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In this week’s briefing:

Why you should still dress up for Easter when war spreads, how history (sometimes) helps us peer around the corner of the future, and whether increased spiritual interest indicates revival.

In two days we’ll celebrate the reason this Friday turned out for the Good. Many of us will dress up, sing our favorite resurrections hymns, take family photos, enjoy a special meal, then sleep the rest of the soon-to-be resurrected.

But especially here in the American South, with children decked out in their monogrammed formal wear, celebrating Easter in seersucker and pastels can feel incongruous with our grimy, dingy world. What of the families waiting on news of their loved ones, deployed into war against Iran? What of the Iranians themselves, caught between American bombs and Islamic theocracy? What of the Ukrainians defending their families and homes? Or the young Russians plucked from the streets and tossed into suicidal combat? What of the Israelis sheltering under a hail of ballistic missiles. Or the Arabs from Bahrain to Dubai doing the same?

How can we stand and sing and preach in church, wearing our Easter finest, when so many suffer and die apart from Christ? Shouldn’t we say something, do something, or at least put off the trappings of Easter and suffer in solidarity?

C. S. Lewis addressed this question the month after the Second World War began in Europe. He delivered his lecture “Learning in War-Time” from the pulpit of one of Oxford’s most venerable churches on October 22, 1939. Why should professors and students bother to study and teach under the shadow of war? The audience knew many in Oxford would soon die, as they had in Flanders Fields and other far-flung battlefields between 1914 and 1918. When everything you cherish could soon be lost, Lewis pondered aloud, why study philosophy? Or history? Or literature? Or, we might ask, why even celebrate the resurrection when hell gapes to receive death’s terrible toll?

Because nothing really changes in war-time. It may be the most extraordinary experience in human life. But nothing is more ordinary, more certain, than death. Or, Lewis admits, maybe there is one thing war changes: it makes us remember death. War kills our illusions about this world. War reminds us we can’t make a lasting home in this life.

“If we had foolish un-Christian hopes about human culture,” Lewis said, “they are now shattered. If we thought we were building up a heaven on earth, if we looked for something that would turn the present world from a place of pilgrimage into a permanent city satisfying the soul of man, we are disillusioned. And not a moment too soon.”

And what does this heightened awareness of death do for us? It liberates us to live in the present. It frees us to cherish the ordinary.

It frees us to enjoy every moment with our church and family as grace from God.

It frees us to celebrate the only escape from our deal with death.

Lewis understood war. He was wounded in the trenches of the First World War. So he knew that even in the most perilous conditions, war doesn’t consume all of life. Whether deployed near the Strait of Hormuz or preaching from the pulpit of Houston, ordinary life goes on. If we wait for an end to drama in life, we’ll never begin to live.

We keep on celebrating Easter during war-time because nothing’s really changed. All of us will die. But Christ has come. Christ is risen. Christ is coming again.

COLLIN HANSEN

Editor in Chief

Top 10 Theology Stories Since 2000: Part 2

Collin Hansen • Michael Graham • Sarah Eekhoff Zylstra

What’s scary about looking back on the last 25 years is thinking about the next 25 years. When I consider this list, I’m blown away by the scope and scale of the changes in my adult life so far and how few of them we could have seen coming.

I have the hardest time convincing my Gen Z students that in 2004, even until 2008 when California voted to ban gay marriage, no one could have anticipated that gay marriage would become legal and mandated across the United States by a 2015 ruling of the Supreme Court. Now it’s just taken for granted, and few even recall that the acceptance and approval of homosexuality, against biblical teaching, has been the fastest and widespread cultural change in Western history.

But then, how many in 2015 could have known that by 2024, a presidential candidate would win while arguing against transgender acceptance? First the sexual revolution looked impossible. Then the sexual revolution looked inevitable. Now the sexual revolution looks inconclusive.

The top of my list probably won’t surprise many listeners. No event in the last 25 years yielded more short-term impact and long-term transformation than the 9/11 attacks. As a top theology story, however, the 9/11 attacks recall a much bigger and longer history than the last 25 years. And they anticipate a predictable future, at least compared to the sexual revolution. The West shaped by Christianity and the East dominated by Islam have been fighting for centuries. They’re fighting right now. And demographics suggest they’ll be fighting at least the next 25 years, too.

We look back on the last quarter-century not just so we can muse over our memories. We look back in the hopes that we can prepare for what’s around the next corner. Most of what happens next will surprise us. But it’s safe to assume we’re not entering a world without religion (as suggested in the 20th century by the spread of communism) but where the conflict between Christianity and Islam will shape the course of human events.

Is There a Religious Revival in America?

Ross Douthat

Last week delivered the unwelcome news that the “Quiet Revival” in the UK is actually silent. Credit to the Bible Society for admitting their much-touted study was a sham. YouGov let them down with inexplicably flawed methodology that took too long to correct.

If such a study had been released five years ago, even many optimistic church leaders would have doubted the results. They didn’t see evidence of revival on the ground. But in the last couple years, for no obvious reason, ministers across Europe (and in the United States as well) have reported more openness to the gospel.

Engaging with Josh Howerton on X, he suggested Elon Musk broke the social media ban on non-progressive narratives when he bought Twitter in 2022. I agree that some of what we’re seeing reflects less fear from Christians in speaking out in public. What feels like growth might just be Christians feeling buoyed by political power to assert their beliefs.

Analyzing this confused landscape, Ross Douthat offers his typically reasonable synthesis: “It’s entirely possible for a faith to experience revival and decline simultaneously.” His own Catholic Church illustrates the point. Some Catholic dioceses could be seeing a youthful influx, including educated converts from evangelicalism. But overall, the Catholic Church in the United States could be declining dangerously by losing far more to the “no religion” category and evangelicalism than they’re converting to Rome.

Douthat’s point goes deeper, however. He notes that with the instability of our digital age, a few converts find easier opportunities to switch religions. But most religions grow more through childbirth and family retention, and the same digital instability erodes those traditional bonds. We see evidence of this divergence when it comes to education. The college-educated doing online research and finding internet communities are more likely to convert to another religion. The working classes, with looser family formation, are more likely to drop out of religion altogether.

As a ministry focused on evangelism and cultural apologetics, The Keller Center has largely focused on the educated switchers you find online and in many urban areas across the West. A couple years ago, when I visited Tim Keller’s alma mater, Bucknell, in central Pennsylvania, a local pastor asked for help with reaching the working classes who show little interest in church or even discussing the claims of Christ. I admitted that I don’t know many people seeing evangelistic fruit among this group.

We can take comfort knowing this challenge isn’t new. It’s what happened during the 18th century while the Industrial Revolution upended the UK. Under those conditions God sent the First Great Awakening—the spiritual movement that converted my Welsh ancestors. The gospel spread among the masses as much as the seminaries. Let’s continue to pray he’ll do the same today.

Next week on Unseen Things:

The spreading scourge among young men, what keeps Carl Trueman awake at night, and our crisis of narration.