This was the title of an article by Dr. John Seel. He believes we are living through a “civilizational inflection.” The West is gravely ill. The disease is spiritual. The need is repentance not policy. “The patient,” suggests Dr. Seel, “still breathes, but the pulse of purpose is gone. We are a zombie culture, animated yet dead.”
A culture cannot heal if it refuses to name its disease. Being influenced by Phillip Rieff, Dr. Seel sees our culture as severing its link to the sacred. Culture is a living organism that shapes and informs our lives. Many believe we can resuscitate our culture, but Seel warns, “to confuse resuscitation for what is really needed resurrection is the final illusion of a dying civilization.”
“The sacred once ordered the social from above; now politics dictates culture, and culture manufactures its own religion,” notes Seel. This reversal is mostly complete and is catastrophic. “God created man in His image. Now man perceives he can create God in his image or replace God with AI colonized by algorithms.” We have dethroned transcendence, while enthroning ourselves. “We have retained the moralism of religion without its metaphysical grounding.” Rieff saw such practices as “deathworks – cultural creations that invert the meaning they inherit.”
The result for our culture is a “dark enchantment – the return of pagan imagination under technological conditions. The world is not disenchanted; it is enchanted by idols.” The cure for such dark magic is divine enchantment. We need “liminal leaders” – “men and women who can live between the lightning and the thunder, reading the weather of the age and preparing the ground for what comes next.”
A liminal leader will exhibit four virtues: 1) “vision” – “The capacity to see beyond collapse toward renewal.” 2) “Courage” – “the willingness to act without institutional permission.” 3) “Humility” – “the conviction that renewal begins with repentance, not strategy” and 4) “Exploration” – “the willingness to seek what they do as not yet know.” It is leadership that is restorative. “It resists both despair and distraction. It builds dense networks of meaning, small communities of faithfulness, and institutions ordered by truth rather than lies.”
“We are living through a liminal period of withering,” notes Seel. It is a, “500-year inflection point,” in which “the ideas of modernity are imploding, the institutions of modernity are paralyzed, and the instruments of modernity (namely AI) are exploding.” We are the first civilization without a shared sacred symbolic. It is a time for watchful discernment and courageous leadership.
I accept the challenge of Dr Seel. “There has rarely been a more exciting time to be alive as a follower of Christ than now. Ours is a turning point.” We live in “the pause between to lightening and the thunder.” We live close to the coming storm. Seel quotes C. S. Lewis, “You can’t go back and change to beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.”
Our culture has a deep spiritual sickness. May I have “the courage to resist its idols, to honor objective reality, and the imagination to rebuild on foundations of transcendence.” As I pray, “Come, Lord Jesus,” may I not focus the turbulent weather patterns of the present age, forgetting the kingdom reign of King Jesus, as the unifying narrative of our time.
Dr. Seel’s article is a prophetic call for men to come forth. I write this blog to encourage men to be “liminal leaders.” “The age is changing. This time, it truly is different. The question is whether we will merely survive the transition – or sanctify it. May we stand, liminal and luminous, as witnesses to the sacred in an age that has forgotten how to bow.”
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