The State of the World
It's difficult to describe what's happening in the world right now. Almost everything is declining, and yet nothing new appears to be rising. Yes, the United States is declining in comparison to its past, and yet nothing is going to displace it, no new paradigm will replace America's current world order. What are the alternatives?
Ethnonationalism is not a viable option anymore, the rapid collapse of an increasingly fascist China will prove the point. Its statist model is failing fast, and it's now a global pariah with almost zero soft power or cultural influence. The future of semi-ethnonationalism, if there is one, can be found in places like Poland where this worldview isn't spoken aloud, and its explicit ideological foundation is religion rather than race. Poland can be reactionary only because it's a close ally of the United States in containing reactionary Russia.
The recent online resurgence of chic aesthetic communism is barely worth mentioning. China's government is pure Leninism, its governing bodies were cloned directly from the Soviet Union, and how effective have they been? China is still a poor country with massive inequality and a higher debt-to-GDP than the United States. China is a dying remnant of Marxist civilization. All its ancient traditions have been erased, consciously expunged over the last 72 years of enforced dialectical materialism. China's demographic profile is possibly the worst in the world, and the country might lose half its population by 2060. China will be lucky to survive as a viable country until 2050.
But most of the world is now facing some milder version of what's dragging China down: low fertility, high debt, and less money to invest. Innovation will likely slow. Everything will get more or less worse for the world as a whole. However, that doesn't mean the current world system and its accompanying worldview will change much. The current system is built around certain institutions, ideologies, and forces of habit that most of the world will not have much reason to abandon even as things stagnate and eventually decline. Less developed regions, specifically Africa, face the darkest futures, and the immigrants flooding out of those places can be morally excused for trying to escape in any way possible, even if their presence in developed western countries is now a cause of declining living standards. The Ukraine-Russia war will likely lead to a hundred million people losing access to reliable food in Africa this year based on current crop and trade assessments.
In short, everything sucks. But if we play this game correctly, Christianity might come out on the other side more dominant than ever. The last bastions of resistance in East Asia are simply demographically dying off. Christianity is already the only viable religion left in China, and it certainly seems to be the only one anyone actually believes in. If China implodes, and the boot of Marxism is lifted off the population, Christianity will likely become the dominant narrative in that country. In a declining world, it's likely to be the only believable narrative left besides Islam.
Christianity has an amazing power to bring people together in community and get them to agree on a common story and accompanying values. Here in China, where lockdowns and regulations have destroyed every other social community, broad networks of Christians from across continents have maintained contact and persistently found ways to gather, socialize, and organize. I still regularly meet Chinese people who say they believe in Jesus and read the Bible despite decades of persecution, but I almost never meet any Chinese who devoutly believe in Taoism or Buddhism (although I'm sure they exist... somewhere).
As Xi Jinping has said, the internet is the ideological battleground of our era. This is obviously true, and Christians should be mobilizing online to spread the Christian message wherever we can, but we should never neglect the face to face interactions that form the basis of individuals actually committing themselves in-real-life to Jesus. Simply showing up to church every week is an act that should never be dismissed. It's a real life commitment to real life people that demonstrates that the kingdom of God is immanent and concrete in our world. It's these "IRL" communities that provide the atmospheres for people to talk to each other, support each other, and organize in big and small ways to influence the world for God's kingdom. It's these church cells that push the world towards the ideal "righteous" form it's supposed to take.
We need to tell ourselves, over and over again, that it's enough to be in this world as God's idols resting in the world temple, purifying ourselves and spreading purity; we are representations of God's ideal form wherever we are, and we should be spreading holiness in our communities and online. The world's real heroes are the one's who simply do the right thing over and over again every day and therefore stop the world from completely rotting away into chaotic sin. To feel happiness and peace in this simple holiness is to become enlightened.
Only a God can save us, and without God's intervention we're all doomed by the overwhelming onslaught of human selfishness, the tiny daily vices that erode humanity. Thankfully, God has already intervened, and his Son gives us hope that our efforts will not be in vain. Our daily deaths to ourselves will lead to eternal glorification. It's more important to say this now, at the precipice of the disillusionment of the coming decades of stagnation, and what will feel like powerlessness in the face of secular decline.