A growing number of public intellectuals are changing their minds about the church. Not all are ready to make a bold confession of faith, but many are willing to recognize Christianity’s role in shaping civilization.
Ryan Avent’s In Good Faith: How the Nature of Belief Shapes the Fate of Societies reflects this shift. Though not a work of theology, it argues for the social necessity of faith. Best known as a journalist at The Economist, Avent recognizes the remarkable achievements of the modern world. Economic growth, scientific progress, democracy, and expanding individual freedom have produced unprecedented material prosperity. Yet he contends that this success has also exposed the liberal order’s fragility.
Beneath economic markets, democratic institutions, scientific advances, and technological progress of the liberal order lies something more basic: shared meaning. “Shared meaning,” Avent writes, “is the basis for any cooperative acts we undertake; it is the foundation of society; no social complexity is possible without it” (56).
At the heart of shared meaning is faith. We’re cultural creatures who inhabit stories, institutions, rituals, identities, and inherited moral expectations. We cooperate because we trust, we trust because we share meanings, and those meanings are held together by forms of faith that are so pervasive and often imperceptible. These days, however, the “shared” part is getting harder as divisions and partisanship deepen.
Modern Faith
One major reason for the loss of shared meaning is something Avent calls “Modern Faith,” which he defines as “a supreme confidence in correct systems” (10). Liberal democracy, free-market capitalism, and technocracy become the high priests that shape and administer our daily rituals. Yet these systems remain deeply human.
We’re cultural creatures who inhabit stories, institutions, rituals, identities, and inherited moral expectations.
“Systems,” Avent writes, “are not independent of human behavior” (17). Democracy, for example, isn’t something separate from the people but is constituted by their actions. When Modern Faith encourages ways of thinking and choosing that prioritize utility and optimization, it suppresses genuine human meaning and erodes the very foundations of shared meaning on which it rests.
Avent experienced the power of shared meaning in church when he was younger. He no longer believes in the resurrection, miracles, heaven, or hell. But he now recognizes what he lost when he rejected God. He writes,
When I left the church . . . I lost the familiar stories that had entertained and comforted me . . . I lost the hope of heaven . . . It took me twenty-five years to realize what a terrible emptiness those losses left. (222–23)
It’s difficult to overlook Christianity’s enormous role in reshaping Western moral consciousness that helped loosen the bindings of clans and tribes, fostered universal moral claims, elevated the dignity of persons, and contributed to the formation of social trust and institutional capacity. Modern Faith threatens many of those blessings Christianity formerly provided.
Emergence of Goodness
The heart of the book is a historical journey through the ways cultures are formed by faith. For that formation to happen, first you need a “democosm,” which is a set of people entangled closely enough to permit significant cultural exchange. This then permits “emergence,” the phenomenon by which interactions among simpler structures give rise to higher-order structures, thereby creating a culture that emerges from shared meaning.
Avent observes that the emergence of a global democosm “creates rich opportunities for potent cultural admixture and innovation,” even as “the cultural foundation of the nation may be weakening” (197).
According to Avent, Christianity produced a genuine moral revolution. It universalized ethics in ways that older tribal religions hadn’t, cultivated commitments to work and self-restraint, and deepened social trust across wider circles. He builds on the work of anthropologist Joseph Henrich, who argues that WEIRD societies (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) were the product of the cultural evolution that Christianity set in motion.
Christianity produced a genuine moral revolution.
“Our moral journey is not over,” Avent argues, and there’s nothing inevitable about its future (100). The pursuit of goodness remains the goal, but goodness must be conceived collectively. He observes, “The extent to which we can be good individually depends in part on the extent to which we can be good collectively” (100). Liberal society has achieved much, and Avent concludes that it “is not heaven on Earth, but it is closer than we have ever been” (265).
This account is compelling because of its emphasis on the relational nature of goodness, yet it stops short of the spiritual horizon of the Christian tradition. Christians understand goodness in relation to both God and neighbor, with the love of God ordering the latter relationship. The true goal of goodness is conformity to the likeness of Christ for the individual and the collective—not only in this life but in the next. Without God, notions of goodness are mere glittering vices.
Threats to Faith
In the final chapters, Avent turns to the future threats to social stability: the disruption of information flows, a cultural nihilism that corrodes cooperation, and the emergence of new ideological faiths to fill the vacuum left by older ones. The only way to navigate these treacherous changes, he argues, “is by devising powerful stories that remind us why we are special and what our responsibilities to each other are” (257).
The looming challenge of generative AI gets particular attention. “You do not need to poke around in AI-focused online forums very long to stumble across material of what can only be described as a theological nature,” Avent remarks (258).
Christians understand goodness in relation to both God and neighbor, with the love of God ordering the latter relationship.
AI functions for many like a new religion, promising technological miracles and even everlasting life. But AI, like all other cultural innovations, requires faith. Humans remain moral agents participating in a nondeterministic system. We remain responsible for the systems we create and the outcomes they produce.
Avent’s In Good Faith achieves something genuinely difficult: a synthetic account of human belief, cultural evolution, and social meaning that takes religion seriously without being religious. He writes candidly about his own losses and uncertainty, giving the book an unusual intellectual honesty.
Where it falls short is in the space between diagnosis and prescription. Avent recognizes our need for community, narrative, trust, and meaning, but his frame can’t explain whether these goods can be recovered and on what terms. Near the end of the book, he reflects on gratitude for “the sheer absurdity of being” and wonders whom we’re to thank for this gift (268). His immanent account strains toward transcendence, stopping just short of faith. Christians need not.
While cultural forms of faith may sustain social order, they can’t replace faith in the God who created us, redeemed us through his Son, and continues, even amid our chaotic age, to lead his people toward goodness in this life and the life to come.
