Editor's note: Enjoy today's devotion written for Devotionals Daily by Paul Anleitner, author of Based on a True Story: Vibe Shifts, the End of Deconstruction, and the Reboot of Meaning.
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Back in the 1970s, my father set off for college as a spiritually disinterested agnostic. Dad was a violent middle linebacker who set the all-time tackles record at Wayne State University in the heart of Detroit—a 5-foot-11 walk-on who earned a full ride by being the toughest guy on a team of mustachioed tough guys in one of America’s toughest towns.
One day after practice, friends invited him to hear the testimony of coach Bill McCartney and Detroit Tigers broadcaster Ernie Harwell. In a musty locker room, my dad was intrigued by how this Christ they spoke of had so transformed their lives. It was appealing, but he needed proof.
My dad—and his entire generation—were born into the "Modern Story," a guiding story in American culture that prized rugged individualism, the centrality of reason, and the separation of the "spiritual" and "material" into tidy, distinct boxes. If he was going to step into the Christian story with Jesus at the center (or, as I call it in my new book Based on a True Story, "the Story of stories"), it would have to come through the language of his native culture. Jesus told the Story in Aramaic farming parables; Paul wrote it in Greek, following Roman customs. Why couldn’t the Story be revealed within my dad's modern American culture, too?
In the Modern Story, truth meant a rational investigation aimed at proving objective reality. "Just the facts, ma'am," as Dragnet's Joe Friday would say. So my dad picked up Josh McDowell's Evidence That Demands a Verdict, a quintessential 1970s work of apologetics that spoke in the cultural grammar of the Modern Story. After his own “rational” investigation, Dad got "born again." The conversion made him virtually unrecognizable to anyone who'd known the frat-boy linebacker of his early college years.
- The Story had worked within his cultural story to re-story his life.
In my own formative heyday, a generation immersed in what I call the "Postmodern Anti-Story," the Story worked in a different but still incarnational way. That story prized seeing through plastic spirituality, raging against "the machine," and being suspicious of authority and tradition. We headbanged to DC Talk's Jesus Freak, which mimicked Nirvana riffs and cast following Jesus as counter-culture. Edgy Gen X authors wrote best-sellers deconstructing performative churchiness, and church planters launched new congregations with names that sounded like rejected X-Men characters.
Sadly, many in my generation just kept "deconstructing" everything until they abandoned church altogether. But that anti-story angst is becoming increasingly passé.
A new "vibe shift" is moving through our culture.
Provoked by a meaning crisis, there's a growing attraction to hope and sincerity in a metamodern age. It doesn't look like DC Talk's grungy "Jesus Freak" video anymore. It looks more like Forrest Frank singing and dancing in a video about how great the day is and how wholesome the vibes are when you follow Jesus. It's not "burn down the system" Fight Club energy so much as the "hopecore" feel of Project Hail Mary. It might even look like a young person saddling up to a gray-haired saint in a dusty pew, singing a hymn the Gen X church plant discarded.
Beneath it all is the same ache my dad's generation felt in the Modern Story, that my generation felt in the Postmodern Anti-Story, and that humans in every era have yearned for: we all want our lives to be based on a true story.
The Apostle Paul understood that the light of Christ was already at work in every culture. That's why in Acts 17, amid the idols of Athens, he could see what those Greeks were really searching for in their myths. Standing among the philosophers, he announced:
People of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious… I even found an altar with this inscription: to an unknown god. So you are ignorant of the very thing you worship—and this is what I am going to proclaim to you… He is not far from any one of us. 'For in Him we live and move and have our being.' As some of your own poets have said, 'We are His offspring.' — Acts 17:22–28 NIV
Paul preaches the gospel by quoting two of the Athenians' own poets. Every generation hands the church a new dialect of the same longing—and the metamodern moment, weary of irony, hungry for sincerity, is no exception. Our task is Paul's—to walk our own Athens, read its altars and anthems, and tell the true Story its hearts are already reaching for. The vibe has shifted. And the Story that re-storied my dad, and re-storied me, is ready to do it again.
Watch the Video
Written for Devotionals Daily by Paul Anleitner, author of Based on a True Story: Vibe Shifts, the End of Deconstruction, and the Reboot of Meaning, copyright Paul Anleitner.
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Your Turn
Have you had your moment yet? You, along with all of us, have the same longing because you were created by a Creator who created you for relationship! Lean in. Get re-storied. ~ Devotionals Daily