Two of the most beautiful things I saw on TV last year were broadcasts from Paris, taking place in the city’s two most iconic structures. One was explicitly Christian—the December 7 reopening ceremony (and concert) for the restored Notre-Dame de Paris cathedral. The other was decidedly secular yet also spiritually resonant: the climactic cauldron lighting in the Paris Olympics opening ceremony as Céline Dion sang Edith Piaf’s “Hymn to Love” (L’Hymne à l’amour) from the Eiffel Tower, on July 26.
Both moments of sublime beauty came in the wake of ugliness. Notre-Dame’s reopening followed the terrifying near-death of the 700-year-old cathedral in a fire five years prior. Dion’s performance followed more proximate ugliness—the hedonistic transgression on display in the ceremony’s prior three-plus hours (most infamously the drag queen Last Supper tableau).
These two moments symbolize a vibe shift underway in Western culture. It’s the shift of a culture that has recognized itself on the precarious brink of moral and aesthetic collapse and is now pulling back. It’s the shift of a post-Christian secularism that sees with new eyes how Christianity built Western civilization and what it still offers. It’s the shift of an unsettled and spiritually hungry culture, veering from destruction to reconstruction, from iconoclasm to retrieval, from nihilistic despair to earnest hope.
New Light Dawning
A new light is dawning across the West. We see flickers of it everywhere: soaring Bible sales, Wesley Huff sharing the gospel with millions of listeners on Joe Rogan’s podcast, formerly outspoken enemies of Christianity now appreciating the faith’s role in society, Gen Z men rediscovering church, The Chosen becoming the most-translated TV show in history, Denzel Washington getting baptized and becoming a licensed minister, Russell Brand getting baptized by Bear Grylls in the Thames, contemporary Christian becoming one of the fastest-growing music genres, and on and on.
The glimmers are evident not only in explicit Christian occurrences but also in pop culture’s shifting posture toward traditional values and spiritual transcendence, evident in everything from Volvo and Apple commercials to Superman trailers (and “Look Up” advertising slogans). We see it in politics with voters around the world rejecting the excesses of wokeism and globalism, choosing instead to favor candidates who vow to conserve “traditional” goods like the family, local economic flourishing, and national sovereignty.
This shift is apparent all over the place, but the two Paris events this year strike me as particularly potent expressions, in part because of the city’s symbolic significance. Just as California is a bellwether for trends in America, Paris is often a trendsetter for Western culture generally—often the birthplace of political, philosophical, gastronomic, and artistic movements. Will the City of Light be a harbinger of a new (or recovered) spiritual “enlightenment” across the world?
‘Hymn to Love’ and the West’s Spiritual Ache
Light figured prominently in the finale of the Paris Olympics’ opening ceremony.
The climax began with the stunning cauldron lighting—a blazing ring lifted by an illuminated hot-air balloon elevating nearly 200 feet in the sky above the Tuileries. As the balloon rose, the camera shifted to the “surprise” of Dion standing with a microphone on the 187-foot-high first level of the Eiffel Tower. Dion hadn’t performed publicly since 2020 but passionately belted out Piaf’s “Hymn to Love,” even as the rain poured, producing puddles on the grand piano beside her. Watch the moment.
The timeless song is a requiem of sorts, written by Piaf as she grieved the death of French boxer Marcel Cerdan—who had died in a 1949 plane crash on his way to see her. Dion brought her own grief to the performance: the loss of her beloved husband, René Angélil, to cancer in 2016, and the loss of her regular performing abilities due to stiff-person syndrome.
The song is an ode to what’s been lost—a memorializing of something gone but not forgotten. But it also ends with a hopeful recognition that love’s existence hints at something transcendent: “Those who love will live eternally / In the blue, where all is harmony.” The word “hymn” in the title situates the song’s celebration of human love within the genre of church music. Indeed, as sung by Dion from the Eiffel Tower’s cathedralesque silhouette to a global “congregation” of nearly one billion, it felt like a secular culture grasping for the vestiges—or a foretaste—of some sort of unifying, ceremonial adoration of the good, true, and beautiful.
It felt like a secular culture grasping for the vestiges—or a foretaste—of some sort of unifying, ceremonial adoration of the good, true, and beautiful.
The moment was also a palate cleanser after the aesthetic poison we’d ingested in the ceremony hours before. The world doesn’t hunger for androgynous deathworks and transgression but rather for elegance, regality, purity, and transcendence. Even within the same three-hour ceremony, the vibe shift was evident: A culture looked in the mirror and reacted with horror, but then gazed on true beauty and oscillated to hope.
Notre-Dame Reopened, Classic Beauty Reembraced
Many of us were gutted as we watched the 2019 Notre-Dame fire unfold live on television. The moment seemed to encapsulate Western civilization’s collapse in one horrifying image. Looking back, I think that moment—coupled with the global pandemic the following year—set in motion a civilizational wake-up call. Confronted with the prospect of what we can lose, or willingly cede, those years catalyzed in many a new desire to conserve.
Five years later, Notre-Dame’s reopening ceremonies presented evidence of that resolution. The cathedral’s reemergence from rubble wasn’t just celebrated for its technical achievement. The ceremony felt like a unified recommitment to fragile ideals.
Many of the world’s most prominent leaders attended. Donald Trump sat next to French president Emmanuel Macron in the front row. Jill Biden, Prince William, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni, and even Elon Musk were nearby. Beauty has the power to halt bickering and build consensus in ways little else can.
The ceremony felt like a unified recommitment to fragile ideals.
The resurrected architectural space was a source of galvanizing inspiration (underscoring the value of beautiful churches). But the music performed in its hallowed halls—its acoustic grandeur and 8,000-pipe organ awakened again—was stunning. If you haven’t yet, watch some of the ceremony’s performances, especially these:
Yo-Yo Ma performing Bach’s prelude from Cello Suite No. 1.
Gustavo Dudamel conducting an orchestral performance of Saint-Saën’s Symphony No. 3 (Organ Symphony).
South African soprano Pretty Yende singing the very Protestant hymn “Amazing Grace” in the reopened Catholic cathedral. Watch below:
“Amazing Grace” couldn’t be a better song for this vibe-shift moment. The third verse sums up the emotion of being graciously preserved or plucked from the pit: “Through many dangers, toils and snares / I have already come: / ’Tis grace hath brought me safe thus far, / And grace will lead me home.”
If Western culture turns back from the brink of decadence and self-inflicted ruin, it’ll only be because of a gracious move of God.
You Don’t Know What You Have Until It’s (Almost) Gone
These two moments, in the same city, in the same year, feel symbolic of a civilizational turning to gratitude and hope after a long stretch of taking things for granted, giving up on history, and growing cynical.
So often, we don’t know what we have until it’s lost—or almost lost.
In various corners of culture, there’s a growing awareness of good gifts we’ve taken for granted but don’t want to lose.
We see this in the turning tide against transgender medical interventions, from the United Kingdom’s Cass Review to growing numbers of detransition stories and regrets. The goodness of one’s biological sex and gendered embodiment is clearer for many who partially or irrevocably lose it.
We’re also seeing the beginnings of pushback against disembodied digital life. As I observed recently about Jonathan Haidt’s game-changing Anxious Generation, 2024 “felt like a turning point in the rising awareness of the detrimental effects of excessive scrolling.” We don’t know the goodness of gifts like physical relationships, unmediated stillness, and embodied experiences until they’re nearly gone.
And though it’s not happening yet, I hope the vibe shift leads to a course reversal on marriage and fertility. A world with tons of aging people but no babies is a scary one (just watch Children of Men). A world with fewer marriages is a lonelier one. We’re already on the brink here. Will we see the abyss and pull back, choosing to build marriages and families again?
So much depends on whether people have hope. Despair leads to isolation, deconstruction, and hedonism in the short time you have. Hope leads to fruitfulness and selflessness—building something that will last beyond your fleeting life. The Christian gospel is, of course, the hope everything hinges on. There are signs that “post-Christian” people are recognizing this fact. Maybe we’ve seen enough evidence that a world that’s done with Jesus isn’t a world we want.
Cultural Tipping Point?
Hope leads to fruitfulness and selflessness—building something that will last beyond your fleeting life.
We’ll see what 2025 brings. But it does feel like we’re at or near a cultural tipping point. Metamodernism is one name for it. Others call it a vibe shift. Christians might pray it will one day be labeled a revival. It’s a waffling between the poles of despair and hope, between what Byung-Chul Han calls “survival society” and a hope-fueled life that goes beyond mere survival and “opens up a meaningful horizon.”
It’s clear people are hungry for a meaningful horizon. They see glimpses of it in goose-bumps–inducing musical performances and other brushes with transcendent beauty. What an opportunity this is for the Christian church. Let’s lean into these longings and point people to the most meaningful horizon of all: Christ’s eternal kingdom.
The Gospel Coalition