Top 10 Theology Stories Since 2000: Part 2

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0:00:00 – (Collin Hansen): In May of 2005, Don Carson says homosexuality will be to the 21st century as indulgences were to the 16th century. They will not be the issue that divides the church, but the presenting issue that divides the church. We’re talking top theological stories last 25 years. Every major mainline denomination split over this.

0:00:41 – (Sarah Zylstra): Hello, everyone, and welcome to Gospel Bound. I am not Colin Hanson, but I am here with him and with our friend and colleague Mike Graham, who is the program director at TGC’s Keller center for Cultural Apologetics. My name is Sarah Zylstra and I’m a journalist at the Gospel Coalition, and I am here today to ask the questions. Mike and Colin, it is great to see you again.

0:01:05 – (Collin Hansen): Let’s keep doing this, Sarah. We’re on a roll. Let’s keep going.

0:01:09 – (Sarah Zylstra): As our listeners of last episode know, we are halfway through a fascinating list. And this is the top 10 theological stories of the 2000s. I was about to say 2000s. That would be a lot of theological stories. Yeah. Of the 2000s. Life has changed dramatically for all of us in a lot of ways of the last 25 years. Thanks. Smartphones and social media changing views on sexuality and painful political polarization.

0:01:34 – (Sarah Zylstra): And we hear about all those things in the mainstream media or on our social media feeds. But what we hear about less, and what I’d argue is even more consequential, is these storylines of how our country’s relationship with God has changed and shifted since the 1990s. That has been significant and I think it affects all of these other stories. So here’s a quick recap from what we did last time. Number 10 on our list of top 10 theological stories was the global church leadership moves south. And by that we mean Africa South.

0:02:06 – (Sarah Zylstra): Number nine was denominations decline as non denominational churches rise. And maybe some of that is just denominational churches taking the denominational name off of their sign. Number eight is China cracks down following the fast growth of the church there. And we could also say that about other areas of the world, but China is the one that has been in the news the most. Seven is the great detourching, which is forcing or maybe opening up opportunities to different apologetic strategies for the church.

0:02:37 – (Sarah Zylstra): And number six was the Great awokening, which runs from Ferguson to Floyd and which changed a lot of ways that people think about things. Today. We’re going to finish up our list and we’re going to work our way from number five to number one. You guys ready for this?

0:02:51 – (Collin Hansen): As learned as I’ll ever be.

0:02:55 – (Sarah Zylstra): All right.

0:02:55 – (Collin Hansen): It’s my Idea. And it’s my list and I’m still daunted by it.

0:03:00 – (Sarah Zylstra): All right, let’s just take one bite of this. Yep. Colin, what’s number five? Tell us what number five is.

0:03:06 – (Collin Hansen): It’s a little worrisome when your number five is COVID 19 shutting the world down. That’s not number one. You got to wonder what the other four are going to be in here. I need to go back and give some context here. It’s fascinating what from history we choose to remember, what we choose to forget. This is. I think I remember first seeing this from Andy Crouch, which shout out to Andy as having the best early insight to COVID 19. That helped me and countless others during those days in 2020. But this was the biggest disruption in physical church meetings across the world since the Black death of the 14th century.

0:03:53 – (Collin Hansen): I mean, we’ve had wars, we’ve had other diseases, we’ve had flus, we’ve had all sorts of different stuff, but we’ve never had a disrupt like this. The churches physically meeting together. One thing I often will tell people, it’s one of those things not just looking for what happened, but what did not happen. It is the first major national tragedy in American history with no call for religious unity or meaning where, especially in those early days with President Trump and those press conferences that the high priests of our cultural interpretation and intercession were the scientists.

0:04:33 – (Collin Hansen): That was originally. Everybody looked, but you saw no. Part of it is because of the inability to gather. But there was no major push for coming together. No major. I mean, there was some of it which was undone by especially the response. Well, the death of George Floyd and the response to it that goes back to our earlier conversation. Because these two are very linked. That’s why they’re together. This top 10 list, they’re distinct, but.

0:04:57 – (Collin Hansen): But they’re linked. But there was no major push toward kind of a turn toward God or a turn toward intercession from religious leaders or let alone Christian leaders there. But then, as we’ve seen already with so many of these other stories, there was a major backlash. So scientists are held up as the great high priests intercede on our behalf. And yet then as more information comes out and the. The lying, the admitted confessed since then, lying from those same scientific leaders, things about masks, things about six feet apart, things that they just spoke confidently about that they did not understand.

0:05:38 – (Collin Hansen): I did a podcast earlier for Gospel bound on five years since COVID 19 shut the world down. I talked more about that there. But this has been a major catalyst for widespread institutional mistrust. And that affects church leaders, that affects our work at the Gospel Coalition, that affects everybody, that affects theologians, that affects how people learn. And also I think something that had been. I think it was Ross Douthit who said that. COVID 19, I can’t remember what he said. Was it like five years happened in one year?

0:06:14 – (Collin Hansen): Things that might have taken 10? Was it 10? 10, yeah. So a decade. A decade happens, yeah.

0:06:21 – (Mike Graham): Duthad said we had a decade’s worth of conversations in one year.

0:06:25 – (Collin Hansen): Yeah. So I suppose that probably includes Floyd then as well. But like 10 years of shifting toward online, being prime, of just everybody being forced to learn how to do zoom at the same time. I mean, just look at all the podcasts. My podcast started right, but this podcast started right before COVID 19. But look at that huge, huge growth afterward as well. So just the sense that the real action is happening online now, that might even be unwound.

0:06:57 – (Collin Hansen): I don’t know how AI is going to affect that, but that might even unwind in the days ahead. But that was a huge implication. And then just the last implication to think about has had huge theological effects in so many different ways. But it connects back to one of the earlier topics. This is something that really continued to divide the west from the East. And of course, a lot of this has to do with the way the disease came out of China and then efforts to be able to cover for how that disease originated, which still is not commonly determined as far as I know.

0:07:37 – (Collin Hansen): Plenty of people have strong theses and some stronger than others, but I don’t think that’s been officially acknowledged, as far as I know. But just a lot of that mistrust across the east and the west. And I alluded to this earlier with the broader dynamics with China, but significant response then, and I’m not necessarily saying that these are linked, but part of the broader separation between east and west would be Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the significant persecution by Russians toward Evangelical Baptist leaders across Ukraine.

0:08:14 – (Collin Hansen): There was just a sense that the world was descending into a chaos that we had not seen in literally more than 50. Well, I mean, we’re talking closer to 70 years at that point. So you see the largest land war in Europe since 1945. You then saw the largest murder of Jews since the Holocaust in 2023, on October 7th. So COVID 19 was not directly responsible, but was the most significant catalyst in a broader sense of destabilization, especially in the last five years of this 25 year period.

0:08:55 – (Collin Hansen): So when I’M talking to audiences about this. I just tell them, you can think about it in the aggregate, but I’ll just think about it in your personal life. I bet that COVID 19, as much as anything else on this list, changed something in a very concrete way in your life. Could be a good way, could be a negative way, but there’s no doubt that was not something that left any of us untouched.

0:09:22 – (Sarah Zylstra): Mike, do you have numbers for what it did to the church, like church attendance?

0:09:26 – (Mike Graham): There was definitely a spike in dechurching that was around that time. The attendance numbers that different denominations publish all show a precipitous drop in that time frame. Most have kind of done what they call regression to the mean. So whatever the denomination was doing after about three, four years, it was roughly kind of on that same path. So it does seem like most of the things that happened during that time weren’t necessarily permanent.

0:10:01 – (Mike Graham): And I think a lot of the churches that tried to pivot online, I think 90% of churches had some kind of online manifestation. I think most have not kind of stuck with at least the same modalities and those kinds of things. So it feels like more of a temporary disruption than a permanent one.

0:10:27 – (Sarah Zylstra): Yeah. Although, Colin, as you’re saying, you know, there’s probably something in your life that’s different. I bet there’s also something about your church. Right. Or like, maybe you do more Zoom meetings or you probably. My church is still live streaming. I think one person watches. Right. But you kind of got in the habit of like, well, I guess we now we live stream, just push this button and.

0:10:45 – (Mike Graham): Yeah, we do.

0:10:45 – (Collin Hansen): We do continuing education cohorts through the Gospel Coalition, because everybody knows how to use Zoom now. So what we found is that Zoom is no replacement whatsoever for regular ongoing education, especially for children. But it can be a really excellent supplement in a way that could put you directly in touch with the best teachers in an interactive format around the world. So it doesn’t replace anything.

0:11:12 – (Collin Hansen): There’s no widespread movement to say what we really need is to move elementary education online. There’s no movement to say we should be moving college education online in some way. That ten year experiment, Mike, might have killed the possibility of more shifting. 10 years in one year, killed the possibility of a lot more shifting toward basic education online. It’s clearly not something that’s very good, but it’s good as a supplement.

0:11:38 – (Collin Hansen): I just think back to the book that I did during that period called Rediscover Church with Jonathan Lehman, and when we were writing that book, right as all this was happening because it was motivated by this trend. We thought, we don’t know if people are gonna come back. People don’t even think anymore about how Mark Zuckerberg was gonna lead us all into the metaverse. We were all gonna have these online avatars. We were all gonna go to church.

0:12:02 – (Collin Hansen): There are church plants in the metaverse, and everybody saw that. They kind of look like those old Playmobil, like stick figure characters.

0:12:10 – (Mike Graham): They look like the Wii characters from the old Nintendo Wii, like the bowling games.

0:12:17 – (Collin Hansen): Speaking of the last 25 years, I have the. I have the music in my head now, like just kind of bouncing around.

0:12:25 – (Mike Graham): Like, Zuckerberg spent like tens of billions of dollars of meta’s. Meta’s good cash.

0:12:32 – (Collin Hansen): They changed their name. They changed their name to Meta and

0:12:37 – (Mike Graham): they blew it on that foolish metaverse.

0:12:40 – (Collin Hansen): So.

0:12:42 – (Mike Graham): And you remember all those Fortune 500 companies, they all said, oh, we’re going 100% work from home. And it’s like, how long did that last? It didn’t last very long. Everybody’s get back to work. Get back into the office or you’re fired.

0:12:55 – (Collin Hansen): Everybody can go. Started with Elon Musk. Everybody can go. Listen to the episode I did on Gospel Bound with David Bonson where we talk about this, where he’s anticipated this. So Bahnsen’s view on this when it came to work, that this idea that we’d be able to just all work from home was not going to happen. The productivity levels significantly declined. But in the same way those prophets saying, hey, it’s going to be great, all churches are going to be moving online, thankfully turned out to be wrong, because if anything, it’s reinforced the physicality, the embodied nature of the Christian life, and that is an irreducibly theological reality.

0:13:35 – (Collin Hansen): And COVID 19 helped remind us, for better or worse, that is the spread of this disease, the weakness of our bodies to be able to fight it off, but also the strength and also the significance, I guess, of what we lose when we don’t see other people physically and especially when we don’t gather together in worship. So no doubt. Massive story. COVID 19.

0:13:59 – (Sarah Zylstra): Yeah. Not a lesson that anybody who lived through that is going to probably ever forget of the.

0:14:05 – (Collin Hansen): Or want to relive.

0:14:06 – (Sarah Zylstra): Yeah. Or ever want to relive.

0:14:08 – (Collin Hansen): Once is enough.

0:14:11 – (Sarah Zylstra): So bookending Covid were Trump’s presidency. Sometimes it feels like he has been president forever, but really not the one that ran from 2016 to 2020. And then this one that we’re in currently, which will run from 2024-28. So why did you put Trump at number four?

0:14:27 – (Collin Hansen): Well, again, I mean, look at these stories just keep getting. They’re going to continue to get bigger and bigger. And so, you know, if we’re at 30,000ft, you’re going to continue to kind of elevate to see this, the significance, because how many different issues, theologically and otherwise, can you fold under? I guess, like you said, Sarah, some of it’s just President Trump’s direct influence. Some of it’s things that have happened around him.

0:14:56 – (Collin Hansen): Some of it’s just the fact that not only because he’s been president for so long, but in the public eye for so long, this is no doubt going to be considered the Trump era by historians. I don’t think that’s any dispute at all. But also just with the way he dominates media, the way he dominates thoughts, the way he dominates action. And that’s not just the United States. That’s around the world, the way everybody needs to react to him and the initiatives or things or tweets or whatever. So that’s part of why it feels like it’s been forever. And for people who are younger than us, this is the only president that they’ve known or remembered or certainly the only president they voted for. There aren’t that many in history that have been in three different elections voted for in there.

0:15:41 – (Collin Hansen): So. But let’s just name a few of the things that have flowed out of this. I think the most significant are related to the Supreme Court. And not every president gets to appoint a lot of Supreme Court justices. But you can go back to those really contentious Kavanaugh hearings. Those were uniquely shaped by President Trump, his resolve to not give in to removing him to the critics, and those were alleging different misdeeds against him. That was replacing Anthony Kennedy.

0:16:11 – (Collin Hansen): Anybody who’s been listening to my teaching for any period of time knows the significance of Kennedy as sort of America’s pop philosopher. You know, his descriptions of the sweet mystery of life and things like that. So in theological and philosophical terms, that was a massive replacement. And of course, Amy Coney Barrett in 2020, right toward the end, very significant, with long standing Supreme Court Justice. Of course, many cases long outlive the president who appointed them or the Senate who confirmed them. So those have huge implications. And I don’t think this is not specific to Trump, but it’s continued.

0:16:49 – (Collin Hansen): I just need to point this out. Sometimes I feel as though my job is just to be a witness to history. And just as a reminder of what happened, I met in January 2017 with a number of Christian college leaders at their invitation in Atlanta. And they, of course, like many of us, had expected Trump to lose to Hillary Clinton. The plan there. And Sarah, you’ve done the best reporting on this. I mean, I want to know what you remember from this time. But basically the idea was Christian colleges are going to get shut down. I think you’re the one, Sarah, who reported not just the removal of funding, but the literal basically like illegality of what was perceived to be discrimination.

0:17:32 – (Collin Hansen): What do you remember from that period, Sarah?

0:17:34 – (Sarah Zylstra): Yeah, what I remember is calling up, I think Hillsdale and Grove City are the colleges that don’t take funding. And basically like, let’s write a how to of what do you do when the government comes after you and you have to. You don’t get any funding at all, Pell Grants or any type of funding. And you’re just going to need to, like, privately fund your own education if

0:17:54 – (Collin Hansen): the government allows you to continue to exist when you’re functioning against how the law could be interpreted as being discriminatory.

0:18:04 – (Sarah Zylstra): Yeah. And well, yeah, beyond accreditation, will they take your teachers? Right, Gordon, and their teachers were unable to serve as student teachers in the public schools around there. Yeah, all kinds of stuff.

0:18:15 – (Collin Hansen): So one of the biggest stories by far has been the much stronger and strengthened religious liberty protections enacted primarily by the Supreme Court or kind of decided by the Supreme Court in this last decade. That’s a huge Legacy the last 25 years and a very positive development, one that has been assisted quite a bit by President Trump because of the Supreme Court appointees. Again, things were trending somewhat in that way without him, but definitely that’s been confirmed with him.

0:18:50 – (Collin Hansen): Of course, anytime you’re gonna talk about the Supreme Court, you’re gonna look at one of the major stories embedded in here. And that, of course, is the Dobbs decision, Roe v. Wad overturned in 2022, but is a theme that we keep coming back to. You have both the exuberance of Roe being overturned, something that a lot of us never thought could even be possible. But then also the shift in 2024 of President Trump and with much of the Republican Party in his wake, toward a pro choice position.

0:19:21 – (Collin Hansen): And then as we’ve been reporting, as Sarah, you’ve been reporting lately, I can safely say that there has been never been less interest in the pro life cause in the evangelical church in the 25 years that I’ve been doing this. We are at a low ebb. And as Sarah, you just reported recently for the first time in how long? I mean, when was the last time abortions were going up?

0:19:46 – (Sarah Zylstra): Yeah, I mean, they dropped. I think they hit the lowest point in 2017, and they started to creep up since then. But that’s happening globally.

0:19:54 – (Collin Hansen): Globally. So, yeah, it’s not just a Trump story and not just the United States story, but that’s been a significant development in here as well. Of course, the centering of immigration as the number one topic for Republican voters. And when you’re talking about Republican voters, the majority of those are evangelicals. So immigration becoming probably, I would argue, the most contentious social, cultural, theological issue that’s alive today inside the evangelical church and perhaps even in our broader culture.

0:20:31 – (Collin Hansen): That’s very much the case of how President Trump has shifted the Republican Party platform and policies there, not to mention all sorts of questions about enforcement and whatnot. But that’s been a huge shift in there. We’ve just been able to see when it comes to theological discourse, church unity, trust in institutions and things like that. You’ve seen with President Trump, a significant rise of populism that’s pushed out many urban and highly educated evangelicals, not only from church leadership, but also just within the Republican Party in general.

0:21:08 – (Collin Hansen): And so what you’ve seen, though, at the same time is, is more unity across the races, and some of this has really been changed by the recent developments on immigration, but more unity across the races among evangelicals when it comes to politics, especially on the lower end of the education and economic spectrum. And that’s certainly a major change from the earlier Bush administrations, change From Romney, from McCain’s coalitions and things like that. So that’s been a big development in different ways inside the church.

0:21:41 – (Collin Hansen): But I just want to just mention two meta trends that are definitely not resolved here before we move on and get to our top three. What we see in general continue under President Trump is a shift away from a view of liberty as something that frees us to do good, but a view of liberty that frees us to do whatever we want. I’m not saying that’s unique to President Trump. I’m not saying that’s unique to the Republican Party. That’s just kind of the American ethos.

0:22:13 – (Collin Hansen): But I think that that has continued to consolidate as the dominant view of what we of freedom, of liberty, and of what we’re striving toward as a society is the freedom to be able to tell everybody else, don’t tell me what to do. And you can see how this overlaps with COVID Right. So significant development there as well. And Then the last thing here, and I don’t know, Mike, if you want to add anything here, because we debate this among those at the Keller center, but with the rise of the much more assertive executive branch, and I don’t want to pretend as though that only happened under President Trump, that we’ve been moving that way.

0:22:52 – (Collin Hansen): I did a review for Books and Culture years ago about the entire 20th century was moving toward a stronger executive and President Obama did that, no doubt, very much strongly did that. And then, and then President Bush did earlier as well when it relates to things like national security and surveillance and war powers and whatnot. But it seems as though this more assertive executive branch has bolstered some arguments about post liberalism, including this is another major theological story that very much is a subset of the Trump era. The rise of Christian nationalism and the pursuit of a so called Christian prince or the effort to impose doctrinal decrees from the top down in a way across people or even Old Testament law across whether or not you subscribe to those views and outside of the church.

0:23:43 – (Collin Hansen): And so even right now in the pca, there’s a major theological debate about the relationship between the church and the state. So huge theological implications. My goodness. We could do whole episodes just about this part. But Mike, anything to clean up that I missed on that topic?

0:23:58 – (Mike Graham): No, I don’t think I have anything to add here. I think that was pretty well comprehensive.

0:24:02 – (Sarah Zylstra): You’re doing great, Colin. Yep.

0:24:04 – (Collin Hansen): Just need to gather my breath.

0:24:05 – (Sarah Zylstra): Yeah, you’re doing. That’s good. Speaking of top down, let’s talk about number three, Obergefell.

0:24:11 – (Collin Hansen): Oh man. I mean, let me just pause here, Sarah, and ask help. Take us back to the mindset of how would we describe. This is the largest. Mike, you mentioned the great d. Churching as the largest and most dramatic change in the church, church attendance and affiliation in American history. But the largest and fastest moral transformation in American history is the shift of acceptance of homosexuality and of gay marriage in particular.

0:24:46 – (Collin Hansen): We’re old enough, Sarah, to remember how this has changed. Help set the stage for how that. What that feels like, that change.

0:24:54 – (Sarah Zylstra): Yeah. What’s interesting about it is that you just don’t know what’s the decision that’s going to change everything. And it’s so far reaching. I’m even thinking in terms of the. The skyrocketing number of fatherless children. Right. So like not only taking apart marriage of a man and a woman so that you could marry someone of your same sex, but so that you didn’t have to marry anybody. Right. There’s just, like a lessening of any kind of.

0:25:20 – (Sarah Zylstra): Of social pressure around anything to do with sexuality and by extension, the family. Right. Like, raise your kids however you want, with whoever you want or don’t. Or, you know, like, there. There’s just anything that touches sexuality from abortion to then, like, I can remember whenever there was people who’d say, what about transgenderism? And everyone else laughed and like, what are you talking about? Clearly, that’s crazy. And then two years later, it was, like, totally plausible.

0:25:46 – (Sarah Zylstra): And so how quickly that shifted and how everything in that orbit just felt like it fell off a cliff.

0:25:51 – (Collin Hansen): Can there be a. Can it be a coincidence that ever since gay marriage was not just legalized, but then mandated across the country, 2015, a decision written, again by the aforementioned Anthony Kennedy, Is there any coincidence that we’ve been spending the entire time since then talking about the decline of marriage, the decline of interest in marriage, a decline of interest in raising children? This was not a decision that strengthened the institution of marriage.

0:26:23 – (Collin Hansen): It is a decision that not only redefined it, but then also relativized it as not important. That’s been the implication of it 100%. Not a rush toward an excitement, exuberance about the openness of it, but a recognition that there’s nothing special here to be pursuing. And also a de centering of it as an organizing social stage of life that is expected for the vast majority now. It’s sort of an option, if you feel like it.

0:26:58 – (Sarah Zylstra): Yes. And I think we can also trace along that same time period the decline of the ability to tell stories in Hollywood, because without that organizing principle, which had been underneath so many stories for so long, the storytelling got lost.

0:27:15 – (Collin Hansen): Rom coms have almost disappeared. That’s a major change that you would see if you dropped from the 1990s, an era of really significant rom coms into the 21st century. Almost disappeared. It’s just not. It would not have the same resonance. Though I do have to make an exception there for basically every Hallmark movie that’s an actual 25 or even die Hard.

0:27:35 – (Sarah Zylstra): Like, it’s an action movie, but the whole thing is organized around a relationship with his wife. Right. So, I mean, there’s a lot of action movies that have a rope of some sort of male, female relationship underneath it.

0:27:48 – (Collin Hansen): Yeah, yeah, yeah. They don’t go away entirely, but they do become de centered as a kind of norm. But I just want to point this out. This is a significant dimension of the Gospel Coalition’s history. And, you know, the first meeting of the Gospel Coalition. In 2005, Don Carson, Tim Keller convened these church leaders from around North America. They send out these dozens of invitations. Everybody says yes, they show up.

0:28:15 – (Collin Hansen): And in 2005, May 2005, this is right after President Bush has been reelected. He’s heading into his second year. The values voters, so called values voters, have created a permanent Republican coalition of suburban and ex urbanites. According to Karl Rove, anytime a political strategist says this, you just know he or she is wrong. If you don’t like the politics, just wait a while. Because let’s look in the last 25 years, how many things have.

0:28:44 – (Collin Hansen): How many things have changed? So this is the values voters election. Evangelicals are our ascendant. And in May of 2005, Don Carson says homosexuality will be to the 21st century as indulgences were to the 16th century. They will not be the issue that divides the church, but the presenting issue that divides the church. We’re talking top theological stories the last 25 years. Every major mainline denomination split over this.

0:29:22 – (Collin Hansen): They all split, they all declined, they all split. The last holdout, the Methodist Church, in terms of the largest denominations, that was because going back to number 10, that’s because the way the Methodist Church votes is a global vote. So global South Asians, but especially Africans, kept the United States conservative on its historic beliefs on sexuality. But at the same time, there was no possibility of Americans being able to wrest control of the declining, to go back to the great dechurching story of institutions in the Methodist Church, the seminaries and dominational agencies and things like that.

0:30:06 – (Collin Hansen): So they were stuck in this stalemate and they finally reached a settlement that produced the global Methodist Church, which in and of itself is a significant development in these last 25 years. But Carson could see that at a time when. And just keep this in mind, I ask my students this all the time and they don’t have a clue. Gay marriage would be banned in California in 2008. Three years later, banned in California.

0:30:32 – (Collin Hansen): The votes were. There was a sense. This is what shifted. There was a sense at the start of this 25 year period that we evangelicals represented a silent majority who were conservative in their values, especially on things like homosexuality. That is not remotely the case 25 years later. That’s even a delusion that seems like it’s practically from black and white eras. That’s how dramatic this transformation was. And almost all of it happened not just gradually over time, but basically in a period between 2008 and 2013 leading up then to the 2015 decision.

0:31:09 – (Collin Hansen): That is also very much the effect of the Obama administration specifically, and Obama pushing that in his second term. I also have to point out to people that the first incoming president who was very proudly pro gay was Donald Trump. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, both in 2008, were against gay marriage. I mean, we all kind of knew that they weren’t really, but that was their official position because they knew that’s what the voters would demand.

0:31:36 – (Collin Hansen): That is how much things have changed with just huge implications that are easy for us to be able to take for granted. Now, I do think about the positive, though, here, and this makes me reflect. I don’t know if you guys have any thoughts on this, but I think about the ministry that we do with the Gospel Coalition. And at one point it felt like every day there was some other Christian leader who was leaving, like abandoning biblical orthodoxy on sexuality or leaving the church or something like that.

0:32:11 – (Collin Hansen): And every time they would. There’d just be this major news story and it would feel very despairing. And, boy, that hardly ever happens anymore. I mean, that doesn’t seem to happen very often now. It could be a result of, if you had that view, you’re already out of the church or something like that. It could be part of the broader great de. Churching dynamic in there, but that just isn’t so. I don’t know, Sarah, you’re always looking for the positive side of things. And I would say the fact that there has been no widespread evangelical abandonment of institutional views on sexuality, that is not something we should take for granted. It didn’t necessarily look that way.

0:32:57 – (Sarah Zylstra): And I don’t even. Having a presenting issue like homosexuality or indulgences isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Right. To judge or to, you know, be able to tell the fruit from something,

0:33:10 – (Collin Hansen): to expose the underlying issues, to bring the problems to a head. Yeah, absolutely.

0:33:17 – (Mike Graham): To bring two of our top 10 stories together and not to just, you know, end this particular one on a sad note. But it is a sad note for me. And it’s the way that the racial conversation in America and the sexual conversation in America, I think, got unhelpfully bundled. And the bundling of those two conversations. I think in many ways it really hurt the ability for evangelicals to process both situations from a helpful standpoint and left people, I think, in a way where a conversation that was probably.

0:34:02 – (Mike Graham): I think there was conversations that were going in a helpful direction, but I think the conversation got cut short and it got truncated. And I think a lot of that was because I think people in the broader progressive society wanted to bundle those two things because one of the fastest ways to win over the country is to basically say, well, if you don’t sign on with this, this, and this, then you’re racist.

0:34:37 – (Mike Graham): And these are one and the same issue. And I don’t see them as being one and the same issue. They’re not. But I think the bundling of those two issues really created a lot of complexity for evangelical leaders. And I think it cut a conversation that had some productivity there to it, but it definitely cut it short. And that conversation just crash landed. And I don’t really know if we’ve recovered from that.

0:35:09 – (Mike Graham): I’m grateful that evangelicals have held the line on traditional sexual ethics, but I think one of the things that’s been a casualty of that has been that broader conversation about race.

0:35:22 – (Collin Hansen): Boy, Mike, that’s a really astute point. And that allows us to then go back to what we talked about in the previous episode, the Great Awokening. Because that originally is a racial category. Correct. I mean, that originates out of African American culture about being awoken to the dynamics of racial injustice, and sometimes has the implications that you mentioned go further down into critical race theory and whatnot. That’s the basic idea.

0:35:50 – (Collin Hansen): But now when you talk about being woke, it could apply to a million different things, but specifically, it often has a corollary to sexuality and especially things like lgbtq. So that’s. Exactly. It becomes a label that crosses that spectrum and makes conversations really confusing. It makes it difficult for you to obey. I think what the Bible teaches us about partiality along with what the Bible teaches us about sexuality, makes it hard because the cultural cross currents are moving against each other.

0:36:26 – (Collin Hansen): And this is why, just looking back at some of the resources we’ve produced during this time, this is why Rebecca McLaughlin’s book the Secular Creed has been so helpful and why it’s been so popular. It’s just been a best seller for us. Because she walks better than anybody else I know walks through. To be able to delineate between what the Bible teaches on race and what the Bible teaches on sexuality in ways that are certainly not handled well by our political parties or our media or other cultural.

0:36:55 – (Collin Hansen): Cultural leaders.

0:36:56 – (Sarah Zylstra): Yeah. That bundling makes me think there’s all kinds of things that got bundled. Right. So those conversations where you before have both political parties or people from different churches a lot closer and at least able to sort through nuances of things, and all of this got worse because of our screens. So number two on your list, Colin, driven by the iPhone. Our lives shifted digital.

0:37:21 – (Collin Hansen): Yeah, well, Mike knows this because we work on these projects all the time. But when you’re trying to assess the significance of a cultural change, and let’s just take something for example, let’s just take two examples here. One would be why would fertility collapse across nearly every country around the world at almost the same time? You can have theological conversations about this, you can have political, you can have economic conversations about this, but one of the ways you have to look at this is, is through technological adoption.

0:38:05 – (Collin Hansen): And that’s why we look back and say, well, on the one hand, we’re not seeing nearly as many teen pregnancies as we saw before. We’re not seeing nearly as much drunk driving. That’s positive. On the negative side, that’s because people aren’t having sex very much anymore and they’re not hanging out with each other anymore. Why? Because they’re on their phones. Not only on their phones, you can also add streaming services, which is another thing that’s new these last 25 years.

0:38:36 – (Collin Hansen): But it is primarily the phones. Now, that’s one issue. And the other issue you can look at, which we’ve covered, and Sarah, you’ve done a great podcast on this would definitely be the mental health of young women in particular. And we know that Gene Twenge, Jonathan Haidt especially, have been the lead advocates for recognizing a connection between this widespread decline in teenage female mental health that corresponds to the adoption of the iPhone, invented in 2007, but not widespread, adopted especially among young women until 2012.

0:39:13 – (Collin Hansen): Now, I was just teaching on this recently at a church outside of Atlanta, and I was talking, introducing them to the terms of rapid onset gender dysphoria, social contagions. How can an idea take something like in the course of a few short years that, say, 5 to 10% of the American population would identify as LGBTQ. How does that number go in a few years to 40% of young women identifying that way, and then this is noteworthy, and in the last two years, declining dramatically? Again, well, that’s the theory of social contagion, which is the way an idea will spread dramatically through social networks in a way that produces widespread effect. But again, how does that happen?

0:40:08 – (Collin Hansen): It doesn’t happen without the communication. It doesn’t happen without a social imaginary that you inhabit that is driven by these perceptions, shaped by your device, which occupies this overwhelming role in your life. So when you’re talking about any theological conversation in the last 25 years, it is very difficult to conceive of how it has not been Shaped by the iPhone, which has given you the rise of YouTube, it’s given you the rise of podcasts, it’s given you the rise of audiobooks.

0:40:46 – (Collin Hansen): A lot of these things are really positive. Of course, we wouldn’t be wasting all of this. We’d be wasting all this time if we didn’t care about that. That’s how most of us, most people are engaging with us right now. And we’re thankful for that. Good things can spread, just like the negative things can spread. But there are issues underneath issues. And the iPhone is, is the most significant invention of our last 25 years that has the most explanatory power for not only our theological discourse in the church, but any number of broader civilizational level trends in shifting plausibility structures. That’s the iPhone. Sarah, again, you’ve done so much research on this.

0:41:30 – (Collin Hansen): What are some of the other effects that you see?

0:41:32 – (Sarah Zylstra): Yeah, you know, what I was just thinking about as you were talking was another thing Jean Twenge points out in her book Generations is that you think generations are shaped by events or something big that happens, a war or nine, 11 or something, but really they’re shaped by technology. Which makes me think back to. We were just mentioning the number of abortions that are rising around the world, not for a political reason, but for a technological reason. Now we have the pill and it’s so much easier and it’s so much cheaper and you can just do it in your own house.

0:42:01 – (Sarah Zylstra): And so the reason abortions went down for all those years had almost nothing to do with any restrictions that were passed at the state level or who is in the White House. And the reason they’re going back up doesn’t have anything to do with it either. So I was just thinking about how technology shifts.

0:42:17 – (Collin Hansen): We covered this earlier, but. And I just have to remind us sometimes of some basic, basic facts. Do we think that the number of minority men being shot by police officers, especially in unjust ways, do we think that that problem has gotten a lot worse in the last 25 years? We have a lot more awareness of it. But do we think that the numbers have increased a lot or the injustice has increased a lot?

0:42:48 – (Collin Hansen): Not likely. It’s probably more plausible that our awareness is what’s really changed, which has a lot of positive effect, because now we can do something about it. We can reform police. We can finally hold people to account. We can put them in jail. We can. There’s all sorts of positive things, but it also changes our sense that the world is getting a lot worse. I’m more physically threatened. I mean, just thinking about how many violent, horrible deaths are we subjected to having to watch nearly live.

0:43:23 – (Collin Hansen): If you just want to be on your phone at all, I mean, I can be looking for recruiting updates for Northwestern football and boom, all of a sudden I’m watching a guy get executed in the streets. That’s a different experience and a very disorienting one. Mike, how do we even cope with that?

0:43:44 – (Mike Graham): There’s so much complexity of when I think about the first half of my life and how knowledge was acquired, how knowledge was acquired was primarily in the classroom and through books and the second half of my life, you know, and at this point in my life, it’s. It’s almost like half was in, you know, one century and, you know, a little bit more than half in this century, you know, now what was embodied in physical is largely dis, you know, disembodied in digital.

0:44:14 – (Mike Graham): And so, you know, most of the learning that I’m happening is being mediated on screens. And even within this century, the evolution of that is shifting rapidly. So most of the source material for the last, for the first 22 years of this century was primarily occurring through primary sources. I’m reading ebooks, I’m reading PDFs, I’m reading articles, I’m reading essays, I’m watching videos, so on and so forth.

0:44:46 – (Mike Graham): But then in the last three years, there’s been a big shift there to artificial intelligence with the large language models. And now what was primary source material is now secondary source material. And so what stands between me and knowledge is basically massive statistics and massive compute that statistics plus words equals what comes out of the large language models. And so it’s not that there’s some big conspiracy or whatever that Silicon Valley is trying to, you know, do this, this to us or that to us.

0:45:24 – (Mike Graham): But there’s a sense in which Silicon Valley are now the high priests of epistemological knowledge. And as people move away from Google Search, which would put you in back into primary sources, now, they’re just going to get summaries that gives you a statistical distillation average of all the stuff that it’s been trained on, good, bad, and everything in between. The greater complexity to and related to AI is it’s not like AI is new, because the same technology that kind of drove.

0:46:01 – (Mike Graham): We’ve had AI in our pockets for years. When you go back to 2010, when Meta introduced PageRank, the first algorithm on the Facebook timeline, it’s not that different of a technology that was kind of mediating what it is that we saw. So these are not new things and new trends, but the challenge is moving forward is the ways in which we’ve become siloed, because attention is money. And almost all these tech companies are publicly traded.

0:46:38 – (Mike Graham): And the ones that aren’t are trying to. Trying to become publicly traded. And so when attention and money are the same thing, and you have shareholders and you have to feed those shareholders money, then, you know, every. Every tech company is trying to get more and more of your attention. Well, how do they get more and more of your attention? Well, they need to show you things that you want to see.

0:47:03 – (Mike Graham): And what that does is that incentivizes technology not from a truth orientation, it incentivizes things from an attention orientation. And the problem with that is that humans are fallen and broken. And so in order for the tech companies to make money, they have to do things that actually push us further into our depravity. And so this presents real challenges for the future of knowledge, for the future of our faith.

0:47:34 – (Mike Graham): And, I mean, if we really want to bring this thing full circle to a number of different threads, let me tie a couple knots for us and put a bow on this. Okay, so we talked about fertility, and we’ve talked about Gen Z quite a bit. Okay, well, what happens, you know, and we’ve talked about institutions and distrust and the rising distrust in institutions. These have been all things that we’ve discussed in this top 10. All right, let me bring all these threads together.

0:48:00 – (Mike Graham): Okay, so as the distrust in institutions has risen and as people have increasingly gone for their information diet, where they go to seek out knowledge, intentionally or unintentionally, they go to highly individualistically, algorithmically controlled methods, whether that’s AI or through algorithms and social media, they’re increasingly seeing things that are what they want to hear. And so people increasingly go down highly individualistic rabbit holes.

0:48:36 – (Mike Graham): And so what happened in the past is that men and women often did not diverge too much ideologically or even politically. They often, you know, movements one way or the other, they were done in parallel, like schools of fish. But that has changed in the last 10 to 12 years with the era of smartphones, social media, and now AI. And so you have young women who have one very, very specific type of media diet that trends one way, and now you have young men whose media diet trends a very different way.

0:49:14 – (Mike Graham): And the reason why those things didn’t work that way in the past was because institutions, physical institutions, had a mediating influence, and men and women would move together and they, you know, whatever the ebb and flow and the tide of men and women, they would still move together because they were still a part of those physically mediated institutions. But now in this anti institutional era, in this era where everybody’s information diet is completely individualized, you know, it’s, we’re going back to the era of the judges where everybody just does what’s right in their own eyes.

0:49:51 – (Mike Graham): So young men are moving one way, young women are moving the other way. And now this impacts marriage rates, it’s going to impact fertility, it’s going to impact the, you know, voting patterns. And all of these things from a demographic standpoint are going to get very

0:50:06 – (Collin Hansen): interesting and then add sycophancy. You talk about this in the AI Christian benchmark. The idea that AI gives us what we want to hear, it’s not giving us the facts, it’s giving us summaries of what we expect it to be able to hear. So that’s exacerbated in here. And I just look back as we head toward the number one issue here. Just there’s so many things that they push in so many different directions. And I think we’ve handled, like you said there, Mike, a lot of the complexity of this and seeing you pull one thread and then 20 more follow in there, that’s what makes a story rise to that level of number two of being that big. But in this online shift, just one more thing to be able to add here is the role that the online world has played in relating to a lot of the abuse scandals of the last 25 years.

0:51:05 – (Collin Hansen): And I go back again thinking about the great awokening, thinking about these officer involved shootings of African American men. Was there a huge increase? No, but our perception has changed and hopefully our ability to try to change it. That’s the ideal. Similarly, do we think that priests, and unfortunately it’s not limited to Catholic priests by any means, do we think that that problem started in the year 2000?

0:51:35 – (Collin Hansen): Obviously not. Do we think that it got worse in the year 2000 and since then? I don’t think that’s even very likely either. But how is our awareness of the problem changed dramatically? That is because as you go back to the Boston Globe 2002 Spotlight Series, there have been priests who were, who were, I mean, brought up on charges and put in jail for this. But you wouldn’t find it in your newspaper or you would see it. You could see it, but you’d have to find it buried in a very large newspaper. Another thing that’s disappeared last 25 years.

0:52:10 – (Collin Hansen): But then with Spotlight, the Internet, you can now see it anywhere you go and anywhere around the world. And that’s now true of any given controversy. We’ve alluded to this already, but that is a major shift of how every single theological issue and challenge in the Church can be immediately imputed to the whole. And that underlines so many different assumptions. So, Mike, I think you do a great job there of just laying out the way that the shift toward the digital creates an entirely different social imaginary that transforms what we regard to be plausible, good, bad, in ways that are shaped.

0:52:54 – (Collin Hansen): And we are shaped then in ways that we are not actively comprehending because we’re receiving them as simply a reflection of the world. But the reflection we have is Narcissus, it turns out the reflection is us and what we want to see, or worse, what we fear the most. That’s the real danger here. And you have got to fight back against that. And we try at the Gospel Goshen to fight back against that by telling all these positive stories of how God’s at work in the world through what Sarah does.

0:53:26 – (Collin Hansen): But we also try to do this by going back to what you said, Mike, which is to focus on the mediating institutions, the community, the family, the church. These have been ordained for our good and that’s why they’re so necessary. Because that will allow us then to come together and not to be subject to the whims of the ever changing algorithm and the device in our pockets

0:53:51 – (Sarah Zylstra): and give us relationship that is real and healthy. Yeah, that’s good. I think this is a huge story. Honestly, Colin, I thought this was gonna be number one. The way that digital life has changed us over the last. Since we were in college, it’s been huge. But I think that was my chronological snobbery because I’m taking. I was thinking about what was urgent rather than what was important. And your number one is actually not a new story.

0:54:18 – (Sarah Zylstra): And I think a lot of people maybe even would be surprised at how old it was. So why did. What did you pick and why? For number one?

0:54:26 – (Collin Hansen): Yeah, it’s 9 11. So here’s why it’s 9 11. Now let me give you the case for why maybe the phones should have been first.

0:54:35 – (Mike Graham): Okay.

0:54:37 – (Collin Hansen): I think just think about this. Imagine if 911 happened today. What would Twitter do with that? What would Reddit do with that? What would AI do with that? Sometimes I wonder if we could have survived that. I mean, I mean that literally. I don’t know what we would have done to tear each Other apart through that or just all of the wildest conspiracy theories exploding on us at the exact same time that we’re all just trying to come to terms with what we have just watched happen.

0:55:15 – (Collin Hansen): So the kind of mass trauma experienced by something one of the first. I mean, there have been other bad things that we’ve seen happen. We’ve seen space shuttles blow up, which happened also in the last. I mean it’s happened a couple times, unfortunately, of course, but we’ve seen bad things happen before. We’ve seen things reported almost live. Think about the Vietnam War as an example, or the Tet offensive in 68. Whatnot, but nothing quite like the experience of what we watched so many of us watched in 9 11.

0:55:51 – (Collin Hansen): When you look back in the last 25 years, if you asked people what’s the one thing that you would cite as the where were you when it’s got to be 9 11? Covid19 what was the first moment you realized the world was going to shut down? I can remember that too. You guys probably can as well. But the number one is definitely 9 11. When we are, Lord willing, if it gives us 80 years, we’re still going to be talking about where were you on September 11, 2001 and how did that change your life?

0:56:23 – (Collin Hansen): So that’s just kind of the broader scope there. But I want to drill down into a couple different applications of this. When you’re at that 30,000 foot view and then when you keep rising, you keep rising to bigger picture, you need to zoom out to history. And when you look at the past and then you use the past to come through our time period, that is 25 years, our lifetimes, then you look forward, you see what was the big story back then, that was the big story today, that will be the big story in the future.

0:56:55 – (Collin Hansen): Is it not the relationship and the conflict between Christianity and Islam? Because it’s not atheism that is growing and that is going not in the global perspective. It’s a Western phenomenon. It’s not growing. I mean, of course it’s a communist phenomenon as well, but with significant implications in China, but not so much in post Soviet world. So it’s not atheism, it’s not communism, it’s not Hinduism, which is not a converting religion.

0:57:28 – (Collin Hansen): It’s largely an Indian phenomenon. We talked about Hindu nationalism. It’s not Buddhism. I mean you keep coming. It’s not Mormonism. It’s grown a lot, but it’s not taking over. So what is going to be the dominant block formation of how People organize well, there’s going to be a world that’s been largely shaped and continued to be shaped by Christianity, and there’s a world that’s been shaped by Islam.

0:57:59 – (Collin Hansen): And those are going to come in conflict in part because of their similarities. These are three of the great monotheistic religions to go along with Judaism, but also their dramatic substantial differences. Submission at the heart of Islam and grace at the heart of Christianity. One of the most significant books I read during this time period was by Joseph Henrich at the Harvard University, the Weirdest People in the World, Western educated, industrial, rich and democratic.

0:58:28 – (Collin Hansen): And the framing of our entire civilization as having been formed over the course of 1500 years by Christian practices and assumptions, namely around the family and the community and the neighborhood, just like we just, we just talked about in the last one. But what are those parts of the world that have never been shaped in the same way by fundamental Christian assumptions about freedom, about organization, about community, about family?

0:58:57 – (Collin Hansen): It’s obviously the Islamic places. And then going forward, what do we see as the kind of the major dispute across Western countries today was immigration. And it’s different for us in the United States because most of our immigrants come from Central and South America. And that, of course, are largely Christian places. But that’s not the case in Europe. So when we consider the implications in this next generation beyond, it seems as though, and I talked about this in my secularism podcast for gospel events, it seems like we need a re encounter with Christianity or we will see some kind of continued growth or beyond from Islam.

0:59:41 – (Collin Hansen): So that seems to be when we really zoom out furthest in history, when we really get the highest elevation, and then we come to a specific event that had that kind of mass trauma effect of the wherewith you. I think that’s why it needs to be 911 as the most significant theological story. Now, let me just add one more bit that explains what’s the further theological element here. I’ve shared this before.

1:00:07 – (Collin Hansen): It’s not original to me. I’ve seen it from Tim Keller and many others. But the shift that you started us with, Sarah, the shift that frames the entire great dechurching of what was different in 2000 from what was different in 2025, is a story in part about the shift from the world of the 1990s was a post communist period where for decades the person who was the model American was somebody who was not a communist.

1:00:37 – (Collin Hansen): Namely, they were a believer in God, not an atheist. Okay? That’s the model American. So the enemy American, the enemy that we need to oppose internally and externally. Is the atheist the communist since 9 11. That and largely because of 9 11, you saw that shift. You see the rise of the new atheism is very much a post 911 phenomenon. The broadening. I mentioned that shift in the Bush administration in 2005.

1:01:06 – (Collin Hansen): What was a major factor labeling everybody who held a biblical view on sexuality to be a, quote, fundamentalist. And what are fundamentalists? They are those people who take their religion so seriously and are so intent on imposing it on everyone else that they would even fly planes into buildings. So Mike, you talked about how the great awokening conflates race and sexuality. This is the conflation of 911 with sexuality.

1:01:34 – (Collin Hansen): So why was the pump primed for us to be able to shift so quickly on homosexuality? Because anybody who argue was a fundamentalist and fundamentalists are the people who fly planes into buildings. It’s Westboro Baptist Church, which I alluded to earlier in there as well. So look at all of the implications. And then one Last one is 911 triggered. It brought the theological question of theodicy. Why does God allow evil?

1:02:01 – (Collin Hansen): Of course, because of what we experienced with that. I mean, that’s such a traumatic event that we have to be able to cope with. We have to understand where is God in a world with this kind of evil. Do you guys remember what happened then just a few years later? The Southeast Asian tsunami. Then you have Hurricane Katrina, 2005. There’s that 2005 again. And Mass culture wide questions about theodicy where Christians were very much on the defensive, pushed by the new atheists who were dominating the best seller lists at the time, saying that a good God would never allow all these things to happen. Therefore we can’t trust God and we certainly can’t trust his.

1:02:42 – (Collin Hansen): His teachers here on earth. So that’s my case for why I think that is at the top of this list. And again, it’s a long time back, but even though we don’t think about it every day, it doesn’t have that kind of ever present effect like the smartphone does. I think it’s underneath a lot of what we’re experiencing. And I think you could easily look at the rest of our lifetimes and say I will still be a dominant story for as long as we live.

1:03:10 – (Sarah Zylstra): Mike, do you agree with him? Do you think that’s number one?

1:03:12 – (Mike Graham): Yeah. No. The reason why for me is because it deals with civilizations. What you have is a clash of two very different civilizations. And beneath them is religion for both, obviously the civilizational religion in Continental Europe is more in disrepair and looks different than what it does in even the UK or, you know, or in North America. But yeah, I mean, you have a clash of civilizations. This is also the same reason why, you know, at numerous points in this top 10 list, the east and West and, you know, China and, you know, and USA peace has come up a number of times in a different ways because it’s civilizational in nature.

1:04:02 – (Mike Graham): And so these things are, these are massive trends. One of the things that, Colin, that you’ve talked about at a couple different places is when we’re doing cultural analysis, a lot of cultural analysis happens in kind of the kiddie pool shallowness. And what we need is to have a more kind of deep sea approach where we’re going all the way down to the seafloor in, you know, in very deep bodies of water.

1:04:35 – (Mike Graham): And so for me, you know, it doesn’t get any more deep than when we talk about clashes between civilizations, because that is water that is always going to be there, you know, and, and we’ve got to be able to reckon with how those things impact and, you know, play behind the scenes in almost every, everything that we do. The hard part about, you know, civilizational challenge, you know, civilizational friction, is that it’s often invisible.

1:05:04 – (Mike Graham): You know, we’re not thinking about the ocean floor, but that water is there and it’s really, really important. And it’s some of the most important cultural analysis that we do. And that’s why we, we do stuff like these, you know, this top 10 list for, you know, of the last 25 years, because you are not doing cultural analysis until you get all the way down to the ocean floor. So much of what counts for cultural analysis today is basically splashing around at the surface of, you know, whatever happened or whatever we saw on the Internet or, you know, whoever got upset with, you know, who about, you know, something that really isn’t news.

1:05:43 – (Mike Graham): This is news. 911 is news. I will remember exactly where I was when that happened, you know, for the rest of my life. And so for me, 911 is 100% number one because it’s, it’s civilizational in nature. And look, I mean, there’s a lot of people who are going to be listening to this who weren’t even born, not alive, you know, and they have no memory of that. And so this is very, you know, if you’re listening to this, like, you know, go talk to your mom and dad about, you know, and your, you know, if your grandma and grandpa, you know, about where they were. And what were their experiences like?

1:06:14 – (Mike Graham): And same for your pastor?

1:06:17 – (Collin Hansen): Well, just a couple things real quickly to wrap up on this one. We’ve seen these historic Christian communities across the Middle east, many of them decline, some of them entirely disappearing. That’s a direct consequence of 911 and of course especially then the US led invasion of Iraq in 2003 ordered by President Bush. On top of that, you also have the broader regional instability of the Middle east precipitated by the Iraq War, leading to things like the Syrian Civil War.

1:06:50 – (Collin Hansen): The Syrian Civil War is the major impetus for the mass migration into Europe, leading to the current debates about immigration that are become maybe the most pressing issue right now in politics across the West. So even we could pull all these different threads and find other specific things in there as well.

1:07:11 – (Sarah Zylstra): Those are all pretty dark. Is there any bright spot or way that you can see God that worked through 9 11?

1:07:18 – (Collin Hansen): You know what’s great about asking about that, Sarah? And I appreciate that something that 911 has helped me to think through is the nature of divine providence. This is a theological list, after all. And I think not only about what God allows that we see, but also what he prevents that we never even know about or never even think about. And you, of course, Sarah, you covered the 911 attacks. Looking back at an anniversary, and it was the first episodes of a recorded podcast, right?

1:07:54 – (Mike Graham): Yep.

1:07:55 – (Collin Hansen): Looking at the 20th anniversary, is that right?

1:07:58 – (Sarah Zylstra): Mm.

1:07:59 – (Collin Hansen): Yeah. So I think you could see what I saw, which was first of all, there were not other attacks. There hasn’t been anything in the United States on that kind of scale since then. New York City did not empty in many ways, just in terms of day to day life. Of course the loss of life was horrific, though thankfully not as horrific as we all thought it would be at the time. Still very bad. But in some ways COVID 19 ended up being more long term disruptive to New York City because that was a ground zero in the United States for that.

1:08:41 – (Collin Hansen): But then you also see, and this is why I write books about history and I like to think about big ideas and like to learn from different leaders through history. But when I was working on my book on Tim Keller that I’ve revised and updated recently for paperback re release, I just was able to think very much about how we wouldn’t really have known his ministry or thought about that ministry without the spotlight that was provided by 911 and the rallying across the country toward the people of New York specifically.

1:09:18 – (Collin Hansen): And so the worst tragedies will, as we often see, they draw out the worst in people, but they also bring out the best. They also lead people to ask really hard and necessary questions. They wake us up from our, from our slumbers. And so God is doing, I mean, we’ve heard many people say this before. He’s doing a million things at once. And maybe we’re aware of a few of them and that’s even including the worst tragedies, but that’s one that I would identify. What would you add, Sarah? I mean, again, you’re the one who’s done the deep dive reporting on this.

1:09:54 – (Sarah Zylstra): I would add maybe a question because I’m not as familiar with this as I should be, but I know after 911 there was kind of a rush toward New York City with funds, but also with church planters and kind of a drawing of church planting toward the city. And I wonder how much that played in the next. I guess there was a wave, I guess you would call it of the Acts 29. But all kinds of people, the SBC creating send to city, I mean redeemer

1:10:22 – (Collin Hansen): and city to city would be primary.

1:10:23 – (Sarah Zylstra): Right. And it was a time of people doing the hardest ministry, which is church planting in the hardest areas, which are urban centers. And so it just felt like that played a role there.

1:10:35 – (Collin Hansen): Well, I think you’re right about that, Sarah. I think the spotlight on urban America and New York in particular definitely changed people’s perceptions. There was a lot more sympathy toward people who lived there as opposed to especially what had been inherited from the 1980s. And so I remember getting to a point where people I lived with in other parts of the country and my wife and I did live out there outside of New York for the 10 year anniversary, but living in other different places. There was a time when if you said, I’m going to go try to start this thing in New York, like when Tim Keller did it in the 1980s when people would say, oh no, that’s a bad idea, I would never do that.

1:11:12 – (Collin Hansen): Then all of a sudden, especially through the growth of Redeemer, growth of a lot of those church plants and Keller’s ministry and things like that, people would then say, oh, I’m so jealous of you. You get to be there, you get to go to these churches, you get to be able to see that. And, and I haven’t. I mean I’ve talked about this and written about this as well, but I don’t think you can separate the young ISIS reformed movement from 9 11.

1:11:36 – (Collin Hansen): I think there was a shift, especially among the millennial generation and some of Gen X, those who were in college just after college, those people that you’ve covered, they were at one day 2000 with John Piper there in Tennessee. They were in school watching these things. There was very much a sense of seriousness, of purpose, of God is God and he demands everything or I shouldn’t be messing around.

1:12:07 – (Collin Hansen): I mean it was just very much a sobering, I guess is the way to put it. And so then all these hard questions coming, you needed a robust theology to be able to respond to them. Well, of all things Reformed theology will give you, it’s a pretty good theodicy there. So yeah, you can see the rise of the new atheism. You can also see the rise of the young, restless Reformed. You can also see the rise of New York City church planting. And if we just want to look very narrowly at the church scene in New York City, it’s very clear. Tim Keller documented this very clear huge growth of the evangelical church in the couple decades between 911 and COVID 19, which of course was really tough for churches in New York. So yeah, definitely some positives and do appreciate you bringing us back to that, Sarah.

1:12:58 – (Sarah Zylstra): I think that’s a great place to end us thinking about the providence of God and the hand of God over the last 25 years through things we never saw coming to bring good out of things that looked only dark and and to be always, always surprising us, I guess right of like, oh, here’s the next thing that that’s coming around the bend that he is working out for good. And what an amazing thing that we serve a God who works everything for the good of those who love Him.

1:13:28 – (Sarah Zylstra): So thank you so much to those of us, those of you who listened, thank you so much to Mike and Colin for spending your time chatting with us us today. Colin, thanks for being on Gospel Bound.

1:13:38 – (Collin Hansen): Glad to be here. I love it. I’ll stick around for a little while longer. Keep doing this. Thanks, Sarah. Thanks, Mike. Thanks for listening to this episode of Gospel Bound. For more interviews and to sign up for my newsletter, head over to tgc.org Rate and Review Gospel Bound on your favorite podcast platform so others can join the conversation. Until next time. Remember, when we’re bound to the gospel, we abound in hope.