleague Fran Maier has drawn attention to the importance of Dietrich Bonhoeffer for the church in America today. At the Catholic Thing he noted that this year marks the ninetieth anniversary of the Barmen Declaration, in which a number of prominent theologians in Nazi Germany publicly opposed the “German Christians” who were seeking an accommodation with Nazism. Bonhoeffer was one of the signatories. Then, at the launch event for his fascinating new book, True Confessions, he quoted from Bonhoeffer’s letters, that it is “only with gratitude that life becomes rich.”
That Maier, a Catholic, calls on Bonhoeffer is a sign of the times. This is not simply because in the current climate Catholics and Protestants share common cultural concerns. It is also because the great temptation of our day, that of conflating politics with Christianity, is intense. The stakes are not as high as they were in Germany in 1934. But the principal challenge for Christians, that of remaining faithful as witnesses to the gospel rather than enablers of those whose politics resonate with our cultural tastes, is the same.
Bonhoeffer may be the most famous German theologian to oppose Hitler and Nazism, but he was not the only one. Another who speaks to our times is Helmut Thielicke, a Lutheran theologian and pastor. Like Bonhoeffer, Thielicke was hounded by the Nazis, though he survived and was even able to pastor a church for a while in the 1940s. A polymath and a preacher, he wrote a massive theological ethics as well as a critique of Bultmann. Many of his sermons and lectures were collected and published. Also like Bonhoeffer, he was not an entirely reliable guide to traditional Christianity. His historical context was Nazism but his theological context was neo-orthodoxy. The latter was always somewhat more “neo” than “orthodox” at key points.
I first encountered Thielicke when I picked up a copy of Man in God’s World in a used bookstore in the late 1980s. It’s a series of lectures on Luther’s Small Catechism that he delivered in Stuttgart Cathedral in the early 1940s. What caught my attention was the fact that the series continued through the Allied bombings of the city. Thielicke knew that every lecture he gave would be the last gospel message that some members of his audience would ever hear. That gave them an urgency and a relevance I have not encountered elsewhere. Perhaps never has Richard Baxter’s comment about preaching as a dying man to dying men applied to anyone as pointedly as to Thielicke in Stuttgart during the war.
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We must pray, confess, confront, admit, intervene, befriend, and love. As the family of God, we must not give up on those who struggle with addictions as we depend on the transforming and renewing work of the Holy Spirit through the gospel of Jesus Christ, who has overcome the world.

As a pastor, I often find myself counseling people with addictions. Having served in local church settings for more than twenty years, I find ministering to addicts and their families to be one of the more difficult, complicated, and sad things I do. Every week, I preach the Word of God to people who have never been addicts and may never become addicts, to former addicts, to addicts themselves, and to future addicts. There are some addicts who know they are addicts, some who are seeking help for their addiction, and some who either do not know they are addicts or do not want to admit it. Some people think they will never become addicts because they do not have an “addictive personality.” Others think they will never become addicts because their parents were not addicts. And some fear becoming addicts because they think they have an addictive personality or because so many in their family history were addicts.
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As the process of re-enchantment continues, I believe we will see more and more people dissatisfied with the hollow cave of materialistic atheism and seeking experiences of the transcendent. Will the church be ready to offer compelling answers to their questions? And will the worship and fellowship of the church be so imbued with the presence and power of God that visitors stop and say “God is really among you” (1 Cor. 14:25)? May God move in mighty ways to not only draw the lost to Himself but to revive our churches to be vibrant outposts of Kingdom life.

Living in Montreal, I am used to encountering deeply secular people. No heaven above, no hell below, no God at all. Can you even show me one solid piece of evidence for your God? Why would you believe in old debunked myths? These are the kinds of questions they ask. How does one share the hope of the gospel with such people?
Depending on the particular stripe of unbelief, it may be to poke holes in the materialist fortress, to point out self-evident echoes of eternity in their own beliefs, to show the moral implications of atheism, or any number of similar approaches. All of these are types of pre-evangelism: tilling up the hard ground of unbelief so that the seeds of faith in Jesus might have a chance to grow.
Over the last few years, however, I’ve been bumping into another kind of person who is asking very different kinds of questions: Are the spiritual beings around us benevolent or malevolent? How can we more deeply connect to the spiritual realm? Or, like one young man asked me: Can I ever be free from the spiritual forces I opened myself up to by engaging in occult practices?
In another case, a new convert at my church shared with me how, soon before coming to Christ, she had travelled to Brazil to experience a shaman-guided experience with the psychedelic Ayahuasca. Thankfully the ceremony was cancelled at the last minute. These are people with a very different set of beliefs than the typical secular young person, and they lead to very different conversations.
What is going on here? It seemed to me that I was encountering a new wave of the New Age.
Growing up, the people I knew of who were into New Age beliefs and practices were generally middle-aged women. In high school, the mother of one of my friends had a room in their house where she “spoke to angels.” For a few bucks, she could even tell you what they had to say. I avoided that room – there were lots of strange things hanging from the ceiling.
Then there was Oprah, who symbolized the smiling non-threatening face of New Age spirituality. All of this seemed to me far more like wishful thinking, scams, and mushy sentimentality than anything engaged with serious spiritual forces.
So my assumption was that the appeal of the New Age was mostly for that demographic. The young people I encountered were either deeply secular or, if their families had not had a decisive break from organized religion, mildly theistic.
The Rise of Long-Form Podcasting and Joe Rogan
While New Age beliefs never went away, they certainly fell off my radar for a few years. Around the time of Jordan Peterson’s rise to fame, I became aware, like many others, of an online world where serious conversations were taking place in long-form podcasts and YouTube interviews. The format seemed to foster nuanced, open, and surprisingly deep conversations at a time when the content of primetime news shows was devolving into 90-second shouting matches between talking heads.
One strange little corner of that online world was Joe Rogan’s podcast. With marathon 3-hour episodes of – shall we say – wildly varying quality, no one (least of all Joe) expected it to become so popular. Rogan is vulgar and blunt, but he has a winsome personality, a good dollop of common sense, and perhaps his most dynamic qualities: an insatiable curiosity and a capacity for wonder. Listen to him and his guests talk about grizzly bears or ancient Egypt and you’ll quickly find your own curiosity and wonder awakened.
Recent controversies have continued to polarize opinion about him and, ironically, broaden his reach. To some he is a dangerous purveyor of misinformation who platforms discredited and dangerous fringe thinkers (and to be fair, he certainly talks to some strange folks); to others he is a voice of sanity and one of the few remaining spaces where free speech is defended. But one thing is for sure: his audience is massive, easily eclipsing other podcasts and cable news shows. And the lion’s share of that audience seems to be young men – millions of them.
These are the men facing the meaning crisis – the existential inheritance of postmodernism. Or, more simply, the meaning crisis is what happens to a soul when you teach it that everything is a cosmic accident and therefore nothing has any real or ultimate meaning. They have no interest in organized religion, but they love the masculine competence and self-respect that the podcast exudes.
To these young people, Rogan offers not only entertainment through interesting interviews but also a taste of re-enchantment through his curiosity and wonder, the promises of technology, and his experiences and endorsements of psychedelic substances as gateways to wisdom and knowledge. This is where I see a connection between Joe Rogan’s massive popularity and influence and the unexpected reappearance of New Age spirituality in young people.
In this article, I want to focus on aspects of Rogan’s project that I think the church should take note of because they are illustrative of much broader societal trends which present Christians with both challenges and opportunities. But first, let’s see how this fits within the broader cultural narrative.
Streams of Re-enchantment
In his book ‘Return of the Strong Gods,’ R.R. Reno, editor of First Things magazine, shows how the disenchantment – a kind of spiritual malaise – that has spread across the West is not simply a byproduct of secularization but the result of a specific strategy adopted in the aftermath of the two World Wars.
Traumatized by the horrors of Auschwitz, Western intellectuals embraced what Reno calls ‘the post-war consensus,’ the idea that strong beliefs, convictions, and claims to truth are what give rise to the passions that caused such atrocities. In order to ensure that such things never happen again, these ‘strong gods’ were cast out and replaced with weak ones: pillars of objective truth gave way to plastic values, solid moral virtues dissolved into liquid cultural preferences.
If this is the case – and I found the argument of Reno’s book to be, on the whole, persuasive – then the intentional suppression of the human hunger for transcendence in the West since the end of the second World War dovetailed with the natural effects of secularization to create a situation where souls have been starved for a taste of eternity as never before.
This dual process of secularization and suppression brought low the ceiling of the world and drained the vibrant colors of life to a paltry grey, leaving young people with a gnawing hunger to come into contact with something beyond what they can see and touch, to be swept up into something bigger than themselves.
Like a mighty river held back by a hastily-built dam, this God-given hunger was artificially restrained. But now it seems to be breaking forth as that dam comes apart in pieces. The wave of re-enchantment washing across the West manifests itself in various ways. In what follows, I select just three streams that have struck me as particularly relevant to Christians, the third of which will bring us back to Joe Rogan.
First, the spiritual shape of political ideologies.
Many seek and find an echo of transcendence in the crusader-like pursuit of political and cultural goals.[1] Invariably these beliefs take the shape of grand narratives that mimic the Biblical story, including some pristine Edenic state, a fall into sin, a path of righteousness, and an eschatological hope. Radical environmentalism, the LGBTQ activist movement, and the progressive Left all fit this pattern and hold increasing cultural and institutional influence in our day.
Some movements on the far-Right such as white nationalism take the same general shape and likewise require a whole-life commitment.
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