To Reenchant Our Lives, It’s Kenosis All the Way Down – Religion & Liberty Daily

The American entertainment complex has long been decried as blindly marching toward moral degradation—distorting the truth, indulging the profane, and opting for stories latent with a nihilistic detachment and despair. And yet something has started to shift in the cultural imagination.

Recent blockbusters like Top Gun: Maverick, Project Hail Mary, and James Gunn’s Superman have all built their successes on sunny optimism and traditional hero archetypes. Bands like Creed and the Goo Goo Dolls are back on the airwaves, spurring rising generations to belt syrupy, sentimental lyrics with zero irony. Television reboots are aplenty, with each aiming to capitalize on an alienated audience sick with nostalgia and longing for a very particular place and time.

According to cultural theologian Paul Anleitner, a “vibe shift” is upon us.

In his new book, Based on a True Story: Vibe Shifts, the End of Deconstruction, and the Reboot of Meaning, Anleitner argues that our current crisis is profoundly tied to the stories we tell ourselves. We are “storied creatures,” he writes, with a “spiritual yearning for a story that holds it all together,” a narrative that is “coherent and purposeful” and gives us “a significant role that matters to others.”

We were created with an ache for home and the wholesome, for communion with a transcendent God and connection to his enchanted world. But we have long ignored this reality, and amid the subsequent cultural malaise, such longings are bound to brim and burst.

Falling for the Postmodern Anti-Story

To show what got us here, Anleitner traces the various evolutions of America’s storied life, from the divine deference of traditional myths to the modern moralisms of Leave It to Beaver and Rocky IV to the nihilistic deconstruction of Fight Club and The Matrix.

Unlike the modes of the past, he writes, our “Postmodern Anti-Story” is “a sledgehammer that came to demolish all guiding stories.” Much like Neo in The Matrix, we have been pushed to question and suspect whatever story we’re being told.

In the Modern Story heroism was about taming nature, conquering evil, or ascending the ladder of meritocracy. In the Postmodern Anti-Story, the dragon you should set your eyes on slaying is the imposed identity that the Modern Story places on you. The moral triumph is the act of choosing your own identity.

Such an attitude quickly led to a “break stuff ethos,” Anleitner insists, and it wasn’t confined to the rambunctious revelry of a few rebellious millennials. For example, it could be seen in something as soft and palatable as Seinfeld, infamously known as the “show about nothing,” which dominated mainstream American television for a decade. Unlike the “laughing while you learn” formula of I Love Lucy and The Cosby Show, Seinfeld was built on “the absurdity of our mundane lives.”

The protagonists were morally bankrupt, narcissistic, and devoid of any emotional intelligence. … Week after week, millions tuned in to watch a cast of characters who never changed, never grew, and never pretended to care about anything but themselves. Seinfeld reflected a worldview where nothing is sacred, sincerity is scorned, and ironic detachment is the norm.

It was an approach that soon extended well beyond our TV screens, stretching from business and politics to our religious and educational institutions. Whether one looks to the spiritual homelessness amid the “rise of the nones” or the craven combativeness of the “the great awokening,” we’ve steadily replaced sincerity with cynicism and confidence with critique. We have mainstreamed Nietzsche but through the moral vocabulary of Kurt Cobain.

While such suspicion may make for hilarious television, it’s no way to imagine the world and our place therein. As C.S. Lewis writes in the conclusion to The Abolition of Man:

You cannot go on “seeing through” things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too?

It is no use trying to “see through” first principles. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To “see through” all things is the same as not to see.

The Metamodern Shift

Anleitner is hopeful that we’re nearing the end of this particular cycle. He discerns symptoms of cultural fatigue and believes a reckoning is at the ready. “We cannot live in an anti-story with only an antivision,” he writes. “What we really want isn’t endless deconstruction but reform that is oriented toward a vision of our highest good.”

As one signpost of this “metamodern shift,” he notes the films of Wes Anderson, which are chock-full of irony. And yet, from his earlier work (The Royal Tenenbaums) to his latest (The Phoenician Scheme), Anderson urges us to think and feel about the permanent things with surprising sincerity. Likewise, the multi-Oscar winning Everything Everywhere All At Once is thoroughly postmodern in its structure and artistic sensibilities. Yet it ultimately serves to center the importance of story itself, all while finding near transcendent meaning in the mundane mysteries of family, laundry, and taxes. The problem is that it still bumps up against the limits of its hedonistic humanism.

It appears that pop culture finally has the wherewithal to challenge the anti-story, but there’s a competing temptation to still turn to our own power and pleasure, to put the pen in our own hands and “self-author” our own way to self-fulfillment. That may be more honest and more coherent, but it still lacks the source of truth that leads to whole-scale flourishing. It still lacks the key for a satisfying conclusion.

“Self-authoring can’t tell you what the good life is,” Anleitner reminds us. “It can’t decide whether it’s better to lay down your life for another or to protect yourself at all costs. This can only be known by adhering to a story that comes from outside ourselves. The story must transcend us.”

So while we see a positive resurgence of a healthy nostalgia, it’s not enough simply to long for the past. We also need to discern properly what’s good and true if we’re to recover the valuable things we’ve lost. We see signposts that our longings are starting to find their arc and aim. But the next part requires something a bit more particular still. How do we step inside the Christian story?

Kenosis All the Way Down

It’s one thing to “embrace the cringe,” as Anleitner puts it, to feel all the feels and fundamentally free oneself to enjoy “the music of the spheres” of everyday life. It’s another to see where that music is pointing us and to reorient our hearts and hands accordingly—to situate ourselves within the “story that holds all true stories.”

Such a path isn’t one-size-fits-all, but for Anleitner, “it’s kenosis all the way down.”

Kenosis is a Greek term for “self-emptying,” used by ancient Christians to describe the center of the story we’re after: “the pattern of self-giving love, the voluntary emptying of power and prestige for the good of another that we see in the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Christ.”

Far from another form of deconstruction or self-destruction, “it is the willing emptying that creates space for union.” It’s the story that liberates us toward relationship, love, and communion. “It’s the pattern that both myth and nature adhere to,” Anleitner writes.

Kenosis requires us to change our cultural imaginations and reshape the ways we interpret the world. It demands that we train our attentions and adjust our behaviors, rhythms, and practices to align with all that’s good and true. In the most quiet, unremarkable corners of culture, it looks like faithfully working, serving, and co-creating: a “build stuff” ethos that points to the ultimate story.

When your attention has been trained by the rhythms of grace, even the mundane starts to feel sacred. …The Christian hope is that all these mundane and messy moments—changing diapers, doing dishes, going to church, sitting bedside with a dying loved one—get connected together at the very end of the episode. But it’s not for a nihilistic punch line. It’s for a climactic culmination.

Indeed, while the pop culture signposts signal this shift from the top, it is here at the bottom that the deeper reshaping begins: in the arts, in entertainment, indeed across all cultural spheres.

In our families, it’s a story that re-romanticizes the self-emptying work of marriage and parenthood, turning daily toil and struggle into generational discipleship. In economic life, it reshapes how we imagine our work and our full range of economic interactions, connecting the creative with the sacrificial and creating real wealth and abundance for a world in need. In political life, it dismantles our narrow partisan allegiances and guides our gazes toward loving our neighbors and cultivating the conditions of a free and virtuous society.

Finally, Anleitner’s book is a timely encouragement to tune our eyes and ears to these burgeoning cultural shifts, lest we waste the moment or take it for granted. Even amid our endless political outrage and algorithmic distraction, we still have an unmistakable hunger for beauty, belonging, and transcendence. As we see with the vibrant conversation around Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, we are craving stories with meaning, and it matters where and how we find it.

But cultural renewal will not ultimately come from finding better content to consume or more compelling narratives to tell ourselves. It begins by recovering the story that has always been true—one strong enough to bear the weight of our deepest longings.

“There is a wholeness underneath the surface of all the fragmentation we feel,” Anleitner concludes. “It draws us to union. To connection. To communion. The wholesome is fundamental. Goodness—not malevolent power, pain, or brokenness—is where the story of reality begins.”