Existential Crisis and the Antidote
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.
Photo Credit: @Pexels/Daniel Reche
John Stonestreet is President of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview, and radio host of BreakPoint, a daily national radio program providing thought-provoking commentaries on current events and life issues from a biblical worldview. John holds degrees from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (IL) and Bryan College (TN), and is the co-author of Making Sense of Your World: A Biblical Worldview.
The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of CrosswalkHeadlines.
BreakPoint is a program of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview. BreakPoint commentaries offer incisive content people can't find anywhere else; content that cuts through the fog of relativism and the news cycle with truth and compassion. Founded by Chuck Colson (1931 – 2012) in 1991 as a daily radio broadcast, BreakPoint provides a Christian perspective on today's news and trends. Today, you can get it in written and a variety of audio formats: on the web, the radio, or your favorite podcast app on the go.
