[40 Minute Read]

A version of the following essay was originally presented at the 2026 Keswick Convention, available for viewing here on YouTube. For the Mission Commission, Peter kindly reworked the content to be more suitable for an international audience.

Dear fellow pursuers of the purposes of God in the world,

Grace and peace to you in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Beneath the headlines sit deeper fractures. There is a crisis of meaning, as a more secular culture leaves people searching for dignity, identity and purpose without reference to God. There is a crisis of relationship, as loneliness deepens, community thins and online tribes offer belonging at the cost of division. And there is a crisis of truth, as algorithms and competing narratives leave us with a thousand micro-stories bumping into one another and no shared story to hold us together.

None of this stops at the church door. Political opinions have hardened into political identities. Christians find that the person beside them in church shares their faith but not their vote. And a great many of us, if we are honest, are being discipled more by our phones than by the slow rhythms of church life.

I write from Northern Ireland, where division has been part of the landscape for as long as anyone can remember. We have not always handled it well, and we have learned a good deal precisely because we have had to reflect hard on where things went wrong. My work with the UK Evangelical Alliance takes me across all four nations of the United Kingdom to meet several hundred church leaders a year. It also regularly puts me in rooms where disagreement is the whole point: public panels on abortion, a debate on marriage at Belfast Pride, slightly surreal meetings with civil servants drafting legislation on conversion practices.

What I see in those rooms, and in churches, leaves me more hopeful than the headlines suggest. The same culture that has produced so much anxiety has also produced a fresh openness to the spiritual. People are asking questions again, and many are finding their way to Jesus.

So how should the church live in a moment like this? How do we carry a confident, hopeful presence into a culture war without taking on its posture? How do we hold unity in Christ across real differences of background, ethnicity, generation and politics? And how do we stay both brave and kind in a society that is at once deeply divided and surprisingly open to the good news?

I want to offer a diagnosis and then a way of living. First, a picture of how we got here. Second, a look at why the most contested issues of our day generate so much heat. Third, the story of Daniel as a pattern for faithful life in Babylon. And finally, some evidence that God is at work in this moment in ways we could easily miss.

1. A game of cultural Jenga

Picture our culture as a game of Jenga

Picture our culture as a game of Jenga. The tower is built from shared beliefs about reality, meaning, relationships and truth. For a long time, those blocks held. The societies they supported were never perfectly Christian, but they were deeply shaped by the Christian story. Slowly, one block at a time, we have been pulling them out, and the tower has started to wobble.

The meaning crisis

At the base of the tower sit the deepest questions a person can ask. Why are we here? What does it mean to be human? Why do we matter?

For most of Western history those questions were answered, however imperfectly, from the Christian story. We are here by God’s design. We are made in his image. Our dignity and worth come from him.

Our “plausibility structures” have shifted

Secularism has been quietly removing those blocks. The philosopher Charles Taylor, in A Secular Age, describes how our “plausibility structures” have shifted: 500 years ago it was almost unthinkable not to believe in God, and today for many people it is almost unthinkable to believe in him. Faith is tolerated as a private hobby but viewed with suspicion as a foundation for public life. With no given meaning and no shared story, meaning becomes something each of us must build for ourselves, from scratch and alone.

A L’Oréal advert with Kate Winslet captures this well. She looks into the camera and says, “I’m worth it.” Then she starts removing her make-up, explaining that being worth it is about being true to yourself rather than about appearance. It is a beautifully shot 30 seconds. The irony is that she is wiping off make-up to sell us more make-up. The advert tells us we’re worth it, but it can’t tell us why. If there is no God and no given meaning, our worth has to rest on something, and the only things left are our looks, our feelings and our achievements. All of which shift with age, with the market, with the mirror and with the algorithm.

The Christian story says something almost scandalously different. Your worth is given before anything is achieved. You matter because you are made in the image of God—not because of what you have done, or how you feel today, or how many people liked your post, but because of whose you are.

Our ideas of dignity, equality and rights are fruit of the Christian story

The historian Tom Holland, author of Dominion, has moved over the years from atheism through agnosticism to something like Christian faith. He has said that his belief in the inherent dignity of every human being turns out to depend on the story told in Genesis, that God made human beings in his own image. Our ideas of dignity, equality and rights are fruit of the Christian story, and our culture is in danger of sawing off the branch it is sitting on.

That gives Christians an extraordinary starting point for almost every contested conversation, from migration to AI. Every person we meet bears the image of God. Take that foundation away and human worth becomes very hard to sustain.

The relational crisis

If the first layer asks, “Who am I?”, the second asks, “Who are we together?”

Our culture has raised the individual and personal freedom above almost everything else. You can trace this turn inward back through both the Reformation and the Enlightenment, but it has accelerated hugely in our own lifetime. We are told to find our true self somewhere deep inside and then express it to the world. The goal is authenticity. You do you.

In that world relationships become optional, flexible and provisional. Life gets commodified. Who’s there for me? Swipe right. I choose whichever church best meets my needs this season, like a subscription. Work becomes mainly about my fulfilment.

We have gained freedom and lost connection

The sociologist Robert Putnam saw the trend coming in Bowling Alone. More Americans were bowling than ever, but fewer were doing it in leagues. They were bowling alone. It has only accelerated since. We shop alone, scroll alone and watch entire box sets alone. We date through apps, swiping past real human faces. We have gained freedom and lost connection, and many governments now treat loneliness as a public health problem.

Even secular voices have started to notice the bill coming due. The writer Louise Perry argues that the sexual revolution promised freedom but in practice weakened commitment and left relationships more fragile, particularly for women. Her answer was a move away from hook-up culture and back towards marriage. When first asked whether she was a Christian, she firmly said no. Over time she began reflecting on what Christianity had given feminism and her own life, and this year she spoke about her faith from the platform of one of the UK’s largest church leadership conferences.

We are made for relationship, with God and with one another.

The Christian story offers a real alternative. We are made for relationship, with God and with one another. The church at its best is a people: multi-generational, ethnically diverse, imperfect and yet a real community of grace and belonging. In a culture of bowling alone, that community may be one of our sharpest apologetics.

The truth crisis

The third layer is truth, and in particular how we decide what counts as true at all.

Increasingly our culture treats truth as personal. You have your truth and I have mine, and any claim to an overarching truth is suspected of being a disguised power play. So we deconstruct. We question norms, challenge institutions and dismantle inherited beliefs.

Some of that was necessary. Modernity had its own arrogance, science does not have every answer and some unjust hierarchies deserved to be overturned. But pushed to its limit, the instinct leaves us with a serious problem. If truth is entirely subjective, nothing can finally be challenged and nothing can finally be trusted. Carl Trueman, in The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, traces how meaning and truth have been steadily reduced to a matter of personal taste.

The result is a post-truth culture, where truth is fought over more than it is discovered. How do you do justice when everyone brings their own truth to the witness box? Having spent years as a barrister, I sometimes imagine the new oath: “I swear to tell the truth, my truth, and nothing but my post-truth perspective.”

When that drive to deconstruct is turned on marriage, family, sex and gender, it becomes a sustained effort to dismantle the norms themselves. A culture that keeps deconstructing eventually finds it has nothing left to build a life on.

Atheism could not answer the most basic question of what life is for

Some of secularism’s best-known champions have felt that emptiness for themselves. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, for years one of the most articulate atheist voices in public life, has written that atheism could not answer the most basic question of what life is for. She now describes herself as a Christian.

That tension, of course, isn’t new. In John’s Gospel, Pilate asks Jesus the strikingly modern question: “What is truth?” Jesus does not hand him an argument. Later he invites doubting Thomas to put his finger in the wounds in his hands and side. For the Christian, truth wasn’t primarily an idea to debate, but a person to encounter.

The tower wobbles

Put those three together and the effect is cumulative. If you have ever played the game Jenga, you will know the moment the tower begins to wobble. Remove shared meaning, weaken relationships and relativise truth, and the whole structure becomes unstable. You can feel it.

This is where the language of polycrisis becomes helpful. Political division is real, economic anxiety is real, migration is reshaping nations, artificial intelligence is transforming work, climate change raises profound ethical questions and wars create global consequences. But these are not disconnected issues. They collide within cultures already struggling to answer basic questions about identity, community, and reality.

The tower wobbles because its foundations have weakened

The tower wobbles because its foundations have weakened. That helps explain why so many disagreements feel existential rather than merely political. Public life is contested, full of competing stories and power plays with no referee. It is fragmented, because opinions have become identities. And it is exhausting: the doom-scrolling, the anxiety, the sheer speed of change. There is a widely shared sense, often unspoken, that something isn’t holding.

2. Why every issue feels existential

Those crises help explain why today’s contested issues generate so much heat. A debate about migration quickly becomes a debate about national identity. A debate about gender becomes a debate about what it means to be human. A debate about AI turns into a debate about consciousness, and a debate about assisted dying into one about the value of vulnerable lives. The headlines change every week. The questions underneath rarely do.

Our culture has been detaching human dignity from its biblical foundation

Start with meaning. For generations our culture has been detaching human dignity from its biblical foundation. Once people are no longer understood first as made in the image of God, we start asking what else gives a person value. You can see the consequences at both ends of life, in the debates over abortion and assisted suicide. You can hear it in the dehumanising language now routinely used about migrants and refugees. You can see it in identity movements offering belonging rooted in nation, ethnicity or ideology. The current interest in Christian nationalism reflects, in part, a society hunting for a story bigger than itself.

AI raises the same question from another angle. If intelligence is what makes us distinctively human, what happens when machines outperform us at more intellectual tasks? Notice how instinctively we anthropomorphise AI (we give the systems human names like Claude), we talk to them like people, we start attributing personality to lines of code. Underneath the technology sits a much older and much deeper question: what makes a human being human? Genesis roots our uniqueness in bearing God’s image rather than in intelligence or productivity, and that gives the church something to say that engineers and regulators cannot.

We have forgotten what thick community looks like

Then relationship. Freedom has come to mean personal choice and fulfilment to mean self-expression. Marriage and family are treated as lifestyle options rather than foundations. There is an irony here. When communities with strong family and cultural bonds arrive in the West, many in the host culture struggle to understand them, partly because we have forgotten what thick community looks like.

Then truth. Many of our disagreements are now about the meaning of words themselves. Public debate about migration collapses repeatedly because refugee, asylum seeker, and economic migrant are used almost interchangeably, and honest conversation about numbers, obligations and workable solutions becomes nearly impossible. 

The Bible refuses the easy slogans of either side

The Bible refuses the easy slogans of either side. It insists on the value of every human being, commands God’s people to welcome the stranger and reminds Israel that they were once foreigners in Egypt. It also affirms that governments are established by God to keep order and protect citizens, that nations and laws matter and that justice requires fairness. Holding those together takes wisdom.

Migration is also reshaping the church itself. The centre of gravity of world Christianity has moved decisively to the global South. In the UK, research by the UK Evangelical Alliance has found that around a third of people holding evangelical beliefs come from ethnic minority backgrounds. We send fewer missionaries than we once did, yet people of other faiths are arriving on our doorsteps, and churches here need to think seriously about how we share the gospel with our Muslim neighbours. For many in the West, the Great Commission hasn’t changed, but its geography has.

They throw up strange alliances and surprising fractures

Finally, the polycrisis itself. None of these strands sits in isolation, and together they throw up strange alliances and surprising fractures. The Evangelical Alliance was recently named by Amnesty International as an “anti-rights” group, in the company of the LGB Alliance (a British anti-transgender charity and advocacy group) and a women’s refuge founded by JK Rowling. Political coalitions shift overnight and movements split from within. The church is not exempt. We are navigating live tensions over nationalism, identity, Israel and Palestine, immigration, sexuality and technology, sometimes within the same congregation and sometimes within the same family.

It can feel chaotic, because it is. But for the Christian, diagnosis is only ever the beginning. Scripture has prepared God’s people to live faithfully in confusing and contested times before, which is why the book of Daniel speaks so directly to this one.

3. Daniel in Babylon

Daniel 1 opens with catastrophe. Nebuchadnezzar besieges Jerusalem, God allows it to fall and treasures are carried off from the temple. The king also takes some of Judah’s brightest young men and enrols them in a three-year programme of re-education, with new names, a new language, new literature and food from the royal table. This is cultural conversion by design.

Daniel and his friends served Babylon well without being swallowed by it. Their response offers four habits, and each one answers a block missing from our Jenga tower.

Identity: knowing whose you are

Babylon’s first move was renaming. Daniel became Belteshazzar, a name designed to rewrite his story and detach him from the God of Israel. Our world uses different tools. It hands us labels built on success, failure, image, performance, and follower count.

Daniel’s name was changed, but his identity held

Daniel’s name was changed, but his identity held. Daniel means “God is my judge”, and that fact, rather than Nebuchadnezzar’s rebrand, shaped every decision he made. In Christ our identity is just as secure. We are chosen and beloved, engraved, as Isaiah puts it, on the palms of God’s hands.

So Daniel “resolved not to defile himself” (Daniel 1:8). He chose to live out of God’s story rather than Babylon’s. We face the same choice every day, usually before breakfast: will I live from the identity the world hands me or from the one God has already spoken over me? In a culture gripped by a crisis of meaning, this is where faithful witness starts. Christians cannot offer a stable identity to a confused culture if our own is tossed about by every passing label.

Relationships: friends and foes in Babylon

Daniel’s first and deepest relationship was with God. Later in the book we read that he prayed three times a day, whatever the political weather.

Christianity is personal, but it has never been private

He also had faithful friends. His resolve was a shared decision made with Hananiah, Mishael and Azariah, and when Daniel proposed the food test, they stood with him. In chapter 3 three of them would stand together in a furnace. That pattern of standing together began in chapter 1, over a plate of vegetables. In exile, isolation makes compromise easy and community makes conviction possible. Christianity is personal, but it has never been private.

Daniel also related well to his captors. Verse 9 tells us that God caused the official to show him favour and compassion. Notice how Daniel goes about it. He doesn’t rebel or grandstand. He proposes a test. His posture is humble rather than hostile, and he trusts God while honouring the people in front of him.

That has been a lesson for me in some of the most divided spaces I have sat in. I remember walking into Martin McGuinness’s funeral (a Northern Ireland political leader and statesman for Sinn Féin) alongside the Commissioner for Victims and Survivors, a surreal experience given everything his life had meant in Northern Ireland.

Offering real community to friends and outsiders alike is an essential apologetic

I have sat on a panel at Belfast Pride knowing that almost nobody in the room agreed with my biblically orthodox views on marriage and sexuality. I have discussed the Ashers case, in which a Christian-owned Belfast bakery declined to decorate a cake with a slogan supporting same-sex marriage, with the campaigner Peter Tatchell, and watched his view change over time.

Faithful presence doesn’t guarantee agreement. It does make disagreement possible without dehumanising the person across the table. In a lonely and fragmented culture, offering real community to friends and outsiders alike is an essential apologetic.

Truth: discerning what to receive and what to resist

Nebuchadnezzar set out to re-form these young men, training them in Babylonian language and literature, feeding them from his table and giving them new names. It was a calculated attempt to reshape their loyalties and their whole way of seeing the world.

One click at a time we are trained

Empires like Babylon have always had formation strategies. Nebuchadnezzar used education and royal food. Ours uses personalised feeds and infinite scroll. The platforms learn what keeps us engaged and serve us more of it, and anger, fear, and certainty all perform well. One click at a time we are trained in what to want, what to fear and whom to blame. That is as true on Facebook as on TikTok, and no generation is exempt. Recognising that we are always being formed, whether we consent or not, is half the battle.

Daniel didn’t refuse everything Babylon offered. He learned the language, studied the literature, and worked within the system. But at the king’s food and wine he drew a clear line. That is faithful presence: discernment rather than blanket withdrawal. We receive what is good, reject what compromises our worship and redeem what can serve God’s purposes. Every generation asks its own version of the question. How do we use technology without being mastered by it? How do we take part in politics without making politics ultimate?

Daniel’s courage was rooted in God’s presence

Daniel’s courage was rooted in God’s presence. Babylon was powerful, but God was present, and when Daniel and his friends turned down the king’s food, God gave them health, wisdom and favour. In a post-truth culture addicted to deconstruction, we need that kind of rooted presence, staying put in a particular people and place and building up. We also need the courage to keep telling and living the truth about marriage and family, about gender, about assisted dying, and about the pull of Christian nationalism, with conviction and with grace.

Participation: seeking the peace of the city

Daniel and his friends could have withdrawn into bitterness or quiet resistance from the sidelines. Instead, they took the opportunities in front of them. They studied hard, served in the king’s court and took real responsibility inside a pagan system. They lived out Jeremiah’s instruction to the exiles: “Seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you” (Jeremiah 29:7).

Cultural engagement and… supernatural insight went together

They also excelled. Verse 20 says the king found them “ten times better” than all his magicians and enchanters. That excellence was God’s gift rather than a matter of ego, and it became a witness to his presence. Daniel’s wisdom pointed beyond Daniel. His cultural engagement and his supernatural insight went together, and his place in Babylon was always a signpost to a greater kingdom.

For us that means showing up at work and at school, in parliaments and hospitals, on the football pitch and at the parents’ association, wherever our particular Babylon happens to be this week. In a world of permanent crisis, we need that kind of participation, getting properly stuck in and doing it in a way that points beyond ourselves.

4. A gradual awakening

Another story is unfolding in the UK alongside the story of division. It is quieter and rarely makes the evening news, but the signs of spiritual openness are hard to ignore.

People are looking for truth—real truth

Research suggests 54% of people in the UK believe Jesus was a real historical person and 45% believe in the resurrection. Around half of students say the Bible is still relevant today. Bible sales in the UK are up 87% over five years, and the best-selling edition is the youth edition of the Good News Bible. People are looking for truth. Real truth, rather than their truth.

The church looks different from the stereotype, too. The UK Evangelical Alliance’s Understanding Evangelicals research shows that under-35s are now the age group most likely to hold evangelical beliefs, that one in three people holding those beliefs is from an ethnic minority background and that, reversing a long trend, evangelicals are now more likely to be male than female.

Secularism… is a symptom of affluence

Secularism, someone once observed, is a symptom of affluence. It flourishes when life is comfortable enough for us to imagine we don’t need transcendence. When comfort cracks, the deeper questions come back quickly. Secularism has turned out to be a thin story, and many young people are tired of the triviality it offers. One young convert described his new faith as “the rediscovery of an inheritance I’d been deprived of.”

That openness often looks different among young men and young women. Among young men there is a hunger for truth, order, and something solid to stand on. Joe Rogan, one of the most listened-to broadcasters in the English-speaking world, has said on air that “we need Jesus”. Jordan Peterson talks openly about faith. Some of that search leads to wise mentors and healthy churches. Some leads into darker corners of the internet, where influencers offer certainty without wisdom and strength without compassion.

The real stories are rarely tidy. A pastor in Middlesbrough told me that three young men had turned up at his church independently, each moved to come after watching the memorial service for the American activist Charlie Kirk online. Half his congregation was excited and half was frightened. I understand both reactions.

God often draws people through imperfect pathways

Another church in the north-west of England is split almost evenly between recent migrants and voters for Reform UK, a party campaigning for sharp cuts to immigration. By all accounts everyone gets along, though the minister chooses his words with care. God often draws people through imperfect pathways. The question that matters is whether, wherever they started, they are now being formed by Christ.

Among young women there is real spiritual openness too, though it is often explored through manifesting, crystals, astrology, and tarot. One young woman had built a well-known Instagram account reading tarot. A few months ago she gave her life to Jesus. When she announced it she lost tens of thousands of followers and a business built on the very thing she had renounced. That is a costly conversion.

Another young woman, drawn to crystals, sensed God saying to her while she was manifesting, “Stop calling me the universe and start calling me God.” The hunger is real, and the gospel meets it by pointing the search towards the God who has made himself known in Jesus.

Faith is surfacing in unexpected places. Christians in Sport report that three in four football clubs have Christian players in their first-team squads and that half of Premier League clubs have some form of regular Christian gathering.

God’s work is often gradual before it becomes visible.

None of this proves revival, and Christians should be wary of over-claiming. Jesus described the kingdom growing quietly, like seed in soil and yeast in dough, and God’s work is often gradual before it becomes visible. I write from a UK vantage point, and readers elsewhere will know far better than I do whether similar patterns are emerging where they live. The question is worth asking, because decline is only part of the story of our time.

5. Good news people

We are playing a vast game of cultural Jenga, and it can feel as though everything is balanced on a single block. But the chaos and uncertainty have played their own part in this gradual awakening. God is on the move.

We don’t need to become experts in cultural theory

We don’t need to become experts in cultural theory to speak hopefully into this moment. You don’t need to master the literature on existential angst to see that people are lost in a meaning crisis. We have a story to offer them, one that gives every human being dignity, meaning and hope, and finds our identity in Jesus Christ.

You don’t need a sociology of expressive individualism to notice the relational crisis. Loneliness is everywhere and family breakdown is on the rise. The church at its best offers what our culture struggles to create: a family where people bring meals when you are sick, celebrate when a child is born, pray with you and keep turning up. A community where people from every background belong because they belong to Christ.

And you don’t need to untangle postmodernism to spot the crisis of truth. People want to know what’s true and what’s real, but they also want to see it in action. Often the answer is our lives, as parents and spouses, workers and neighbours, people who foster and adopt, volunteer and open their homes.

I honestly don’t know how they navigate the chaos.

I sometimes wonder how friends who don’t yet know Jesus navigate the chaos without a relationship with him, without a community of faith, and without a story that tells them what is true and real. I honestly don’t know how they navigate the chaos.

So, the first question is about us before it is about our culture. Is my identity rooted in Christ, or in the labels Babylon offers? Am I being formed more by scripture than by the algorithm? Am I part of a local church, or trying to follow Jesus alone? The New Testament knows nothing of solitary discipleship. Am I willing to speak the truth with grace wherever God has placed me, whether in a classroom, a hospital ward, a laboratory, a government office or behind a supermarket till?

A certain peace and contentment

One story brings this together for me. Steven Bartlett hosts one of the most popular podcasts in the world. He interviewed the scholar Wes Huff, who spent two hours explaining the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus with remarkable clarity and humility. A few weeks later Bartlett sat down with John Lennox, the Oxford mathematician who has debated Richard Dawkins and written on Chrisitan apologetics. Near the end of the conversation, Bartlett said something fascinating. He said, in effect, “What impresses me most isn’t all your answers. It’s you. You have a certain peace and contentment—that I see in the Christians I have interviewed.

Be rooted in God’s story

You don’t need to know everything or win every debate or answer every objection. You do need to be rooted in God’s story. Live in such a way that people notice something different. Live with confidence and humility, hope and peace, and when they ask why, point them to Jesus.

Our task is not to win the culture war. It is to bear faithful witness to Jesus, who has already won. In a polarised world, that is what it means to be good news people.

Pray

• Pray for all followers of Jesus to be bold in their contexts, trusting in God for their identity and for discernment with regard to how best to engage with culture (and politics if the opportunity presents itself).
• Ask God to give you great wisdom in your leadership responsibilities, that you will present a stable role model for those within your spheres of influence.
• Pray for insight to know how to navigate culture well, to understand the times like the biblical sons of Issachar—to know how the people of God should live in this time of great uncertainty and chaos.
• Embrace the whole counsel of God in scripture carefully and prayerfully. Ask the Spirit of God to show you the deeper principles behind God’s moral activity in the contexts of scripture. At times God’s moral stance can seem to shift, but you will find the ethical principles behind the narrative and narrated consequences are constant. Our God is not a fickle God.
• Seek, in all of this, better ways to witness to God’s grace and share the truth of the gospel in embodied as well as verbal fashion as you prayerfully trust the guidance of the Holy Spirit.