Every Vibe Shift Is In The Lord’s Hand

For months now, since before the latest economic upheaval, much cultural conversation has revolved around a “vibe shift” in the United States and other corners of the world.

What exactly is this vibe shift? It’s hard to identify a single factor.

Some point to political shifts: Donald Trump’s second election, rising anti-woke and anti-DEI sentiment, the growth of conservative politics among young men, and legal backlashes against some of the trans movement’s excesses.

Others point to shifts in popular culture: the appearance of Christians and even apologists on podcasts like The Joe Rogan Experience (and the popularity of these podcasts over and above legacy media), X’s transformation under Elon Musk, and backlash and controversies around prominent voices from the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements and the waning deluge of ad campaigns from Woke Capital.

There’s even a religious component to the vibe shift: the rise of Bible sales in the United Kingdom and the “surprising rebirth’” of belief in God among celebrities and intellectuals, the (temporary) plateauing of the “nones” and of religious decline, and the upward trend among Christians of traditional views on marriage.

In a nutshell, the vibe shift is seemingly rightward, masculine, semi-religious or semi-Christian, and institutionally unregulated.

As a campus minister at a large University of California school, I can perceive this shift, even though the effects on campus haven’t been as sharp due to institutional, ideological entrenchment and the gendered dynamics of universities becoming increasingly female/feminized spaces. Five years ago, when I met a student who wasn’t explicitly Christian or a traditional Muslim or Jew, I could rightly assume his or her moral orientation and challenges to faith leaned left on every major issue. Now, when I sit down with a student—especially a young man—I can’t. Even assuming the university selects for and creates more left-leaning male populations, the shift right means I’m as likely to be talking to a closet conservative or someone who’s close friends with one.

What does this mean for ministry in a post–vibe shift age? I can’t offer a comprehensive assessment. Instead, I’ll make a few practical and theological observations that can help orient us as we seek to understand and navigate the shift for the sake of God’s kingdom and glory.

Rebellion Against Imposed Chaos

We must grapple with the vibe shift’s moral orientation and impetus. We’re seeing neither a turn from darkness to light nor a regression to the Dark Ages. Instead, we’re seeing rebellion against what I’d call “schoolmarming anarchy.”

In brief, over the last decade, expressive individualism and LGBT+ progressivism have teamed up with increasingly bureaucratic and technocratic attempts at social control. In the name of protecting various classes from oppression and harm, the mechanisms of social opprobrium via cancellation, legal enforcement through state and federal measures (e.g., Title IX shifts), and overwhelming social messaging (look at movie scripts and plot lines from about 2017 to 2022) have aimed at socially engineering a progressive consensus that “liberates” and “affirms” us all in our particular diversity.

This movement has two ironies.

First, this attempt at control has been socially corrosive and morally chaotic. When we deny biology in favor of ideology, family bonds aren’t strengthened but further dissolved. Insisting on poring over every nook and cranny of every social relation to ferret out injustice and oppression hasn’t had the desired effect of increasing justice, peace, and harmony—and this is according to some leftists.

Rather, the result is an ingrained, isolating hermeneutic of suspicion, a tax worked into the most basic social interactions. Kids have been told they can be whatever they want, but this hasn’t led to improved mental health—instead, it has caused paralyzing levels of anomie and anxiety, metastasized by the smartphone and social media.

Kids have been told they can be whatever they want, but this hasn’t led to improved mental health.

Second, many champions of this movement managed to do all this in morally censorious, punitive ways. Folks who alleged themselves to be the advocates of social liberation against entrenched structures of oppression ended up looking like Dolores Umbridge wearing a rainbow flag pin.

As a result of these ironies, rebellion looks like the pursuit of order, of conservative or right-leaning values. In this environment, campaigning against pornography can be viewed as edgy or transgressive. Pushing for traditional family values is punk rock. Those of us ministering to the spiritually searching today can’t ignore this phenomenon.

One young man from a couple of years ago comes to my mind. He came to my group not as a believer nor a skeptic, but as spiritually curious. What intrigued him was a clear sermon on God creating the world with natural rhythm and order, including a law about human nature and about men and women that’s not mere social construction, as he heard in class. Studying education, he was appalled by how he was taught to handle potentially nonaffirming parents of trans students (by hiding and lying). But he didn’t know where to go for moral guidance. He feared for his grades and standing in class if he dissented. A theologically conservative pastor was about the only help he could find.

This shift has created an opportunity to clearly present the truth of the law revealed in nature and in Scripture, as well as the gospel that has the power to reform hearts and restore order from chaos. The law isn’t the gospel of Christ crucified and risen, and we must be clear about that in our preaching. But good laws are their own form of good news for those who have suffered under bad ones. The Torah was a key part of making Israel a light to the nations as the Gentiles saw the justness and goodness of God’s proclaimed order (Deut. 4:8).

People are often reeling, starving, and eager for truth and for some ballast amid a cultural and moral storm. Our churches can and should be havens for weary travelers. These fields are ripe for harvest.

Conservative, Right-Wing, or What?

While the vibe shift relates to moral perceptions, it isn’t unambiguously righteous, traditional, or Christian. The right-wing realignment around anti-woke backlash features many leaders who aren’t doing so out of a clear orientation to the Ten Commandments or Christ’s lordship.

For instance, Dave Portnoy and the “Barstool conservatives” buck progressive social trends around personal pronouns while remaining staunchly pro-choice, campaigning for marijuana legalization, and not caring for an instant about the moral degradation around homosexuality. None of this is “trad” or regenerate.

On the technological side, Elon Musk is pro-natalist, anti-pronouns, and anti-woke. He has also fathered at least 14 children by several mothers who were impregnated via artificial insemination, allegedly after polygenic embryo screening. These aren’t Christian family values. Rather, they reflect the Silicon Valley genetic technocracy that’s more Nietzschean. The seeming conversion of Silicon Valley, led by many factors, including the rise of Peter Thiel, has a Girardian, pro-gay, and transhumanist flavor.

And this doesn’t even account for the Andrew Tate problem. Tate is famous as a radical misogynist, abuser, porn-producer, accused sex-trafficker, and more. But he’s emerged as a gonzo version of the tamer masculinity influencers popular with young men today, urging them to resist being captured by a society insistent on feminizing, neutering, and henpecking them into submission to things like monogamy.

Talking to a non-Christian young man last year, I asked him about Tate. He laughed and said none of his friends openly likes him because he’s obviously ridiculous. But secretly, they consider him someone who still makes some good points. As crazy as it is to imagine, Tate isn’t even the worst figure out there.

Again, some moral stances of prominent figures in this vibe shift aren’t traditional or conservative. On the contrary, a strong component (though not the whole) of the shift looks more like the repaganization of our culture than the preservation of it.

Where Do We Go from Here?

What do we make of all this? Pastors and parishioners recovering from a cultural crouch, where they had to hedge their speech and hide their convictions, can feel understandable relief, an exhilarating rush to engage the culture with boldness and energy. They may sense the missiological opportunity that has opened up in key sectors of our culture.

I’m not here to rain on that parade. But we must keep a few cautions in mind as we engage.

Test the Zeitgeists

Be mindful that not every spirit––every zeitgeist––is from God, which is why we’re to “test the spirits” to see which are from him (1 John 4:1) and which are from the Devil. Hopping on the vibe-shift bandwagon carries danger. Un-Christian ideological capture can happen in a putatively right-leaning, conservative direction just as easily as a left-leaning, progressive one.

The Devil doesn’t care if he tricks you into going to hell as a based right-winger who understands that men are always going to be men and women are always going to be women, or as a blue-haired progressive who doesn’t, as long as either way you don’t come to understand your need for Jesus.

Different Pagans Are Still Pagans

Different kinds of pagans are just that—different pagans. Romans, Greeks, and Scythians had different moral traditions. They all needed radical conversion.

A strong component of the shift looks more like the repaganization of our culture than the preservation of it.

The vibe shift has lowered the conscious barrier of hostility for many toward the claims of more traditional faiths, especially around the subjects of nature, gender, sex, and the family. There’s greater awareness of Christianity’s culture-shaping force. I have no problem seeing some of it as a sort of praeparatio evangelica. But we must recognize the need for a concrete call to repentance in response to the same gospel we had to preach to their progressive pagan neighbor.

Someone who shows up in church, understands there’s a higher power and a need for spirituality, wants a stable family, and holds some traditional instincts about the existence of two sexes still must repent, believe the gospel, and submit his or her entire moral imagination to Scripture. And that’s just as much a miracle of the Holy Spirit as the conversion of the more progressive “nones” who may still walk through your door.

Vibes Shift and Shift Again

History is messy. Progressives, as that term implies, imagine history as linear, moving always inevitably forward and never backward. (Incidentally, too many conservatives believe the same thing.)

But as we’ve seen over the last 10 to 15 years, things move fast and in surprising, chaotic, and unpredictable directions. Progressive overreach provoked a conservative and centrist backlash that’s rolling back much of the cultural “progress”––in some cases, even further than they could have imagined. Witness several varieties of antisemitism in sectors of both the right and the left. Considering the aggressive program of the last decade to emphasize racial consciousness, one thinks of Gandalf’s words in The Fellowship of the Ring, “The dwarves delved too greedily and too deep.” And behold, a long-sleeping Balrog was awakened.

Vibes can snap back (or forward) into something unpredictable. Take the decline of religious belief: While the decline has slowed, it hasn’t reversed; 30 percent of the population still identifies as religiously unaffiliated, and church attendance seems to still be declining (though there’s been an encouraging and significant bump among young men in the United Kingdom). Young men are trending conservative politically, but young women are still the most progressive cohort in recent memory. If recent trends in higher education hold, they’re still potentially set up to dominate the workforce, higher education, and corporate America for a generation. They need the gospel too.

Your preaching and teaching of the law and gospel need to be rooted more deeply in something much firmer than your capacity to catch the current wave of public opinion. Retrofitting your ministry into all-masculinity-and-politics-all-the-time might be successful in the short term—pragmatic, homogeneous-unit principle, seeker-sensitive churches grew for a reason. It may be the case that this current vibe lasts for the next 10 to 20 years.

Or we might see a quicker life cycle, perhaps of two to five years, considering political and economic volatility. Given the life cycle of thought-process on the internet, it might even be quicker—online, memetic realities are intrinsically ambivalent and unstable. Some argue that shift back is already happening. I’m not so sure. I’m not a prophet, but I know the famous quip remains true as ever: “Those who marry the spirit of the age will find themselves widows in the next.”

Trusting God Amid the Vibes

Your preaching and teaching of the law and gospel need to be rooted more deeply in something much firmer than your capacity to catch the current wave of public opinion.

Practically speaking, it’s good to read the room. It’s good to know your audience and speak to the hurts, fears, and desires of the present age. It’s good to know which populations are (humanly speaking) more pliable and soft-hearted toward the truth of God in this season. It’s good to repent of cowardice if you’ve become convicted in light of Scripture about the nature of your ministry over the last decade. What isn’t good is to allow your preaching and ministry to be swept up and tossed along, to and fro, with every wave of cultural doctrine.

In this cultural moment—as much as in any other––remember that God is the sovereign Lord of history. In our evaluations of history, culture, and society, we’re all too often tempted to take into account every other contingent human, technological, political, and cultural factor at play without recourse to the fact that while “the lot is cast into the lap, . . . its every decision is from the LORD” (Prov. 16:33). That includes the vibes.