Hello, fellow wayfarers … How to combat yielding to cynicism in a cynical age … What a reader taught me about how to respond to suffering … Why Alcoholics Anonymous might have a lot to teach the rest of us about community … What a just-deceased pastor said to a white Jim Crow–era Baptist church about why their segregation was a theological crisis … A brand-new reader of this newsletter offers a Desert Island Bookshelf … This is this week’s Moore to the Point.
Cynicism Makes Sense Right Now—and It Could Cost Us Our Souls
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’s 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” (Dan. 9:2, 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.
A Reader on What He Learned About Suffering
A few weeks ago, I received a kind and encouraging note from a new reader to this newsletter, Jim Ekrut. He was responding to our discussion right before Christmas about the apocalyptic nature of the incarnation of Jesus. He wrote:
For both Nativity and Apocalypse, we have romantic sanitized versions of how life and history should go—and when they don’t, what will our response be? As a friend told me the day my first wife, children, and furniture drove out of town, “You’ve walked with God long enough to know that it’s going to be all right. It’s just not going to be all right the way you thought it would be.”
Jim wrote that he has just begun treatment for a recent cancer diagnosis but that he is holding fast to his faith “in the God who holds history and life in his hands, regardless.”
I’ve thought repeatedly of these words ever since I read them: “It’s going to be all right. It’s just not going to be all right the way you thought it would be.” I have found that to be true, and good, and beautiful.
What the 12 Steps Can Teach Us About Community
On the podcast this week, I am joined by my friend Ian Morgan Cron. Perhaps you’ve read Ian’s book The Road Back to You or listened to his popular podcast Typology.
This week we talk about the 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous and what it is about them that actually works. Ian talks about his new book on the subject, The Fix: How the Twelve Steps Offer a Surprising Path of Transformation for the Well-Adjusted, the Down-and-Out, and Everyone In Between, and how it opened up new ways for him to think about addiction as more than just substances and about community as more than just gathering and “connecting.”
I was reminded of some words by the late Frederick Buechner about AA:
They have no dues or budget. They do not advertise or proselytize. Having no buildings of their own, they meet wherever they can.
Nobody lectures them, and they do not lecture each other. They simply tell their own stories with the candor that anonymity makes possible. They tell where they went wrong and how day by day they are trying to go right. They tell where they find the strength and understanding and hope to keep trying. Sometimes one of them will take special responsibility for another—to be available at any hour of day or night if the need arises. There’s not much more to it than that, and it seems to be enough. Healing happens. Miracles are made.
You can’t help thinking that something like this is what the Church is meant to be and maybe once was before it got to be Big Business. Sinners Anonymous.
You can listen to the conversation here.
Desert island bookshelf
Every other week, I share a list of books that one of you says you’d want to have on hand if you were stranded on a deserted island. This week’s submission comes from Beth Ferguson of Cedar Park, Texas, who is a new reader of this newsletter. Beth says that a Desert Island Bookshelf was a challenge because she ordinarily doesn’t reread books. She writes:
I selected this specific set of books for three reasons. First, they all feature beautiful, lyrical, poetic, and sophisticated language. Second, the themes in each book are thought-provoking. Third, the books prompt me to focus on higher things. I believe these books will withstand the test of time and uplift my spirit.
Here’s her list with her commentary:
- I have shared Miss Rumphius by Barbara Cooney with many children. I love asking children how they can make their world more beautiful.
- Thoughts to Make Your Heart Sing by Sally Lloyd-Jones is a beautiful devotional book for kids. It is made of heavy paper, has lovely illustrations, and features free-verse poetry. It ministers to my inner child.
- The Valley of Vision edited by Arthur Bennett is a collection of Puritan prayers. I love to use their words to shape my own prayers.
- Scott Erickson and Justin McRoberts’s book Prayer: Forty Days of Practice appeals to me because it combines a visual picture with a one-sentence prayer. I love to ponder the picture, journal what comes to mind, and finish by reading the associated prayer.
- The many blessings in John O’Donohue’s To Bless the Space Between Us encourage me and help shape my prayer life.
- Luci Shaw’s poetry in Eye of the Beholder is beautiful. To choose just one poetry book is difficult.
- Madeleine L’Engle’s A Circle of Quiet may be the oldest book in this stack. For many years I read it annually during the Christmas holidays.
- Eugene H. Peterson is a favorite author, and I chose Run with the Horses because, if stuck on a deserted island, I can’t think of a better prophet to meditate on than Jeremiah.
- Since I will have time to ponder the deep things of God, I wanted a theology book. I enjoy Phylicia Masonheimer’s Every Woman a Theologian: Know What You Believe. Live It Confidently. Communicate It Graciously.
- Tish Harrison Warren’s Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life will help me practice seeing the hand of God in everyday life.
- Emily P. Freeman’s A Million Little Ways: Uncover the Art You Were Made to Live will encourage me to be creative!
- Last but not least, the newly published The Understory by Lore Ferguson Wilbert is added for its beauty of language and fascinating descriptions of the complex interrelationships in the forest floor.
Thank you, Beth!
Readers, what do y’all think? If you were stranded on a desert island for the rest of your life and could have only one playlist or one bookshelf with you, what songs or books would you choose?
- For a Desert Island Playlist, send me a list between 5 and 12 songs, excluding hymns and worship songs. (We’ll cover those later.)
- For a Desert Island Bookshelf, send me a list of up to 12 books, along with a photo of all the books together.
Send your list (or both lists) to questions@russellmoore.com, and include as much or as little explanation of your choices as you would like, along with the city and state from which you’re writing.
Quote of the Moment
“You and I are able to gather here in this beautiful sanctuary today only because the early church reckoned with the revolutionary ramifications of God’s amazing grace and tore down the barriers of prejudice. As Gentiles, you and I would never have become a member of the New Testament church, unless God, through the Holy Spirit, sent Philip to a Black man, sent Ananias to a Middle Eastern man, sent Peter to the man from Western Europe; and sent amazing grace to every race.”
—Rev. Dr. Charles Robert Marsh (July 17, 1932–December 23, 2024), to the all-white 1960s-era First Baptist Church of Dothan, Alabama, urging the congregation to end the church’s policy barring membership to African American Christians. This quote is cited in a eulogy by pastor Marsh’s son, scholar and author Charles Marsh, just a few weeks back. You can read it here.
Currently Reading (or Re-Reading)
- László F. Földényi, Dostoyevsky Reads Hegel in Siberia and Bursts into Tears (Yale University Press)
- Richard Carwardine, Righteous Strife: How Warring Religious Nationalists Forged Lincoln’s Union (Knopf)
- Ian Morgan Cron, The Fix: How the Twelve Steps Offer a Surprising Path of Transformation for the Well-Adjusted, the Down-and-Out, and Everyone In Between (Zondervan)
- Kerry Dearborn, Baptized Imagination: The Theology of George MacDonald (Routledge)
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Russell Moore
Editor in Chief, Christianity Today
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