There are a growing number of people, on all sides of the political spectrum, who are convinced that western civilisation is in crisis. What seemed settled is in turmoil. Everything we thought we agreed about turns out to have been a mirage, a sham, a plaster on a seeping wound. Or so some argue.

NS Lyons is the author of a Substack called The Upheaval and this is how he describes the current problems:

Deep atomization and alienation. A rejection of higher authority, any authority, even the authority of reality. Boundless ego of the self. A void of higher meaning. Unmitigated fear of suffering and death. Existential anxiety. Nihilism. Anger at life, anger at all of creation. A desperate, limitless thirst for technological control as a reaction. Deluded hopes for utopia on earth and the end of all suffering.

Thoughts on Today’s Upheaval and Its Implications

Doesn’t sound good does it? There might be other ways of seeing all those issues but I think it would be hard to deny that those issues exist. But these issues are, according to Lyons, symptoms not causes.

Relentlessly, every issue I was investigating began to converge on our modern society’s lack of ready answers to the same uncomfortably metaphysical questions: Why are we here? What is truth? What is real? How do we explain suffering? How do we justify existence? How do we live in the world? And so on.

We thought we had resolved or at least successfully set aside these questions in our modern, secular age. But it turns out this neutrality was always impossible; they are unavoidable and have to be answered. If they aren’t, something else will inevitably rush in to fill the void, no matter how crude, ill-considered, disordered, or dangerous that something is.

Ibid.

Why are we here? What is truth? How do we explain suffering? Those questions sound a bit religious which surely can’t be? But Lyons, reluctantly it seems had to admit that himself.

I’ve had to conclude that, at bottom, our civilization’s crisis is first and foremost a spiritual crisis. And that the great struggles underlying our present upheavals are really struggles over essentially theological questions, such as whether there is any inherent dignity in human life and the human body, or whether all matter is inherently evil and only pure spirit good. Most of all, at the core, there seems to be a great struggle between two competing visions about what it means to be human: whether Man exists as, in essence, machine or Imago Dei. As someone who previously thought theology was surely an irrelevant anachronism, having it turn out to still be the Queen of the Sciences has all been a bit of a shock.

Ibid

Lyons isn’t alone in thinking that ‘theology was an irrelevant anachronism’ and that the triumph of the secular seems to be, well, not quite as total as some would have had us believe. When asked what role did faith play in Lyons life, he answered,

Well, not so long ago it really had no role in my life at all, and I was perfectly satisfied with that, even smug about it, as so many intellectually-minded people tend to be. That has changed dramatically over the course of the last five years or so.

What then is absolutely fascinating is how he describes God hunting him down, which you should read for yourself but he then is asked about what he sees in the church and it is a mixed assessment.

The fact is that Christianity very obviously faces an existential struggle with a very dangerous competing (and arguably directly heretical) theological worldview—one that is extremely seductive, has successfully seized and merged itself with state power across the Western world, and is rapidly going global. It should now be clear that this will be a period of trial as great as any in the Church’s history.

I think this is why so many theological questions pretty quickly come down to whether or not someone thinks someone else is caving in to the spirit of the age: sexuality, leadership, politics or whatever. There is an intuition that the church should somehow be standing up to something but isn’t, should be standing for something but it seems to be what the world agrees with and so in all sorts of areas there is this suspicion about there being too much world in the church and that leads to an instinctive reaction against. Against whatever it is, and it could be anything. This isn’t always right or wise but I think I understand a bit better now why it happens.

But for the church that can get its theology, anthropology, and doxology right there is a tremendous opportunity.

My impression is that people today, and especially young people, are looking above all else for solid ground; for shelter in the storm. They are looking for the real and the eternal, for that which will not melt into air. They are looking for authority they can trust, when authority has everywhere else dissolved. And they’re looking for loyalty, community, and love that does not falter. Unfortunately they often mistakenly turn to the worst possible places for these things—like extremist ideological movements—because they see no other alternative presenting itself. Meanwhile they are increasingly unsure of what is true, of what reality even is, or what even the most basic aspects of what it means to be human are, because there is no one there to give them an answer with conviction. In this situation, to be liquid in character is to be subsumed into the very same sea of chaos that everyone is trying desperately to stay afloat in while finding nothing solid to clamber onto. I think in this storm the Church will either be the rock it was founded to be, and stand fast, or it will sink beneath the waves.