What is the "Vibe Shift" and does it point to revival?

Mark Turman: [00:00:02] I'm Mark Turman and this is Faith and Clarity. We're glad you're joining us as we seek to equip you with biblical truth, uh, to think critically, to live faithfully and to serve intentionally where God has placed you. Uh, this week we're talking about a really important and hopeful subject, uh, what may be, uh, the early signs of a vibe shift in our culture, uh, which is another way of saying that God may be stirring a revival in his church and an awakening in our culture, particularly Western culture. And, uh, we want to talk about what that may sound like, look like already in some early steps. And so, let's roll. Let's jump right in. My, uh, conversation partner is a philosopher, a cultural theologian, as well as a podcaster and an author. Uh, he's spent some time in the last number of years, uh, looking at what's been going on in the last couple of decades around words that may be new to you, certainly new to me in the last couple of decades, deconstruction, the problem of disillusionment, disbelief, distrust. Uh, some have called it an age of cynicism. It's into that space that Paul Anleitner has been working and speaking, uh, from his home base in the twin cities area. Uh, he recently compiled a good bit of his work in a book called Based on a True Story. Uh, he holds a degree in history from the University of Michigan, as well as a master's degree from Bethel Seminary, and he's joining us today to talk about the vibe shift, uh, and the new openness that is coming in our culture. Paul, welcome to the Faith and Clarity podcast.

Paul Anleitner: [00:01:42] It's an honor to be on with you, Mark. Thank you.

Mark Turman: [00:01:46] Tell us a little bit, Paul, about just your personal background of faith. How, how did you end up doing what you do now?

Paul Anleitner: [00:01:53] Yeah, it's a great question. It directly connects to the reasons why I feel so called to write a book like Based on a True Story. My parents were first generation born again evangelical Christians. Um, my mom had grown up devoutly Catholic in the 70s. My dad maybe nominally so, uh, and in their college years, they both had what they would describe as a born again experience. And so I'm a kid of the 80s and 90s and very much a product of a strange convergence of different cultural influences. Of course, being a an evangelical youth group kid, a kid that grew up in Sunday school and vacation Bible school, I was very much immersed in that world of evangelical subculture and there was a lot of wrestling with what was going on in the broader culture. So I went to a K through 12 Christian school. I was at church, it felt like four days a week, you know. Um, involved in everything. My parents were leader leaders in the church. And I have really, for most part, really fond memories of those experiences. I haven't always, but that's kind of part of the book. I've had to work through and go back and re realize and appreciate all that was going on there. So that's one layer. But of course, being within a subculture that is nestled within a larger American culture, there were a lot of things happening in the broader culture as I moved into my more formative teenage years, which were a real spiritual shift. So one great example of this that I bring up in the book is how maybe some of you who are old enough, you could remember back to let's say a Friday night in 1989 and you and your buddies go to Blockbuster video store and like, we're going to rent a movie. And even though you've seen it for the umpteenth time, you still go, hey, let's go grab that copy of Rocky 4. And you take it back and you and your buds, you're watching Rocky 4 and you got all of these earnest, sincere training montages, this story about the underdog guy who goes out and he is so virtuous, he is such a hard worker that he even convinces the Soviets after defeating Ivan Drago that his way of seeing the world is right. And none of us in 1989 were rolling our eyes over that. We weren't deconstructing the the narrative of, you know, America versus the Soviet Union. We weren't doing that at all. But I fast forward 10 years later to 1999 and I'm a young man watching Fight Club, The Matrix. I didn't attend, but Woodstock 99 was also very interesting insight into the spiritual shift at the time. Branded as the peace and love revival of Woodstock 69, but it ended literally in fire and ash as young guys my age roved around the fairgrounds chanting, bleep you, I won't do what you tell me, quoting a rage against the machine lyric. There was a very different spiritual shift that was happening in the 90s. And part of my argument is that while we weren't aware of it at the time, that was a very unique phenomenon in American culture. And it produced something that we could call the meaning crisis. It produced the greatest statistical decline of faith in American history, and it happened in my lifetime. So I've been very interested in the reasons why that happened and uh, signs of hope that maybe that was just a blip on the radar. Maybe there is a new spiritual shift emerging.

Mark Turman: [00:05:30] Yeah, well, we'd love to see some of those signs, uh, that you talk about and and we'll get to those in a minute. Um, but, you know, as a pastor, uh, a little bit older than you, but, um, came to the Dallas area in the late 90s, uh, not long after what you just described and, uh, had all this excitement and energy about planting a church. Um, and then found it to be a whole lot harder than what I thought it was going to be. Uh, and as I was working through, uh, much of what you've written and talked about, I thought, this must be some of the reason why it was so difficult to grow a robust church, even in a high growth county, uh, of one of the most popular places in the country. I was like, why does it seem so difficult? Uh, and it had something to do with the underlying mentality of what was going on with a lot of the people that we were trying to engage with. Um, but kind of to set the framework for this, Paul, uh, we talk about things like meta narratives, we talk about things like cultural vibe and zeitgeist. Um, what do we mean by cultural vibe? Can you kind of give us a framework, a definition of that?

Paul Anleitner: [00:06:45] Yeah, I use vibe as essentially a substitute word that helps communicate uh, an a biblical insight that I think Christians, long time Christians would just recognize as true, but it's helpful in communicating across different contexts to name something that we would say is spirit or spiritual. So when I talk about a vibe, I'm talking about the general spirit of a culture. And of course, again, if you're, if you're a long time follower of Jesus and you're immersed in the biblical narrative, you have very little trouble acknowledging that there are forces at play that are beyond just our materialist, common materialist framing. But for some people, that's still a struggle. And so one analogy I like to give when I talk about this is when I talk about the vibe or I talk about a spiritual shift, I want you to picture going to you're in high school and it's the week of homecoming and you had a pep fest for the homecoming football game. And you're doing these cheers, you know, we got spirit, yes we do, we got spirit, how about you? What are we talking about? Well, we're talking about a felt tangible sense of shared identity based in a story about who we are with symbols like a mascot, with artistic creations like a school fight song, with a bunch of unique rituals that might have been unique to your own school, campus and community. And so when you went to that homecoming football game, if the team won, you would say, man, school spirit's feeling pretty high that next week at school. But if the team lost to their cross town rival, you could feel it in the air. Like you could just have been a kid in the glee club going to algebra class. Don't even care about football, but you could feel the change in that school spirit. So that's one way of framing it to help people understand that every culture has a spirit to that culture. It is the invisible values, the ideals, it is the guiding stories that make that culture bind together into something unique. And when the story changes, the spiritual change happens within that culture because every culture is united around a shared story. That's what makes it a culture. It has a shared story, it has shared rituals, and it has symbols that point to the values implied in that guiding story. So vibe shifts are one way of saying spiritual shifts, story shifts, identity shifts that are felt throughout a culture.

Mark Turman: [00:09:27] Okay. So let's, let's talk about you, uh, in your work, you you call out 1990 as kind of a pivotal moment. Uh, and so basically mean for the last 30, 35 years, we, uh, as you described it, have been living in a certain kind of spirit. Uh, and like I said, may have been some of what I was encountering in planting this church. Um, but, but let's, let's walk that out a little bit more. Uh, I really resonated with many of the cultural references, particularly to entertainment, uh, that's in your work. Uh, and I can remember like being a young dad, um, in the late 80s, uh, you know, watching Bill Cosby and how, how we journeyed, um, in a a strange way from like the Cosby show to friends and then ultimately to Seinfeld, which I never, like, unlike a lot of people, I never became a Seinfeld fan. Um, and I don't know why I should be, you know, there's certain moments of the show that I've seen, but I never connected deeply to the show the way I had done with previous shows. Um, so can you kind of, I was trying to think through this as well as in talking to you. I think I ran into the word deconstruction as it relates to faith probably five, maybe eight or nine years ago. Uh, we used to talk about people losing their faith or people becoming disillusioned in their faith. Maybe deconstruction is just a fresh word of describing that. Um, but call out some of the symptoms, not just in our entertainment, but maybe in some other ways that frame the last three decades or so of the spiritual mood of our culture.

Paul Anleitner: [00:11:14] Yeah, let's start with that word deconstruction because it's one that as you've mentioned already, probably a number of your listeners and viewers will have some familiarity with in the context of the kind of common recent vernacular where people say, you know, I'm going through a deconstruction of my faith or I deconstructed out of church or something like that. But that word has uh, layered meaning and we could actually go back to the ways in which it was employed maybe in a more academic sense, going back even as far as the 1960s in postmodern philosophy. So if you go back to the 1960s in what for lack of a better term in the sort of intelligentsia circles of academia and high culture, there was already this brewing movement of deconstruction and deconstruction is something that is to say, my relationship to the past, to the stories of the past, to the values of the past is one primarily of cynicism. So, you know, sometimes you will hear philosophers talk about postmodern thought as a hermeneutic of suspicion. And what that means as hermeneutic is the reading lens, the lens in which you engage with the world or a particular text or a work of art, being one of primarily suspicion. So that was in, you know, kind of the intelligentsia circles of the 60s, didn't really hit the pop culture mainstream until the 90s. And that's why I highlight the 90s as a crucial pivot point. So that notion that let's say was in the kind of Foucault and Derrida, those are some of the postmodern philosophers of the mid 20th century who are, and these are vast oversimplifications for those that have gone and gotten their philosophy degrees, so forgive me for a moment. But they had this underlying suspicion of meta narratives. I know that's a word you've used on your podcast before. Overarching stories, stories that try to explain everything about the purpose of life, who God is, why are we here? What does the good life look like? And an inherent suspicion that those stories are always propaganda, that they are always masking some play for power. So that suspicion began to move into popular culture in a significant way in the 90s. So real practically, you brought up the Cosby show. You know, the Cosby show, if we can set aside, um, Bill's later legal troubles for a moment, it was, it's a moral play. Like every week, the comedy is in service of a moral lesson that at the time in the 80s, most people felt was just universal. So the most common lesson was something about like meritocracy. So Cliff and Claire, their message every episode to their kids in some way, shape or form was, you better work hard, get an education, right? Well, they were speaking to the values of a different story and we don't have to unpack this all now, but we could call it the modern story's values. And so by the time you get to the 90s, there is this hermeneutic of suspicion, a cynicism towards things like the Cosby show, not particularly the Cosby show, but what that represented, that we all have these shared values. They're clearly objectively true. We should be teaching moral lessons. And that suspicion in the 90s came into play was saying, no, no, no, that stuff, that stuff about objectivity, that's what the powerful use to oppress the powerless. It's all narratives of control. Now, you might watch Seinfeld and go, well, Seinfeld didn't feel that cynical. It's not trying to, you know, rage against the machine. It wasn't. Seinfeld gave us a kind of comedic nihilism. It looked at the sitcom and deconstructed the sitcom format, which was largely, we're going to laugh and we're going to learn a moral lesson. Larry David, Jerry Seinfeld, co-creators of of of Seinfeld said, we've got two rules for Seinfeld. No hugging, no learning. And that was a an intentional reaction against the previous format of the sitcom genre. That's kind of a microcosm of what was happening at large in culture. I'll give you another example. 1992, The Death of Superman. You know, in the early 80s, we had this hopeful, optimistic Christopher Reeve. By the late 80s, even in comic books, there's these kind of, well, what if, what if Superman is just, what if he's just propaganda? You know, can there really be because he's the most powerful person around and power is always inherently corrupt, isn't it? You get these cynical critiques and by 1992, I just had an interview on my own podcast with Dan Jurgens who wrote the comic book that was became best seller, the Death of Superman. We killed Superman. Why? Because DC comics was realizing a lot of the younger audience were saying things like, we just don't like Superman anymore. He's a big blue boy scout. His values are antiquated and dated. And what they actually tried to do, it was interesting talking to Dan Jurgens about this. What they tried to do was show that, hey, when Superman dies, you might not be happy with what comes in to fill that vacuum of power. It was actually an incredibly thoughtful counter critique of what was going on. And that, I have a chapter in the book, chapter five, the Death of Superman in which I I lay this out as a kind of symbolic narrative for our culture. That when we killed that notion of there is some highest ideal. There is some fount of goodness, truth and beauty. There is something we can aim towards. When we killed that and thought, hey, it's going to make everything better, it clearly didn't. That cynicism, the deconstruction, the, maybe that manifested in someone's life is going, you know, I've seen some difficult things in the church and instead of my grandparents generation who saw difficult things in the church and decided, well, we're going to work to reform, we're going to stick it out. My generation said, no, we need to tear it down. We need to leave. That's definitely going to make things better. And what I'm expressing is in my generation, I'm an elder millennial. My generation and younger, we did that whole tear it down thing and everything got worse. Deaths of despair skyrocketed, our pews emptied and we just thought, well, that's okay, but nothing, nothing better was ever filled. We got stuck in perpetual deconstruction, constant cynicism, made us more lonely, made us more isolated, and it actually eroded the moral foundation of our vital institutions of culture. And I think many people, the good news is, because this sounds pretty dire, the good news is, I think people are waking up to that reality and saying, we need a better story.

Mark Turman: [00:18:22] Yeah, there seems to be a, uh, a growing sense of cultural, um, uh, hunger, uh, kind of matched with what you might call cultural frustration. But, uh, I wonder if you would comment about, uh, if we've, if we've been navigating as, as I think you've described, uh, a real deep journey for 30, 35 years into cynicism and into, you know, high, high levels of skepticism of, well, you just can't trust anything or anyone. Um, all of it is suspicious. Um, why can't human beings be sustained by a negative story?

Paul Anleitner: [00:19:02] Oh, that's a great question. Well, because inherently, you are a spiritual species that has an innate longing for meaning. Now, obviously, it's easy for me to say that with from my Christian convictions. But something I've been really fascinated by over the last 10 years or so is how even the behavioral cognitive science of this stuff has shifted. And more and more cognitive scientists, friends of mine, people that I've been in dialogue with for years that don't profess to be Christian are saying things like, you know, that kind of that Richard Dawkins-esque story that if we just get rid of religion, we will be on some, you know, unfettered march to a utopian future. Well, we clearly found out that's not the case. We can't, we don't, we're not evolving beyond these spiritual religious impulses. And in fact, many of the cognitive scientists today that again, aren't even professing any sort of creed or doctrinal statement are saying things like a John Vervaeke, we're inherently a spiritual species, a Clay Rutledge, an Andrew Huberman is going like, I have to pray to start my day all the time because I know I need deeper transcendent source of meaning in my life. So I think from sort of like a cultural research and development standpoint, we kind of just did a several decades long weird experiment. We're like, hey, let's just try to be completely irreligious and we can talk about the problems with that on multiple levels. Let's tear down everything from the past and let's see how that goes. And then we kind of got to the point where it's like, it didn't make things better. In fact, if anything, it seems like it has made things worse. Like, it feels more dystopian out there. I feel more hopeless. So we are innately a spiritual species that has to have meaning. And the psychology on this is really, really clear. So there are three pillars that support our sense of meaning in life. Coherence, that has to do with does reality have any sort of discernible repeatable pattern? Is it in any way rational, right? As a Christian, I go, yeah, because there's ultimately the mind of God behind it, created with intentionality and love. There's an order to creation that undergirds everything from the sciences to logic and reason itself. But if you don't have that and you go, I think the world is just a random chaotic mess. Well, you won't experience meaning in your life. That second pillar is purpose. So I might look around and say, hey, I think math works, I think physics works, but maybe kind of be a bit like a Richard Dawkins and go, well, there's no mind behind the matter at all. It's just is all working for some reason, but it's ultimately purposeless. You can't live in that story either. To be without purpose, to not see a point that all of this is headed towards is unsustainable. And the final pillar is significance. Significance has to do with what role do I play in the overarching purpose of life? Do I matter to others? And we know this, I, this is like, I mean, as solid of cognitive science stuff as as we have right now. You cannot escape that you are built as an inherently meaning seeking creature in ways that no other species on our planet are. We cannot escape that. So the question then becomes, what ultimate meta narrative, guiding story gives me the most coherence, the most purpose, the most significance, and is it in accordance with reality? That's the question we should be asking.

Mark Turman: [00:22:57] Paul, that just, yeah, that takes me in a lot of different directions, but mainly it takes me in this direction, which is, is that another way of describing the essence of what hope is? That we are both meaning driven and we are hope focused. Is that a way that we could say that? And that with without hope, um, we spiral into, um, really deep and dark places. Is is that, am I on the right track with you?

Paul Anleitner: [00:23:25] Absolutely. And that, to be, to be fair and to be clear, struggling with hopelessness is not a new issue, right? I mean, that's a perennial problem in the human condition. It's been, you can go back and look at cave paintings that, I just saw one the other day. I don't know how long ago it was dated, but it's clearly three stages of a man who looks, in the even in this primitive cave painting, looks depressed. You know, so wrestling with hopelessness isn't necessarily new. What I'm suggesting has been fairly new is as a civilization, especially in Western, uh, the Western tradition, a civilization going, hey, I think we can run on a show about nothing. You know, that was the old adage about Seinfeld. Seinfeld's the show about nothing. I think I can, I think I can believe in nothing at all. I think that has been new and that has created a different kind of hopelessness. So even the nuns, N O N E S, the people that say, I don't believe in anything at all, I have no religious affiliation. That shift from, let's say 1990 where it was 6 to 8% of US adults, jumped in by my adulthood into the 2020s upwards in the neighborhood of almost one third of American adults saying, I don't have any religious affiliation. I don't believe in anything at all. That is new. The precondition for hope is that you have to see some purpose. You have to see that you have agency too. And that gets to the question of significance. Do I play any role in the story? Can I act in the world in any way that is meaningful? And in order to say yes to that, there is an implied story about, well, what's the point of life? What should be, to use the language of the 20th century theologian Paul Tillich, the real question about religion is the question of what should be of ultimate concern. That is the fundamental question. What should be of ultimate concern in my life? The answer to that functions for people, whether they know it is God, that functions as God in their life. Godlessness is not an option. You have something that you're orienting your life around that says, this is, this is why I chose this job, why I chose this kind of lifestyle, this kind of family. It has to do with that kind of compass direction of our heart and mind and soul saying, this is the direction of what ultimate concern should be in my life. This is what I give my attention, my worship to. And so in order for us to actually have that oriented in the right direction, yeah, we need meaning and meaning fills us with hope that even on the hard and difficult days that in the right story here, what I believe is the story of stories, that hope wins in the end. It's a resurrection story.

Mark Turman: [00:26:30] Yeah. Well, and just listening to you talk about it, just reminds me that we're back to the question, uh, and to the reality, I should say, that we are all at our very core essence, we are all worshipers of something. Um, and and our worship is directed toward what we believe is of ultimate concern. That's right. That's, that's what we are wired to do and we can't help ourselves. This is what we're going to do. Um, all right. Now I have a question for you, but I'm going to let you have a minute to think about it while we take a break. But I'll give you the question and then after the break, I'll get you to come back. Uh, this is a little bit of a curve ball, so that's why I'm going to give you a break, okay? Uh, which is, what is, how does Christianity give us a way of reconciling the two things that you just mentioned? One of those is the sense of rationality about the story that we live in and the reality of the randomness of life that seems to be around us more frequently than we want. How, how can Christian, how does the Christian story reconcile the rationality and the randomness that we're experiencing on a daily basis?

Paul Anleitner: [00:27:45] That's great.

Mark Turman: [00:27:45] So I'll give you a minute. We'll take a break right now. Give our audience a break and we'll, uh, give a moment to think about that. We'll be right back with Paul Anleitner.

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Mark Turman: [00:28:54] All right, we're back talking about the spiritual vibe that is, uh, apparently, uh, showing some signs of changing in our culture, perhaps, uh, an an openness, uh, a receptivity to, uh, the things that are core to the issues of faith. And we're talking with Paul Anleitner about that. Paul, I want to come back to this question of rational and random. Um, as you talked about before, that we need a story that is coherent and that has in it a a really strong foundational sense of it is rational, it is meaningful, it moves on purpose and with purpose. Uh, but we also know that life is enormously random. Uh, one person gets cancer, another person doesn't. One part of the world experiences a tsunami that, uh, kills thousands of people, other parts of the world don't. Uh, you you can come up with endless numbers of examples. How does Christianity reconcile those two things?

Paul Anleitner: [00:29:57] That's great. I first want to start with what what we even mean when we employ a word like rational because we we have to step back from, obviously, we've been talking a lot about some of the deficiencies of what I call the postmodern anti-story. But before that, our culture was largely dominated by what we call the modern story. And one of the things that the modern story, the post-enlightenment story did was it divorced rationality from Eros. I mean, true proper Eros. It divorced psyche and Eros in such a way that said, well, the universe is a machine and we can objectively know it by being completely detached. There is no spirit that we should divorce our loves. And that's a particular story that I think is incongruent with a story that is much, much deeper and more time tested in the biblical narrative. So when we talk about rationality, it's important for us to say, there is as human beings, as time bound beings in finite that we don't, we never have a view of reality that is from nowhere. And this is really important. I am always seeing from somewhere. I am always seeing from a story. So there's there's a really important thing that it might be hard for people to initially grasp, but the there was even back in the 1960s. Here's one quick illustration of this and it is it is all connected. So George Gerbner, a sociologist in the 1960s, did this really interesting experiment where he found that the more people watched violent dystopian media in the news, the more they tended to overestimate how violent and dystopian the world was out there. So they would do things like consume a bunch of violent dystopian media in the news and ask them questions about like homicide rates or poverty in the world. And over and over, there was a correlation between those that consumed those stories and how much they would overestimate how awful the world really is. Now, the question I would ask is, well, were they, were they being rational in their assessment? And that's an interesting question, right? Well, they might be internally feeling some sort of sense of logic and coherence, but what was happening was the story itself changed their, we could call it convictional location, their their vantage point on the world. So I want to speak to that first and foremost, because only within a story where love, there's a, there's a great Christian philosopher by the name of Esther Meek, and I believe she calls it covenantal epistemology. The idea is that your loves will shape how you even read what is rational about the world. I have to confess, I'm not a big fan of going to children's Christmas programs at church. Just doesn't light me up. But that changes, that has changed when one of my children are involved in it. My loves change my interpretation. So there is, we have to pick at this notion that rationality is ever just, you know, some sort of impartial machine movement. Now, with that said, right, how we see the world is based on the story we already believe. People do have a long standing, it's in our own Christian scriptures that people are wrestling with the nature of the problem of evil and the seemingly random nature of suffering at times. We have a whole corpus of wisdom literature that gives us a well-rounded dialogue about that. So that's one of the things I want to speak to right away because you see it already in the biblical text. You put Proverbs next to Ecclesiastes and what you're getting are not competing stories, you're getting stories that give us a harm a harmony, a more harmonious picture of the way the world is. And yes, Proverbs is like, most of the time, if you like eat right, you exercise, you take good care of your body, you work hard, you're not a drunk, you're not slothful, life will turn out better for you. And that is normatively true. But it's not the whole story. So we get, we get Ecclesiastes and Job and these are stories in which, yeah, suffering does happen to righteous people. Now, I won't be able to answer and solve the problem of evil right now. That would be a, that would be an act of hubris. I did write an earlier book about that that's that's no longer in print. But here's what I would just say to speak to that. Okay. So, is that, first of all, do we want to live in a world where people always get what they deserve? Because that cuts both ways. Yeah. And I'm fine with a vision of the world in which God saw it so fit because of his love and redemptive nature that people who would do really, really awful things wouldn't get what they deserved. Karma does not run the world. And that again, cuts both ways. A world in which, yeah, suffering is possible for someone that is lived their whole life in a way that's seems to adhere with Proverbs. It might be just the shape of the kind of world God made where redemption is possible. And where I see this most on display is in the cross of Christ. Has there ever, there was, there's no more righteous one than Christ himself. And so the world we do get, uh, Tolkien called it, you know, when he wrote the the Silmarillion, he kind of had this creation myth at the beginning of that book. And he described the song, the music of creation as filled with immeasurable sorrow, but I'm paraphrasing slightly, but that sorrow also contributed to the beauty of the song. And that in the end, even those dissonant notes that his like Satan figure tries to destroy the song of creation with, God in his goodness somehow finds a way of even weaving those dissonant notes into a beautiful symphony. It's not monochromatic, it's not one note, it's a symphony. And in the end, I believe what we will see is that this story was the best story possible. You know, Tolkien calls it a eucatastrophe. And um, so I, that's not, no way going to be satisfactory enough for somebody really grappling with the, the problem of evil. There's a long history of Christians doing it. All I want to say is there is no pure rationality where we're seeing from nowhere. Our loves and our story is going to change the way we interpret the world. And within the Christian story, people aren't, you know, polyannaish, right? It's in our scriptures that we're grappling with these things as well.

Mark Turman: [00:37:13] Well, and as, as, uh, one theologian, Paul Gould says, it, it reminds us that these things that we run into that appear random to us in many ways, um, remind us that this is not the way it's supposed to be. Right. And the Christian message is that it's not always going to be this way.

Paul Anleitner: [00:37:33] Right. And that's, and that's so crucial, Mark, because, you know, C.S. Lewis called it the problem of goodness, right? So that just, just like we look around and we go, oh man, why is this broken? Well, the brokenness assumes, baked into our nature, when we look around and go, it shouldn't be like this. Well, that, that is from the standpoint of believing that the story starts with goodness and hopefully ends with goodness. That is the meta narrative of what C.S. Lewis called the true myth. So my thing that I'm trying to help people see is I'm not trying to gloss over that there really are problems and that cynicism sometimes feels deserved. The deconstruction that a lot of people my age went through, the pain they experienced is legitimate and real. There really are times in which stories do mask a play for power. We saw it in Nazi Germany, right? There are ways in which meta narratives and myths do mask a play for power. But to say they all do and that the very core of reality itself is malevolent power is a story we have to reject because that story eliminates the possibility of redemption at all. So practically speaking, when someone's lying on a therapist's couch and they're processing a point of pain, they're telling a story. And whether or not even the therapist might be a professing Christian or have any professing religious affiliation, the sheer fact that that person is like, I want to help you process your story in such a way that you find redemption and hope. The underlying assumption that they may even be blind to is that the story starts from goodness and ends in goodness. That is the only hope of redemption, Mark. That's the only hope.

Mark Turman: [00:39:24] Yeah, and the, and to me, kind of the, the essence of hope is, uh, at the core is that things can and will get better. That's right. Um, they can and they will because of a good God that is standing behind all of it. Um, Paul, I wonder, uh, I want to get to some of the signs that you call out, um, that something new is emerging. Um, but before we do that, I want to know, uh, if you have thoughts or hopes that this long journey into this experiment of cynicism and deconstruction, um, do you think we can learn the lesson that, uh, as one of my friends says, you know what, we, the world is reformed and redeemed by Christ and always in the process of being reformed. Can, uh, you call this out kind of toward the end of your writing, which is there are places and times when deconstruction and questioning is essential. Uh, we should never lose sight of that and go too far down the road as you said toward being polyanish. But is there a way that we can in our time get away from moving to extremes and realize as, you know, Ecclesiastes says, there's a time to tear down and there's also a time to plant and build. Can we learn that lesson, do you think?

Paul Anleitner: [00:40:46] I I I hope so. You know, and often times this stuff ends up being cyclical. I mean, we certainly seen the biblical narrative and the cycles of Israel's faithfulness and faithlessness that this stuff, we don't always learn our lessons even from one generation to the next. But what I'm trying to speak to here is not that we we need to move into some place where, uh, we deny the realities of human suffering and oppression and real injustice out there. There is an appropriate place to question, to critique, to be like Jeremiah and to call out idols. That is wholly appropriate. But what I'm trying to speak to is the implied, the implied narrative, the implied, uh, status ladder pursuit of what I call the anti-story made deconstruction the highest good you could pursue and achieve in life. And then we get all of these sorts of baked into that and little cultural pockets, these sorts of status incentives. So real practically, I mean, I'm probably some of your listeners have gone through this, Mark, where they've experienced some church hurt and it kind of led them into this, well, maybe, you know, religion is is just another one of those meta narratives that are at their core malevolent and it's a tool of oppression and they leave the pews and then they go and they maybe start, I don't know, you could call it like an ex-vangelical home group or something like that. And now all the their friends get together and I have a story, I know a guy, I write about him, I call him Thomas in the book, doubting Thomas. I know these stories of people that have gone through this stuff and they end up in a group like that and they spend because the new capital is, how much can we critique? How much, the most cynical gets the highest awards. Nobody says that out loud, but it's baked into the story. So what ends up happening is you never leave the deconstruction mode. You always feel like, well, the only good work in this house of faith and meaning is a work that involves a sledgehammer in my hands tearing something down. Not that we never have proper place for remodeling our house of faith and the story we're living in. That's reform because reform has to do with a highest vision of the good. It has a blueprint and it looks at and goes, yeah, this kitchen really is a mess. The plumbing is a mess. But you only know it's a mess because you know what the right vision is. The anti-story leaves you in this mode of, well, there never is a true picture of reality. There never is a true story to live in and all you have in your whole life is just to keep deconstructing and deconstructing and it is miserable. People that go through that find themselves increasingly isolated, increasingly lonely, and you know what happens, even practically, I've seen church plants that have gone through this and said, well, we're going to kind of do this like deconstruction church thing. I have seen how those end over and over because eventually the finger pointing at the person in the past that hurt you, when you incentivize deconstruction and cynicism, those fingers start getting pointed to the people seated across from you in community and it never ends well. So there's the difference between reform and deconstruction. Reform is, I've got a vision of the highest good and this isn't in accordance with that. So we need to repent, metanoia, change the way you think and get in line with God's grain, go with the grain of God's intended order for reality. That needs to happen. Deconstruction is about this movement of, I just need to keep tearing down and it has to end and move into reconstruction.

Mark Turman: [00:44:27] Yeah, and it, and anybody can tell you with very much observation, it's really easy to tear things down compared to rebuilt, to building something that becomes better and more beautiful. Um, so let's talk for a few minutes, uh, about some of the signs and sign posts that you're seeing, um, that people are becoming more and more open and more and more passionate about, okay, well, let's get now to the rebuilding, kind of what you called a a Nehemiah moment. Uh, love that image of, uh, God just moving in this one guy's heart to say, this can and should be better. We should rebuild the walls. Um, uh, and it usually takes longer, um, and it usually involves more people to build than it does to tear to tear down in some ways. Um, but let's talk about that from the standpoint of of entertainment and movies. You make, you make the the statement that, um, Top Gun Maverick couldn't not have been successful in 2019, but it was successful when it came out. Uh, what are we seeing just in the culture from things like movies?

Paul Anleitner: [00:45:39] That's great. And because in the same way when we were talking about the shift we could pick up in the 90s and how the stories that kind of started coming out of Hollywood and were shaping our imaginations and forming us in ways we weren't fully aware of that that preceded the kinds of shifts, statistical shifts of decline, emptying pews, uh, spikes in deaths of despair. In the same way, if that was true then and is often true that ideas have people more than people have ideas, then we should be looking for, well, what does it mean when the kind of vibe shifts in our movie theaters and what we're watching on Netflix? And so Top Gun Maverick is one example of that. People called it the thing that saved the movie theater. And if you look at that, many of the stories that we saw like in the 2010s, even like in Star Wars movies, had this really cynical approach to the previous generation. You could look at the way let's say a Luke Skywalker was treated in, uh, episode eight or nine of, uh, the new Star Wars sequels and, you know, he's kind of this jaded hermit who's given up on the force and he needs to be taught moral lessons from a 16 year old girl who's got no training in it whatsoever and he's essentially given up on his, it was a very, very cynical approach to a hero that is one of the more important American icons. So when I walked into the movie theater for Top Gun Maverick, I thought, you know, they'll probably give Maverick that same treatment. I mean, that just kind of seems to be the way to go. We're suspicious of our Superman figures. But instead, what I got was hope. I got a guy that, yes, he had his own character weaknesses that he was working through, but it wasn't a cynical takedown. In fact, the next generation looked to him for wisdom. Uh, it had incorporated many of the critiques of the postmodern era. The early Top Gun movie didn't have as many people of color. Uh, women were really only love interests in the original Top Gun. But in the new Top Gun, some of those critiques of deconstruction were brought in in a way that I thought was fairly healthy without preaching at the audience. So you have a female pilot who isn't just a love interest and or a symbol of objectification and she's just a competent pilot. Those actually exist. My my wife has a friend who is a competent pilot in the Navy or Air Force. So that's a real picture of reality. Um, but it was hopeful, it was aspirational and people came out of that going, oh, that's what movies feel like. I think you can see some other signs posts of that. I I submitted my manuscript for this book just before Project Hail Mary came out. But if you've seen Project Hail Mary starring Ryan Gosling, that's another example of a movie that it's almost like the anti-fight club. You know, Fight Club in 99 in my generation was cynical, dark, hopeless. The solution to your despair is to burn the whole system down. Project Hail Mary was, it was wholesome and that's really important because after being fragmented, after losing our identity, after going through what cognitive scientist John Vervaeke calls domicide, meaning the killing of our home, we're looking for the wholesome. We're looking for a homecoming. So I could watch it with my kids and I never had to cover their eyes on a single scene or even cover their ears. That was actually something people were like, oh, that's kind of refreshing. And it was a story about grace, saving the world, you know? It was about death being swallowed up by life, literally. It was a story about sacrifice and the what the shape, the true shape of this story looks like and it looks like a cross. People don't, even some people started to notice, oh, it's called Project Hail Mary. His name is Grace. I think the scientist that sent him out into space, her name was Evangeline or it was a play on, you know, um, you know, evangel, right? Good news. All of those symbols were there and people walked out and goes, oh, that was awesome. So refreshing. Those are little sign posts of like people being opened up. So in one short sentence, how I would summarize it, Mark, is I I see what's happening right now is culture moving from a state of closedness, spiritually, to a state of openness. And now the question is, in this state of openness, what will come in and fill that longing for a better story?

Mark Turman: [00:50:25] Yeah, and that tees this up really good because, um, the question I wanted to ask you in that moment is, you you make it very clear, openness is great. It's essential, but it is only like, uh, cracking open the door or stepping the first step in that openness is not enough. And you give some pretty, uh, dramatic stories that illustrate that. Talk about openness as a moment for the church. Um, and and how important and how urgent it is that we see the culture well and we look for what God's opportunity and calling for us is in this moment.

Paul Anleitner: [00:51:06] I just had a meeting a week or two ago with a pastor, uh, of a thriving church near Arizona State University. And he was telling me, who had been kind of listening to my podcast for a while, and he said, Paul, we started using your commentary internally in our own team because we started noticing young people coming to our campus with a built-in openness that we hadn't seen in decades. You know, decades of doing college campus ministry, a lot of what they experienced was probably something akin to what you experienced when you started, you know, pastoring in in Dallas and you're kind of having to get past all of the layers of cynicism and and maybe even it changes the way you preach, right? I've heard some commentary from from pastor friends who said, I've had to change the way I preach because kind of the Gen X millennial method of preaching was kind of playing on that deconstruction stuff, even when they were trying to do it positively, like, oh, you learned this about this Bible story in Sunday school. Well, let me show you how who taught it to you was wrong. And even pastors well intended, tapping into that kind of energy. I mean, it's similar to what we saw with like DC Talk in the 90s, right? That Jesus Freak song was tapping into that energy and and trying to redirect it. But we're not in the Jesus Freak generation anymore. It's Forest Frank. It's kids that are just like, give me something hopeful, positive. I'm open. And so the timing right now is so, we are in such a crucial moment right now for people to go through what I call restoring. Restoring around the true story. They're hungry for it. They're hungry for it individually. Even those, and you mentioned this already, even those like, uh, an Ashley Landy who I write about in my book and she has her own brilliant memoir about her own experience where her openness, spiritual openness took her in this journey into dark psychedelic experimentation and encountering real, I mean, actually in not in a state of, uh, psychedelic hallucination, but in her waking hours, the darkness was so powerful that she was being confronted in her visual perception by demons and realized, oh, openness to spiritual things isn't enough. I need right orientation. So there's, that's the step. So we take the openness and we go, that openness is beautiful, it's wonderful, and in a lot of ways, it's so refreshing to what people in ministry have had to wrestle with and all the cynicism. But now that orientation needs, the openness needs to move to proper orientation. And I think that's the moment that's in front of us now that is so exciting. I am so hopeful for what this means for college campus ministers, for local churches, for people starting parachurch ministries, for for people even kind of outside of church ministry, writing the next generation of Netflix scripts, starting podcasts, building new nonprofits. It is, as I think you've alluded to already, it is a Nehemiah moment. Now is the time to build.

Mark Turman: [00:54:22] Yeah. Yeah, and it's so, uh, exciting to consider what that reality can be. Um, because as you point out, um, in the book and in several different stories that people are discovering that the most compelling, the thing that is of utmost concern is a sacrificial love that is at the core of Jesus's story. Um, you know, just reading scripture even recently from 1 Corinthians where Paul says, this is the wisdom of God. It looks silly, it looks foolish, it looks crazy that God would become one of us for the benefit of all of us. You know, and and but that is is the story of all stories, right? That's right. And we we start looking for where are we a part of that story, as as somebody said, the story we find ourselves in. That's right. And at the and at the core of it, the most hopeful thing is that sacrificial love. Um, and so this is absolutely a moment for us to seize. Um, Paul, thank you for the conversation today and thank you for the work that you're doing. Where can people, uh, find you and and for a moment, just tell us what is, uh, what is good makers, um, this organization that you have founded?

Paul Anleitner: [00:55:38] Yeah, so I I realized when I was first working on the manuscript for Based on a True Story, I've had this sense that a call to action, which I give in the end and not just to participate in your own personal renewal, but to be a person on mission, a person of significance that takes this moment in front of us and there's a window. I don't know how long it will be and we don't get to decide how long it will be. That window of openness we have right now affords us an opportunity for cultural renewal, to literally from the bottom up. I'm not talking about kind of like dominion theology here. I'm talking about from the bottom up, changing American culture so that our kids and our grandkids inherit a better world. That is the moment I feel right now. And so when I was finishing that up, I realized I need to try to help give people an outlet for this. So Goodmakers is a nonprofit organization that has, uh, three different pillars to it. One is a, what we call a center for cultural renewal. And it is, you know, the kind of education, formative input stuff. We've got a newsletter, um, where we highlight the good work that people are already doing, stories of inspiration. Um, you know, I've got my own podcast, we call Goodmakers podcast where I interview and sit down with a bunch of people to talk about these kinds of things and what does it look like for culture to be renewed? Then we also have a leadership network. So the leadership network is something like the just, the Hall of Justice for the Justice League. It's like, how do we get people connected together? Not to say like a one ring to rule them all approach organization, but to say, how do I bring you into relationship? So I'm I'm been talking with a a brilliant songwriter, fairly well known in the church and he's got a new era in life in which he wants to write and he wants to write the kinds of fiction stories that C.S. Lewis would be proud of. And I'm like, all right, how do I get you connected with the right people to make that story a reality? Because it's going to take collaboration for us to do this and it's going to take us to redeem and renew our institutions of education, church, business, nonprofit for this thing to be oriented together inside a better story because it has to be a shared story, Mark. Um, to some extent, it does me little good if just me and my family, we're living inside the true story and but our neighbors don't, right? Like that's not going to halt the seemingly inevitable trajectory to a kind of Mad Max dystopian future. We need to find a way to make this a shared story and that that happens in and through healthy institutions. So, um, that's that's a little bit of what we're trying to do with good makers and um, of course, people can find my work at Paulanleitner.org. I'm most active on X and uh, based on a true story, you could listen to it as an audio book. It's available. Amazon, you can go, maybe even there's plenty of Barnes and Nobles, physical locations where you could go in and grab a copy um, to as well.

Mark Turman: [00:58:52] And we'll put all of that in our show notes so people can, uh, connect to you online and, uh, in print as well. Paul, thank you. I look forward to future conversations and possible collaborations. And, uh, thank you for what you're doing. I want to thank our audience for tuning in today. And, uh, like I said, you can find more information in all the show notes, including, uh, more information about Denison Forum at denisonforum.org. Uh, we want to also say a shout out to our production crew, Connor Jones, Aubrey Kerr, and our friends at Sound of a Rose Studios. They are all helping us to do good work. And to our audience as well, thank you for your prayers and your financial support. Your contributions helps us to provide good quality, uh, resources like this podcast, uh, that are biblical, digital, and free. And we thank you for enabling us to do that. And, uh, we're grateful. We'll see you next time on Faith and Clarity.