A Word for Our Troubled Times
· The Atlantic
IN HIS 2024 book The Age of Grievance, Frank Bruni argues that America is suffering from a cultural sickness. We are angry, acrimonious, and indignant, he observes, consumed by resentments and committed to retaliation.
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Plenty of empirical data supports Bruni’s assessment. A record high of adults—80 percent—believes that Americans are divided on the most important values. National pride, trust in government, and confidence in institutions are near record lows. The Princeton University historian Sean Wilentz says the United States hasn’t been this divided since the Civil War. Nearly half of Americans think another civil war is likely in their lifetime. Affective polarization—our distaste for those who do not share our politics—is at an all-time high, and shapes everything from where we shop to whom we wed.
Individually, Americans are suffering from an “epidemic of loneliness and isolation,” according to a 2023 report by former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy. Depression rates have skyrocketed; instances for adults under 30 have doubled since 2017. Suicide rates have increased by 37 percent since 2000. Anxiety is rising. America is facing a youth-mental-health crisis.
It seems at times as if America is a “twilight kingdom,” in the words of T. S. Eliot, in “this valley of dying stars.” Too many people are living fragmented lives: “Shape without form, shade without colour.”
WHAT WE LACK, in a single word, is shalom. I think shalom is among the most beautiful words in the Bible. In the New Testament, which was written in Greek rather than Hebrew, the word used is eirene. Shalom is often translated into English as “peace,” which many people take to mean the absence of conflict. But its fuller meaning is something closer to human flourishing.
[From the March 2026 issue: Rod Dreher thinks the Enlightenment was a mistake]
Scholars have written that the word connotes wholeness and integrity, community and connectedness, righteousness and justice. They have claimed that it involves achieving the right relationship between ourselves and God, and between us and others. It also has to do with restoration, with recapturing God’s original design for creation. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks characterized it as “a state in which everything is in its proper place and all is at one with the physical and ethical laws governing the universe.”
Shalom is the climax of the Biblical priestly blessing: “The Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make his face shine on you and be gracious to you; the Lord turn his face toward you and give you shalom.”
THE GOAL OF PERFECT JUSTICE is of course impossible to achieve on this Earth. But we are taught to seek to make the world better than it otherwise is. In Jeremiah, for example, God commands the exiled Israelites in Babylon—living within the enemy kingdom, which destroyed Jerusalem—to “seek the shalom of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper.” Even as strangers, they were told to seek the welfare of the city to which they had been called, to contribute rather than to destroy, to act with righteousness rather than vengeance.
Some 2,500 years later, Desmond Tutu, the Anglican archbishop of Cape Town, the voice of voiceless Black South Africans who fought apartheid through nonviolence, won the Nobel Peace Prize. In his address, Tutu said:
There is no peace in Southern Africa. There is no peace because there is no justice. There can be no real peace and security until there be first justice enjoyed by all the inhabitants of that beautiful land. The Bible knows nothing about peace without justice, for that would be crying “peace, peace, where there is no peace.” God’s Shalom, peace, involves inevitably righteousness, justice, wholeness, fullness of life, participation in decision-making, goodness, laughter, joy, compassion, sharing and reconciliation.
Half a dozen years later, apartheid was collapsing. In 1994, Nelson Mandela, who had been imprisoned for 27 years because of his fight against racial segregation, was elected the nation’s first Black president. He appointed Tutu chairperson of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. They were committed to bring healing to their shattered homeland, to pursue shalom.
WHICH BRINGS US TO THE CONTEMPORARY UNITED STATES. Our situation is nothing like what the Israelites experienced in Babylon, or what Black people faced in apartheid South Africa. But something is amiss. We are a riven society seething with resentment. Everyone can sense it. But there is weariness, too, a longing to find the peace that right now feels beyond our reach. We need to find a way to calm the dark passions.
Christians are hardly the only ones who can be instruments of peace. But Christians are called to create shalom, and should be a healing force in society. Yet in far too many cases they are doing the opposite: inflaming resentments, seeking conflict, and inflicting wounds. No one, including Christians, can impart to others what they themselves do not possess. Their souls are at least as unsettled as the rest of the world.
What explains this disquiet? For some Christians, faith is less a force of transformation than it is a ratification of certain preexisting tendencies. We all interpret the world subjectively, at least to some degree, understanding experiences through the lens of prior, and sometimes unconscious, beliefs. What many of us hope to feel is often well beyond what we actually feel. Christians may repeat phrases like incantations—I have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, my Lord and savior—hoping that claiming so will make it real.
But there are also certain people who are drawn to faith, or at least who draw faith to them, who are rigid and controlling, incurious and dogmatic. Their thinking is black-and-white; they frame complex issues as binary. They see conflict as the natural result of faithful obedience and tolerance as a sign of flagging commitment to doctrine. They believe that faith is synonymous with certainty, which leaves little room for mystery.
[From the July/August 2021 issue: How America fractured into four parts]
Then there are plenty of Christians who believe themselves called to act as theological policemen. They weaponize faith in order to defend it against perceived enemies from within and from without. People with this profile are vivified by calling out those who hold beliefs and teachings they deem have deviated from theological truths. They live for confrontation. This can provide purpose to their lives; in many cases, it creates in-groups and out-groups, both of which they seem to need. This cast of mind does not encourage inner peace or reconciliation.
I RECENTLY ASKED the theologian Rowan Williams what part of him that is essential would be missing were he not a person of the Christian faith. “The world would be less exciting without my faith,” he told me. He cited the many examples of people whose faith has “enlarged and enriched what I see and what I sense.” I also asked him about the things he most wanted his life to convey to others. “That sense of the enrichment just around the corner of your vision,” he replied, “the perspective of that eternally overflowing source of love and mercy and how that lights up everything.” For Williams, and for others, Jesus is “infinitely compelling.”
If Christians are going to help heal our broken world, they will need to rediscover that sense of enchantment, of faith enlarging and enriching our lives and the lives of others, and of trying, even imperfectly, to pattern our life after the life of Jesus.
Many people outside the Christian faith, and not a few within it, would say that something has gone sideways, that a commitment to propositional truth doesn’t quite translate into lived experience, that dogma is prioritized over beauty and tenderness, that a determination to be right comes at the expense of being gracious. In theory, none of these things are necessarily in tension; in practice, though, they sometimes are.
The Christian faith, at least as embodied in the people to whom I look to as exemplars, does not sharpen rougher edges of our lives but sands them off. It reduces rather than increases anxiety. It heightens our sense of awe and wonder toward the world. In God’s love is found “the consciousness of delight.” Faith also deepens an appreciation for what the theologian and philosopher David Bentley Hart calls the aesthetic of truth, which is beauty. And beauty “expands our hearts into joy,” as Williams says. Maybe most powerfully of all, faith allows people to take the shattered pieces of their lives and repair them, to make meaning out of suffering, to redeem pain. They find peace within, and from that inner peace they become peacemakers, repairers of the breach, children of God.