One of my favorite cultural analysts, , published an article at yesterday titled “The Commodification of Christianity” which posits that the growing interest we’re seeing among Gen Z in Christianity reflects a thin, digitized, plastic, frictionless and faceless vision of faith: “The problem with religious apps is the same problem we have with Instagram communities or with online porn, we encounter the virtual version of everything first, before the real thing. And so that becomes our standard. Supplements become substitutes.”

I share Freya’s concern here. The Church, especially evangelicals (but Catholics are guilty here, too) has a history of adopting technology and then in retrospect discovering whether it is helpful or appropriate after it is too late and damage has been done. The excitement of progress draws us to develop things like gamified prayer apps in place of cultivating habits of prayer without a dopamine-driven point system. I see that and recognize the problem. I’m just not convinced that commercialized, digitized Christianity is that widespread and significant among younger generations. I do, however, see young people drawn to the faith for a sense of belonging. And sometimes that belonging isn’t a belonging to Christ and his Church, but to a kind of cultural Christianity, one that is mixed up with a political agenda. That concerns me, but even here I have hope that when the gospel is properly preached in churches, those who attend for the wrong reasons can be won over to the beauty of the gospel and a true belonging to something deeper, truer, and more complex than partisan politics.

Everybody desires to belong. But our desire to belong in the contemporary world is especially acute because our natural spaces for belonging have broken down so dramatically. Families are fractured. Friendships are fluid. Young people aren’t dating at the same rates. Where do you belong in a deep, meaningful sense? A group that gives you shared purpose, meaning, value, and direction, that encourages you in virtue and supports you in difficult times? That reminds you of your place in the cosmos? Healthy associations (institutions) can do this by embodying God’s truths to us in the world. This is true of families, marriages, churches, schools, and so on (for more on this, see my next book which I should be writing right now: Shoring Up The Ruins [the title will almost certainly change]).

However, just because we have this deep desire, doesn’t mean we pursue it in meaningful ways. In fact, if society gives us primarily superficial options to fulfill this desire, we start to look for superficial ways to fulfill it. For example, if young people only see dysfunctional marriages with self-absorbed people, and community modeled at their jobs in highly contrived ways, and the only churches they visit treat them as viewers or consumers of a worship or entertainment production, then they will look for superficial ways to belong. They will come to expect that commitment is unnecessary, that “joining” Christianity is more about a lifestyle option than about recognizing the reality that Christ is the Son of God and they desperately need him to redeem their lives.

In that way, we shouldn’t be surprised when some young people turn to Christianity less for the radical transformation of the gospel and more for the identity with cultural Christianity and its political leanings that it brings. Because they don’t see themselves committing to something greater, something life-changing, something that makes demands on them. They see themselves making a lifestyle choice. They are choosing to add Christianity to their profile. And that doesn’t demand commitment. It can be dropped at any time.

This all sounds like I’m disparaging these young people who are coming into the church. And I want to clarify that point. For whatever reason they are entering a church to hear the gospel preached, I say, “Praise God!” I just pray that they are hearing the gospel preached and the whole counsel of Scripture.

Because the reality is that we all come to Christ with mixed motives. No one comes with a pure heart. None. If someone comes to your church because of a desire to be identified as a certain kind of cultural Christian, great! Yes, in a sense they are treating Christianity as a consumer identity, but also, great! You have an opportunity to share the gospel with them and disciple them. Praise God for that!

Here’s the thing: some young people will come to identify with cultural Christianity, but some will come because they desire to belong to who they were created to belong to, God. And in the end, all of them need to know that their true desire is to belong to God. Whether they mask it under cultural Christianity or a desire for a spouse or a desire for friendship or whatever, our true desire is to belong to God. And that happens (in part) when we commit to his Body on earth, the Church, when we meet face-to-face, embodied, at the table, in communion, in prayer, greeting each other, singing together, rejoicing together, crying together, repenting together, forgiving each other, and so on.

What’s important is that the desire of those who are concerned about politics don’t have to surrender their concerns when they commit to the church. And the person who desires a spouse or a friend doesn’t have to give that up when they commit. But when you belong to God and have your loves properly ordered, those other desires become relativized. You no longer find your sense of identity or belonging in politics. Justice matters. But it doesn’t define your place in the cosmos. It is right and good for you to look for a spouse or friend, but you belong to Christ and his Church, so you should never be alone.1

So, back to Freya’s point. Is the growth in young people we are seeing in the church due in part to a commercialization of Christianity? To some extent, sure. To a larger extent if you consider that some young (and older) people consume Christianity as a lifestyle option to add to their profiles or identities. But I choose to take this as a challenge for the Church. How are we going to invite people in our pews to the beauty of committing to the whole truth of the gospel and the wonder of belonging to Christ? I think we begin by showing that it is beautiful. And by cultivating embodied, committed communities that model what it means to walk in a manner worthy of the gospel.

This article really doesn’t have much to do with the virtues, except perhaps faith, but still, please consider buying and sharing my new book, To Live Well: Practical Wisdom for Moving Through Chaotic Times, especially with someone young. And if you have bought it, consider leaving an honest review on Amazon if you bought it there or Goodreads if you bought it elsewhere!

One of the pieces of advice I try to give my classes early each semester is that I can’t facilitate their growth in learning unless they choose to have a posture of humility. This might sound a bit arrogant of me, a bit “sage on the stage” as opposed to the “fellow traveler” model of teaching, but after nearly 20 years of teaching, it’s a conclusion I can’t avoid. Humility is a necessary sub-virtue to all true forms of learning. Aquinas puts humility under the virtue of temperance and that seems right to me since you are rightly moderating your perception of yourself, but as with all the virtues, there is a mixture of other virtues: justice and love especially. It is an injustice to God, your neighbor, and yourself to perceive yourself wrongly because it is not giving those individuals their due regard. But it is also unloving because when you love someone’s existence, you naturally respect them and show them honor. So I see humility as touching temperance, justice, and love, but mostly temperance.

When a student enters my class convinced that they have already mastered the content, they are condemning themselves to learn nothing. When a student enters convinced that they lack knowledge, they open themselves up to the possibility of wisdom. And this necessarily means being humble before teachers, professors, elders, pastors, the wisdom of the past, and the subject. This is true for all of us, not just students. For all of us, the path to knowledge comes through humility.

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Recently I have been building the case that inhibition marks contemporary culture, particularly the sense that we lack agency in our lives. A few weeks ago I argued that because we are taught that we are radically autonomous, we get overwhelmed with our freedoms and freeze up, coming to despise the very freedom that we’ve been promised by the World. In this process of despising our freedoms, we come to deny our God-given agency. Instead of just rejecting the promise that we are radically free from God, family, the church, and creation, we respond by coming to believe that we are also unable to act in our lives. We feel we are helpless to make our own choices, advocate for ourselves, or otherwise act. But part of becoming healthy, God-honoring adults is learning to accept the truth that God has given you agency. You have the ability to make choices: both prudential and ethical. In fact, you have a duty to make and act on your choices. This is part of what it means to be human. You have the obligation to make judgements and act. Thankfully, as Christians we have the help of the Holy Spirit to guide us and strengthen us, but we still must ask for wisdom and make judgements and follow through with them. And that duty can feel crushing to some people. How do I know if I’m in God’s will? What if I make the wrong choice? What if I’m not really worthy or qualified to make this choice or act in this way? This is the sin of pusillanimity, a fear of being unworthy of the giftings and greatness that God has called you to. And he has called you to act in your life! So how do we do this? How do we make choices and act with resoluteness when we are afraid we are inadequate to the task, either because we feel we can’t make good choices or we don’t have the agency to follow through with those choices?

Choices

Let’s first consider the fear that you are not capable of making difficult decisions, whether those are difficult moral decisions or life decisions. To begin with, James tells us that God offers wisdom generously to all who ask (James 1:5). But verse 6 reminds us to pray without doubt! We have no reason to doubt that God will give us wisdom. This doesn’t mean that when we make a decision after praying for wisdom it will necessarily be the right one; it’s still possible to deny the wisdom God gives us with our own pride, but he will give us wisdom. Then it’s important to go through the process of prudent discernment, which I discuss in To Live Well: surveying reality rightly, identifying the good, deliberating moderately, making a judgement, and acting resolutely.

I don’t have the space to go through each of these steps here, but what I can say is that going through this process allows you to accurately assess the situation according to reality, focus on what would glorify God, bring in wise counselors, and make the best judgement you can with the information you have at the time. Your duty is to be faithful to make the best decision you can with what you have for God’s glory and your neighbor’s good. That’s it. Make that decision and move on. You can always make the best decision you can, because by definition, that’s the best decision you can make. That what God asks of you. But he does ask that of you—that you use the wisdom and reason and wise counsel and the Word that he has given you to make good choices. And then to act on them.

And when you make a mistake (not if, but when), you must face your mistake, repent (if that is appropriate), learn from your mistake, and make a new wise decision. That’s what human life is comprised of: a series of choices (the best you can make) some of which are mistakes, and some of which are wise, all done under the grace and for the glory of God.

The point here is that you probably have all the tools you need to make wise choices in your life. God has gifted you with the Holy Spirit, with reason, with resources, and if you look around, there are probably wise counselors for you to rely on. The goal is not to have those counselors make decisions for you, but to get their advice. You still have to make the decision. The good news is, you can!

In addition to praying for wisdom, we should pray for courage to make wise choices. Because once you make a choice, you have to walk it out. You have to live it. Many of us get stuck in our heads. We spend all our time deliberating or we make a decision and then never act. But a truly prudent person does something about their decision. They go out into the world and follow through with their choice, only veering from their path if new, significant information comes to light. And that takes courage.

Actions

As I have argued before, the contemporary world tries to convince us that we don’t have agency, that we are controlled by massive forces: our biology, the State, Big Tech, the Economy, the Environment, and so on. We’re just along for the ride. Voting doesn’t do anything. Politicians are all the same: corrupt and self-serving. The same can be said for corporations. We’re all victims of our mental and physical conditions, which, as we research more, we discover are more and more disruptive of our lives. There’s no predicting the market or careers because the Economy is out of control and/or is governed by an oligarchy of billionaires. At best, all we can do is entertain ourselves and fight for scraps. This mindset is directly related to the socio-political nihilism described by James Davison Hunter in his book, Democracy and Solidarity.

But it’s not reality. In reality we still have agency, more agency than we think. Yes, there are powerful forces which limit what we can do in the contemporary world, but we can still act, can still choose to live, to fight for what is good for us, to advocate for justice and human flourishing.

Human life has been toil since the Fall. This is nothing new. You can advocate for yourself medically more than you think, whether it’s physically or mentally or both. You can advocate for yourself or for justice at work more than you think. You can pursue beauty and good work, even when the world feels plastic and saccharine and soulless. You have agency. The only question is, will you take a step to the block and exercise that agency, or will you find excuses to abdicate your humanity?

As children, some of us climbed the ladder to the slide only to hesitate at the top for fear of plunging down. Over time, hopefully, we learned that the good of the joy of sliding was worth the risk of hurting ourselves. And so we took the plunge, we acted with courage.

Many of us still hesitate at the top, afraid that what awaits us at the bottom is only pain and suffering. And of course, that is possible. Just as when going down a slide it’s possible to fly off and hurt yourself, so it’s possible that if you take a plunge in your life and become an active agent based on a wise choice, you may end up hurt. But oh, the joy you will miss if you never plunge!

Again, the good news is that God has given you what you need to act! You have the Holy Spirit, his Word, the church, and reason. If you have prayerfully made a wise decision, then walk out that decision in peace, knowing that God is beside you. Do so with your head held high. You may be afraid, as you were afraid when you first went down that slide, but that fear can go with courage, knowing that you are doing what you are obligated to do: the best you know.

And here’s the truly Good News: even the best you know will sometimes be wrong and God’s grace is enough for you in that moment! If you repent and turn to him in your sins, he will forgive you. You don’t have to be afraid to choose wisely and act responsibly. Your Father in heaven knows you and loves you and desires your good. He will shepherd you to sanctification. Rest in that and act.

For more on choosing wisely and acting with courage, see my new book, To Live Well: Practical Wisdom for Moving Through Chaotic Times, out now wherever fine or even mediocre books are sold!

A week ago I asked for suggestions for things to write about, and my friend suggested I address the challenge of cultivating virtues in our children. It is difficult to raise children to be virtuous, particularly in a culture that celebrates vice. Aristotle knew this and addressed the problem in his Nicomachean Ethics, right at the end: “It is difficult, however, for someone to be trained correctly for virtue from his youth if he has not been brought up under correct laws.” And so we need good government to set up strict laws to cultivate virtues in our children! Simple. Except that anyone who has witnessed public attempts at instilling even civic virtues like obeying the law, voting, and basic communal spirit can attest that the State is a very, very poor moral tutor. Yes, the State can teach us what we are free to do by granting us liberties, but it is not very good at teaching us what we were made for through propaganda. The exception, Aristotle notes, was an extreme form of violent oligarchy: Sparta. If we want to grant any kind of liberty, then we can’t rely on the State to cultivate virtue in our children. So what’s the alternative? Aristotle’s answer is that “it seems fitting for each individual to promote the virtue of his children.” Thanks, Aristotle. But how do we do this work of “promotion”? If children need a holistic understanding of the virtuous life that the State should but fundamentally cannot provide without restricting liberty, how can parents provide that? I believe parents can cultivate virtues in their children by inviting them into a virtuous life, by modeling virtues, by using the language of the virtues, and by surrounding their children with a community of virtuous people.

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I recently came across this article from an Association of Certified Biblical Counselors counselor on how to treat OCD “biblically,” which begins by rejecting the psychological label altogether. This isn’t the first time I have objected to some biblical counseling views of OCD. There are many objectionable things in the article, including recommended treatment, which amounts to a compulsion: stop thinking bad thoughts and replace them with good thoughts through the power of God:

One’s thoughts are real reflections of the heart, but dealing with thought itself is not going to bring about true freedom. A believer must identify the thought that arises from a heart that is not treasuring Christ in that moment, repent, and replace it with godly, fruitful, Christ-honoring thoughts. The biblical strategy is not a formula for instant victory. Sanctification is a process.

Yes, well, if it were only that simple I would have done it a long time ago, pal. I thank God that he provided the gift of methods like ERP and I-CBT to provide healing for me and so many others. But what I want to focus on is the author’s argument that intrusive thoughts are specifically sinful thoughts which are “real reflections of the heart”:

• “They are not random misfires or meaningless electro-chemical waves created by the brain. They are what the Apostle Paul calls ‘the law of sin’ dwelling within us.”

• “It is important for us to understand that these ‘intrusive’ thoughts still come from the flesh that remains in the corruption of sin and are an indication of a believer’s longing for glorification.”

• “What OCD describes as ‘out of nowhere’ or ‘unwanted, intrusive thoughts,’ the Bible explains as temptation that arises from one’s deceitful desires. Whether that is control, certainty, or pleasure, the heart is tempted by what it craves.”

For Statler, the author of the article, we must “mortify” these intrusive thoughts just as we mortify sinful desires because they are sinful desires. While I see how someone with a poor understanding of OCD could come to this conclusion if a client reported to them having sexual or blasphemous intrusive thoughts, I believe it fundamentally misunderstands the nature of the disorder (which is a disorder) and what the experience is.

In Matthew 5:27-28, Jesus gives his famous teaching about committing adultery in your heart:

²⁷ “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ ²⁸ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart.

For someone who has sexual intrusive thoughts, this is not their experience. The thoughts that confront them are unwanted, undesired, not entertained, and not in the heart. They are the equivalent of saying, “Don’t think about a pink elephant.” When you suffer from OCD, your mind takes what you care about most, or what you most fear becoming, and turns that into a specific fear that it throws at you, repeatedly. Your intrusions are not (in my experience) random. So if you get sexual intrusive thoughts, you may deeply fear becoming someone who is sexually abusive—even though that is the last thing you would choose to become! You don’t fear becoming this kind of person because you are prone to that particular vice (although yes, we all are sinners), but because you hold the opposite virtue in such high regard! So your mind tells you, “Don’t think about this fear!” And you naturally think about it. This is categorically different from someone looking lustfully at a woman or even having deceitful desires. Your “heart” does not “crave” these images or sensations. You detest them. It is a cognitive trick of your mortal mind. That’s how OCD works.

Statler’s model presents these intrusive thoughts as “deceitful desires,” and while he claims the Bible as warrant for this interpretation, it’s not at all clear that James has intrusive thoughts in mind when he was writing James 1:14-15: “But each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death.” Notice that James writes, “enticed by his own desire.” In OCD, the intrusive thoughts are not our own desires. They are the opposite of our desires.

There’s something insidious about Statler’s model, as if a secret, subconscious evil force lurks in us and inserts dirty and blasphemous thoughts into our mind at random. What a terrifying and disturbing way to understand intrusive thoughts. This model is perfect bait for someone with OCD to ruminate more!

Again, the more accurate way to understand OCD intrusive thoughts (which overlap but are not equivalent with all human intrusive thoughts) is that they are like your mind reacting to a feared self by telling you not to think about something, which only makes you think about it more. For example, in in-person interviews, I often get the intrusive urge to throw coffee in the face of the person interviewing me. Is this the sin of hate coming up from my heart? Is this a “deceitful desire”? The “law of sin”? A “craving” of the heart? No. It’s a weirdo thought that that action would be the worst possible thing I could do in this particular moment! So my mind thinks, bizarrely, “Whatever you do, don’t throw your coffee at him!—Oh shoot, are you going to throw your coffee at him?” And the answer is 100% of the time, NO! Because it’s not actually a “deceitful desire.” It’s a weirdo thought that my imagination dreamed up as the worst case scenario, as the thing I couldn’t think about, as the “Pink Elephant,” so of course I thought about it. We all have such aberrant thoughts. And they don’t tell us about our deepest desires.

In the same way, OCD sufferers who struggle with violent or blasphemous thoughts experience images and ideas that aren’t cravings from the heart or deceitful desires, but fears of who they may become. They are afraid of becoming violent people, or people who hate God. So their mind conjures up worst case scenarios that are against their desires and their hearts. And the way forward is not to focus on those thoughts, which just gives them more attention than they deserve, but to treat them as the mental noise that they are. Because God knows our hearts and intentions and desires. He knows our condition. And he knows that the path to healing comes through treating those violent and pseudo-blasphemous thoughts as the nonsense they are.

Now this is not to say that intrusive thoughts can never be sinful. The line between an intrusive thought and a sinful desire can be hard to disentangle, particularly for people without OCD or for people with OCD who are getting intrusive thoughts about subjects outside their theme. For example, my OCD theme has nothing to do with sexual intrusive thoughts, so when I do have sexual thoughts that are unbidden, unwanted, and undesired, I’m cautious to ask God to help me have a pure heart. I don’t dwell on the thoughts (that will make them stick). And I don’t fight the thoughts (that will also make them stick). I just pray something simple and quick like, “Make my heart and desires pure, and teach me to love your beauty.” To what extent am I in control of these thoughts? That is not clear to me. I’m still thinking that through. But what I do know is I desire God’s help to mortify my thoughts so that they are holy. And the same is true for thoughts of greed, envy, hate, and pride. For more on lust, see here.

My point in this article is that when we are talking about OCD intrusive thoughts we are talking about a different beast, something that is not motivated by “deceitful desires” but by a distortion of the mind and a fear about the self.1

The treatment needs to address the faulty understanding of the logic of OCD and the faulty understanding of the self—the self that is actually a beloved child of God who is washed by the blood of Christ. Biblical counselors are right that a Christian understanding of the mind and heart are important for healing. But this article’s particular treatment of OCD is deeply harmful and misguided. The treatment emphasizes rumination and the conception of intrusive thoughts misunderstands the experience and its theological significance.

Postscript:

It has been suggested that OCD intrusive thoughts are cases of “concupiscence,” inclinations towards sinful desires which are themselves sinful according to the majority of reformed theologians. I have no objection to the reformed teaching on concupiscence, but I don’t think that’s what we’re dealing with here at all. Talk to someone struggling with OCD thoughts. These aren’t inclinations towards a desired sin. They are quite literally the opposite. I know what concupiscence feels like. I know when I feel a disordered inclination to desire someone who is not my wife, for example. We’re not talking about lust, but the desire to lust. I know that feeling. And I repent of it, because it is concupiscence and it is the first step toward sin. But that is not what is going on with OCD intrusive thoughts. There is no second step from the initial thought to a desired action. None. In fact, there is a repulsion. It is a categorical error to frame OCD intrusive thoughts as concupiscence, and it wrongly pours guilt and shame upon them. It is pastoral and counseling malpractice.

Learning to live with AI in higher education has not been easy. While some advocates are praising the pedagogical possibilities, many professors are concerned about rampant misuse of AI. Students are using AI to write entire papers for them, to summarize readings, to do their math questions, to create presentations, to do any kind of homework assigned. And the concern by professors is that students are merely offloading the cognitive work onto large language models and passing it off as their own thinking. In response, some argue that we just need to adapt, that AI is inevitable and students are going to use this technology no matter what, so we might as well help them offload their cognitive abilities as little and as ethically as possible. Other professors I know have outright bans on the technology in their classrooms. But what if the core of the problem is not the introduction of a new technology, but a profound lack of virtue? What if at the root of students’ misuse of AI to avoid studying is a fundamental lack of love?

Insofar as contemporary education is motivated by a drive for maximal efficiency, what Jacques Ellul calls technique, rather than love of wisdom and knowledge, students will naturally and quite reasonably gravitate towards tools that are the pinnacle of efficiency. But if we teach students to love what is lovely in their subjects, they will see the futility and hollowness in using AI to avoid thinking for themselves.

Contemporary students typically enter college with the mindset that their goal is to complete a certain set of tasks as efficiently as possible to graduate, preferably (but not always necessarily) with a high GPA. One major driver of this ideology is the high cost of college education, which pressures students to finish not just on time but early. Many students come into college with college credit from high school to expedite the process. Another driver is the shifting economy, which has only grown worse with the expansion of AI. Students are anxious to enter the marketplace and begin their careers as soon as possible. Finally, the way we have rewarded young people for the last few decades has not been for their pursuit of wisdom or knowledge, but for their GPA (which is often inflated) and their extracurricular accolades. So they have been conditioned to believe that their worth is tied to their performance on assessments, not their virtuous pursuit of wisdom or even character growth.

In colleges and universities, students are typically taught by Ph.Ds, “doctors of philosophy,” a word which literally means “love of wisdom.” It ought to be the case that in each class, these professors are inviting students to love wisdom, which always includes truth, beauty, and goodness—transcendent realities. When a teacher makes a compelling case for why students should love a subject, students are invited to seek the wisdom in that subject out of passion, out of a desire in their hearts and minds, rather than out of a drive to efficiently pass the course.

Even better, teachers should model their own love of a subject for students, showing them how and why to love what is lovely, praise what is praiseworthy, delight in what is delightful, and so on. Math teachers who get excited about proofs do this. Historians who get excited about stories in history do this. Their love of their subject is contagious. They embody what loving wisdom looks and feels like. That latter part is important. Many students have never felt a love for a subject before in school. They have only experienced school with dread. They need someone to model the emotions of passion for a subject for them so they can emulate those emotions themselves.

I have witnessed this in teaching difficult modernist poetry to skeptical students. As I embody my love for the poetry and communicate that love and invite them into the dance of reading and interpretation, they come to see and believe that there is something lovely where before they saw only noise and an obstacle to a grade. They grow excited to read the poetry. They offer different readings and interpretations of the images. They venture out in class discussions. They catch the passion.

Love will always be the best motivation to learn. But it is a virtue that needs to be cultivated in students by teachers. When students come to love writing—not necessarily the difficulty of writing, but the wisdom that comes from it—they will be less likely to offload their editing, brainstorming, and drafting to a machine that will rob them of valuable critical exercises. And the same principle holds true for other subjects.

It is also a reality that some students will not catch the passion, no matter how much you explain the wonder of the subject or embody the love for it. They will choose not to love. They will choose to turn their face away in scorn from what is beautiful in creation and neglect their own God-given gifts. Your task as a teacher is to always put before them the invitation to come home, to see the grandeur of God’s world and to explore it earnestly with all of their strength and all of their mind. But they have to make that choice. You can’t force someone to love. And that is the challenge before us today. Those who choose not to love will have easier and easier means of faking their way through parts of life through AI (until they hit a wall). But what an impoverished way to live!

Teaching students to love their subjects means a return to human education, but not human-centered. Practicing the virtue of love means that we are reminded, in gratitude, of the Creator of these wonderful subjects of study and why they are worthy of our investigation. Virtues demand a telos, a direction towards which they and we are pointed. Even as students study math or physics or biology or poetry, they are studying the creation and glory that God has made for us to discover, and that is part of wisdom.

When students (and professors) come to understand that their task is to love what is lovely in pursuit of wisdom that God has made wonderful for us to discover for his glory, the allure of maximal efficiency loses its grip. It’s revealed as the hallow, soulless, foolish force that it is. The challenge before administrators and educators is less, “How can we catch AI cheaters?” but, How have we been subtly reinforcing maximal efficiency instead of the virtue of love? The solution to rampant AI cheating is not to surrender to technology and allow students to use AI to do their thinking for them, it’s to teach them to love wisdom.

For more on the virtue of Love, please check on my new book on the virtues, To Live Well!

In 1948, Richard Weaver published Ideas Have Consequences, a classic of conservative thought. And he was right. Ideas do have consequences. For example, as our culture has increasingly come to accept the belief that humans are sovereign over their lives, it has fed directly into abortion and assisted suicide amongst other evils. The problem with this phrase is that it seems to have more explanatory power than it really does. Ideas have consequences, yes. But so do material conditions. So does our environment. Also, we can’t often disentangle the web of ideas that produced an outcome. It’s not just one idea, but several. “Ideas have consequences” is a powerful phrase to use when there is a tidy direct line to draw from, say, radical individualism to assisted suicide, but even then we must be cautious. What role does the medical industry and cost-saving measures play? What role does our disrespect for the elderly play? It’s complicated! What I want to argue today is that we should be very cautious when arguing that ideas have consequences. Not that we shouldn’t make that case, but that we shouldn’t flippantly use that phrase as a causal argument. Sometimes things seem to have a direct causal relationship based on an ideology, but that isn’t evidence that there is a causal relationship. The reality is, ideas have consequences, except when they don’t—which is all the time! And evangelicals across the theological and political spectrum use this phrase (despite its conservative origins) as a hammer to hit at their opponents. Progressives claim that abuse is consequence of the ideas of complementarianism. More conservative types claim that sin is the consequence of the ideas of more centrists types. When the reality is much more complicated and human. We’d all do well to use this phrase sparingly.

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Increasingly I am convinced that inhibition is a defining characteristic of contemporary culture. As a nation, we’re dating at lower rates, having less sex, young people are delaying getting their driver’s license, we’re in a loneliness epidemic, people are turning to AI companions for love and attention, we feel compelled to adopt AI, we feel controlled by our mental health diagnoses, we’re (again, as a nation—not me specifically) addicted to sports gambling and pornography and all sorts of substances—in other words, we seem to be helpless. To a large extent, we are not active agents in our own lives. We are subjects pushed around by massive forces: our biology, our environment, the government, corporations, social media, our passions, and so on.

And what’s so fascinating about this to me is that this inhibition comes at a time when we are promised and sold radical autonomy. We are told that we create our own lives. That we are masters of our own destinies. That we can and must make our lives meaningful and rich and exciting and purposeful. My theory is that it is precisely this promise of radical autonomy that has led to the widespread feelings of helplessness in contemporary society. To the degree that we have been told that we are responsible for our own individual sense of belonging, identity, meaning, value, and purpose,1 we freeze up, we feel helpless to act, and we allow others to choose for us. Part of the tragedy of this is that God designed us to be active agents in our lives, to make wise choices. When we rightly see ourselves as belonging to God, and therefore belonging to the Church and our family and our neighbors and even creation, we also rightly see that we have a moral obligation to act purposefully in our lives.

The Weariness of the Self

In Alain Ehrenberg’s 2009 book, The Weariness of the Self, he argues that the contemporary experience of depression is marked by inhibition (12). But it’s the causes of this inhibition that interest me most. Ehrenberg writes: “The individual, free from morality, creating herself by herself and aspiring to the superhuman, . . . is not our reality. But, instead of possessing the strength of the masters, she turns out to be fragile, lacking in being, weary of her sovereignty and full of complaints” (218-219). In other words, we are weary of trying to be our own sovereign selves. We have radical freedom to remake our identities (think of social media’s powers of self-expression), but it has come at a great cost: “If moral constraints have grown lighter, psychic constraints have taken their place. Emancipation and action have stretched individual responsibility beyond all borders and have made us painfully aware that we are only ourselves” (226). Elsewhere he refers to this as the “illness of responsibility” (4). In other words, as we are burdened with responsibilities to “be ourselves”, we (ironically) grow less able to be ourselves in the sense of who God created us to be.

Let me tell you what this can practically look like. It can look like society pressuring you to conform to a certain body image so you can compete in the dating market (which is now literally a market with dating apps). And so you optimize your life, your diet, your body, your exercise, your schedule to maximize your opportunities to meet someone with the highest potential to give you an experience of validation, but it never lasts. And the more you try to “be yourself” and “express yourself” the more you end up conforming to social expectations so that you can receive affirmation. Your choices are made for you by TikTok beauty or lifestyle gurus. You feel less capable of approaching people. Calling someone on the phone seems impossible. You feel more and more inadequate and less and less able to move. And shame covers everything. The shame of being an individual in a world of personalities.

We bear this shame because we were never meant to bear the burden of self-creation and we are meant to be active agents in our own lives. This tension weighs on us, filling us with feelings of inadequacy and helplessness, and yet I think most of us know that it ought not be this way. We were made to be free, yes. But that freedom looks different from the freedom offered by the World.

Agency in Christ

When you recognize that you belong to God and you are not radically autonomous, you are actually more free to advocate for yourself to God’s glory. By belonging to God you belong to his Church, which comes with certain duties and obligations. You have responsibilities to serve, to care for others, to worship, to participate in the life of the Church. This sounds like the loss of agency, but it’s actually the opportunity to act righteously. Each of these responsibilities is a choice, and it is your duty to listen to the Holy Spirit and the Word and act, to invest in the Body of Christ. Many Christians view church passively, as something that happens to them. They expect to be entertained or engaged with a professional presentation. Consumption makes us inhibited subjects, eyeballs watching instead of whole bodies participating. But when we rightly see ourselves as made in the Image of God and delighted in as sons and daughters of God, then we know that our active participation in the Body of Christ is a joy!

Similarly, in various ways, once we recognize our belonging to God we should have the courage to advocate for our good. Because in seeking our own good, we seek God’s good. Let me tease that out, because it may sound selfish, but rightly understood, it’s not. When you seek your own good, and your good is defined properly according to God’s will, then it is not selfish. It is glorifying to God. Philippians 2:4 says: “Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others.” Note that Paul does not say to “ignore your own interests!” Paul acknowledges the goodness of looking out for your own interests but desires that the Philippians also look out for the interests of others! In a like manner, it is good for you to seek your own good, when that “good” is defined by God’s will. For example, it is good to seek your physical and mental wellbeing. That is taking care of the body God has given you stewardship over! That pleases God! Another example is being a prudent steward over your finances and talents. Another example is taking the initiative to make friends or go out on dates.

In these ways you are taking an active role in advocating for your life, rather than passively allowing life to go by. But you are taking an active role because you know that your life matters before God, because you know that it glorifies God, and because you have a responsibility to act wisely. And the exciting thing is, there is grace for when you don’t act wisely. You see, the World says you must be a radically autonomous individual who masters his or her own world, and if you mess up, the very meaning of your life is at stake. But when you belong to God and your identity and belonging and purpose and value and meaning are hidden in him, there is grace for your mistakes. You are free to act with purpose because you already belong to him. You don’t need to be afraid.

I did two wonderful podcasts this week that were very different! One was the Holy Post:

And the other was Mere Fidelity:

A few days ago, I had the pleasure of joining the MereFidelity podcast (the episode isn’t out yet), the podcast hosted by . And asked me an excellent question which I didn’t answer adequately, and I want to take the time to elaborate on here. He asked me about the Love chapter in To Live Well, specifically the section on “Friendship,” and about how we can practically develop and nurture deep friendships. I want to take that a step further and ask the question, what does love mean in a friendship? How ought we love our friends in practice if we intend to develop deep friendships that will carry us through life?

My theory is that many contemporary people have never been taught these practices of love in friendship, or they have allowed these practices to atrophy so that their friendships have atrophied as well. Certainly the statistics on friends suggest that something has changed. And my fear is that with the rise of AI companion bots, some percentage of Americans will continue to neglect these practices by turning to a simulacrum of a companion who sycophantically never requires love.

So what does love in friendships entail? How do we love our friends well? What does that look like in the day-to-day trenches of modern life? And how does our love of friends fit with our love of God?

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Last year, wrote a moving essay entitled “Why We Doubt Everything” for her Substack, (which I highly recommend). In it the article, she argues that it’s not so much that the younger generation has lost faith, but that they never were taught to have faith to begin with. She calls Gen Z “a chronically doubtful generation,” doubting God, relationships, identity, beauty, and so on. And entire industries are built to feed into this doubt, to prey upon it. India is a perceptive analysis of contemporary culture, and I think she’s correct. Young people in particular are plagued by doubts. I certainly don’t think it’s only young people, however. Uncertainty is a part of our culture. On the one hand we are made to feel uncomfortably doubtful about our wellbeing so that we feel the urgent need to purchase products and services, and on the other hand we’re promised relief from doubt by these products and services. We are kept in the liminal space between anxiety and safety. What exacerbates this problem is that so many of our institutions have been weakened through fallen or corrupt leadership. Our trust has been broken. So the doubts we have about our wellbeing are not relieved by appeals to institutions that can aid us, because the State, churches, corporations, and schools have all let us down. Even families have let us down. Relationally our trust has been broken. This is especially true, as India notes, for those who have experienced online dating. The number of people who have had their sexual imaginations disordered by pornography (especially violent pornography) is horrifying. So what does it mean to have faith in a culture of chronic doubt? It means having faith in a Person, the Person of Jesus Christ. And to allow that faith to give you the hope and courage to reasonably trust other people and confidently navigate this chaotic world.

As I said, I believe India is basically correct that we live in a chronically doubtful culture. I think there are market reasons for this, and I think there are other sociological reasons for this (the Catholic Church sexual abuse scandals or the numerous sexual abuse scandals in evangelical congregations for example), and I think there are ideological reasons for this (with the loss of a belief in shared reality, we are increasingly skeptical of everything). But whatever the causes, the effects are that people suffer from chronic doubt that prevents them from living flourishing lives, that makes them inhibited. They are afraid to venture out and date someone because what if they are abusive? They are afraid to apply for a job because what if they get rejected? They are afraid to commit to a friendship because what if they get betrayed? So this basic lack of faith keeps them from acting courageously.

But if this is a matter of faith, is it wrong? Should you have faith in someone else? Should you have faith that your spouse will never let you down? Should you have faith that your friend will never share your secrets? Should you have faith in fallible human beings? Should you have faith in yourself to be honest at all times? In his essay on “Faith” as a virtue, Josef Pieper argues that properly speaking, we are right to not have faith in other fallen human beings. True faith demands utter reliance upon a person. It demands that we put ourselves in their hands. That we believe what they speak.

Think about what a radical proposition that is. I love my wife and trust her immensely. But I don’t believe what she speaks as 100% reality. I know that she experiences reality from a subjective position and can only report her view at the best of times, and will sometimes unintentionally forget to mention things. I know myself and trust myself deeply, but I know that I am an unreliable narrator of my own experience. I know that I sometimes paint experiences in ways that flatter my ego or denigrate my self-worth, depending on my mood. The fact is, fallen humans are not worth putting our true faith in.

To truly have faith in someone is to believe what they speak. Who can we believe completely? Whose words are worthy of our faith? Who except Christ? Except God? When we have true saving faith, it is the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives moving us to accept Christ’s Words and believe in them. To believe not in the abstract idea of Christ as the Son of God, but the reality of the Person of Christ, and therefore to believe what he speaks, and to believe the whole counsel of Scripture.

How does that true faith affect our ability to arrest the chronic doubt of our times?

First, it grounds us in hope. Because we believe in the Person of Christ and his Words, we believe in his promises. And his promises give us hope for the resurrection and for tomorrow. We know his Father is working all things together for our good! That doesn’t mean that we should recklessly walk into broken institutions and be harmed by toxic leaders, or that we should jump into harmful relationships and expect God to protect us from harm. But it does mean that we can have confidence that God is sovereign and caring for us and that it is good for us to take risks and trust. We can hope all things because God is making everything new. This isn’t blind optimism, but a cautious, prudent hope that trustworthy people and institutions are worth trusting in! We don’t have to and we should not give into the vice of despair.

Second, and relatedly, we have reason to take courage. As we are confronted with opportunities to strike out and trust other people and institutions, we need to take a risk, be vulnerable. As I have written about before, it is worth taking this risk. We can have this courage and act confidently because of our faith in Christ. Whatever suffering we may or will experience, Christ will be with us. So we don’t have to be afraid. And if we are trusting people and institutions for the sake of the good, because we desire to build relationships and glorify God, then it is honoring to him that we do this work.

Third, I think we need to become the kinds of people who are faithful to each other. No, we can’t be worthy of true faith; only Christ is worthy of that. But I can be worthy of human faith from my wife by remaining faithful to my wedding vows. I can be worthy of faith to my children by being a safe and supporting and loving father who always points them to Christ. I can worthy of faith to my students by being safe and supportive and encouraging and knowledgeable and pointing them to Christ. And so on. One of the reasons Gen Z has so many doubts is that older generations have given them reasons to doubt. We need faithful adults. If you are not one today, become one, starting now. And the only way you’ll be able to do that is if you have true faith in the Person of Christ, who is the model of all faithfulness, the one who made you righteous, and the one who loves you.

If you found this discussion of the virtue of Faith helpful, you’ll enjoy my new book, To Live Well: Practical Wisdom for Moving Through Chaotic Times which is now available!

Also, I had the joy of being on the “Oh My Word with Katie” podcast. Take a listen.

Finally, two reviews came out for To Live Well:

The Gospel Coalition

1517

Once again, if you have a chance to read and review the book, please do so. If you purchased it from Amazon, please leave a review there. If you purchased it elsewhere, please leave a review on Goodreads. Thanks.

Today is the day. After working on To Live Well: Practical Wisdom for Moving Through Chaotic Times for three years, it’s finally (officially) out. So I wanted to write a piece that explains what this book is all about, where it came from, who it’s for, why you should read it, and how you can help get the word out. Because I do need help. I deeply believ…

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Tomorrow is the release of my fourth book, To Live Well: Practical Wisdom for Moving Through Chaotic Times. I know I’ve talked about it a lot, but I am proud of the book. Tomorrow I’m going to publish a special post talking about the book and why I think you should read it. But for today, I want to share another excerpt cut from the book during the editing process. Each chapter contains several practical examples of how to exercise the virtues. Under the virtue of justice, I had a section on how to practice justice in relation to the “government,” which is not always easy for Americans. I hope you find it helpful and challenging.

Justice demands that we submit to the governing authorities (Rom 13:1), but also that we show them respect and honor. This is particularly difficult in liberal democracies like America where rebelling, criticizing, and condemning the government is not only seen as permissible but as responsible. There is a balance here between respecting governing authorities, recognizing their legitimate authority, and holding government leaders accountable to the people. For most of us, the challenge is not to defer to the government’s authority too much, it’s to see ourselves as superior to government leaders.

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It’s one thing to read that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 6:19). It’s another thing entirely to believe it and live it. This is especially true in a culture that degrades the body, that consumes the body, that commodifies the body, that abuses the body, that teaches men that women’s bodies are ther…

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A few days ago, asked me to write something on the challenge of rootedness in the contemporary world. Which is ironic, because had just left me a comment on Instagram where he criticized the way “people talk about rootedness and rootlessness.” I’m afraid I’m going to make Andrew, who is a faithful reader and commenter, frustrated by talking about rootedness and rootlessness. Sorry Andrew!

Here’s the challenge as I’ve seen it play out in many people’s lives:

You grow up in a specific place with your family and make friends, then you go off to college and make new friends and slowly grow a bit detached from that place and your old friends and even your family. Then you decide to find a job based on where you can find employment or where you and maybe your spouse think it would be exciting to live. Later, you have kids and discover that it’s hard to be distant from your family. You miss their support. They miss watching your kids grow up. But by that point you’ve already put down roots. The kids grow disconnected from grandparents, aunts and uncles and cousins, but moving is a huge commitment and finding work (in this economy?) can be overwhelming. So instead, you make do. You try to travel to visit family when you can. You FaceTime with them. You make friends locally. But all along you have a sense that you are split. A part of you will always belong to where you grew up: the people and places you grew up with. And a part of you will belong to where you live now.

But is that okay? Do you have an obligation to move to be closer to family? If so, how do you know when you have that obligation? What demands do our belonging to people and place put on us, and how much should we follow our own vision of life? Should we just follow our dreams wherever they take us, or do we have a duty to consider our obligations to others?

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The following is a section that didn’t make it into the published manuscript of To Live Well for pacing and length reasons, but I quite like it, so I edited it and expanded it a bit for our purposes here. It was meant to be one of the “application” sections under the virtue of temperance. I hope you find it beneficia…

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A mental health condition does not just affect the person who has a diagnosis. It affects the people around them as well, their family and friends, their support system and coworkers and loved ones. When you can’t show up to work because your depression is so heavy on you, that affects your coworkers. When you can’t take your kids to school because your anxiety is spiking, that affects your spouse. When you snap at a customer because you’ve been ruminating and your anxiety is high, that affects them and your employer. When you break promises because you feel like it’s more important to pay attention to obsessive doubts that your OCD is feeding you, that affects everyone involved. The list could go on. The question many sufferers from mental afflictions want to know is, How responsible am I for the harm I’ve caused others? If doctors and therapists agree that I have a mental health condition, does that mean it’s not my fault that I’ve acted in these ways? This question has a practical importance to it, because it affects how you seek to address the harm done. Do you apologize for the harm you did or the harm that the condition did? Or both?

As always with these pieces on mental health, I’m writing as someone with lived experience, pontificating from my position, not as an expert, but as someone who cares and has thought about these issues a great deal. So take them for what they are worth. It is my belief that in most cases, we don’t get to know where the condition starts and our agency begins. I make this argument in On Getting Out of Bed. We don’t get to know. We each must make our best effort to act with agency and take responsibility while accepting grace for our condition.

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As AI tools begin to mimic the quality of some actual human musicians and artists, and as writers continue to experiment and test boundaries of how to use AI, questions around the authenticity and purity and value of human-made creations have arisen.

If AI can make a song that moves me as deeply as a song writ…

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A recent study released by the Institute for Family Studies reports an alarming rate of demoralization among young men:

One possible takeaway from this is that young men should get married and have kids, get a full time job, and/or get a BA. But I think it’s still remarkable that 26% of young men with kids feel like they are failures! If anything, this study shows that the feeling of being a failure is incredibly common for young men. And having worked extensively with young women in my job as a college professor, I can say that many young women struggle with this feeling too. In fact, I’ve found that many older people of both sexes struggle with impostor syndrome and doubts about whether they are “good enough.” And in my experience, many of the same core doubts that trouble older people and women trouble younger men. But on top of those, there are some demographic specific challenges that face young men. My task today is to explore what some of those core challenges are and how we can invite young men, and others, to live into the fullness of who they were created to be before God.

What I think we’ll find is that the absence of clear life plans, the abundance of idolized public figures, the underdevelopment of courage, and the failure to understand grace all lead to an overwhelming sense of failure in life.

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One of my working theories about contemporary culture is that we are deeply inhibited. Obviously when you make a sweeping claim like that there are a million exceptions, but I think it’s true for a lot of people. I think a lot of people feel frozen, stuck, afraid to act on their God-given agency in a world that seems inc…

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