The term “zeitgeist” was first coined by the German writer Georg Hegel in 1807, meaning something akin to “the spirit of the age.” Looking back at the 19th century, we can more confidently ascertain its zeitgeist, as it was a period of radical social change driven by the Industrial Revolution. Just the same, the 20th century sought to contain the forces of political ideology and grappled with the powerful existential threat posed by our own technology. As our current, young century matures, it appears that the spirit of this age is one that is fully saturated with the constant stream of anxiety.
Young people carry the weight of academic pressure and an uncertain professional prospect with the rise of AI. Adults feel financial strain, political upheaval, cultural and moral confusion. The elderly bear the weight of isolation in a technological age and the loneliness it can entail. Common to all is the deep existential doubt that appears to be so pervasive and so pernicious—the doubt of the value and meaning of their lives and their place in the universe.
This zeitgeist is firmly a unique artifact of our post-modern world, and unlike in previous ages, where faith, family, tradition, and occupation could provide a direction for us, our zeitgeist is one of fragmentation and ultimately defined by the anxiety that this fragmentation provokes. In the current socio-political environment, anxiety is not just an occasional psychological state, but the default atmosphere that we breathe in. What is more, it has found its way into our work, our relationships, and even our Christian civilization.
I believe the folk wisdom commonly goes—“man’s extremity is God’s opportunity”—and that axiom has both hidden grace and application here. It is precisely because the zeitgeist of our age is so thoroughly saturated with anxiety that it is also saturated with a sense of desire. More specifically, beneath the restless motion of post-modernity, there is a yearning for stability, permanence, and paramount to all things—truth. The pervasiveness of our doubts points not to the demise of faith in our time, but to the human desire for something enduring, something that will not erode under the pressures of culture, politics, or our ever-expanding technology.
The crisis of meaning created by all of these things may be the prologue to its recovery.
When relativism finally exhausts itself in endless self-reference, when unlit minds cease to be given a platform, when nihilism is no longer regarded as a virtue and indifference a badge of honor, people will again desire to seek out the truth and the purposefulness of their own lives. It is exactly the cultural malaise that isolates the individual and drives them into their anxieties that also propels them toward inward contemplation. Once there, in that solitude, God can speak to them once again. At this moment, we are witnessing both the dearth of meaning in our world and its long-awaited rediscovery. Our age of anxiety may, by grace, yet become an age of renewal.
Here, we might recall the Danish theologian Søren Kierkegaard, who saw anxiety not as a moral or psychological defect but as a spiritual condition intrinsic to our human freedom. Kierkegaard lays claim that anxiety is the “dizziness of freedom,” the experience of standing before the infinite possibilities of existence and recognizing both our capacity to act and the possibility of our human frailty. This experience, he argued, could become the conduit through which faith might readily flow. In confronting our own condition as mortal clay, we discover our dependence upon God, a dependence that transforms anxiety over the threshing floor of doubt into spiritual growth.
The Christian response to anxiety is not suppression, but metanoia transformation. It is to allow our fears to become harbingers of an unrealized faith, and our uncertainty to become the aperture through which divine truth enters our hearts. In a world that seeks to drown its unease in endless distraction, consumption, and self-definition, faith calls us instead into an act of contemplation.
For Christians, this moment propels us to reclaim the centrality of our faith as the answer to anxiety. This is not to promote it as a spiritual panacea for all things, nor to indulge in the naïve idea that belief alone dissolves the storms of our age. As a rule, faith provides a vantage point—a transcendent vista—from which we can rightly perceive the anxieties that define our present world.
Faith does not dismiss the current zeitgeist as irrelevant, nor does it romanticize past ages through nostalgia and pretend they were free of their own specific turmoil. Instead, it offers us a transcendent horizon from which the anxieties of our era can be measured. When Christ tells His disciples, “Let the day’s own worry be sufficient for the day” (Mt. 6:34), He is not offering empty comfort or encouraging a studied ignorance. He reveals the truth that has always cut across the spirit of every age: that God holds our lives in His providential care.
Photo by Edge2Edge Media on Unsplash
