A Brave New World

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Changing what it means to know.

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Social media.

Living each others' stories.

The walls come tumbling down.

We think of tech as a thing to be used; they think of it as part of who they are.

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Four fractured parts

• Free America
• Smart America
• Real America
• Just America

Call this narrative “Just America.” It’s another rebellion from below. As Real America breaks down the ossified libertarianism of Free America, Just America assails the complacent meritocracy of Smart America. It does the hard, essential thing that the other three narratives avoid, that white Americans have avoided throughout history. It forces us to see the straight line that runs from slavery and segregation to the second-class life so many Black Americans live today—the betrayal of equality that has always been the country’s great moral shame, the heart of its social problems.

Just America isn’t concerned only with race. The most radical version of the narrative lashes together the oppression of all groups in an encompassing hell of white supremacy, patriarchy, homophobia, transphobia, plutocracy, environmental destruction, and drones—America as a unitary malignant force beyond any other evil on Earth. The end of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, published in 2015 and hugely influential in establishing the narrative of Just America, interprets global warming as the planet’s cosmic revenge on white people for their greed and cruelty.

I am not arguing for what is right.


I'm observing what is.

Yet: note the righteous roots of many of the reactions we have described.

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So: what does this mean for the gospel?

"I want it to be meaningful again."

We cannot pretend we are where we were.

So often, we give accurate, even moving answers to questions they do not care about.