By Sarah Irving-Stonebraker, TGC. (Photo: Jameson Berrios/Unsplash)
Im just . . . disconnected,” a friend said, pausing before emphasizing the last word. I was chatting after church with some young adults, and one of them, with her characteristic candor and insight, touched on something. This sense of disconnection was the same thing I was hearing from my students at university. In contemporary culture, many people are rootless, atomized, and unsure of where they belong.
When life is all about self-invention, history is deemed irrelevant. And yet the culture of “you do you” is producing an epidemic of loneliness, an “anxious generation” (to use Jonathan Haidt’s term), and rapid polarization as people desperately try to find meaning and purpose in the myriad of idols of this world, from politics to wellness to transhumanism. People are yearning to be part of a larger story.
This is an opportunity for Christians. God invites his people to be part of a much larger historical story. If we understand something about why history matters biblically, and how to steward it well, then history can help us speak the gospel into this rootless age.
Living in a Rootless Age
As a history professor, I often ask my students, “What is our contemporary society’s vision of the good life?” Their answers are almost always some version of this: “Finding and then being your true self.” This culture holds that unleashing one’s true potential is the key to finding happiness.
This obsession with self-fulfillment is connected to a deeper pathology, that is, the view that because there’s no God, there’s no ultimate story about where humanity has come from and where we’re going. The past is deemed irrelevant to what our culture values most, which is the freedom to be ourselves and enjoy the life we desire. This is the first characteristic of what I call our Ahistoric Age.