The Madness of the Moment
When I spoke with Vincent Bacote on Created in the Image of God, I came away feeling that he had given language to a problem many people can sense but struggle to name.
We are not just living through political disagreement. We are living through what he aptly described, in effect, as a kind of moral and spiritual madness.
That word may sound too strong until you look around.
We are polarized in ways that go far beyond ordinary differences of opinion. Whole populations now sort themselves into rival camps, each convinced of its own moral clarity, each suspicious of the other, each reinforced by its own narratives, fears, and preferred authorities. We no longer merely disagree. We increasingly interpret one another as threats. And once that happens, it becomes very easy to justify almost anything in the name of protection, justice, righteousness, or survival.
Vincent’s insight was to place this not first in the framework of politics, but in the much older framework of Genesis.
He pointed to Genesis 3 and 4 as an anatomy of the human condition: insecurity, fear, hiding, blame-shifting, rivalry, envy, and finally the urge to eliminate the competition. In other words, what we are calling a crisis of culture may be, at a deeper level, a fresh eruption of a very old disorder.
That rang true to me.
Cain is not simply angry. He is destabilized by comparison. Abel’s acceptance becomes, in Cain’s imagination, his own diminishment. Another person’s favor becomes proof of his own threat. And once the other person is experienced that way, the logic of neighborliness begins to collapse. The brother becomes the obstacle. The obstacle becomes the enemy. And the enemy becomes expendable.
That is not just an ancient story.
It is a living pattern.
It shows up in race. It shows up in politics. It shows up in religion. It shows up in institutions. It shows up every time identity becomes idolatry and fear begins writing the script.
One of the things I appreciated most about Vincent was that he did not reduce this to partisan talking points. He spoke with the seriousness of someone who knows that race, for example, is not a rhetorical game. Nor is it merely an imported political category. As he put it, racism can be understood as a species of antagonism to neighbor. That is a deeply useful formulation because it puts the issue where it belongs: not merely in the realm of sociology, but in the realm of moral theology.
If I antagonize my neighbor because I have absolutized some dimension of my own identity, then I have not merely made a social mistake. I have disordered love. I have allowed some created marker—race, tribe, class, nation, ideology—to rise above the command to love God and therefore above the call to love neighbor.
That is the madness.
And it is not confined to one group.
We all know how easily grievance can harden into narrative, narrative into identity, identity into suspicion, and suspicion into hostility. We all know how quickly “we are trying to protect what matters” can become “we must defeat those people.” We all know how the desire to make things right can be overtaken by the desire to make someone pay.
This is why Bacote’s larger project matters so much. He is trying to help Christians inhabit public life without simply mirroring the pathologies of the age.
That is the diagnosis.
So what is the calling?
Vincent used a phrase I found especially important: Christians are to engage public life non-triumphalistically.
That is not the way many of us were taught to think.
Too often, Christians have imagined only two options. Either withdraw from culture in order to remain pure, or take hold of culture in order to fix it. Either retreat from the world or seek to dominate it. Bacote is offering another way.
Engage, yes. Serve, yes. Witness, yes. But do not confuse witness with takeover.
That distinction is everything.
There is a way of talking about “redeeming culture” that quickly becomes a baptized version of conquest. We start by saying we want to bring Christian values into public life, and before long we are imagining that if only the right people held enough power, the kingdom itself could be installed by force of policy, influence, or institutional control.
Vincent was very careful here, and rightly so. He did not deny that Christians should bring their convictions into public life. He denied that this should be done triumphalistically. He denied that faithfulness means domination. He insisted instead on a mode of presence that serves rather than seizes.
This fits deeply with what I have tried to wrestle through in my own work. Human beings were never meant to rule over each other as though dominion were license for control. The urge to dominate is one of the oldest corruptions of calling. Christ did not model takeover. He modeled service, truthfulness, and self-emptying love.
That matters in race relations. It matters in politics. It matters in church life. It matters in every sphere where fear whispers that the only way to be safe is to be in charge.
Bacote’s point, as I heard it, is that Christians should enter public life not as conquerors but as stewards and servants. We do not engage culture in order to absorb it uncritically, nor in order to crush it into our image. We engage it with appreciation and discernment, confidence and humility, conviction and openness. We build bridges between faith and life rather than walls between sacred speech and actual existence.
That last point stayed with me.
Vincent described himself as someone who builds bridges between faith and life. That is such a needed image right now because we are surrounded by forms of religion that either stay safely inside their own walls or else rush into public life armed mainly with certainty and aggression. Neither option is adequate. Faith must walk around with us in the world. But if it is going to do so well, it must be formed by humility.
Humility is not weakness here. It is realism.
Which brings us to the larger horizon of the conversation: eschatology.
Vincent’s forthcoming book, Signposts of the End: Our Eschatology Informs Our Ethics, touches a theme very close to my own long-running concerns. Eschatology—the study of last things, ultimate things, end things—has often been mishandled by Christians. For some, it becomes prediction obsession. For others, it becomes ideological fuel. For still others, it becomes the rationale for trying to install the kingdom by human force.
Bacote is pointing in another direction.
He does not deny that the future matters. He argues that our view of the future should shape our conduct in the present. But he is deeply cautious about any claim that we know enough to build the final form of the kingdom ourselves. Instead, he speaks of gestures of the kingdom.
I love that phrase.
A gesture is not the whole thing. A gesture points. A gesture hints. A gesture signals. A gesture says, “It is something like this.”
That is a profoundly sane and modest vision.
We are not the authors of the end. We are not the engineers of perfection. We are not the possessors of a formula that will finally get history under control.
What we can do is live now in ways that bear witness—partial, flawed, but real—to what is coming.
That means our ethics are not about installing utopia. They are about giving off an aroma. A trajectory. A signpost.
If our eschatology is triumphalist, our ethics will become coercive. If we imagine that the kingdom is ours to establish in finished form, we will be tempted to baptize domination, confuse power with righteousness, and justify all manner of ugliness in the name of final goods.
But if our eschatology is humble, our ethics will be different.
We will act with hope, not panic. We will serve without claiming mastery. We will pursue justice without imagining ourselves omniscient. We will build, repair, and reconcile as people who know in part and therefore must act without pretending to be God.
That, to me, is one of the deepest gifts Vincent offered in this conversation.
He diagnosed the moment without hysteria. He described the Christian calling without conquest. And he placed both inside a horizon large enough to humble us.
We need that.
We need people who can name the madness of the moment without becoming mad themselves. We need Christians who can enter public life without needing to take it over. We need an eschatology that forms patience, courage, and truthfulness instead of frenzy.
Vincent Bacote gave us a glimpse of that path.
And in a time when so many voices are telling us to fear, react, and dominate, a voice calling for humble public faith may be one of the clearest signposts we have.
Sneak Peek
As always, here’s a quick sneak peek at what’s next on Created in the Image of God. And, as with several of these conversations, because the shows are often pre-recorded and already “in the can” before this article appears, these may already have aired by the time you read this. If so, they’re still well worth catching in replay.
On Sunday, November 1 at 7:00 a.m. US Central time, I spoke with Jason Romano—author, speaker, and executive producer of Sports Spectrum—about the intersection of sports and faith, and how calling, purpose, and following Jesus can shape life both on and off the field. From his years at ESPN to a leap of faith into ministry, to the stories of athletes and leaders navigating faith in the world of sports, it was a rich conversation.
Then on Tuesday, November 3 at 8:00 p.m. Central time, I was joined by Justin Giboney—attorney, political strategist, and founder of the AND Campaign—to explore how Christians can engage politics and public life without sacrificing conviction, humility, or commitment to justice. From faith and civic responsibility to imagining a more thoughtful and faithful Christian witness in the public square, it was a timely and important exchange.
