Four Ways To Stop Nothing

Why Nihilism Is Everything

The other day some guy on Twitter named Kevin suggested that Donald Trump is the number one reason people are leaving the church (presumably the Evangelical church). I disagreed. Instead, I suggested that the single greatest threat to the church, and the biggest reason people are leaving is nihilism.

So I want to talk about nihilism—both its definition and how it’s manifesting itself in western society and the western church. It’s important because I think it’s the true threat to the church’s witness. (Shout out to @JamesBulgaria for prompting me to do so.) Here’s my tweet:

Joseph Lear @josephmljr

Nah dawg, it’s nihilism. And the dread of daily life and existence. That’s what the church has failed to address. Politics only goes to far. We need metaphysics because everyone’s stuck in the abyss of immanence.

Dr. Kevin M. Young @kevinmyoung

The GREAT ABANDONMENT of the Church is caused more by its response to: 1. Donald Trump 2. George Floyd, BLM, and CRT 3. COVID than it is 1. Deconstruction 2. Rejection of Jesus 3. The chance to sleep in They had to leave the Church to keep their faith.

“Nihilism” is a philosophical term (with a broad and complex history) that doesn’t really show up in everyday conversation (unless you’re a diehard fan of The Big Lebowski), so let me explain it as simply as I can. It comes from the Latin nihil which simply means “nothing.” So we might say “Nihilism” is “Nothing-ism,” or the belief that everything is fundamentally nothing—that all of existence is bereft of purpose, meaning, and substance, and that it’s therefore absurd. To be a nihilist is to believe that nothingness has the first and the last word about everything. It’s to believe that your existence is random and arbitrary, and that whatever awaits us in the future, or after death, is an eternal vacuous abyss. Maybe we should be depressed, or maybe we should laugh. Or maybe we should laugh depressingly.

I think nihilism strikes all of us as a bleak outlook on life (to put it mildly). But I also think it resonates on some level with the vast majority of us. Whether we’re Christians or not, there’s the gnawing sense, this haunting feeling that, really, nothing matters. It’s the existential malaise we find ourselves in here in the West. Consider this Instagram reel I came across as but one example:

ianmcconnellmusic

A post shared by Ian McConnell (@ianmcconnellmusic)

Here are the lyrics if you missed some of them:

Humans aren’t really gonna kill the planet! (yay!)

We’ll just make the planet unlivable for us. (Aww…)

But the earth will keep right on spinning way long after we ain’t in it.

And life will keep right on living

til the sun EXPLODES and oh—

I’m not important and neither are you!

So let’s do whatever we wanna do!

Bask in our cosmic insignificance,

Soak up this blip we’re living in,

‘Cause nothing matters anyway!

Isn’t that great??

Note the beautiful setting of the video, his sardonic smile, the happy tune he’s playing, and how that is all juxtaposed with his apocalyptic lyrics: We’re all going to die (“the planet unlivable for us”), which means we’re “not important,” and “nothing matters.” His nihilistic belief results in nihilistic morality that errs on the side of hedonism: “So let’s do whatever we wanna do…soak up this blip we’re living in.” Finally, reckoning with the nihilism is the only way to soothe the discomfort it brings, which is why we must “bask in our cosmic insignificance.”

Obviously, I don’t know Ian McConnell (the guy singing). But if I were to guess, he’s not really being serious in this video. The whole thing is meant to be a joke. It’s meant to be absurd. His embrace of nihilism is disingenuous, and perhaps intended to mock nihilism itself. But the deep irony is that mockery of nihilism is itself nihilistic. To say “nothing matters” is a serious allegation. It’s no laughing matter. Not to mention the fact that vast, vast swathes of western civilization stare at the dark ceiling of their rooms at night and meditate on their hopelessness. Or they watch an endless feed of tiktoks to distract themselves with the subtle dose of dopamine that hits with every flick of the thumb. Never before have we seen the suicide numbers we’re seeing in American society. Killing yourself is the ultimate nihilistic thing to do. And more of us have thought of committing it than haven’t:

“Isn’t that great?”

“Lol.”

So, sure, people may use political compromise, anti-BLM rhetoric, or any hot button cultural issue as an excuse to leave the church, but really they’re leaving the church because the church is failing to issue a rejoinder to the dread of daily life we all feel. Not only has the church failed to confront nihilism, but the church is also itself nihilistic. It’s nihilistic precisely because it has failed to identify nihilism as the problem we are facing in the West. We end up throwing punches at the shadows cast by the thing itself. We don’t dare turn around and face the reality of our situation, because we’re afraid our anemic Christianity can’t really stand up to the challenge. So the church has had to adopt Trumpian politics (at least in Evangelical circles) to stave off and hide its own sense of absurdity.

The thing that Kevin from Twitter fails to recognize is that the liberal protestant church is in a much worse position that the Evangelicals are. The Episcopalians, the Presbyterians, the Methodists, and the Lutherans are hemorrhaging people not because they’ve preached MAGA but because they’ve preached nothing.

Back in 2003, David Bentley Hart wrote a piece called “Christ or Nothing,” in which he claims that the options set before us in the West are either faith in Christ or “an unshakeable, if often unconscious, faith in nothing, or nothingness as such.” And that’s the situation we continue to find ourselves in. No one is tempted by Islam. People aren’t running to become Buddhist monks. They dabble in witchcraft, rubbing crystals and burning sage in their living rooms not because they think it does something, but because it’s nothing.

So how does the church proceed as we continue to bleed the nihilists from our nihilistic churches? Here are four concrete steps we can take:

1. Invite people to be baptized as an alternative to suicide.

2. Preach: "God chose even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are.”

3. Fence the Lord’s Supper to remind people that the bread and the cup are not crystals and sage.

4. Delete Tiktok.