The Revival of Advent
Christian faith is on the rise. Depending on the study you look at, in the last five years Millennials and Gen Z adults have seen anywhere between a 25-50% rise in “personal commitments to follow Jesus”. Non-Christian commitments to faith have grown by nearly 50% in the same time period. By every metric and measurement that you can find, Christian faith is growing, and if I’m honest, I have a hard time believing it.
For the majority of my life, anything religious had been met with a growing sense of cynicism. From 1990 to 2020, the Pew Research Center noted that there was a 42% drop in Christian believers, where the vast majority of those who drifted from their Christian roots became “religiously unaffiliated”. Postmodernism and its rising skepticism towards the grand narratives and universal truths of Christianity became popularized. This swell in popularity was compounded by the newfound age of the internet, which removed any filter between us and the smattering of ideas that exist throughout the world.
In theory, this age of ungated information should have released us from the shackles of ignorance. Opening our minds to new ideas, new technologies, new styles, new perspectives, and anything else that we might desire to seek out. Its real consequence was a generation whose worldview was no longer shaped by imperfect but well-intended, loving wisdom of those who were closest to them. In lieu of the slow and careful discernment over the formation of our worldview, whatever sounded good, felt good, and seemed good, became our north star. Radical individualism took over our hearts and life started to be lived through the insulating lens of “what does this mean for me and my life”.
Alexander Tocqueville, a French philosopher who visited the American Experiment nearly two hundred years ago, predicted this proliferation of what he called American Individualism. Individualism, as the name states, places the priorities of the individual above all else. The most fundamental truth about this ideology is that your existence is your responsibility. In short, morality, purpose, and meaning all rest upon your shoulders, as a curation of your own authority. As a result, we find ourselves living in a cultural moment where the mainstream philosophy for life is to approach anything and everything with cynicism and skepticism, because otherwise we’d run the risk of subjecting ourselves to the misguided authoritative structures of those who came before us. “We know ourselves best.”
As Buddha once said, “No one saves us but ourselves. No one can and no one may. We ourselves must walk the path.” We have nothing to gain, if not gained through our own actions. This is the guiding principle, our north star that we must follow. We must do everything to get everything, and if we do anything less, then we can expect to receive a life that is less than. Is this not the case? Is it not true that we must show up and participate in life? Is it not our responsibility to build a life worth living? To put in the work, such that we can leave something that is better than when we found it? Everything around us is pointing towards the individual as the sole proprietor of their salvation. But is that really the case?
What came with a promise of freedom, became like shackles. Through the choices we make, we find ourselves enslaved to ourselves – we become an oppressive authority over our own lives. What we choose, and the foundations we set as a result, become the tethers of life that shackle us to future versions of who we’ll become. Choices, no matter how small or big, are expressions of our acceptance of something better than the alternatives. And these expressions of goodness, despite our intentions to acknowledge them as an expression of moral perspective, build themselves into a worldview that we profess to the world. Emanating from this worldview, is our best attempt to define what we believe to be good and a version of truth that we hold ourselves accountable to.
Until we’re confronted by the otherness of our choices, do we then come to question the choices we’ve given up. What I’ve come to realize is that this same paradoxical phenomenon occurs in the daily rhythms of how we govern our own lives. We make choices, little impositions of our own authority, by our own authority, that result in these little forfeitures of our freedom. And it’s my belief that this same awakening is what we’ve experienced throughout the last five years. In the face of some of the most radicalized expressions of ‘self’ that the world has ever seen, we are seeing the young people who grew up in this paradigm, turn their backs on it, and ask for something different - Christianity.
Whether we choose to accept it or not, there is something innate to our humanity that leaves us asking questions about the meaning and purpose of our lives. The cultural chaos we’ve experienced throughout the last five years is a contest between our desire to claim our own physical salvation through the judgement of our own choices, or to put those choices, enacted by our acts of faith before God, to be the final deliverance of our spiritual salvation that will give life for an eternity. It’s my belief that we’re seeing a generation that finds themselves galvanized to contend with this powerful question - if not I, then who?
As we close out another advent season this Christmas, we can find the answer to this calling. Our hearts ache for the fallen and broken things in this world. There is a common language to grief and sadness and loneliness and all of the other tragic things that we encounter in life. Whether it’s happening to ourselves, or we see it on the faces of others around us, we feel that unmistakable yearning within our hearts for the world to be made right.
There is something about the holiday season that has a way of bringing this to the forefront. As the world seems to wind down, our focus is lifted from the chaos of our day to day lives, and put onto more important things, like those whom we love. For many families, it’s an opportunity to gather everyone together, to prepare a meal and to commune, something that many wait all year to enjoy. It’s also within this same spirit, that our eyes are lifted and our hearts break a little harder, when we see the elderly widow, living alone and without her family on Christmas morning; or when we see the homeless man on the street corner, begging for whatever we’re willing to give, while we make on our way back to our warm home with a car full of groceries.
We experience, for a brief moment, the heart of God. A longing for a benevolent, glorious, and holy God to reveal himself to the world. The meaning of Christmas is that this longing is met in the person of Jesus. That his life, death, and resurrection was real. That the son of God, came down and did what we could never do - Jesus saves us from the burden that we’ve placed upon ourselves. He saves us from sin, redeeming us in the midst of this fallen and broken world, and saying “take up your cross and follow me.”
In the height of our self-righteousness, Christ breaks through, and has broken through for so many in these last few years. Proclaiming that we can experience the fullness of life as God had intended, through faith in Him who came to save us. Jesus graciously gives what we could never give ourselves - a life of true meaning and purpose. In the chaos of postmodernism, we’ve seen the most unexpected generation turn in revolt, from the fullest expression of individual authority that the world has ever seen. And instead, they’re asking the question: What if there existed a God, who would leave his home in glory, and pour his redeeming love into hearts of those who would simply believe?
“Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.” (Revelation 21:1-4)
