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Existential Crisis and the Antidote: Guest Column

Aug 19, 2026John StonestreetChristianityChristianity

A 2026 study found that one-third of Americans are currently experiencing an existential crisis of meaning, including 39% of Millennials and an alarming 52% of Gen Z.

Today on Breakpoint, author and professor Dr. Thaddeus Williams has some thoughts on what’s causing the catastrophic loss of meaning today and how the person of Jesus Christ provides what the world needs most.

If we want to speak meaning into our cultural moment, with its epidemic levels of felt meaninglessness, let us run a short thought experiment.

Paul tells us in Colossians 1:16 that all things were created both by Jesus and for Jesus. In Romans 11:36 we see that from Christ and through Christ and to Christ are all things, to whom all glory is due. Theologian Colin Gunton notes that “It is not therefore something which holds things together, but someone,” and that Someone is Jesus.

In our thought experiment let us assume for a moment that the resurrected Person of Jesus is not the ultimate focal point of meaning, what then?

Dr. Loyal Rue, an avowed atheist, helps us run the experiment. In a famous lecture called “The Noble Lie” delivered to the American Academy for the Advancement of Science, Dr. Rue offers us three possibilities for finding meaning. First, each individual can become the centerpoint of meaning for his own universe of personal fulfillment. Rue calls this “the madhouse option,” which abandons all hope for social cohesion. Second, the State can make itself the centerpoint of meaning in an otherwise meaningless cosmos. Rue calls this “the totalitarian option” where all individuality and freedom are lost. Third, we can say that the universe has meaning even though it doesn’t. Rue calls this “the Noble Lie,” which “deceives us, tricks us, compels us beyond self-interest.” In Rue’s bleak trilemma, either the Me destroys the We, the We destroys the Me, or the Lie saves them both, but only by destroying the Truth. (Rue himself defends option three, since “without such lies we cannot live.”) Atheist Alex Rosenberg offers a fourth possibility in the concluding line of his book, The Atheist’s Guide to Reality: “Take Prozac or your favorite serotonin reuptake inhibitor, and keep taking them till they kick in.”

So take your pick: Would you rather live in Rosenberg’s Pharmacy of chemically-induced meaning, Rue’s Church of the Noble Lie, the totalitarian’s Prison of State-imposed meaning, or the relativist’s Madhouse of self-made meaning?

Thankfully, the thought experiment fails. Those are not our only options. Jesus is, in fact, the Telos, the Goal, the focal point where all lines converge and find enduring purpose.

In the era before the seventeenth century, before Galileo, Kepler, and Newton, a fixation on meaning questions often left our understanding of the material world dragging woefully behind. In the era following the Scientific Revolution, we have come to understand the mechanics of the universe far greater than ever before. Yet it appears more meaningless to us than ever. We know more and more about matter but less and less about why matter matters.

Such close-minded materialism has ushered us into a kind of teleological Dark Ages. We have become just as naïve about the meaning of the universe as the medieval alchemist was about the mechanics of the universe. But the meaning void left swirling at the center of a materialist’s cosmos will be filled with something. The human heart, like nature, abhors a vacuum.

To our family, friends, neighbors, and co-workers who are experiencing that existential crisis, we must show them a Grand Telos beyond Dr. Loyal Rue’s madhouse, totalitarian nightmares, and noble lies, a meaning infinitely more meaningful than Alex Rosenberg’s pharmaceutical illusions. We must point them not to an impersonal Something but to the Personal Someone by whom, through whom, and for whom they exist. Bold and clear evangelism—pointing to the resurrected Jesus as the only one big enough to save us from sin and satisfy our deepest existential longings—is precisely what our increasingly nihilistic age needs. Tell someone about Him today.

For more on how the Person of Christ speaks to the meaning crisis of this cultural moment, see the latest book by Dr. Thaddeus Williams, Reflecting the Son: How to Mirror Jesus.

Business and the Christian Life: Guest Column

Aug 6, 2026John StonestreetEconomicsBusiness, Christianity, Church Ambassador Network, Economics, Ethics

President Calvin Coolidge once said that “the business of America is business.” Too many Christians think of business as either inherently bad, immoral, or perhaps amoral, something set apart from their faith. At best, it pays the bills and support the missionaries, but many fail to see it as also under the Lordship of Jesus Christ.

Recently, Colson Center COO Pete Marra challenged a group of business leaders to rethink business according to a Christian worldview, especially in light of emerging cultural challenges:

I believe there’s one thing that changes the world, and that’s the Church. There is no plan B. There’s no alternative to that. It’s the Church. But I also believe that there’s something that is equally under it, so not exactly equal, but equal and under, and I would say that is enterprise. Enterprise being business.

What we have at our disposal through business, the ability to organize, to solve problems, to create value, to deploy capital, to steward the things that God has given us, is something that’s very unique to enterprise itself. … So, with that kind of framework, I want to talk a little bit about calling and think about place.

There’s a reason that we use the idea, “You are here.” This can’t be missed on us in this cultural moment, particularly as business leaders—leaders of enterprises—that you were brought to a time and place that God has called you to and God has brought you to. And it’s now.

[I]t’s not an accident. I believe not only has God brought you to this place and called you to this space, but he’s equipped you for it. [T]here’s something that’s happening inside the world that we’re speaking to in theological spaces, and philosophers and some politicians and business leaders are talking about it, and that’s the age of AI. 

But AI is just a new tool for a bigger problem. The bigger problem that we’re facing—and one that I think is going to impact business and enterprise in a way that we have never seen, at least in my short lifetime—is the fundamental question of, “What does it mean to be human?”

I know that sounds a little bit heavy or like I’m trying to make a bold statement, but I just want you to think about something like your corporate culture. I want you to think about how you use enterprise when you have an opportunity to become more efficient, make more money, which generates more profit, which gives you more to steward, which is the reason we get into business.

Let’s not be confused. I’ll stand here and tell you, I love profit. I am never confused about for-profit. In fact, I’ve often joked, I sometimes prefer for-profit businesses over nonprofit, because no one’s confused about what we’re doing.

But here’s the challenge we’re facing: What happens when that idea of profit and the deployment of capital face a maybe once-in-a-generational upheaval to where we no longer need a workforce? What if the ways we used to think about automating production factory lines, we can now automate everybody?

Now, is that going to happen next year? No. But these are questions I think business leaders have to start wrestling with now so that they can do that. We need a framework to be able to think through that. That framework is something you’ve seen inside the Truth Rising: The Study, which is that idea of hope, truth, identity, and calling.

[W]e must remember through these things that that idea of hope is what drives us. Our hope is in Christ, and Christ alone. Never be confused. If that is where we find our hope, then the truth of the world, the truth of God’s story of Creation, Fall, Redemption, and Restoration is the thing that gives us not only meaning, but it helps us anchor the why we do business.

The Dutch theologian Abraham Kuyper famously said that “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is sovereign over all, does not cry: ‘Mine!’” This is as true about business as about anything else.

Guest Column: Spielberg Wants to “Mess With” Your Faith

Jun 24, 2026John StonestreetChristianityChristianity, Church Ambassador Network

Award winning film director Steven Spielberg said recently that his new film will likely “mess with” a lot of people’s theology. “Disclosure Day” is about what would happen if there were a sudden mass revelation about the existence of extraterrestrial life. According to Spielberg, it will force people, especially Christians, to rethink Who God is.

As he told CBS Sunday Morning,

What does this do to the fundamental beliefs that many of us have? … Is God our God only on this planet or is God a God for every system where there’s civilization, intelligent life, and even developing life?

It’s not unusual for celebrity artists to weigh in on things outside of their expertise, but this talented filmmaker is out of his depth. Even if there were a real life disclosure day, it would not alter anything about Christians’ fundamental beliefs. The God portrayed in the Bible created and oversees the entire universe. As the Psalmist said, “The Lord established his throne in the heavens, and his kingdom rules over all.” That could easily include other worlds and other life forms. But of course, there is no evidence of that anyway. This is a film. Spielberg must think that Christianity is barely hanging on from falling into the dustbin of history.

If so, he’s certainly not the first. Expectations of Christian extinction go back to the beginning. According to the Gospel of John, the High Priest Caiaphas thought that killing Jesus would erase His influence. When He failed to stay dead, the Jerusalem authorities thought that bribes and rumors would stamp out the new Faith. Those same authorities hoped that beating and scolding the apostles would keep them quiet.

The Romans spent centuries trying to stamp out Christianity, from Nero who infamously burned believers in his gardens to Marcus Aurelius who believed he could mock them out of their faith. By the 200s, the Church had grown so much that Emperor Decius decreed an empire-wide assault on Christians. By the beginning of the fourth century, Diocletian instigated the Great Persecution. In the end, persecution set the stage for toleration. Eventually, under Theodosius I, the Roman Empire was Christianized.

Later, when the Western Empire fell to Germanic tribes, the Church did not fall with it. Instead, Christianity not only endured but the pagans were converted. Islam tried to take down the Church a few centuries later. After subjugating Christianity in the Middle East, Muslim raiders seemed poised to conquer Western Europe. They were stopped in the middle of what is France. Almost 1,000 years later, armies of the Turkish Sultan advanced to Vienna, twice, before being pushed back. The smart money would have been that Christianity would fall, but it did not.

During the Enlightenment, confidence that the Church would fall was at an all-time high. In the 1700s, the influential French thinker Voltaire claimed that he was “living in the twilight of Christianity.” In 1822, Thomas Jefferson added that, “I trust there is not a young man now living in the U.S. who will not die a Unitarian.” Voltaire’s home later housed a Bible society, and Jefferson’s generation was followed by religious awakenings and an explosion of missionaries sent around the world.

In the twentieth century, the Communists predicted the end of what Marx called the “opiate of the masses.” Everywhere they went, revolutionary groups assaulted religion, especially Christianity. In Russia, China, Cuba, and elsewhere, the first targets of the Communists were churches, pastors, priests, and other religious groups. Often the persecution worsened out of frustration that the Faith simply would not die. In the end, Christianity stood over Communism’s grave, after contributing to its demise.

Whether from internal failings or external threats, Christians can be discouraged. But, to borrow a quip from Mark Twain, predictions of the church’s demise are greatly exaggerated. If emperors and empires and armies haven’t stamped it out, Steven Spielberg doesn’t have a chance.