This piece was adapted from Russell Moore’s newsletter. Subscribe here.
This past week, I talked to a friend who was discouraged by the politicization of everything. She wanted a break from social media division and conversations that all end up as political arguments. So she found a Christian women’s Bible study in her community and signed up, hoping it could give her connection with others, a reminder that there’s more to life than the news cycle. Then she discovered that the Bible study speaker had been part of the January 6, 2021, Capitol attacks.
I winced, imagining her disappointment, and immediately thought of others facing the same kind of legitimate dispiritedness.
Imagine the Pentecostal Christian who trusted the “prophet” who seemed to know all kinds of personal details about people in his audience. What must she think when she realizes this was not the Holy Spirit but the man’s ability to scan social media feeds ahead of time, to pretend to have a spiritual gift when it was all just a marketing technique? Or contemplate what it must be like to be inspired by a pastor speaking at the presidential inauguration only to see him, within hours, offer a personally branded meme coin for people to buy. It would be hard not to see all this and not be disillusioned.
The danger, though, is that at least for some of us, disillusionment can easily give way to cynicism. The cynicism of our moment comes in at least two forms. One is an opportunistic kind of cynicism. This is the kind that determines that no one is really sincere and that the whole world is divided into two simple categories: hucksters and marks. The opportunistic cynic decides, then, to learn how to be a huckster. Anyone who doesn’t is a sucker or a loser, in this view.
That makes things much easier for the opportunistic cynic because, among other things, it gives an immediate intellectual shortcut. One need not actually think about what’s true and what’s false, what’s real and what’s fake, what’s right and what’s wrong. All the opportunistic cynic has to think about is what works. Once the cynic knows who the “friends” and who the “enemies” are, he or she has the template needed to cheer on the right side and to denounce the wrong one.
The other kind of cynicism is instead despairing. If opportunistic cynicism is self-advancing, despairing cynicism is self-protecting. Once I stop expecting actual goodness or sincerity in other people or in institutions, I feel like I can’t be hurt anymore, or at least not hurt as much.
I think often about the late pastor Eugene Peterson’s saying how creatures like crabs and beetles have an initial advantage over other forms of life because they have exoskeletons, protective bone systems on the outside, to protect them from disaster. Cynicism can seem to offer that kind of protection: Nothing can disappoint you if you’re pre-disappointed.
“Creatures with endoskeletons (that is, with their skeletons on the inside, like kittens and humans) are much more disadvantaged at first, being highly vulnerable to outside danger,” Peterson wrote. “But if they survive through the tender care and protection of others, they can develop higher forms of consciousness.”
Cynicism protects us from some initial hurt, but in the end, it filters out not only the genuine danger and fakeness we rightly want to avoid—it ultimately filters out everything and everyone. We no longer expect any goodness or authenticity or grace, anywhere. We stop seeking. We stop asking. We stop knocking at that door.
But even for those of us who decide we want to avoid cynicism, there are pitfalls. After all, one way to pretend to be free from cynicism is to act as though any negative assessment of reality is itself cynical.
The most cynical people I know are those who wave away any sense of lament or warning with “Why don’t you just talk about all the good things?” That’s not only its own form of covert cynicism but a cynicism factory because, in the fullness of time, most people come to see the difference between truth and propaganda.
So how do we respond to a troubled time without cynicism? The church is in genuine crisis on multiple fronts. So is the nation. So is the world.
Lately, I am drawn to the Book of Daniel. In the ninth chapter, Daniel—an exile from Judea in Babylon—wrote that he studied the Scriptures of old and determined “the number of years that, according to the word of the Lord to Jeremiah the prophet, must pass before the end of the desolations of Jerusalem, namely, seventy years” (v. 2, ESV throughout).
That itself was a reckoning with reality. After all, Jeremiah was controversial because he said that Babylon would indeed carry the people of God away and that it would be 70 years before they would return. The people wanted to hear other prophets, those who said the crisis would soon be over.
If Daniel had been cynical, he might have just denied there was a problem and busied himself with learning how to bow to Nebuchadnezzar’s golden image whenever the music started. Or he could have simply given up altogether and decided that Jerusalem was gone, that all that he could hope for was to be left alone in Babylon.
Instead, the text reveals, Daniel turned to the kind of prayer that recognized how dire the hour was yet also remembered that God is a God of mercy and of grace, that he had delivered his people from Egypt and that he could deliver them again.
“Now therefore, O our God, listen to the prayer of your servant and to his pleas for mercy, and for your own sake, O Lord, make your face to shine upon your sanctuary, which is desolate,” Daniel prayed. “O my God, incline your ear and hear. Open your eyes and see our desolations, and the city that is called by your name” (vv. 17–18).
God’s sanctuary was indeed desolate. Daniel was free from the deluded cynicism to say otherwise. And he trusted all that could change, because he was also free from the cynicism that gives up on hope.
Some of us struggle with seeing the depths of our crisis. Some of us struggle to see that the Spirit is still on the move, and that any Babylon can fall, as the Apocalypse puts it, “in a single hour” (Rev. 18:19).
We can help each other to remember all of that. And when one of us stumbles under the weight of cynicism, others of us can bear the burden for a while, to keep the prayers and hope and memory going until the hurting one can hear it again, can see it again.
Cynicism makes sense right now. It seems that the arc of history is bending toward it. But we know that the arc of history is skewed, and has been since our first ancestors brought death upon themselves in the Garden. We know that something’s gone awfully wrong with the world and that this is not how it’s supposed to be. That’s why we are looking for something different, for another king, another kingdom.
Let’s keep our sanity by reminding each other that cynicism will one day seem crazy.
Russell Moore is the editor in chief at Christianity Today and leads its Public Theology Project.
