There is a quiet crisis beneath the noise of modern life. Institutions are distrusted, communities are fragmenting, and a creeping sense of meaninglessness haunts even the most prosperous societies. People scroll endlessly, argue bitterly, and yet feel more alone than ever. Something foundational is missing — and the hunger for it is unmistakable. What is that missing thing? A growing number of thinkers, even secular ones, are arriving at a surprising answer: faith.
Ryan Avent, a journalist at The Economist, has written a sweeping new book arguing that shared belief is the invisible architecture of every functioning society. His work, reviewed recently by Stephen O. Presley at The Gospel Coalition, makes a compelling sociological case. Read the source article. Avent is not a Christian — he says plainly that he no longer believes in the resurrection — yet he confesses that leaving the church left a “terrible emptiness” that took him twenty-five years to name. His diagnosis is honest and important. But the Christian tradition does not merely diagnose the emptiness. It names the One who fills it.
What Scripture Says About Our Fractured World
The Bible is not surprised by social disintegration. Long before economists had words for it, the prophets described it. Jeremiah watched the people of Judah abandon the source of living water and dig for themselves “broken cisterns that can hold no water” (Jeremiah 2:13, ESV). Every age has its broken cisterns — ideologies, systems, technologies, and movements that promise to hold meaning together but crack under the weight of human sin and limitation.
“For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened.” — Romans 1:21 (ESV)
Paul’s diagnosis in Romans 1 is precise: the root of cultural disorder is not ignorance but suppression. Humanity knows, at some level, that it was made for God. When that knowledge is pushed aside and replaced with confidence in human systems — what Avent calls “Modern Faith” in democracy, capitalism, and technocracy — the result is not liberation but futility. The heart does not stop worshipping; it simply redirects its worship toward things that cannot bear the weight of ultimate meaning. As Paul writes, people “exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator” (Romans 1:25, ESV). Every idol, from ancient fertility gods to modern algorithmic platforms, is a variation on this ancient exchange.
The Apostle Paul writing to the Ephesians describes the condition of those outside of Christ as being “alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world” (Ephesians 2:12, ESV). Alienation, strangeness, hopelessness — these are not merely personal spiritual states. They ripple outward into broken families, fractured communities, and societies that cannot agree on what is true or good. The crisis of shared meaning that secular analysts are only now naming is, at its root, a crisis of the human heart separated from its Maker.
Christ: The Cornerstone of True Community
Avent is right that Christianity produced a moral revolution in the ancient world. Historians and anthropologists confirm it. But the Christian claim goes far deeper than sociology. The church did not merely offer a useful set of shared stories. It proclaimed — and still proclaims — a living Person who is himself the ground of all meaning, the source of all genuine community, and the answer to every broken cistern.
“So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole structure, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord.” — Ephesians 2:19–21 (ESV)
This is not a metaphor for social cohesion. It is a declaration about the nature of reality. Jesus Christ is the cornerstone — the stone that determines the alignment of every other stone in the building. Remove him, and the structure does not merely weaken; it loses its defining reference point entirely. This is precisely what Avent’s book, for all its brilliance, cannot account for. He sees that the building is leaning. He even traces the cracks back to the loss of Christian formation. But without the cornerstone, he can only propose new stories and better systems. The gospel proposes a Person.
Jesus himself declared, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life” (John 14:6, ESV). He did not say he had found the way, or that he taught the truth, or that he promoted flourishing. He identified himself as the very substance of these things. A society that loses Christ does not merely lose a helpful religious tradition. It loses the source of the very goods it is trying to preserve — trust, dignity, moral seriousness, hope, and the capacity to love across difference.
Living It Out: Being the Church in a Fragmented Age
Avent’s secular analysis is, in a strange way, a gift to the church. It reminds us that what we carry is not merely privately comforting — it is publicly necessary. The question is whether we will live it with the depth and courage the moment requires.
1. Recover the Richness of Christian Community
The early church was not primarily a lecture series or a political coalition. It was a community of people who “devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers” (Acts 2:42, ESV). In an age of loneliness and fragmentation, the local church is one of the most countercultural institutions on earth — a place where people of different backgrounds, generations, and temperaments are genuinely bound together not by shared preferences but by a shared Lord.
2. Offer Meaning, Not Just Morality
Our neighbors are not primarily looking for a better ethical framework. They are looking for a story large enough to live inside. The gospel is that story. It begins with creation — we are made in God’s image, for his glory and our flourishing. It moves through the fall — we have broken what was made good. It reaches its center in the cross and empty tomb — God himself entered the wreckage to rescue us. And it ends in new creation — a renewed world where every tear is wiped away (Revelation 21:4, ESV). This is the narrative that held the ancient world together, and it is still the only one with the power to do so.
3. Engage the Culture with Confidence and Charity
When a secular economist writes honestly about the emptiness he felt leaving the church, Christians should not respond with triumphalism. We should respond with compassion and invitation. Peter calls us to “always be prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you,” but to do so “with gentleness and respect” (1 Peter 3:15, ESV). The goal is not to win an argument but to introduce a Person.
The Gospel: The Only Foundation That Holds
Here is the truth that every honest heart eventually reaches, whether it takes twenty-five years or a lifetime: we were not made for systems. We were not made for ideologies, technologies, or even for civilization itself. We were made for God — to know him, love him, and reflect his glory in the world he made.
But we have all turned away. “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23, ESV). That turning — personal and collective — is the source of every broken cistern, every fractured community, every society that cannot hold itself together. The diagnosis is not political. It is spiritual. And the remedy is not a better system. It is a Savior.
“But God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” — Romans 5:8 (ESV)
Jesus Christ, the eternal Son of God, took on flesh, lived the life we could not live, died the death we deserved, and rose bodily from the grave on the third day — defeating sin, death, and the powers that hold human societies in bondage. He offers forgiveness, reconciliation with God, and membership in a community that will outlast every empire and every algorithm. This is not a useful social story. It is the truth. And it is available to every person who turns from their own broken cisterns and trusts in him.
If you have never placed your faith in Christ, or if — like Avent — you once knew the church and walked away, the door is still open. The cornerstone has not moved. Come and build your life, and your hope for society, on the only foundation that cannot crack.
