Hello, fellow wayfarers … How a 1970s end-times novel predicted the craziness you’re living through right now … What advice I had for my son as he graduates high school … Where Ray Ortlund finds good news at rock bottom … A Desert Island Playlist from Toledo … These are the adventures of a bad evangelical at a time near the end of the world … This is this week’s Moore to the Point.
How an End-Times Novel Predicted the Insanity of 2025—and How It Just Might Point the Way Out
If you’ve ever looked around at the chaos of the current moment and wondered, “Who could have seen this coming?” I have an answer: Walker Percy.
Percy, an American writer, died 35 years ago this week—long before Trump, Twitter, TikTok, or transgender sports debates. But more than half a century ago, he eerily foresaw something like 2025, in which technology, tribalism, and spiritual emptiness converge. If we’re to find our way through the madness, maybe we should listen to what he had to say.
“A serious novel about the destruction of the United States and the end of the world should perform the function of prophecy in reverse,” Percy wrote of his 1971 novel, Love in the Ruins: The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World. “The novelist writes about the coming end in order to warn about present ills and so avert the end.”
Love in the Ruins is a kind of Narnia, except the children walk through the wardrobe into a post-Christian West with no Aslan in sight. The central threat isn’t nuclear fallout or alien invasion but a nation fractured along the lines we now call red and blue America.
In this “time near the end of the world,” the country is split into a right (self-identified as “Knotheads”), driven by resentment toward minorities and rage at elites, and a left fueled by ideologies of sexual liberation and secularism. Religion becomes politics; politics becomes religion.
The protagonist is Tom More (yes, named after that Thomas More), a psychiatrist, sex-addicted alcoholic, and lapsed Catholic living in a Louisiana suburb after the spiritual and political collapse of America.
More observes that there are left states and right states, left towns and right towns, even left movies and right movies. The center is gone. The younger generation, he says, are would-be totalitarians: “They want either total dogmatic freedom or total dogmatic unfreedom, and the one thing that makes them unhappy is something in between.”
Families are fractured by politics, churches by ideology. More’s Catholic church splinters into three: a booming “American Catholic Church” in Cicero, Illinois, defined by right-wing politics and celebrating “Property Rights Sunday”; a “death-of-God” progressive church, where priests monitor sexual response in scientific labs; and a tiny, irrelevant remnant still loyal to Rome—now politically unintelligible in a world ruled by ideology.
Two characters survey the news:
“There are riots in New Orleans, and riots over here. The students are fighting the National Guard, the Lefts are fighting the Knotheads, the blacks are fighting the whites. The Jews are being persecuted.”
“What are the Christians doing?”
“Nothing.”
The collapse in Love in the Ruins is not just political or cultural—it’s personal. The world is falling apart because people are falling apart. The underlying issue is a civilization that no longer knows what a human being is for. That’s a question politics cannot answer, yet politics has become a surrogate religion for people without a deeper anchor.
Percy’s vision is strikingly familiar: a society beset by mental illness that seems tailored to political tribe.
“Conservatives have begun to fall victim to unseasonable rages, delusions of conspiracies, high blood pressure, and large-bowel complaints,” More observes. “Liberals are more apt to contract sexual impotence, morning terror, and a feeling of abstraction of the self from itself.”
More invents an “ontological lapsometer,” a device meant to diagnose and correct psychological imbalances—massaging rage out of right-wingers’ brains and anxiety out of left-wingers’. It’s treated as a technological fix for what ails us. But More knows better.
The deeper problem is that people now see themselves either as angels—disembodied, limitless, with pure will—or as beasts driven by appetites and enemies. We see it now too. Tech billionaires promise artificial intelligence chatbots to supply friendships we no longer cultivate, authoritarian ideologies rise again, and many political and religious leaders defend or ignore it. The center does not hold.
Percy recognized that religion often seems helpless in such moments. He imagined scientists walking home from the lab on a Sunday morning, passing a church where the door is ajar and a preacher says, “Come, follow me.”
How do the scientists respond? Percy suggested they wouldn’t reject the invitation—because they’re not in the kind of predicament that allows them to even hear it.
“The question is not whether the Good News is no longer relevant,” Percy wrote, “but whether it is possible that man is presently undergoing a tempestuous restructuring of his consciousness which does not presently allow him to take account of the Good News.”
So what do we do? The answer is not utopian schemes or dystopian despair. It is, paradoxically, to move deeper into the crisis—until we can feel what’s missing. As Percy put it, the goal is to recover the self “as neither angel nor organism but as a wayfaring creature somewhere in between.”
That requires humility. We can’t fix the world or ourselves. The novel ends not with More’s invention saving the day but with its failure. What was meant to heal only deepens the wound.
And yet More finds a way forward—not through grand solutions but through the small, human steps of humility, connection, and grace. Even recognizing his lack of contrition becomes its own kind of mercy. He stops trying to save the world. He starts to live.
We can begin again only when we are willing to be asked—and to answer—the question “What are you seeking?” In this way, catastrophe becomes the precondition for hope.
Only when we realize we are not “organisms in an environment” to be perfected—or to perfect others—can we begin to feel our cosmic homelessness, which might just point us home. Only when we see that we are in the ruins can we begin to look there for love.
Maybe the world is falling apart. Maybe it always has been. But that doesn’t mean you have to fall apart with it.
A Letter to My Son as He Graduates
Our son Jonah graduates from high school this week. Our congregation, Immanuel Nashville, asks each senior’s parents to read aloud a letter at the graduate luncheon, which was this past Sunday. Here is ours.
Dear Jonah,
The church asked that we choose for you a Scripture verse that we especially commend to you on this, your graduation from high school. I want not so much to commend as to re-commend the same passage that we’ve prayed for you all of your life to this point.
It’s appropriate that we stand here, in Nashville, where you first made your presence known forcefully, at least to me. We lived in Louisville, Kentucky, at the time, but I was just a few miles from here, attending the plenary session of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Executive Committee. I thought it was safe to make the meeting since you were not due for another three and a half weeks. Your mother, though, called in the middle of the meeting to tell me that she thought you might be on your way early. You were.
I darted up Interstate 65, fearful the whole time that I would be late, that I would be pulled over by highway patrol for going too fast or that the miles would simply be too many, and that you would arrive without your father there to meet you.
I made it on time. The next day, I wrote on my website:
After a long night, our son Jonah Yancey Moore was born at 9:30 this morning. As is appropriate for coastal Mississippians, our son was born on Mardi Gras. He is the fourth of four boys, and will meet his three brethren in a few minutes. We are grateful to a Father God for bringing this child safely to us.
I started to wonder very soon after your birth if we had named you poorly. As you know, we originally planned the name “Noah” for you, until we sounded the full name out and realized that you might one day conclude that “Noah Moore” was some comment on whether we wanted to have any more children after the fourth. I moved from one water-faring prophet to another. But you were, in most of the obvious ways, not a “Jonah” at all.
Jonah, after all, as described in the Bible, was an unstable and dour man. You are neither. You did not, and never have, dominated others with your appetites. Selfishness has never characterized the way you’ve related to others around you. As a matter of fact, I think everyone in your life—from classmates to teachers to your brothers—would testify that your life contributes stability and other-directedness.
At the same time, that sense of stability is one of joy and of laughter. Your sense of humor is loved by everyone around you, and that has been the case virtually from the beginning. When I took you to the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, for the first time when you were six, you looked at the statue before us and said, “No wonder he won the war; he’s huge.”
With that stability and hilarity has come a deep and wide creativity. I don’t know of anyone quite like you—with both the steady hand of the leader and the agile mind of the artist.
The biblical Jonah shirked responsibility, fleeing for Tarshish to escape the call of God. You not only excelled at academics but worked dependably and faithfully at a restaurant at the same time.
The biblical Jonah spent much of the book complaining—about the assignment to Ninevah, about the heat of the sun, about the withering of a plant, about the fact that God wouldn’t wipe out his enemies. One of the things the rest of us have had to work hard to do is to try to anticipate what you might want—whether we are talking about the choice of a restaurant or Christmas presents—because we know you will not complain and show gratitude regardless.
As a thought experiment, I tried to imagine going back in time to Mardi Gras of 2007 and telling my 35-year-old self the kind of man you now are, and I cannot think of a single thing my past or present self would change. With you we are well-pleased.
Over time, though, I came to realize that your name fits not in terms of the prophet himself, but that to which that prophet pointed. At the time of your birth I wrote:
Above all things, we pray that this young Jonah would be a godly man, valiant and loving and passionate for Christ Jesus. We prayed for his coming, and we prayed for his safety. Now we’ll pray every day for years that he will know, in the fullness of time and by the power of the Spirit, what his namesake learned: that God delivers His anointed from the belly of death itself. We pray that He will look away from himself and to Another.
We pray he’ll one day confess with brokenness and gladness, “Behold, One greater than Jonah is here” (Matt. 12:41).
Those prayers were answered, and continue to be answered, more than we could have asked or even thought.
And so, for your graduation passage, I return to the one that came to mind at your birth, from Matthew 12:38–41:
Then some of the scribes and Pharisees answered him, saying, “Teacher, we wish to see a sign from you.” But he answered them, “An evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. The men of Nineveh will rise up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it, for they repented at the preaching of Jonah, and behold, something greater than Jonah is here.”
The problem Jesus addressed was the fact that the religious leaders wanted something objective and provable—some way that they could measure Jesus’ words by something else. Jesus said no such sign would be given. He said instead that the only sign he would give them is that of Jonah. And that sign had two aspects.
Jonah was thrown into the waters of the sea as an act of judgment. The pagan sailors with him believed him that he was cursed. He was their offering to save themselves from that judgment. Jonah went to the place of absolute desperation and the eclipse of all hope—and was delivered up on the other side, alive and still speaking.
The death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus would be the reality to which that event was the shadow. But also, Jesus said, the sign of Jonah is that lives would be changed—the people of Ninevah would find an escape from doom by hearing good news from elsewhere.
Graduating from high school is more than just a major accomplishment, although it is that. It’s more than just a rite of passage into adulthood, although it is that too. Graduation from high school is the creaking and rattling of the roller coaster car, right after you’ve buckled in and secured the bar in front of you. Things change a lot from here, and they keep changing.
Decisions you make now will change the course not just of your life but of literally countless generations to come. One change after another will happen at a velocity you can’t imagine now.
Before you know it, you’ll be in a hospital room, maybe having raced down the highway to make it on time, wondering if the name you picked out will fit. And maybe, in God’s favor, you too will see a child you love graduating from high school, wondering how the time went by so quickly.
You will want to look for signs, for ways to verify that you’re making the right decisions, choosing the right options. You’re ready for all that. You have the character, the temperament, the integrity to face it all.
But then there will be days when the signs you will think you need are about more than just what to do. You will have times when you might wonder, “Where is God?” and “What is real?” and “What is the meaning of it all?”
Some of those times will be after we’re gone—and the signposts might seem to be empty. You will feel as though this is too much for you, and you will be right. As great as you are, Jonah—and you are great—you will need something else, Someone else. And as always, something greater than Jonah will be there.
We pray for you that the message your life gives to those around you will be just what it’s been so far: a sign of that grace, of that strength, of that power, of that hope. Your name is the right one, and it’s the only sign you need.
We love you and are proud of you,
Mom and Dad
Ray Ortlund Finds Good News at Rock Bottom
On this week’s episode of the podcast, you will find out why I keep on the shelf to the side of me a sugar dispenser full of slips of paper from Ray Ortlund—some of them filled with theological heft and some of them that make me laugh. I talk about not just what those little slips of paper mean to me, but what I learned from them about how to encourage others when they are going through, as I was, a rough time.
Ray Ortlund—pastor, author, church planter, Old Testament scholar, Presbyterian preacher turned Anglican priest—was with me on the show this week, talking about what he’s learned about finding good news at rock bottom.
You will come away from this episode feeling hopeful and empowered not just to make it through tough times but to help others through them too.
You can listen here.
Mother’s Day Sale at Christianity Today
If you haven’t yet subscribed to CT, you can do so now for an extra $20 off, from now until Mother’s Day, May 11. This will get you a subscription to both print and digital content, plus access to some super-fun stuff coming down the pike that I can’t yet tell you about.
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Desert island Playlist
Every other week, I share a playlist of songs one of you says you’d want to have on hand if you were stranded on a desert island. This week’s submission comes from reader Brenda Taylor from Toledo, Ohio:
- “What a Wonderful World” by Louis Armstrong
- The Four Seasons by Antonio Vivaldi
- “Clair de Lune” by Claude Debussy
- “Annie’s Song” by John Denver: One of the greatest love songs!
- “Rocky Mountain High” by John Denver: Love the Rockies!
- “Yesterday” by The Beatles
- “Bohemian Rhapsody” by Queen
- “I Will Remember You” by Sarah McLachlan
- “Happy” by Pharrell Williams
- “Your Song” by Elton John
- “This Is Me” by Keala Settle
- “Defying Gravity” by Cynthia Erivo
Thank you, Brenda!
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
“Now the clowns and clairvoyants are aiming at true
In the babble, the rabble, I’m still headed for you
Those masters of war never did go away
And though the bleak sky is burdened I’ll pray anyway
And though irony’s drained me I’ll now try sincere
’Cause whoever it was that brought me here
Will have to take me home.”
—Martyn Joseph
Currently Reading (or Re-Reading)
- Eberhard Busch, The Barmen Theses Then and Now: The 2004 Warfield Lectures at Princeton Theological Seminary (Eerdmans)
- Charlie Peacock, Roots and Rhythm: A Life in Music (Eerdmans)
- Molly Worthen, Spellbound: How Charisma Shaped American History from the Puritans to Donald Trump (Forum)
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Ask a Question or Say Hello
The Russell Moore Show podcast includes a section where we grapple with the questions you might have about life, the gospel, relationships, work, the church, spirituality, the future, a moral dilemma you’re facing, or whatever. You can send your questions to questions@russellmoore.com. I’ll never use your name—unless you tell me to—and will come up with a groan-inducing pun of a pseudonym for you.
And, of course, I would love to hear from you about anything. Send me an email at questions@russellmoore.com if you have any questions or comments about this newsletter, if there are other things you would like to see discussed here, or if you would just like to say hello.
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Russell Moore
Editor in Chief, Christianity Today
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