“Every day they devoted themselves to meeting together in the temple, and broke bread from house to house. They ate their food with joyful and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. Every day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

When the church exploded into existence and as it began to spread across the Roman Empire thanks to the faithful, devoted work of the apostle Paul, it was something new. Entirely new. There wasn’t anything else in the world quite like it. Because of that, it was often attractive to people who were wealthy and influential. It was a novelty, and people who fancy themselves as sitting at the top of the social ladder are often drawn to new things so they can say they were the first to see and experience them. Some two thousand years later, Christianity wasn’t new anymore. It was old. Very old. It was passe. The wealthy and influential didn’t care much anymore. And this was separate and apart from all of the criticism it was receiving for both imagined and real faults on the part of the church. But in the last couple of years, something interesting has begun to happen. Let’s talk about it for a few minutes today.

One of the ministry groups whose work I follow pretty closely has a saying they go back to time and time again. This saying comes in two parts. The first part is this: ideas have consequences. Our beliefs affect our behavior. The things we most believe will naturally affect the kinds of things we do. You can tell both the rightness and the worth of an idea by the behaviors it generates. Really good ideas will naturally have really good consequences.

The other side of this, though, is the second part of the saying: bad ideas have victims. When something is a really bad idea, it is going to have really bad consequences. But the problem with the bad consequences that come from bad ideas is that they almost never stay confined to the people who hold to the idea themselves. They spill over into the lives of the people around them. They create victims out of those people.

Over the last couple of decades at least, the ideas of secularism have been pretty dominant across Western culture. It’s probably not unfair to say that a spirit of triumphalism characterized much of the movement of secularism in the early days after 9/11. The famous Four Horsemen, a quartet of immensely popular atheist thinkers and writers and speakers and their followers gleefully declared that the day of theism had passed, and that a kind of new enlightenment marked by secular humanism was rising. Humanity was finally moving into the glorious future it had been slowly moving toward ever since the Scientific Revolution turned the world from its head to its feet.

And in the eyes of not a few observers at the time both outside and inside the church, it looked like they were right. We heard nearly endlessly about the rise of the “nones.” These were people who claimed that they had no religious affiliation on various demographic surveys. We saw the decline of both the role and the power of the church accelerate as church attendance plummeted. Multiple different denominations – including, most recently, my own – had devastating investigative reports released detailing decades-long patterns of sexual abuse on the part of a relative handful of leaders. Being known as a church member ceased to be a cultural merit and became something that people generally tried to downplay if not outright hide. A fairly militant secularism and progressivism completed its takeover of one political party, and has even started consuming the other. The cheerleaders of this great cultural shift gladly proclaimed that this purging of religion from the public square was all going to make the world a better place for everyone.

But then something happened. The world did not become a better place. At least, it hasn’t yet. Loneliness has become an epidemic. Deaths of despair, especially in the wake of the Covid global pandemic, have become one of the leading causes of death. Mental health numbers skyrocketed. Broadly speaking, people don’t seem to be okay. And because religion – and especially Christianity – has mostly been relegated to the locker room, it’s not there as the convenient scapegoat anymore that it once was. Instead, secularism as an idea is being given a closer look, and it appears to not be doing so well.

One of the early and recent dominoes to fall was when prominent atheist and fierce critic of religion generally, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, publicly declared that she had become a Christian. She found the ideas and practice of atheism wanting on both a personal and philosophical level, sought truth elsewhere, and found it in the claims of Christianity. Reflecting on her announcement of her conversion at First Things, Christian thinker, Carl Trueman, quoting Hirsi Ali herself, writes, “‘Western civilization is under threat from three different but related forces,’ she writes. These are resurgent authoritarianism in China and Russia, global Islamism, and ‘the viral spread of woke ideology.’ She declares that she became a Christian in part because she recognized that ‘we can’t fight off these formidable forces’ with modern secular tools; rather, we can only defeat these foes if we are united by a ‘desire to uphold the legacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition,’ with its ‘ideas and institutions designed to safeguard human life, freedom and dignity.'” Her husband and former fellow atheist, Niall Ferguson, recently declared his own conversion to Christianity.

Last year, comedian and cultural commentator, Russell Brand, who had previously announced his conversion to Christianity, further announced his upcoming baptism. Last year as well, Richard Dawkins, who was perhaps the chief voice of the New Atheists when they emerged as a cultural force in the wake of 9/11, declared in an interview with the BBC that he considers himself a “cultural Christian.” This from the man who has declared religion in general and Christianity in particular to be a major scourge on the earth multiple times in multiple ways. Now, Dawkins has not converted to Christianity in any way, shape, or form. He still thinks the continued decline of church attendance in Britain to be a very good thing. But for him to come around to the idea that Christianity not only isn’t the scourge on humanity he once declared it to be, but is in fact a cultural good, especially when compared with the culture created by Islam (which is under increasingly harsh scrutiny in recent days as new light has been shed on the systemic rape and sexual abuse of more than 250,000 young girls in Britain over the span of multiple decades by mostly Pakistani Muslims all while a government system relentlessly committed to multiculturalism systematically looked the other way), is pretty notable.

In a recent interview with New York Times columnist, David French, atheist Jonathan Rauch declared that in order to save society, Christians need to become more Christian in their belief and behavior. In the interview, French said to Rauch, “You don’t believe in God, but one of the points to your book is for American democracy to flourish, you argue that we need better Christianity. You’re not trying to say that the solution to the crisis in American democracy or problems in American democracy is becoming an atheist. You talk about a solution that is actually about a better version of Christianity, or Christianity living up to its ideals.”

Rauch responded, “Well, I wouldn’t even say ‘better.’ The way I think of it is: What really needs to happen to get our country on a better track is for Christianity not to become more secular or more liberal, but to become more like itself, to become more truly Christian.” He went on to add, “I came to that for a few reasons, but one of them is knowing people like you and other Christians who showed me that the three fundamentals of Christianity map very well onto the three fundamentals of Madisonian liberalism. And one of those is don’t be afraid. No. 2 is be like Jesus. Imitate Jesus. And No. 3 is forgive each other. And those things are very much like how you run a constitutional republic.”

Sociologist and statistician, Ryan Burge, recently released a report showing that the belief in miracles among the college educated population is rising quickly. One of the best predictors of whether or not someone embraces the existence of the supernatural is now how much education they have. In another report, the sale of Bibles in the last year rose 22% while the overall sale of books rose only 1%. People may not be buying more books in general, but they are buying a whole lot more Bibles than even just the same period last year. Jordan Peterson has been on a long, slow, very public journey in the direction of Christianity. British historian and atheist, Tom Holland, seems to be slowly lumbering in that direction as well.

What is going on?

Well, it would seem that a growing segment of the most elite and formerly most resolutely opposed to religion in general and Christianity in particular portion of the population of the cultural West is rediscovering Christianity and is liking what they find. There is a growing awareness and acceptance of the fact that Christianity is not merely the source of Western culture as we know it as a whole, but of the parts of Western culture we like the best like democracy and universal equality and human rights. When set against the backdrop of the trio of competing worldview forces Hirsi Ali identified of secular authoritarianism, militant Islam, and aggressive wokism, Christianity appears to offer the world not merely a different option, but a qualitatively and even quantitatively better one. A much better one. A sufficiently better option that a growing number of prominent atheists and formerly fierce critics of Christianity are varyingly softening in their criticism or even outright embracing it at a risk of public perception and career. These folks are also starting to recognize the philosophical emptiness of atheism.

Now, does all of this mean we are about to see a grand cultural shift back in the direction of Christianity? Maybe not. Probably not. But the fact that a growing number of culturally prominent people seem to be recognizing personally and then publicly just how important and valuable a thing the Christian faith rightly lived out is in the world is not nothing. It’s a good thing.

In the earliest days of the church, Luke noted that the believers enjoyed the favor of all the people. Everybody liked the followers of Jesus whether they were part of the club or not. Why? Because they were such good neighbors. They lived out the love of Jesus in practical ways that were pretty radically different – and better – from anything the culture around them had to offer. They made the world a better place. This is because they were driven by better ideas than the rest of the culture around them. Ideas do indeed have consequences. Christians sometimes and even often have failed to live up to the ideas of our religion in ways that have caused great harm and drawn just criticism and condemnation. But in these cases, the basic ideas of Christianity aren’t the real problem so much as our inability to live up to them. The ideas, on the contrary, are good. Very good. Let me invite you to consider what all of these folks have and are starting to realize. Christianity is worth your time. Jesus is worthy of your devotion. His followers, when faithful to His commands, make the world a better place. You should join the movement. I can guarantee you’ll be glad that you did.