If you traveled back to the early 1960s, you’d be hard-pressed to find Christians hopeful about the country’s trajectory. The sexual revolution, hippie movement, and summer of love suggested the country was driving hard and fast toward libertine atheism. In 1966, TIME published their infamous “Is God Dead?” cover story.
But five years later, the vibe changed. TIME’s cover sported a psychedelic Christ under the headline “The Jesus Revolution.” In a strange twist, the hippies and flower people were turning to God. No one predicted it, but history is far less predictable than we pretend.
But maybe it’s not. Sometimes history repeats itself. The last eight years have had more than one touchpoint with the ’60s: presidential assassination attempts, widespread protests, and progressive cultural ascendancy. During this period, resisting the liberal perspectives on LGBT+ issues came with a high cost. Cancel culture was a thing.
But, to quote Sam Cooke’s 1964 anthem, “change gon’ come.” The last six months have seen a rapid cultural vibe shift unlike anything I’ve seen since Bruce Jenner became a Vanity Fair cover girl. Tech moguls like Elon Musk are talking about Christianity and supporting a traditional vision of gender. Joe Rogan hosted Wesley Huff, a Christian apologist, on his podcast—making it possibly the widest-reaching long-form gospel presentation in history. Bible sales are skyrocketing to unprecedented heights. World-renowned scholars like Niall Ferguson and former New Atheists like Ayaan Hirsi Ali are becoming public Christians. Young men from the most unchurched generation are showing unprecedented interest in faith.
We’re a nation driven by more than ideas and values. Arguably, our cultural engine is feelings, trends, and resonances—or “vibes.” Right now we’re living through a vibe shift. Different trends are catching; new resonances are echoing; strange feelings are emerging. And the vibe shift is now affecting one of America’s most powerful corporations. Meta, Facebook’s parent company, is undergoing a conversion of its own.
Zuckerberg Follows the Vibes
Mark Zuckerberg recently announced he’s making dramatic changes to Meta’s content moderation that are favorable for the gospel (and, yes, plenty of other messages that aren’t as holy). Like many Christians, I experienced firsthand how Meta’s draconian, progressive-biased “fact-checking” and “content moderation” amounted to suppressing Christian content on their platform.
Arguably, our cultural engine is feelings, trends, and resonances—or ‘vibes.’ Right now we’re living through a vibe shift.
They’ve throttled posts by any Christian nonprofits, churches, or content creators that challenged progressive ideas, virtually requiring them to pay for ads for online attention. When these Christians did so, Meta limited their ability to target ads and sometimes rejected their ads (with little or no explanation) because they broke their content moderation standards. I know many people who encountered practical barriers to posting ads: they were required to mail multiple forms of notarized identification to Meta over a period of months before they could boost posts. Many often never knew the reason why this happened, only that it effectively censored their speech online.
In today’s media ecosystem, all this is tantamount to forced death by attention starvation. If Christians wanted to reach people online, they had no choice but to use the social media highways Meta created. The problem is that they aren’t public roads. Anyone who wants to transfer information must pay a toll, and the tollbooth attendants deemed some users “problematic.”
Now Zuckerberg is promising to change. His announcement was laced with about-faces and mea culpas. He admitted that Meta’s “fact-checkers” and content moderators were biased. They bowed to governmental state and national pressure to suppress content. To prevent that, Meta is moving content moderation to Texas and, following the lead of Elon Musk’s X, they’ll allow community notes to act as the fact-checkers. He went on to note that debates around LGBT+ issues are no longer problematic. They’re now to be allowed. Such changes are, in his view, a return to Meta’s original free-speech values.
Of course, I have no idea how sincere any of this is. But I don’t doubt that Meta is changing its policies. Likely for the same reason it’s changed in the past: Meta smells the vibe shift and it doesn’t want to miss out on the cash. The progressive imperium (which Meta helped create) is sinking under its own weight. Meta doesn’t plan to go down with the ship. They know—because they track all our communication—that the average American is sick of coastal elites demanding conformity to their zany ideas about men in women’s bathrooms, prisons, and sports.
Whatever the reason, these changes will influence our media landscape. Ironically, the technocrats who tried to silence God-talk may construct new roads for his annunciation. Despite historical precedent for these sorts of changes, they may still come as a surprise for most of us. After all, it was evangelicals who popularized the idea of a growing “negative world,” in which progressive corporations like Meta attacked Christianity. But our latest vibe shift may signal a different future than the negative-world evangelicals expected.
After the Negative World There Was . . .
Aaron Renn’s viral article about the three worlds of evangelicalism sparked an ongoing debate about our cultural moment. He theorized that Christianity was viewed positively before 1994 (positive world), then neutrally until 2014 (neutral world), and now negatively in our current milieu (negative world). Given the vibe shift, I wonder whether Renn and fans of the negative world thesis will revise. Have we entered the neutral world once more? (And does this mean it’s OK to trust Keller again?)
Meta’s changes will influence our media landscape. Ironically, the technocrats who tried to silence God-talk may construct new roads for his annunciation.
In truth, I have little interest in this debate because the Bible is clear: We’re outsiders in every generation. The negative world is always with us. To citizens of heaven, every world is a negative world. Yes, that negativity is expressed to varying degrees in varying ways, but we’ll never cease living in a negative world—at least until the resurrection.
Whatever world you want to call this new vibe, it’s not a perfect world. It’s just a new negative world in which resistance to the gospel will take new forms. In the future, vibes will do what vibes always do: shift. What’s unchanging, solid, and sure is the truth of the gospel. We don’t need to suss out the future to see the opportunity before us. Let’s take advantage of this window for the right things: for evangelism, discipleship, work, and faith.
If the Master returns, let’s be found making good use of the time. After eight years of progressive hegemony, people are hungry for something more than mind-bending liberal ideologies and woke sloganeering. They want the bread of life. The water that wells up to eternal life. Let’s boldly feed that hunger and quench that thirst by proclaiming Jesus with plainspoken boldness. To do this well we must hammer our swords into plowshares and live with such infectious joy that the world takes notice of our joyous Savior.
Follow the movement of the Spirit, and pray and hope he’ll use you in this moment to feed the lost sheep of God’s future flock.
The Gospel Coalition