Ep. 443 Paul Anleitner - The Anti-Story is Collapsing. What's Replacing It?

In this episode, Paul Anleitner traces how a culture that once watched Rocky in full-throated sincerity learned to read everything through suspicion. We talk about the modern story we inherited, the postmodern anti-story that dismantled it, and the meaning crisis left in the rubble. There is a vibe shift happening as people reach for nostalgia and re-enchantment. We get into the three pillars of meaning, mean world syndrome, why Top Gun: Maverick and Project Hail Mary landed the way they did, and Paul's central claim: that kenosis, self-emptying love, is the shape of reality. 

Paul Anleitner is a cultural theologian who writes and speaks on the role of culture and story in our quest for meaning. 
He is the author of "Based on a True Story: Vibe Shifts, the End of Deconstruction, and the Reboot of Meaning" (Nelson Books)

His unique interdisciplinary approach integrates theology, philosophy, and science to help individuals and institutions navigate cultural shifts and address perennial religious longings.

Paul's Book:

Based on a True Story

Connect with Joshua: jjohnson@shiftingculturepodcast.com

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Transcript

Paul Anleitner: 0:00

What story not only holds me together, puts my missing pieces, the fragmented parts together, but what's the story that can hold all of this together? And what I'm optimistic about right now, Joshua, is the kind of meta modern move to look at and survey all stories and to look for something hopeful and meaningful. Is people picking up on the pattern of patterns, the story of stories that says at the center of it all is kenosis, the thing that actually holds me together, you together, the thing that holds all things together. Colossians one, Hebrews one, is the pattern of the death and resurrection of Christ.

Joshua Johnson: 0:57

Hello, and welcome to the Shifting Culture podcast, in which we have conversations about the culture we create and the impact we can make. We long to see the body of Christ look like Jesus. I'm your host Joshua Johnson. Our guest today, Paul on Leitner, uses an image in our conversation that I really like. He says a generation picked up a sledgehammer, went to work on everything they had been handed the institutions, the churches, the stories, and swung until there was nothing left standing. And then, standing in the rubble, a few of them right now set aside the sledgehammer. They're picking up a metal detector. They're starting to sift through the wreckage for anything gold, anything worth rebuilding on. And that's kind of where we are right now. Where the culture is, the anti-story of the last 30 or so years has run its course, and in this anti-story, all stories mask a play for power, until that turns out to be a story as well, and then cynicism starts to eat itself, and we're all very cynical, and what's left is an ache for something we've lost. We know that we have lost something. People are now reaching for nostalgia, for reenchantment. Paul calls this a vibe shift that's happening. In this conversation, you know, we talk about the modern story that we inherited, the postmodern one that dismantled it, and the meaning crisis sitting in the crater, and something has to be next. What I hope is that the true story of reality, the notion that the death and resurrection of Jesus, that kenosis, that self-giving love, is at the center of reality is the story that we get to step into. Pray that this is the thing that brings meaning to our lives. This is the thing that shows us that there is something better. That there is hope in the world again. So, join us as we discover the stories that we inherited and the stories that we are going to be living into in the future. This is my conversation with Paul on Lightner. Paul, welcome to Shifting Culture. So excited to have you on. Thanks for joining me.

Unknown: 3:19

Thanks for inviting me, Joshua.

Joshua Johnson: 3:21

Yeah, we're going to talk about story, where we are in the story of the world, anti-story, meaning making. We're going to get into a whole bunch of of different things. I have often heard that we, as humans, are storied creatures. We're narrative creatures. Do you think that is true? That we are creatures of story.

Unknown: 3:45

Yeah, absolutely. I think like intuitively everybody gets that, right? I mean, at one level we understand that. You understand that if you're a parent. I mean, you understand that being a child, and and you think about the ways in which, let's say, as a parent, you try to introduce your children into what's true, good, and beautiful. What the true story of the world looks like. You try to give them a life strategy, and the way that you do that is by telling them stories. You know everything from Bible stories and Sunday school to fairy tales to bedtime stories, we get that intuitively that that we're storied creatures in the way that we try to pass on from one generation to the next. Like, what does the shape of reality look like? What is my role in the world? What what what does the good life actually look like? So we get it on that level. I think we also intuitively get it when we speak about ourselves. You know, so when I, you know, if we were to take a little more time, grab a cup of coffee or a bite to eat together, Joshua, you know, and we start to get to know each other, the thing that we start doing together. If I were to say, Joshua, tell me about yourself, you wouldn't just list off a bunch of. Random disparate facts, you know. I I wear red shirts on Mondays, and that wouldn't be what you'd do. You would actually tell me some story of your life that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. It has a point, maybe a telos, a purpose. So we get it on that level. But actually, over the last couple decades or so, the scientific literature, the cog sci, behavioral science, like psychological literature on this, is confirming that this is true. So, a guy by the name of Dan McAdams, pioneering work on narrative identity, shows this is absolutely true. We are storied creatures. We understand ourselves. We try to situate ourselves and the purpose of our life, if we have one, inside of a story. So that's absolutely true. Now we can actually scale this out even to the macro side and try to figure out. Okay, so I get a story maybe from my parents or a series of guiding stories. As a parent, I try to pass them on to my children. Where do those stories come from, and that's where we get into this intricate, interesting layer of interaction between you and me as individuals, and the culture, the subcultures we're enmeshed within. Because, you know, the stories we tell our children, or we heard as children, we didn't just make those up, right? They were given to us, and so I'm really fascinated with that dynamic between how culture gives us, offers, extends to us particular guiding stories, presentations of within your culture. What does the shape of reality look like? What point is there to any in life, and those stories and how they interact with your own narrative identity is what I find myself most fascinated with these days.

Joshua Johnson: 6:46

Yeah, and we could zoom all the way out, and we could see like big picture stories of reality that we have been telling within broad culture for hundreds and hundreds of years, and you can see the shifts and the movements of that, and those things then trickle down into our you know subcultures and the stories that we tell within our subcultures, and maybe the stories that we tell that are say a different narrative than what the the broader culture is telling, and trying to live in a different story and seeing reframing the way the world works for this little subculture that we find ourselves in, this community that we find ourselves in. I'd like to zoom out a little bit and just say, like macro, what were some of the big, overarching stories? What kind of stories were we telling, and we were living in globally, culturally? culturally, maybe within Western civilization.

Unknown: 7:46

Yeah, so I mean, my I'm most focused on Western civil and in particular American culture, right? So that's the culture I've inhabited. It's the one I feel most called to speaking to and and trying to help people navigate. And we'll just maybe we could zero in over the course of our lifetime. Let's say over the past 50 years or so, there have been really two dominant, we could say, cultural stories, overarching guiding stories at play. I was born in 1983, and the world I was born into was still very much in American culture. The dominant macro culture of American culture was very much in what we could call the modern story. Still, the modern story we could trace back to Martin Luther and Martin Luther's kind of divorcing from the traditional story, so the traditional story, which had kind of made up the medieval mindset and reading of the world, was that the world is a divinely ordered cosmos. That your place in the story is preset, ordained by God. If you were born a king, your job is to be the best possible king. If you're born a peasant, your job is to be the best possible peasant. Very hierarchical, right? So you don't necessarily challenge or try to push up against where you have been born into that story. That was the traditional story. Luther comes around, and he-I don't think he's intentionally challenging a story per se, right? He's challenging the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church, and what he's trying to get at is this sense in which that has functioned as this mediator between God and man. And Luther's theologically challenging this notion that you need to have this institutional mediator, and so Luther says, no, there's one mediator between God and man. Now you might be going, your listeners might be going. Well, what does that have to do with you know being born into the modern story? Well, the ramification of that idea, that idea that you could have unmitigated access to God, meant that hmm, I don't know if I need these institutions. Anymore. In fact, I can challenge the institutions. I can challenge the church. Downstream of that is I can challenge kings, right? I can actually move up the status ladder. I can, because I have access to the truth. Because you and I have access to the truth, we can challenge those institutions, and so this bleeds into everything that we get in the modern story from the notions of meritocracy, right? Your place is determined by your how you access the truth, how you respond to the truth. Your place in the story is also determined by in your response to the truth how hard you work, right? So in the modern story, meritocracy is king. What else is king? Perhaps more than anything else is this notion of individualism, because you, as an individual, have access to the truth. You have access to God. You actually have the ability, and in some ways, there were these subtle hints in the modern story that get carried on into later stories that you can self-author your story, right? And there's pros and cons to this. So we think of maybe someone like an Oprah Winfrey, born into the modern story, and and Oprah Oprah in many ways would be the kind of person that culturally in American history, she would have been deemed a century ago subhuman property, right? But Oprah Winfrey rises from poverty, becomes a billionaire. You know, I'm not Oprah's target audience there, but I say, hey, good for you, Oprah. You've self-authored, right? That was the notion. You can go from rags to riches. So that's the kind of story, the modern story. I would say both you and I are born into, and it is core to American culture. It's the story of Ben Franklin. It's the story of Steve Jobs. It's the story of Rocky, which, when you think about it, is pretty wild. If you go visit Philadelphia, I don't know if it's there today. I think they take it down from time to time, and you you travel up the steps. I believe the the library there. I don't know if it's the library or the capital and you see this statue of a man with his arms raised up high it's not a general who has been commemorated for some victorious battle it's not a president or feigned politician from our past we literally have a statue of a fictional character Rocky Balboa enshrined because he embodies the values of that story. So that's the world you and I we were born into. It still had some dominant place in pop culture even in the 80s, but things began to shift in broader popular culture as we moved into the 90s, and you know we can we can talk about that in a moment.

Joshua Johnson: 12:43

I want to to get there because there's I mean I just wrote a piece about Rocky on my Substack yesterday and contrasting it from the bicentennial fight that he had in Rocky won and there into the 250th year anniversary we have in America now, which we now have the UFC fight on the South Lawn of the White House, and thinking through violence and and different things, but the the juxtaposition within the last 50 years of what we get in Rocky, which ends in not someone who wants to dominate or even win the the match, but he actually wants to pursue the love that he has with this woman, and all he wants at the very end is his girl at the end. That love wins, right? It starts with a mural of of Jesus in the very beginning of that movie and ends in resurrected love at the very end. Then it seems like 50 years later we get just pure violence and in the in the front of of the White House of saying this is what it looks like now. We're not going to pursue love. We're going to pursue violence, and it feels like it comes at the end of a an age of cynicism that they're trying to get back into something different, like which is nostalgia. But both of those things seem to be off

Unknown: 14:20

to me.

Joshua Johnson: 14:20

Like it doesn't seem like nostalgia is the answer for nostalgia's sake, and cynicism isn't really answer. So, in those 50 years, what do you think has happened here in America to get us to this place of cynicism, or just trying to reach back into something that maybe wasn't even there in the first place, but reach back into whatever they want to reach back into.

Unknown: 14:47

Yeah, you've you've named a couple very important and crucial words here that are we need to spend a little time, a bit of time with. That's cynicism and nostalgia. So let's go back and let's say imagine you know a Friday night. Let's. It's the late '80s, and and you and your friends have decided I'm we're gonna go to Blockbuster Video, and we're gonna grab a copy of Rocky Four to watch on a Friday night, you know. And you sit through the training montages, and you get to the you know the the final struggle between Rocky and Ivan Drago, and you're sitting around, and I remember sitting around and watching that. And at the time, right at the time, I wasn't wrestling with the geopolitical implications of whether or not this was propaganda, right? Like anti-Soviet propaganda. I wasn't mocking. I wasn't like I wasn't ironically laughing at the training montages, they were full-throated sincerity, absolute earnestness. And when you know John Cafferty's heart's on fire, that synth drops. You could feel on the inside of you. I want to go out and work out. I want to. You know, I remember as a kid going. I'm going to pick up a jump rope. You know, all all of that stuff. There was a spirit of sincerity and earnestness there because one of the things the modern story, as a holdover, an interesting holdover from the Enlightenment, right? The modern story had elevated rationality, right? It had elevated reason and reason's ability to access objectivity, and so within the modern story, you don't think you're actually in a story. You think you're in objectivity, and if you're in objectivity, it's very easy to be earnest and sincere. By the time we get into the '90s, right? You know, this stuff had been moving in high culture much earlier, so I'm just zero in on pop culture for all the academics out there that were like, yeah, you know, there was plenty of cynical critiques in the art circles about Rocky Four. I'm going to talk primarily about pop culture here, so hang with me. So by the time we get to the '90s, that story post the fall of the Berlin Wall, we won the Cold War. Right? It was supposed to be the end of history, and all of a sudden, many people are looking around, going, "We didn't get our promised utopian vision here. So we have these cynical critiques, which had which had been part of the postmodern critiques. We could go back to the 50s and 60s. In fact, you could say in some some ways that Nietzsche in the late 19th century is kind of a proto postmodernist, right? Seeing that God is dead, and if God dies in our story, it's not going to be an empty vacuum. Something's going to fill the vacuum of power. For Nietzsche, God, what makes God most God is power. The postmodernists in academia of the the 60s and onward, the Foucault's, Derrida's, they they latch onto that idea that what makes God most God is power, and all these stories are the modern story, for example, is a story that we get told to mask who actually has power, and so by the late'80s into the '90s, you start getting this movement into pop culture of these postmodern critiques, and they take the form of kind of pop culture postmodernism. So you can see this in very very strong evident ways by the time you get to the late '90s. Let's say 1999 is a pretty key touch point here, but you could see it earlier in the'90s. I mean Seinfeld. Well, let's go back even into the mid'90s. Seinfeld is the show about nothing, right? Larry David had two famous rules on the set: no, nobody could hug, and nobody could learn anything each week. No moral lessons being learned. It was subverting probably 50 years of sitcoms going back to Leave It to Beaver, which was here's the moral lesson you learn at the end. No moral lessons because there is no objectivity. It's so ironic. Nobody is sincere. Move into 1999. You get Fight Club. You get The Matrix, especially for young men in particular. What what were the takeaway messages of those films? Well, you need to rage against the machine, tear down the system. It's all about oppression and power. You're just a battery in the machine. And my that summer, summer of 1999, my generation's Woodstock, as an elder millennial, rebranded 19 Woodstock '99 was the the Woodstock supposed to be reclaiming the summer of love and Woodstock, 1969. If you look online and you search, you know, go do a Google search for "End of Woodstock '99" pictures, you'll see that the festival ended in literal fire and brimstone, with people at the final night rowing around the campgrounds, chanting "Rage Against the Machines" line, "F you, I won't do what you tell me. Burning down the entire property and fairground. There was a different, we could say, spirit of the age that was moving through culture that was making us more cynical. We weren't always that cynical. You weren't that cynical, and. Friday night in, let's say, the late '80s, watching Rocky IV, you became much more cynical because a story, or what I call in my book based on a true story, an anti-story, was moving through culture. So the postmodern anti-story was telling you all stories mask a play for power, and if that's true, what becomes of the disposition of your soul, it's primarily cynicism. We could call it, you know, the technical term is a hermeneutic of suspicion. So the way we read the world, our new default as these anti-stories shape us is to go. I'm going to engage with the world primarily through cynicism, through suspicion, and that does something to our souls, right? So that is the thing that became the dominant story. Even though it's an anti-story, it's saying there's kind of a paradox here that people start realizing. I think in the last five to 10 years or so, there's a paradox here, and when you say all stories mask a play for power. Well, eventually you start to realize that that in itself, in and of itself, is a story. So if you're telling me all stories mask a play for power, I should be cynical about everything. Eventually, the cynicism gets applied to that very story itself, and that's kind of producing what we're experiencing now, and what I, you know, a lot of people call the vibe shift over the last few years. What you've seen, even with nostalgic retrieval, nostalgia is everywhere. What's going on with that? Well, people came to the end of the anti-story and realized I've deconstructed everything. I tore it all down. I left church. I left the pews. I became jaded, cynical, etc. etc. But I actually have to live somewhere in some story. And so, what is nostalgia doing? Nostalgia is that spiritual ache to be like, maybe there's something we lost, right? To name the ache as a genuine ache doesn't mean that everything that people go back and retrieve from the past is true. It's to say that ache is speaking to something true. It's about we've lost something. We lost something in our past. Maybe there's something there that was positive. Maybe I set down my sledgehammer, the sledgehammer of deconstruction, and I pick up a metal detector, and I'm going to go through the rubble looking for any signs of gold that I can find and can rebuild my new story and new life upon. I think that's what's going on right now.

Joshua Johnson: 22:34

Give me some some things that you you said okay. There's a vibe shift. Like we could feel the vibes, but where do we see it? Where do we see these things shift and change that we're saying we lost something, we need to reclaim something, and we're trying to figure it out. Where do you see

Unknown: 23:58

it? Yeah. Okay. So I think as we talk about culture, culture gives us all. Cultures have a guiding story. They have a set of rituals that reinforces or shapes people's souls to step into that story, and they have symbols. They have symbols that act as icons or windows into that story. So I'm really fascinated when I start seeing in broader culture, popular culture, I start seeing shifts in stories, and not just the stories that are made. There are millions of things all over Netflix that get made, and they don't capture the cultural imagination. I'm fascinated when something resonates. Hartmuth Rosa calls uses this term resonance to describe the sort of vibe that we're talking about-the sense that I can't process all of the information rationally, but when something inside of me I feel a resonance with it, we should pay attention to that. So the things that have resonated in culture recently over the last five or six years. I think there's several components. We could start with the stories that are resonating in popular culture. One of the interesting ones that I I first started noticing this shift. We could go back to 2022, and there were a couple of key films that really captured the cultural zeitgeist, and they were different. The first of which was Everything, Everywhere, All at Once. Won a ton of Oscars, right? Massive critical acclaim really resonated with people. It produced resonance. That was a very interesting film because it was doing people reaching out to me saying, "Paul, I need your thoughts on this because it reminds me a bit of Fight Club. It reminds me a bit of the Matrix. It's doing all this Marvel multiverse stuff, but in the end, it's not cynical. You know, it's actually trying to get at meaning, and that was an interesting story because that was portraying a world in which was doing all of the postmodern stuff, irony, like highly ironic. Highly self-aware, you could say meta-textual. It's like it knows it's engaging with all these other time travel and multiverse stories, very matrixy, very Fight Cluby, all of that stuff. But instead, the thing that it actually ends up critiquing, what's the ultimate villain in that story? Well, it's this again, highly ironic, but trying to get at something sincere-the everything bagel of nothingness. It is this nihilistic bagel that sucks in everything into its vacuum, and the real hero of that story was was the husband, Waymond. And if you look at his character qualities, what is he? He is painfully sincere, earnest. He's kind. You would look at him and go, "He was naive, right? And that was a breath of fresh air. He was whatever we walked away with, going, "Oh my gosh! In a world of cynicism, I think maybe it's not naive to be sincere and earnest and hopeful. It is actually to hope against hope. It is to stare that nihilistic void in the face and say, "Okay, well, what am I going to do? Am I going to actually live like a nihilist or not? So there's one of them. Another big hit from that year was Top Gun Maverick. People said it saved the movie theater. Now, some people might look at Top Gun Maverick and go,"Well, that was just a retread of the modern story. But I actually think it was doing something different. I would say it was meta modern in the same way that everything, everywhere, all at once was meta modern. There's these little signs that they they are self aware that they know they're in a movie, right? You know, Tom Cruise buzzes the cockpit, and John Hamm's character, like you know, does the same thing as the. They replace the beach volleyball scene with a beach football scene. They're intentionally self aware of their past, but what we get in that story was different than what I expected. I had kind of expected a cynical takedown of Top Gun Maverick, right? Of Maverick's character, he's a white male, right? I

mean, we'd done the Star Wars: 28:11

The Last Jedi thing, where Luke Skywalker was deconstructed. We've seen a lot of this from the anti-story that was like, hey, all of those modern stories seem to-it's Maverick, Indiana Jones, the Batman's, the all of Stallone's characters. We have one particular type of hero, and he looks this way, and it doesn't include this kind of person or this kind of person. That had been the anti-stories critique, and some of it is very valid, but it became really, really cynical, and so we get. I'm going in expecting subversion, right? I'm expecting subversion. That has been the postmodern trope. We take the story that you thought was good, and we're going to flip it upside down to show you it was actually covering and masking power. I go in expecting that, and here's what that movie does: it inverts my expectations for subversion, and I go in like they're gonna. I know they're gonna cynically take down Maverick, and what do they do? No, they actually portray a character that yes, he's got room for character growth, but the younger generation is learning something from the older generation. He's actually laying down his life for the younger generation. It's this beautiful connection. It's hopeful. It's aspirational, and it is painfully and brutally sincere. It feels doesn't do any of the ironic winking at the camera. Doesn't do any of that. And people walked out, and this is the thing I heard over and over. Oh man, that's kind of what movies used to feel like, so what was happening was a recovery of sincerity, the hope that maybe I could actually live in a story in which I'm not cynical and jaded all the time. That's one dimension, Joshua. Two others I'll mention briefly. Right, so it's not just that our cultural stories and the things that resonate are pointing to this. We also saw decline of new atheism. It seemed like in the mid 2000s new atheism the the the theory was people are going to continue to empty the pews, right? It had been doing that since the early to mid 90s when the anti story moved into pop culture, our pews are emptying. More and more people are becoming nuns, N O N E S. You know, not Catholic nuns. They're becoming atheists, and the story was, the anti-story was, that's going to continue on forever. But around that same time, and actually, if you can trace back a little bit, a little bit sooner than that, attitudes towards religion, traditional religion, were. were shifting as well. There were these interesting spikes, not captured in the data at first, but in people's stories. I kept hearing from people recurring stories who had gone through deconstruction. They had tried living in the anti-story, and something was changing. In them, they were doing the same retrieval thing. They were like,"Hang on a second, I left church, did the deconstruction thing. Maybe I started like tried to do an ex-vangelical church, or we-I had this home group. And one gentleman I write about in particular, we call him Thomas in the book to kind of protect his identity. Thomas had done all of that had a really bad church experience. Had every reason to deconstruct and leave. He starts hanging out with a crew of people that are all angsty and angry and cynical too. And he realizes, as he goes home from these meetings every night, he realizes I feel way worse than I did before. I feel way worse than I did even in my flawed church. I tell a much more complete story. It's a beautiful story in in the book, but Thomas eventually realizes this isn't a story I want to keep living in. And what he does is something that might feel nostalgic, right? He starts looking back to his past and goes, "Well, at least I kind of felt better when I prayed. I don't even know if I believe in God yet. So Thomas started by lifting up even just some half-hearted prayers to a God he he wasn't sure he even believed in, and that began for him this this reconstruction journey. So we can see it in the culture. We can see it in people's stories restorying, looking to reintegrate parts of their past, looking for a true story, and one final component. I'll stop here. We can pick at it more if you want to talk more about it. Is another term that's been going around is reenchantment. There's something happening in our culture right now where the secular story, the story that all we have is matter and nothing more is also breaking down, you know. And and people are becoming deeply, deeply intrigued by explanations for their life that would have some sort of transcendent spiritual source of meaning. All of this is happening together. I think you put all of this together, and you get something that feels in the air like what we could call a vibe shift. It feels different than it did 10 years ago, 20 years ago.

Joshua Johnson: 33:11

For me, with movies like Project Hail Mary this year, yes, like let's work together as humanity to actually solve a crisis. It feels very much like, hey, we're. It's not cynicism. It's it's gives hope, and and people are are watching it over and over in the theater because they crave hope beyond cynicism.

Unknown: 33:36

Yeah, and that critical line for me, Joshua, in that movie, just I have to pick out that for a second. I wish the book got completed before the film came out. I would have added an entire chapter. This crucial line in that film is when Grace is talking to Eva, and he he goes, you know, do you think we have a prayer of this thing working? And she says something along the lines of, yeah, God willing, or something like that, and his question-he's surprised. He's looking at this scientist, right? And he goes,"You believe in God? And her response captures the vibe shift perfectly. She goes, "Well, it beats the alternative, and that's the same thing. You know, that isn't the explicit conclusion of everything, everywhere, all at once. But it's like when you stare into the void, you stare into the vacuum of meaning, and you're in the middle of a meaning crisis, and you're like, "Well, what? It couldn't hurt. It couldn't hurt to maybe just step out a little bit of faith and go, maybe this is true, right? Like maybe there is a true story I can step into. Maybe religion, maybe traditional religion, maybe the church I grew up in, maybe that part of my story doesn't need to be jettisoned. So I think that was the crucial line, the hinge point in the entire movie, and you're you're spot on and I wish I could have written a whole chapter about that that movie.

Joshua Johnson: 35:06

So as we're going through this this new story that you're the meta modernism that you're you're walking through after the postmodern cynicism, we're trying to say let's recover something that we've lost. We're gonna actually rail against cynicism into hope. What does it mean to live a good story, a meaningful story? What makes a good, meaningful story that we could start to live into?

Unknown: 35:39

Yeah. Well, let's. We could take it. Take this question from a couple different angles. Let's let's start with even maybe the standard psychological model. We know now from you know this is this has kind of become the the established framework among psychologists for what gives us a sense of meaning in life. And there's three pillars that support our sense of meaning in life. The first is coherence. Coherence has to do with whether or not does the story that I believe is true does is there like a repeatable, discernible pattern to the world? Is it coherent, right? If I wake up tomorrow and the laws of gravity no longer work, and then the next day the laws of inertia and physics don't work, and nothing is coherent. If two plus two equals four today, but it equals seven tomorrow, that's incoherent, and we don't have any discernible, repeatable pattern we experience an absence of meaning. We would say that's meaningless. I would say you know the the teacher in Ecclesiastes, in some sense, he is wrestling with the problem of coherence. He looks around the world and he goes, "Oh, I see wicked people prospering, righteous people suffering. He's looking for a discernible, repeatable pattern, and and is honestly and transparently struggling with that. The second pillar is purpose. Purpose has to do with okay, well, if there is a discernible, repeatable pattern to reality, does it point to some overarching goal? Is there a telos? Right, that's the Greek term meaning end goal. Telos. Does it point to some objective? Does the story head somewhere? And so you could go, yeah, I'm noticing a discernible, repeatable pattern to the story. But if you have that and you don't see it going anywhere, you're still going to experience an absence of meaning. The third pillar is significance. Now, if the story is discernible, if it is coherent, and I see some sort of overarching purpose to it, but I don't feel like I, as an individual, play any significant role in that story. I don't matter to others, then I am going to experience an absence of meaning as well. So those are the three pillars in the kind of standard psychological model: coherence, purpose, and significance. Now, when we go searching for a story that can give us a sense of meaning, it has to provide us with those three ingredients. The argument that I would make, and I make I make in based on a true story, is that one of the interesting moves that's happening in this kind of meta modern moment, postmodernism came along and said, "Do you realize you're living in a story? And the modernists were like, "No, no, no! It was objective reality, right? And the postmodernists are like, "No, you live in one story among many. Now their hermeneutic of suspicion was like, "Well, you can't trust any of them, right? The meta modern shift has been to say, "Okay, now that I've had this new ability to step back and realize I'm in one story among many, the meta modern shift is to go. Okay, instead of cynically taking down all of these meta stories and overarching stories, because I want meaning in my life, maybe I'm going to survey all of these available stories. And what am I going to look for? I'm going to look for resonance. I'm gonna look for. I'm gonna look for a felt sense of the wholesome, because postmodernism, the anti-story, fragmented my life. It fragmented reality, and I need a sense of meaning. And fragmentation doesn't give me meaning because it breaks down coherence. There's no purpose, no significance. So I'm looking for a sense of the wholesome, and as I survey all of the stories, the interesting thing that I think a lot of people are doing, and they don't even know it's happening. It's is like you know this is just the waters we're all swimming in. Is they're surveying all the stories across time, across culture. They're going back, nostalgic retrieval. They're looking across, you know, the the Western civilization's history. That's why people are arguing about the Odyssey and will Christopher Nolan do a good job? It's it's why people care so strongly about that. Is they're searching throughout all of the stories to go. I wonder if there's something like like a pattern of patterns in all of these stories, maybe there is a story of stories. So the thing that I feel resonance with in Project Hail Mary, the notion of someone laying down their life to rescue and save humanity. Why does that resonate? Oh wait, I noticed it in this story. I notice it in everything from what might be among the high culture elites as trivial as Marvel movies. Why am I so moved at the end of that overarching Marvel story when Iron Man lays down his life and doesn't just brutally beat Thanos to a bloody pulp, but instead sacrifices like, why does that resonate with me? Why does that story? And then we step out and we start looking throughout all creation, and we see the cycle of self-emptying love. Right? It's what the earliest Christians called in the Greek kenosis. It's what's captured. One of the earliest hymns in Philippians two, the Christ hymn, it is this notion of self-emptying love, and so maybe when I think about not just my own story, Joshua, but I start looking around and going, man, I don't know too many people that over the last couple of decades are wild about the trajectory of civilization, and the trajectory we're all heading-not just individually, but together. Because it's not just that you have a story and I have a story; we have to have a shared story for this thing to work. So people are looking at that trajectory, going, "Boy, it looks like we might be heading more towards like Mad Max here, then I want, and I want want want our civilizational story. So, what story not only holds me together, puts my missing pieces, the fragmented parts together, but what's the story that can hold all of this together? And what I'm optimistic about right now, Joshua, is the kind of meta modern move to look at and survey all stories and to look for something hopeful and meaningful. Is people picking up on the pattern of patterns, the story of stories that says at the center of it all is kenosis, the thing that actually holds me together, you together, the thing that holds all things together, Colossians one, Hebrews one, is the pattern of the death and resurrection of Christ. It is the logos of John one that is actually at the core of reality itself, and so the stories we have to tell have to have that at the center, and that would be my argument, Joshua. That in this moment, as we search for a better story, that that is the story of stories. It's the story by which all true stories derive their trueness from.

Joshua Johnson: 42:58

Yes, I fully agree with that, and I think that is spot on. So as we go back from the the macro into the micro and how we live that out and into this true story, as a culture are headed to this Mad Max ending because of our our cynicism and doom, and we we are like the nothingness, the nihilism that has been happening. Getting back to hope, we've we've talked about the modern story being about power, and when you're going in the postmodern as like a railing against power and helping other people rise with power. So in a micro story, if you say, "I actually want to live with you know into the self-sacrificing love of Christ, the death and resurrection. I want new creation, resurrection hope in my story and our story of a community. If we recognize power being misused towards a a a life that is not new creation resurrection life, how do you pursue the good, true, and beautiful within something, and not just take a sledgehammer to it, but pursue the good, true, and beautiful within that story, and not just dismissing power abuse and saying we're going to go make our own utopia somewhere else.

Unknown: 44:32

Right.

Joshua Johnson: 44:33

What does that story for us on a micro level look like in our communities?

Unknown: 44:38

Yeah, that's a really, really good question because one of the things that can be offer us pseudo meaning right now, in many ways, kind of our culture war over the last 30 years has really been about which team picks the modern story and which team is picking the postmodern anti story, and so we have had this collision. And one of the things that we have to be careful of is not thinking that well because the anti-story led to a meaning crisis. The solution is we just go back to the modern story. No, we got the postmodern anti-story because nestled within there were valid critiques. Right, there were valid critiques. I don't want a world where you know we'll take another hero and archetype of the the the modern story was James Bond. I don't want my daughter living in a world where women are only Bond chicks, right? Like, like that needed to be critiqued. I don't want Bond girls all around. You know, there were things in there about the modern story in that it were was neglecting the least of these, but here's the important

part: 45:47

that one of the things I think my people my age, in particular, and younger, have to come out of is they have to shift from thinking that the goal of all of this is to keep seeing through power. Forever, that became the the the hero of the anti the hero of the anti story in my generation and younger in particular was the antihero. You cannot live as the antihero forever. You can't just be the one that says, "Hey, all I'm out for. We'll take another kind of pop culture illustration the the Amazon series The Boys, probably the most famous, caped, memed character in all of pop culture Homelander, who's this kind of soup, dark Superman archetype, you know, and he represents everything that's supposed to be about wrong about the modern story and the conflation of Christianity with power and all of that stuff. You cannot just spend your whole life believing that all forms of power are inherently homelanders, the only reason why you think homelander is evil is because deep down you have a picture of Superman somewhere that you're going, okay, he's wrong because I can imagine a Superman, I can imagine, and this is really crucial, Joshua, because if we don't step out of thinking that deconstruction, seeing through power, isn't of itself the highest good, the problem that we will have is we will never be able to reform and rebuild the institutions that are necessary for us to keep this civilizational group project from heading towards Mad Max, right? Somebody is going to have to step in and lead universities. They're going to have to start thriving businesses and nonprofits. And guess what? You are going to be at the top of the org chart. You are going to have power. This is why we need stories like Tolkien's Lord of the Rings to help us have a more nuanced, dare I say, Christian view of the relationship to power. Because yes, the Ring of Sauron corrupts, and it does. But that's not the only part of that story. There is the longing for the true king and the restoration of right order. This is the problem I've I've wrestled with with the way maybe my generation younger has misinterpreted what was actually probably a beautiful retelling of in some ways Arthurian myths in the original Star Wars stories. The original Star Wars that George Lucas was telling was a story about the restoration of the light. The rebels were the good guys, not because they were just rebelling against power, but because the end goal was we need the light to establish proper order. And so, what I think is a really crucial move for us right now, Joshua, is to realize it's not Nietzsche's critique that what makes God most God is power was wrong. What makes God most God in the New Testament? Well, the Johannine literature is clear on this: is that God is love. It is how power uses its power to give, to lift up, to nurture, to protect, to save, to restore, and so over these next five years in particular, I am-I feel so strongly about this because I see in churches, for example, a lot of boomer pastors are transitioning out of leadership; they're moving into retirement. Who's going to step in and lead thriving, healthy churches. It can't be the person that thinks church is inherently oppressive. And what happens if all the churches collapse? Do you think that actually leads to a better vision of the world, or does it lead more towards Mad Max? I promise you, it's more Mad Max than Shalom. So we have to recover here a sense that no, not all power is inherently oppressive. That is the anti-story. What we need are people that step into positions of leadership that actually see kenosis at the center. So when I am a leader, what am I looking to do? I am looking to look out for the least of these, to care for those who are overlooked, abused, etc. That is crucial, but I only get to that point by recognizing I actually have to move away from being the antihero and be willing to risk the possibility of stepping into the heroic, the true heroic, which is to say, I'm going to pursue virtue. I'm going to take a risk that I can reform these institutions. I can build something better for my kids or my grandkids, and I think that's the crucial move that needs to be made right now.

Joshua Johnson: 50:40

It feels like we can can do that if the ones that are not actually living into love that have power at the moment, they're not looking after the the neglected, the marginalized. It would be easier if if younger generations that. Say no. We actually have to live into a different story. We're going to start something new, and have you know new churches, new nonprofits, new businesses. That's easier for me than is saying you're not giving up power, but you're not actually then doing this kenosis, self-giving love that is necessary for a good, proper story. How do we live in the tension of that if we're in a position that doesn't see the story lived out?

Unknown: 51:40

Yeah, but here's what I think. I think the anti-story has vastly, you know, there's this concept called mean world syndrome. George Gerbner in the 1960s, a sociologist, and this has been demonstrated over and over and replicated since that time. George Gerbner demonstrated in this this experiment that people people who consumed more violent, dystopian, dark media, even back in the '60s, tended to overestimate how dark and terrible the world was, and so in a lot of ways, what my concern is in my generation and younger is a mean world syndrome happening. So I hear I've heard from so many people that you know were in my generation and they left church, and because they saw that there was some sort of corruption in a particular church, they saw a headline, and so they extrapolated from that that this thing is fundamentally broken. It's all about everywhere I go, people in power are using their power malevolently. Well, that's mean world syndrome. There's somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 to 400,000 church congregations in the United States alone. Let's say you even heard 1000 bad church stories over the course of your life. That's less than 1% of all the churches out there that are living simple, mundane, doing good, and so we can't get past and actually build institutions, improve them, help them grow towards being more conformed to the image of Christ. If we have this mean world syndrome filter, the other thing I would say is this, and this is really important. I think this is a fundamental conviction I would hold to, and I would encourage people to to consider the the merits of this argument. I think there was something Hegel got right. I don't agree with Hegel on everything, but Hegel got something right. That there was this notion that it's the great men of history that turn the wheels of history, and Hegel's like, no, it's not. It's the spirit of the age. You know, everybody from let's say young to even I think the Apostle Paul had this notion. This is paraphrasing Carl Jung slightly that people don't have ideas so much as ideas have people, and so I get I would encourage people, young people, and wherever they are at in their own journey, the the thing that you most want to invest your time into changing is the world of ideas, because ideas have people more than people have ideas. The other thing I would encourage them to consider is

this: 54:17

culture is upstream of politics. In 1999, when Fight Club and The Matrix came out, we were in a economy boom. I mean, Clinton was president. You know, like the critiques. Okay, we can go back even earlier in the mid 80s, right? When we kind of get the beginning of these cynical, dark Superman antihero stories. Let's say Frank Miller's *The Dark Knight Rises* Frank Miller's *The Dark Knight Rises* when the first stories portrayed Superman as this stooge for Reagan. Reagan had won every single state in the union except for one, right? So what happens in culture is usually so far upstream, the one big lie that we also need to address in this is by overemphasizing and over preoccupying on the political arena. We're already playing into a story, a story that we could even go back to trace back to Marx, that flattens all of life to the horizontal. It it steps into that postmodern anti story, which is to say every story is political, and it robs us of the nature of myth and true story, which is to say, no, there is a transcendent vertical component, and I promise you, you're not going to get any change in the horizontal until people step into right relationship with the transcendent, so let's let's get the order of operations correct here. That would be you know that would be my argument. And start start of that is very simply, just find find yourself. If you're you're like I'm ready to rebuild, I see. This is heading being stuck in this cycle of cynicism. I'm always looking for the next machine to rage against. That is not the highest good. Really simple

step: 56:09

find yourself a simple, decent, maybe boring little church has good potlucks, right? Tells the good news story. It might not be spectacular. The preaching might not be that great. You can saddle up to some old seasoned saints, maybe sing"Great Is Thy Faithfulness" shoulder to shoulder, and just get a taste of the wholesome. Just get a taste of the wholesome, and realize that you are going to do way more good in the world by just being a beacon of light than always spending your time preoccupied with what's the next devil, next demon in darkness that I have to go confront and expose. We've done that thing. My generation has done that thing for quite a while. It's not the highest good, and I don't think it leads to the reintegration that you're really looking for, and it doesn't actually lead us to being veered away from the Mad Max course that we are on.

Joshua Johnson: 57:10

This was a fantastic conversation, Paul. Your book, based on True Story, is fantastic, and people could go and and get that. It'll be available anywhere books are sold. Is there anywhere that you'd like to to point people to? How could they connect with you and what what you're doing? And what do you hope for all of this work and the work that you're putting out in the world?

Unknown: 57:34

Yeah, I hope I hope that people would begin a process of restorying. I wrote this primarily to help people get a sense in which maybe they were in that place of despair, it's really trying to help people who have been living through the meaning crisis that has come about as these stories they've been trying to live in have not led them to fulfilling meaning. It hasn't led them to experience the I what I what I truly believe is the true story. It's the it's the story of stories. It's the Christian story that transcends the modern, the postmodern, the meta modern. It transcends time and culture, and yet it steps into our culture in unique ways. So, I I've seen what's happened as those people and there's a number of stories I tell go through that process of restorying, and that happens when it happens in your own heart and happens in your own life. I think you can then become an agent of renewal in the world. You can step into a church, you can start a business, you can be the one that maybe as people move in a previous generation into retirement and they're tapping the next gen of leaders to say,"Hey, take this business, this nonprofit, a new new direction. You would be the one to be like,"I know what it looks like. It looks like kenosis. That's my hope, and my hope is that for my kids, and Lord willing, my grandkids one day, that that restoring of our lives would actually lead us further away from that; those apocalyptic visions that kind of haunt our our pop culture sci-fi, and would would help us to actually step more towards the shalom, the peace, the wholeness, the sense of wholesomeness that God intends for creation. And I trust I trust that he's good enough to to do that and work in us to do it. So people want to track along with me more. They can go to my website, grab a grab a book. Probably most active on X. You can follow me on YouTube and you can subscribe to my podcast, which is called Good Makers. Good Makers podcast. It's part of a nonprofit initiative that I'm that I lead to help people restory and to reorient their lives around this story with this cruciform center flourishing at the middle.

Joshua Johnson: 59:51

Excellent. Well, Paul, this was a fantastic conversation. I only got through about a quarter of the page of questions that I wanted to, so I could talk to you for another couple of hours, but we don't have time, so thank you for taking us through the story and what we're headed into. How do we restory, get into what new creation, resurrection, life, living looks like here and now, so that we can live into a story that has transcendence from the transcendent one that we could see some self-giving love here on Earth, and we could move away from this cynicism and despair and nihilism that has been shaping our culture. That then we could actually then see something new, some some new hope and new life in our culture, which would be incredible, fantastic. Yeah. So,

Unknown: 1:00:42

and thank thank you, Joshua. When I look at what you're doing in your podcast, I see that happening. Right, you're the kind of person that took initiative to start something to host the kinds of conversations that would be transformative. The guests that you've had on are spectacular. So, I see what you're doing, and I hope people would be encouraged to be like, "Hey, in my own unique." Way what I see Joshua doing, maybe it's not starting a podcast, whatever that might be. That we go, hey, I'm going to step towards hope. I'm going to step towards contributing something of meaning and to help people restory. So, thanks for the good work you're doing.

Joshua Johnson: 1:01:16

Yeah, thanks, Paul. It was fantastic.

Unknown: 1:01:18

Yeah, take care.