Written by Rev Richard Baird (dia-LOGOS Church and Culture Analyst)
2023: The year that was.
A lot happened in 2023, and while awful wars were taking place, a lot happened on the cultural front which revealed that people are indeed still searching for meaning and answers, but simultaneously being distracted by frivolity and superficiality more and more. From controversial influencer Andrew Tate’s indictment for trafficking through to the Super Mario Bros movie being a hit and the accompanying song “Peaches” through to the Titan tragedy and also Twitter becoming “X”, from Morgan Wallen’s single “Last Night” (a song about longing, lust and whiskey) hitting #1 for 16 weeks through to trendwatchers declaring the year “year of the girl” epitomised by phrases such as “girl dinner” and “girl math,” and Meta being sued by 16 states in the USA for designing their tech to be addictive, and a statement by US Surgeon General announcing that the USA had a loneliness epidemic, I think it’s safe to say that culturally a lot was going on. From a Christian worldview perspective, we are witnessing more and more the imprisoning of the Imago Dei as minds get captured by false ideas covered with bling.
As believers and the body of Christ, we have opportunities like never before. Building a bridge requires not only knowing your own starting point, but also where you are crossing over to. To this end, it helps to know who and what is feeding the soul of our younger generation in particular. What follows is a snapshot into our zeitgeist:
Where to begin?
Let’s begin with Google. Google, now 25 years old, has a feature where you can examine trends globally and locally in terms of popular searches under different categories. In terms of globally, the top people searched in 2023 were (do you know any of them?):
1) Damar Hamlin
2) Jeremy Renner
3) Andrew Tate
4) Kylian Mbappé
5) Travis Kelce
6) Jenna Ortega
7) Lil Tay
8) Danny Masterson
9) David Beckham
10) Pedro Pascal
Out of all the cultural trends and happenings last year, four I believe deserve particular mention:
1. The Barbenheimer Paradox
2. Time’s Person of the Year
3. Word of the Year
4. Manifesting
The Barbenheimer
Paradox (aka The Pink Apocalypse)
The 21st of July 2023 saw the release of two films from two different studios which couldn’t be more opposite: Barbie by Warner Bros and Oppenheimer by Universal Pictures. Barbie was a fantasy comedy based on the Barbie doll and saw everyone dressing up in pink to go and see it on the opening day. Oppenheimer was a biographical movie based on physicist Robert Oppenheimer, scientific director of the Manhattan Project tasked with developing nuclear weapons and father of the atomic bomb. Many movie-goers decided to do a double feature and see both in one day, setting themselves up for some major cognitive dissonance.
I allowed my daughter to go and see Barbie on pain of having to discuss its theological implications with me. When I asked how it was, she said (and this was the consensus of her peers), she said she had mixed feelings, not quite sure what to make of it. It had its expected frivolity, but it was also quite deep in places. I confess my heart sank wondering if my daughter was shallow (I confessed this out loud and was forgiven). When I researched a bit further, this was indeed a theme that came up: Barbie was exploring existential issues, albeit with a postmodern feminist woke flavour (apparently patriarchy is the problem with the world). A Vox article even made a comparison to Adam and Eve in paradise.
Oppenheimer on the other hand explored the theme of destruction, looking at the existential agony experienced by Oppenheimer in the light of the moral dilemmas he faced. As Oppenheimer so famously said (quoting the Bhagavad Gita) “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” From a Christian viewpoint, it certainly raises the issue of what conditions provide the moral justification for war and destruction, and to this end, it is worth exploring the Just War doctrine, the most well-known Christian contribution to the debate of ethical framework for war.
Two very different movies, exploring what it is to be human. My favourite assessment of this Barbenheimer paradox comes from Tim Yearsley, from LICC (London Institute for Contemporary Christianity) when he said:
“The kingdom is like a blonde doll dressed in pink, and a scientist that created a world-ending bomb”
I also did a double-take when I read that. The point he was making was how Jesus loved to juxtapose opposites in speaking about God’s kingdom, in a way that was delightful on the one hand but also unsettling on the other. The movies themselves pose unsettling questions on what it is to be human, and ultimately leave us with a question which is unanswered: who will save us from ourselves? Of course, paradox is what all children of God inhabit every day.
Time’s Person of
the Year
This one is particularly telling in terms of our cultural moment. The choice of Person of the Year didn’t go to a Nobel prize winner or politician or activist, but to a pop star: Taylor Swift. The opening line of the article is:
Taylor Swift is telling me a story, and when Taylor Swift tells you a story, you listen, because you know it’s going to be good—not only because she’s had an extraordinary life, but because she’s an extraordinary storyteller.
Taylor Swift is simply iconic.
She’s the first female artist to become a billionaire through her music, thanks largely to her Eras tour last year. Not bad for a 33-year-old (now 34). Countries have asked her to perform in their nations because of her economy boosting ability, and colleges, including Harvard University, have classes devoted to studying her. The root of her appeal and success? Being an authentic, vulnerable, story-teller. She’s like a big sister and friend rolled into one. But it’s more than that, and this explains the appeal to Gen Z:
But something unusual is happening with Swift, without a contemporary precedent. She deploys the most efficient medium of the day—the pop song—to tell her story. Yet over time, she has harnessed the power of the media, both traditional and new, to create something wholly unique—a narrative world, in which her music is just one piece in an interactive, shape-shifting story. Swift is that story’s architect and hero, protagonist and narrator.
Being in a Swift concert has been likened to a spiritual experience, which is not surprising given that you have people coming together for a common cause (or rather a person), enjoying the experience of the music and the narrative at a heart level (does this sound familiar at all?).
Word of the Year
Dictionaries have words of the year to give an idea of defining words for cultural moments (or cultural moments redefining words!). The Oxford Dictionary has “rizz” as word of the year. It’s a way of referencing a person’s charisma (it’s based on the middle ‘ris’, which explains its appropriateness in today's image-saturated culture:
Rizz(n.) style, charm, or attractiveness; the ability to attract a romantic or sexual partner.
The Merriam-Webster Dictionary Word of the Year was “authentic,” “not false or imitation: real, actual,” or “true to one's own personality, spirit, or character” or “worthy of acceptance or belief as conforming to or based on fact.” As the dictionary explains, it saw a substantial increase in searches since it is often hard to define. It has been used extensively in connection with identity (such as Taylor Swift speaking about wanting to be her authentic self/voice), and with the rise of AI, (especially as expressed through deep fake videos for example), the lines between what is real and false is becoming even more blurred.
Of course, there is a tremendous irony here, because a primary context of this word is in the realm of gender identity, where one is encouraged to be one’s authentic self. If you’re a boy but feel you are a girl, you are then encouraged to live out your authentic self – and that comes complete with a whole package of changing the body as well. In this context, it’s the denial of biological reality that is considered authentic, and it has tragically led to much heartache. This is symptomatic of a deeper ideological transformation that has taken place over the years in terms of how one views the self. Theologian Carl Trueman who wrote on this explains:
Expressive individualism particularly refers to the idea that in order to be fulfilled, in order to be an authentic person, in order to be genuinely me, I need to be able to express outwardly or perform publicly that which I feel I am inside. … In a society where the expressive individual is increasingly the norm and increasingly presented as that which we should all be, then the idea of society itself forcing us to play a role that we don’t feel comfortable with inside makes us inauthentic.
However, as believers, let’s not miss out on the significance of this word: it was the most looked up word in 2023, which tells us very clearly what people are looking for.
Manifesting
I almost want to call this “Spiritual Practice of the Year” because of its popularity. What is manifesting? As the Axis ministry puts it:
A decade ago, your teen might have believed it was Santa who stocked gifts under the tree. Now that they’re all grown up… they might believe they manifested them.
Teenagers are posting on TikTok what they are hoping to bring into reality into their lives; but it's not hoping it into existence, it's ‘willing’ it into reality. With 10 billion views on TikTok (remember that our global population is 8 billion), this is major. The concept itself is not new, as it is, in essence, a re-packaging for this generation of older ideas such as visualisation based on recognising the divine within. It’s beyond the scope of this article to go in-depth and I wanted to rather just highlight the fact that this is a very popular practice, and it also reveals a generation hungry for fulfillment.
Gen Z has often been described as irreligious since they have no formal religious identification based on traditional markers. Tara Isabella Burton has a unique take on this, suggesting that instead of calling them the “Nones” as they often are (based on forms where the box under religious affiliation marked ‘none’ gets ticked), she suggests that they should rather be described as “Remixed.” In her book Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World she points out how traditional religion is like a straitjacket for a generation that has individualism as its focus. The result is an eclectic spirituality based on mix and matching what is liked. They are on the search for spiritual fulfillment in their own way, resulting in:
The rise of bespoke religious identities. The more individualized our religious identities become, the more willing we are to mix and match ideas and practices…The idea that our lives can and should be customized to our personal interests and wants and needs has bled into the way we construct our religious identities.
Speaking of Gen Z, just to throw an extra ingredient into the mix of cultural trends, you may want to check out Gen Alpha and YouTube's #1 trending topic for 2023: Skibidi Toilet which hit 65 billion views (I’m not trying to cause alarm or anything like that…)
Barbenheimer…Taylor Swift…Rizz & Authentic…Manifesting: When we take these four culture-shaping trends from 2023 into account (and there were myriad more that could have been written on), we recognise afresh that the Christian narrative is simply no longer the dominant narrative anymore.
We sit with a culture and generation that is looking for fulfillment in all the wrong places, because all the wrong places have been placed right before them, thanks primarily to the power of social media and the ubiquitous algorithm. It’s a generation that places emphasis on individualism, and then expresses a hunger for connection (of the relational kind!). It desires meaning and searches for authenticity, but then simultaneously struggles to accommodate alternative narratives and points of view.
The Christian worldview, to this generation, is just alien.
How do we reach this mission field?
There are a few considerations to consider (hopefully another article!), but the starting point remains the same as that of any mission context: we need to begin by being the disciples Christ called us to be.
A distinctive life causes questions, and questions become the conduit to revealing Jesus as the answer.
I am indebted to Axis ministry for highlighting these. Visit them at www.axis.org
ibid
From his book The Rise and Triumph of the Modern self, quoted in https://breakpoint.org/authentic-is-the-word-of-the-year-but-does-it-mean-what-we-think-it-means/?