The Vibe Shift

In the last decade we’ve all noticed a change in the sociopolitical landscape. To some it feels like a long-overdue return to sanity as egalitarianism, feminism, and liberalism more generally lose their hold on the imaginations of many in the American public. To others it feels like an “existential threat” and “unprecedented times” as meritocracy, bald patriarchy, and hierarchical thinking reclaim their once sure foothold in Western civilization. It’s a tug-of-war between two poles—two sets of sensibilities—two intellectual predispositions. 

For many years the team pulling to the left enjoyed a social and political advantage. But in recent years, for reasons that are beyond the scope of this piece, the rope has shifted: many from the left have moved closer to center, many from the center have drifted right, and many already on the right have slid further toward the far right.

Online, people call it “the vibe shift.” That’s shorthand for “liberalism is out of style.” And it’s easy to see why. The delivery system for liberal ideas changed as those ideas gradually took over our culture. What once advanced subtly through pop culture began arriving raw and unvarnished, less mediated by the elevated cultural forms that once carried it. A stifling insistence on political correctness, censorship of conservative speakers, racial essentialism, sexual insanity, and the endless “oppression Olympics” of intersectionality came to the foreground.

Think of it like computer code. For decades, pop culture has been “left-coded.” You could enjoy the movie, the music, the art—the product was compelling—even if you never noticed the code running underneath. A story about the weak being lifted up resonates with almost anyone. But in the last decade or so the code itself began flashing across the screen. What once ran invisibly in the background now confronted users in raw commands. Stripped of narrative and symbol, the instructions felt thinner and more brittle—even abrasive and screechy. “Believe all women” or “divest yourself of privilege” doesn’t land as compellingly as a proposition as it does in a storyline.

It isn’t interesting or surprising to me that the left lost its grip on the social imagination of the country as they advanced their thinking from the realm of thought into the realm of reality. What’s been of interest to me is the Christian response to this phenomenon. For as long as the left has been winning the “culture war” Christians have argued for Christianity kind of like this: “If you like our Western, liberal, free, democratic culture, you should be a Christian because the world you live in is the fruit of Christianity. You like human rights? A fan of the elevation of women? Glad we abolished slavery? You can thank Jesus for all that stuff.” We all told people things like, “if you want to keep eating the fruits that our culture has come to enjoy, then you’d be wise to stop trying to cut down the Christian tree that produced that fruit.”

Then—the vibe shift. What happens when liberal ideas with their emphasis on rights, equality, and concern for the weak go out of style, worn out from weaponization? The apologetic in the preceding paragraph goes out of style too. Leaders like Tim Keller and publishing houses like The Gospel Coalition (popular evangelical voices who framed Christianity in liberal-democratic terms), along with many pastors of contemporary churches, now find their arguments falling flat with younger people. They hear “human rights” and think of shrill activism. They hear “elevation of women” and picture blue-haired feminists. They hear “abolition of slavery” and suspect revisionist history. 

A fresh social movement has appeared and with it a new apologetic—highlighting the illiberal, patriarchal, and angular features of the Christian message. In some sense, the vibe shift only caught up with what men like Doug Wilson had been championing for decades. Wilson has long insisted, “Patriarchy simply means ‘father rule,’ and so it follows that every biblical Christian holds to patriarchy.” Here the point is simply that what once made Wilson marginal is now making him mainstream among those fed up with the fruit of liberalism.

The verses once softened or excused—“wives submit to your husbands,” “I came not to bring peace, but a sword,” “I will by no means clear the guilty”—have become selling points. Meanwhile, we find ourselves sheepish about proclaiming texts like, “turn the other cheek,” “the husband doesn’t have authority over his own body but the wife does,” and “there is no longer man nor woman, slave nor free, Jew nor Gentile.”

Ironically, in response to a leftist takeover of biblical sentiments, the new Christian right has developed a more Nietzschean posture toward Scripture itself. Nietzsche famously despised the softening aspects of Christianity in favor of a more Homeric ethic. He called it slave morality—the ethic of the weak, designed by the weak to restrain the strong. On the right (at least the internet right) many of the very verses Nietzsche despised, Christians now downplay—choosing to advance the Christian story in ways that sideline or temper its softer notes, just as we once advanced it in ways that sidestepped its harder edges. Vibe shift indeed.

Fascinatingly, Christianity really did emerge as a left-coded movement when set against its thoroughly pagan cultural backdrop. In the world of Homer and Caesar, what mattered was strength, glory, honor, and domination. Power was proof of virtue; weakness was shame. Pagan religion sanctified hierarchy—slaves at the bottom, noblemen and warriors at the top, women excluded from power. Into that world came a faith that exalted the poor (Luke 6:20), warned the rich (Luke 6:24; 1 Tim. 6:9–10), dignified women (Luke 8:1–3; Gal. 3:28), called slaves brothers (Philem. 16), and proclaimed a crucified criminal as Lord (1 Cor. 1:23). To Romans, crucifixion was the most degrading fate imaginable; to Christians, the cross became the symbol of victory (Phil. 2:8–11). To Greeks, self-sufficiency was the highest virtue; to Christians, boasting in weakness was the mark of true strength (2 Cor. 12:9–10). That inversion was scandalous then, became axiomatic over time, and in the post–vibe shift world has become scandalous again.

Tom Holland has argued persuasively in Dominion that what many Christians have regarded as a return to paganism in our modern “post-Christian” society is no such thing. What we’ve identified as pagan is actually the fruit of the seeds that Christianity’s cultural domination planted. The ideas that we associate with the political left—human dignity, equality, sympathy for the victim—are not ideas that ancient pagan thought naturally furnished. Christianity, against the backdrop of the ancient world, was the radical innovation. It elevated the lowly (James 1:9), sided with the victim (Ps. 72:4; Luke 10:33–37), gloried in weakness rather than strength (2 Cor. 12:9–10). In short, it was left-coded.

But that isn’t the whole story. Christianity doesn’t race toward the left without brakes; it taps them all over the place. Husbands are named heads of their households (Eph. 5:23), children are commanded to obey their parents (Eph. 6:1), churches are led by male elders (1 Tim. 2:12; Titus 1:5–6), and kings are seen as God’s servants for order and justice (Rom. 13:1–4). Enough of these remain that the left views the Bible as “hopelessly patriarchal,” “rigidly hierarchical,” and “morally regressive.” Modern liberals think the Bible leans too far right. Ancient pagans thought it leaned far too left. Put simply, Christianity tilts in directions that displease both camps—and that makes me very comfortable. It gives us a cultural corpus that naturally guards against the excesses of either side.

The tug-of-war match described in the opening of this essay is the same tug-of-war match the Bible plays out in its own pages. It keeps tension on the rope, creating the equilibrium necessary for a straight line. We, on the other hand, are always tempted to resolve the tension—to absolutize one side or the other, to demand pure hierarchy or pure equality. But why would we absolutize what Christianity has worked so hard to synthesize? Its genius is not in choosing left or right, but in holding them together—honoring order without crushing the lowly, exalting the weak without abolishing authority, embracing openness without rejecting borders. The impulses of the right gain their meaning only in service to the ends of the left; the ends of the left can only be secured by the stability of the right. The ideological poles we’ve termed ‘right’ and ‘left’ aren’t at odds any more than male and female are. Their differences generate a harmony—if they can resist turning tension into hostility.