By: Stephen McAlpine
One of the more chilling photos of the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami is of a family of holidaymakers standing in the shallows of the withdrawn sea, as the water come barrelling in again.
They’re at that point between not knowing what is about to hit them, and the growing horror of what threatens to sweep them away. You can see the woman in the foreground calling them frantically back in (good news, they made it!).
And what was coming in that threatened to sweep them away? Not an orderly tide, but a foaming, frothing behemoth that would engulf some quarter of a million lives by the time the waters had receded that dreadful, dark day.
For it wasn’t just the water that was deadly on Boxing Day 2004. It was what the water carried with it: A lethal cocktail of flotsam and jetsam swept along by the tsunami’s force: trees, buildings, cars, all turned into deadly projectiles. A returning tide is one thing. An approaching tsunami is something else altogether.
Here’s a question for the church as it stands in the shallows of the post-Christian beach in the West: Are we simply preparing ourselves for an orderly returning tide of faith, or are we preparing ourselves for a returning, tumultuous spiritual tsunami that will upend our practices, challenge our assumptions about reality and refuse our neat categories?
The Sea of Faith
So why the metaphor of the ocean? There’s been a lot of talk recently about the returning tide of Christian faith in the West. The so call “vibe” has shifted, not only in politics and culture, but religion too. This shift is picked up by Justin Brierley, in his podcast and book The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God, only his language is “tide” not vibe.
In compelling interviews with the likes of historian Tom Holland and singer Nick Cave, Brierley frequently offers a self-conscious nod to Matthew Arnold’s famous 19th century poem, Dover Beach:
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating…
The tide had gone out. Faith had retreated from our shores, pulled out by the modernist lunar mix of advanced education, technology and science, the sexual mores of the past century.
And its melancholy roar was compounded by our own anger and/or anguish as we watched the withdrawal. Religious observance declined, Sunday attendance collapsed precipitously, and, eventually as it does, political legislation caught up with culture. Laws were drafted that were hostile to a Christian vision of human flourishing. Funding pressures were placed upon Christian institutions to try and get them to “behave”, especially in areas of gender and identity.
Even up until a decade ago this tide did not seem to be for turning. The new atheists gleefully occupied the now dried-out shoreline. Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens regaled us with tales of how religion spoils everything, and how God is a delusion. And boy did the culture lap it up. Or so it seemed.
Meanwhile creative atheists such as Lawrence Krauss assured us that despite the loss of a Creator, we still mattered because we were made from the same stuff as stars.
And remember that time Dawkins asserted in a celebrated London bus ad campaign to get on and enjoy life because “there’s probably no God”? Heady days indeed for those convinced of his/her absence, and convinced also that it was their job was to convince us of that absence too!
Has The Tide Turned?
And those ideas held sway. Until the pandemic it seems. And then things seem to change. Seismic disrupters like pandemics will do that. They will stir things on the surface for sure, and we all saw that. But they will stir things at subterranean levels that are capable of moving vast tectonic plates. And in these post-pandemic days the plates most shifted have been around meaning and purpose, and whether there is an ongoing role for meaningful spirituality in the modern West.
Hence the celebrated vibe shift in the USA political and cultural scene too. This vibe shift was part of that subterranean move. Something has changed on the spiritual front, hasn’t it? You can smell it. An a priori commitment to materialism is no longer considered the only intellectually defendable position.
Famous figures such as former atheist apologist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and former playboy comedian, Russell Brand, are now professing Christ. It almost seems bizarre.
Tim Keller, in his inimitable way, sensed the shift before his death. In writing what proved to be his final article for The Atlantic,Keller observed that the meaning and purpose deficit in the West is unsustainable:
As time goes on, secular Americans may begin to see that the rest of the world has developed cultures that are modern but nonetheless religious. Young, secular Americans may feel themselves to be in a kind of wasteland and begin to question their unbelief.
Yet Matthew Arnold’s was already on to this. Here’s the next stanza of Dover Beach:
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain…
This brave new sea-less world might look exciting, but the ocean floor has been stripped in the process. The joy, the love, the light, the certitude, the peace – all gone! All we have is ourselves, so we had better be true to each other.
Yet even that shrivelled vision has proven too difficult. Covenant relationships are rare. We’re now true – but to ourselves alone. It’s a “You Do You” world of dating apps and online influencers. The World Economic Forum has listed polarisation as one of the biggest global risks of the coming decade.
And so what if we are made of stars? So too are toads! We can no longer articulate a human’s intrinsic worth. State-sanctioned suicide is offered to – and accepted by – people with mental illness. Late term abortion is an article of faith among our politicians.
And the idea that a God-less world would lead to less worry? We’ve never been so anxious! Keller again:
The modern self is exceptionally fragile. While having the freedom to define and validate oneself is superficially liberating, it is also exhausting: You and you alone must create and sustain your identity. This has contributed to unprecedented levels of depression and anxiety and never-satisfied longings for affirmation.
A Tsunami Not a Tide?
So perhaps the tide is returning, the sea of faith may be roaring back in. And that’s something to celebrate. But remember that YouTube video! The West has not been irreligious in the absence of orthodox faith. On the contrary the inability of secularism to provide meaning has resulted in a frantic search for something – anything– transcendent to replace the absent sea.
Neo-paganism, the occult, Wicca, stars and tarot, eastern philosophy, techno-religion, and a naïve belief that one can harness dark spiritual powers with little consequence. All of these are flooding back onto our shores actually and virtually.
And this spiritual flotsam and jetsam is racking up a body count, including a huge uptick in requests for exorcisms in places such as New York. Here’s Catholic commentator, Ross Douthat, in The New York Times:
The future of humanity depends on people opening doors to the transcendent, rather than sealing themselves into materialism and despair. But when the door is open, be very, very careful about what you invite in.
Our apologetics and evangelistic frameworks assumed the door was shut. Our aim was to try and prise it open through sensible argument. What we hadn’t accounted for was a door ripped off its hinges by a spiritual tsunami.
Never mind sensible. Weird is back. Weird is turning up on our church doorsteps looking for answers. Weird is oppressed by a devil whose primary trick is no longer to convince Westerners that he does not exist, but to convince them that he is all-powerful.
Are We Ready For the Spiritual Flotsam and Jetsam?
The church must be prepared to disciple ostensibly modern people out of pagan, weird belief not simply Western, sensible unbelief. Our gospel proclamation must provide answers for those who are in no doubt that the invisible world exists, simply because they know that they are enslaved and enfeebled by it.
This will be challenging. Our preaching, our prayer, our practices must recognise spiritual realities we once believed were confined to the experiences of our sub-Saharan mission partners. We may well have to confront spiritual darkness in more obvious forms than in the past. Our discipleship programs may well have to launder out more obviously sinister beliefs than mere secular materialism.
We will have to answer weirdness with a deeper and truer weirdness, the weirdness of a risen, ruling Saviour who has defeated the powers, and has swept us up into the safety of the heavenly places by the power of the Spirit.
I’m with Justin Brierley and Tim Keller on this: the sea of faith is returning. But I suspect it’s not going to be an orderly tide that greets us, but a broiling tsunami replete with spiritual projectiles we will have to navigate with deep grace and gospel conviction.
The sea of faith is coming back in. Is your church expecting an order tide or is it preparing for a tsunami?
Article supplied with thanks to Stephen McAlpine
About the Author: Stephen has been reading, writing and reflecting ever since he can remember. He is the lead pastor of Providence Church Midland, and in his writing dabbles in a number of fields, notably theology and culture. Stephen and his family live in Perth’s eastern suburbs, where his wife Jill runs a clinical psychology practice.
Feature image: Photo by Matthew Smith on Unsplash