Joseph Lear @josephmljr
Nah dawg, it’s nihilism. And the dread of daily life and existence. That’s what the church has failed to address. Politics only goes to far. We need metaphysics because everyone’s stuck in the abyss of immanence.

Dr. Kevin M. Young @kevinmyoung
·
Jan 19
The GREAT ABANDONMENT of the Church is caused more by its response to:

1. Donald Trump
2. George Floyd, BLM, and CRT
3. COVID

than it is

1. Deconstruction
2. Rejection of Jesus
3. The chance to sleep in

They had to leave the Church to keep their faith.

12:25 PM · Jan 20, 2023 //

“Nihilism” is a philosophical term (with a broad and complex history) that doesn’t really show up in everyday conversation (unless you’re a diehard fan of The Big Lebowski), so let me explain it as simply as I can. It comes from the Latin nihil which simply means “nothing.” So we might say “Nihilism” is “Nothing-ism,” or the belief that everything is fundamentally nothing—that all of existence is bereft of purpose, meaning, and substance, and that it’s therefore absurd. To be a nihilist is to believe that nothingness has the first and the last word about everything. It’s to believe that your existence is random and arbitrary, and that whatever awaits us in the future, or after death, is an eternal vacuous abyss. Maybe we should be depressed, or maybe we should laugh. Or maybe we should laugh depressingly.

I think nihilism strikes all of us as a bleak outlook on life (to put it mildly). But I also think it resonates on some level with the vast majority of us. Whether we’re Christians or not, there’s the gnawing sense, this haunting feeling that, really, nothing matters. It’s the existential malaise we find ourselves in here in the West. //

So, sure, people may use political compromise, anti-BLM rhetoric, or any hot button cultural issue as an excuse to leave the church, but really they’re leaving the church because the church is failing to issue a rejoinder to the dread of daily life we all feel. Not only has the church failed to confront nihilism, but the church is also itself nihilistic. It’s nihilistic precisely because it has failed to identify nihilism as the problem we are facing in the West. We end up throwing punches at the shadows cast by the thing itself. We don’t dare turn around and face the reality of our situation, because we’re afraid our anemic Christianity can’t really stand up to the challenge. So the church has had to adopt Trumpian politics (at least in Evangelical circles) to stave off and hide its own sense of absurdity.

The thing that Kevin from Twitter fails to recognize is that the liberal protestant church is in a much worse position that the Evangelicals are. The Episcopalians, the Presbyterians, the Methodists, and the Lutherans are hemorrhaging people not because they’ve preached MAGA but because they’ve preached nothing.

Back in 2003, David Bentley Hart wrote a piece called “Christ or Nothing,” in which he claims that the options set before us in the West are either faith in Christ or “an unshakeable, if often unconscious, faith in nothing, or nothingness as such.” And that’s the situation we continue to find ourselves in. No one is tempted by Islam. People aren’t running to become Buddhist monks. They dabble in witchcraft, rubbing crystals and burning sage in their living rooms not because they think it does something, but because it’s nothing.

So how does the church proceed as we continue to bleed the nihilists from our nihilistic churches? Here are four concrete steps we can take:

1. Invite people to be baptized as an alternative to suicide.
2. Preach: "God chose even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are.”
3. Fence the Lord’s Supper to remind people that the bread and the cup are not crystals and sage.
4. Delete Tiktok.