McCrindle Research recently published a summary of their projections of trends for 2025 and onward. What are the conscious or intuitive beliefs and assumptions that are driving these trends? How can we engage with those beliefs as Christians in a way that leads to fruitful gospel conversations?
Disenchanted Secularised Individualistic Autonomy
Here in the ‘developed West’, every technological advance since the eighteenth century seems to have increased people’s sense of autonomy.[1] Our worldview, or social imaginary, has been shaped to believe that, first, this world is all that exists. If this is the case then, second, we humans are therefore essentially pleasure-seeking, self-interested individuals, ultimately responsible to ourselves. External relationships are useful to the extent that they advance our self-interest. Third, each individual person therefore must discover or construct their own meaningful life in this world. There is no supernatural heaven, so we must construct our own version of heaven here on earth. Moreover, only you truly know yourself, so only you can build your own little heaven. Fourth, we assume that human technology will help us build those heavens on earth. Constant innovation of new technologies permits us to constantly improve.
The internet and social media heighten all the above. We see advertisements curated to our desires as evidenced by our clicks, likes, shares and reshares, while we observe our friends living their (carefully curated) best lives online. We therefore feel like we deserve an equivalent life. This may be part of what underlies McCrindle’s expectations that people will “curat[e] their career” towards “prioritising work life balance.” People feel empowered and entitled to construct their own preferred lifestyle.
Depending on people’s individual circumstances, this expectation of being able to autonomously construct your preferred lifestyle may result in one of three mindsets. Those who fail to achieve their dreams may end up discouraged. They may blame themselves for lacking resources, missing opportunities, and generally being a failure. They may be the tax collectors and prostitutes of today—people who have been brought low enough to be willing to entrust themselves to the friend of sinners. Those who are more pridefully self-confident may blame others for preventing them from achieving their dreams, in angry resentment. This is a form of greed and covetousness—a form of entitlement that will hinder them from accepting the gospel. Those who succeed may rest comfortably in their success. This is also a form of greedy covetous entitlement that effectively blinds people to their need for a saviour.
Religious Morality
The McCrindle report notes record levels of population growth being “largely driven by net overseas migration which is now twice what it was in 2019.” Many migrants are drawn to the ‘West’ by its promises of wealth and lifestyle improvement. Migrants tend to be industrious, because where most of us come from, no one’s entitled to anything—you have to work hard just to survive. Migrant normal is, by Australian standards, diligent, if not workaholic.
So migrants tend to succeed. The first generation builds wealth. Their children excel academically, enter high-prestige professions, amass even more wealth, and inculcate socially beneficial values in their children—values like respect for parents and wider family, industry, and frugality. The third generation are likely to absorb those values and thereby continue to be socially and economically successful. Migrants are therefore highly likely to fit the third profile mentioned above, seeing themselves as legitimately self-sufficient, and this self-sufficiency may harden them against the gospel. But for many migrants, their secular materialistic success may have the ironic effect of reinforcing not a secular autonomous mindset but a religious morality.
Western autonomy is globally a minority position. The majority world is religious. Many migrants will arrive with a worldview/social imaginary that is the inverse of the Western one: God/the gods exist, therefore humans are finally responsible not to themselves but to the divine. Consequently, they believe that morally upright religious people like them, who know the divine, can either save the West by (re)introducing their religion or, more likely, inherit its cultural institutions as autonomous secular Western culture slowly devolves into irrelevance.
People who possess this kind of religious self-confidence often won’t evidence a ‘culture warrior’ mentality, because they don’t have to make war, all they need to do is wait. In the meantime they can preserve their religious identity and community. Their social and economic success will reinforce this perception of moral and cultural superiority. Secular success reinforces a sense of spiritual success.
To such an audience, we therefore need to distinguish the Christian gospel from religious moralism. We are not saved by our works but by Christ’s work for us (Rom 5:18–19; Heb 4:15, 10:5–10). Christian morality is an expression of saving faith (Rom 12:1–2, 12:9–13:13; Tit 2:11–14; Jas 1:26–27; 2:14–26). Justification begets sanctification, not the other way around (Tit 3:4–7; 1 Pet 1:22–2:3). To the religiously ‘successful’, Christ is a stumbling block (Rom 9:30–10:4; 1 Pet 2:6–8), his cross an offence (Gal 5:11). We must retain that offence and be ready to face the censure of those who think the gospel of free forgiveness in Christ legitimises sin (Matt 11:19; Lk 7:34–35; Rom 6:1–4, 15–17).
Social and Ecological Responsibility
The McCrindle article also shows how responsibility is fashionable. People aren’t (yet?) becoming re-enchanted with the divine, but they are at least re-engaging with the physical, both human and ecological.[2]
In apparent contradiction to the online empowerment reviewed above, people are prioritising physical over online relationships. The McCrindle article comments that “across society there is a desire for meaningful human connection,” and that “many are taking steps to try and reduce their social media usage.”
In apparent contradiction to self-interested individualism, people also feel responsible for communal wellbeing. Products need to be created ethically—avoiding slavery and sweatshop exploitation. The increased longevity that has permitted seven generations of humans to interact with each other implies the possibility of intergenerational communication. But will this communication be constructive or conflictual? There is also an increased sense of responsibility towards the physical environment. “Ethical creation” avoids cruelty not only against humans but also animals. Such products are also designed to be easily ‘digestible’ by the planet—reassimilated with minimum pollutants and waste.
A cynical way to resolve the tension between individual self-interested autonomy and fashionable responsibility is to downgrade social and ecological responsibility to a mere virtue signal. But the doctrine of total depravity does not mean that everyone is always as evil as possible. On the contrary, most people are truly, if imperfectly and inconsistently, influenced by the moral compass that is an aspect of our creation in the divine image (Rom 2:14–15).[3] The contemporary sense of social and environmental responsibility represents an awakening to external realities beyond the autonomous self. These realities of embodied existence imply an equally real moral ecology. And that implies the real existence and authority of the God who created these inescapable realities.
We may therefore be able to use this desire for social and ecological responsibility to engage in what Sam Chan has called modified presuppositional apologetics.[4] We can celebrate and encourage this return to created reality, while pointing out that this moral awareness often lacks sufficient foundation. We Christians do not base this sense of responsibility on some universal intuitive sense of human equality nor a utilitarian compulsion to leave behind a healthy planet for our children. We have a stronger foundation than that.
We can push people to recognise the supernatural, divine source of these rightful inclinations. To extend Charles Taylor’s terminology: radical autonomy ‘buffers’ people not only from the divine but from each other and the world. Covid lockdown and increasing evidence about the negative effects of internet and social media overconsumption have made us ‘porous’ to each other again. Ecological concerns have made us ‘porous’ to the planet again. So what’s stopping us from recognising our porousness, our dependence, upon almighty God? Why is it so impossible to believe that he not only exists, but is holy and just, and simultaneously loving and forgiving—and demonstrates all these perfections in the unique atonement he himself achieves in and as the person of the Son (Jn 3:16; Rom 3:25–26; 5:8)?
The deepest obstacle of course, is sin. Sin can use the three beliefs I’ve surveyed as different ways to be independent of God, so we can continue to boast in ourselves instead of Christ. Secularised autonomy seeks to be independent of everything. Religion seeks godliness outside of forgiveness and regeneration. And social and ecological responsibility can show great concern for the creation while still ignoring the Creator. Even as we track cultural trends and reason and persuade, we must pray that God himself shines his light into dark and sinful hearts.
[1] Andrew Wilson, Remaking the world: how 1776 created the post-Christian West (Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway, 2023).
[2] Although see this ABC and this Conversation article about the rising interest in spirituality, which is more individualistic than traditional religiosity. David Ould and Stephen MacAlpine commented on it in a recent in a recent Dual Citizens interview with Rob Dreher. Michael Horton has begun a series, The Divine Self, examining its underlying belief systems, beginning with a historical review in Michael Scott Horton, Shaman and sage: the roots of “spiritual but not religious” in antiquity, The divine self, (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2024).
[3] John Frame helpfully distinguishes between total and ‘absolute’ depravity in John M. Frame, Systematic Theology: an Introduction to Christian Belief (Phillipsburg, New Jersey: Presbyterian & Reformed, 2013), 865-871.
[4] Sam Chan, Evangelism in a skeptical world: how to make the unbelievable news about Jesus more believable (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2018); Sam Chan, How to talk about Jesus (without being THAT guy): personal evangelism in a skeptical world (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Reflective, 2020).
