We have moved beyond postmodernism, but the contours of post-postmodernism are not quite clear. The next phase based on the premises of postmodernism is nihilism with its loss of meaning, animated resentment and violence, and drive for power…Our is a moment that calls for more than the taken-for-granted status quo. Nihilism is the frontline in the West’s missional challenge…We need a new generation of liminal leaders who are up to the task.

For decades, many believed America was divided between the Right and the Left, conservatives and liberals, believers and secularists. This is the framework used by cable news services. But sociologist James Davison Hunter now argues that this map no longer helps us. The deeper reality is that both sides share the same underlying condition: a culture of nihilism.

“Nihilistic culture,” Hunter writes, “is defined by the drive to destroy, by the will to power.” This is now our common world. As such it is our missional front line.

The real question for leaders is no longer; how do we win the culture war? The real question is, how do we rebuild meaning itself?

This requires restoring what the West has lost: a shared sacred order. Without it, a society cannot endure. Technology, prosperity, and politics cannot substitute for it. A culture cannot survive on material gains when its spiritual and moral foundation has crumbled. Rebuilding this sacred order requires liminal leaders in the church, people able to navigate this in-between time between the old, collapsing order and what comes next.

Collapse of the Sacred Canopy

Sociologists like Émile Durkheim, Peter Berger, and Philip Rieff saw this long before it arrived. They warned that modernity would hollow out the structures that give life moral shape. They warned that expressive individualism would dissolve the bonds that hold communities together. They warned that without a shared sacred order; societies unravel into confusion and conflict.

We now live in that reality.

Meaning has thinned. Institutions have weakened. Identity has become weightless and self-invented. Extreme violence is daily news. Reality itself is contested.

The symptoms are all around us, but they are symptoms of a far more lethal systemic metastasizing disease than many imagine.

We are not simply lost. We have lost our ability to find the way home. When Hunter asks whether we have the cultural resources to reverse this decline, his implied answer is sobering, “very few.” This is why liminal leadership must focus not on tactics but on foundations—not on arguments but on architecture. Renewal begins by rebuilding the deep structures of culture.

A sacred order rests on three legs:

1. Authority — the vertical source and story of truth and obligation.
2. Plausibility — the social and institutional environment that reinforces belief.
3. Ritual — the embodied practices that sustain identity and community.

Remove one, and the structure falls. Our culture has lost all three. Renewal requires restoring each one. Let us take them one at a time.

Recovering Sacred Authority

Every society needs a story that rises above personal preference. Without it, people become their own sources of truth, and society dissolves into competing wills. Today, the modern creed is simple: “You do you.” But a culture grounded only in personal choice cannot endure. Freedom without form is chaos. Authority is not about domination; it is about acknowledging that reality has a shape. It means we live in a moral universe—one we did not create but one with which we must align.

Modern people believe morality is a personal preference. But morality is not invented; it is discovered. It arises from the structure of creation. Marriage, sexuality, identity, truth—all have meaning because the created world has meaning and design. Ethics has a metaphysical basis.

We cannot rebuild authority with data alone. People live by stories. They trust what captures their imagination. They are shaped more by images than arguments. To rebuild authority, we must offer a compelling, beautiful, and true story about life. The rebuild starts with the imagination and often with artists.

This is why the Christian story is central. Rather than the simplified idea of “Believe so you can go to heaven,” Scripture presents a grand narrative: God is actively restoring everything and calls His people to join Him in that renewal today.

Theologian N.T. Wright reminds us that the Christian hope is not escape from the world but transformation in and of the world. Heaven is not a distant realm but the power of God’s future breaking into the present. “On earth as it is in heaven” is more than a prayer, it’s our mission now. This creational story grounds authority. It explains who we are, why we exist, what life is for, and where history is headed. Without it, we drift into the emptiness of self-invention.

Churches unintentionally weaken sacred authority by focusing on an individualistic theory of change:

• “Change hearts, change society.”
• “Get everyone to believe the same worldview.”
• “Focus on personal faith.”

But culture does not change one individual at a time. Culture is not the aggregate of individual choices. Culture is a normative invisible reality, a separate thing, created through institutions, networks, symbols, and shared imagination that define reality for all others in a manner that is largely taken-for-granted. Cultural change is not about mass mobilization but reality-defining worldmaking. Most evangelical institutions and ministries in America have adopted an understanding of culture and a theory of cultural change that is false and will fail.

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