Low tide isn’t only the portent of a return. Low tide reveals the terrain of the land that the sea has shaped. High tide covers the sea’s effects, but when the tide is low we see things that had before been obscured. In the same way, secularization has revealed Christendom’s effects in a new way. Perhaps the influence of the Jesus Movement has never been more starkly apparent. Those with eyes to see it have a fresh opportunity to appreciate the power of Christ’s kingdom and the dangers of spurning it.

Matthew Arnold lived at high tide. The English poet wrote his famous “Dover Beach” when churchgoing was at the flood. In 1851, the national census recorded an unequaled high-water mark in church attendance: half of England was in church each Sunday. But, perhaps prophetically, he could feel the tide going out. As he looked out at Dover Beach he saw it as a parable for something shifting in his day:

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

That was his view in 1851. I wonder how he’d respond 173 years later, when church attendance is more like 5 percent than 50.

We can frame the West’s secularization in many ways. One is to note that the percentage of “exvangelicals” in the United States is higher than the percentage of evangelicals in Britain. This has come about due to “the great dechurching,” where 40 million Americans have left the church this century. Just how far out is the tide now?

And what should we do about it? One response is to prayerfully await the tide’s turning. After all, tides don’t only go out; they also come in. Perhaps there are signs this is occurring. Justin Brierley’s book and podcast The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God expertly chart the terrain of our changing faith landscape. It also points to stories of recent adult converts like Paul Kingsnorth and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, or Christian-friendly intellectuals like Douglas Murray and Jordan Peterson.

But critics have pointed out that the “rebirth” Brierley sees may be a triumph of hope over experience. Historian Tom Holland, one of the key figures of The Surprising Rebirth, seemed less than optimistic recently when he pointed out to Brierley in an open conversation that we no longer have truly Christian public figures. In the 20th century, we had Martin Luther King Jr., C. S. Lewis, and Billy Graham. Nowadays, whom do we have?

Those who point to the popularity of Peterson, a Jungian psychologist famously resistant to church, only reveal we live in a vastly different age. Perhaps the successor ideology has unstoppably gained ground, and we must make do with Arnold’s pessimism: “neither joy, nor love, nor light.” What can we say as Christians?

Ultimately, the tide will turn—at some point. One day, the knowledge of God will flood the earth “as the waters cover the sea” (Hab. 2:14). And we might well see revival in the West in our lifetime. For this we pray. But in the meantime, there’s something else we can do. Low tide isn’t only the portent of a return. Low tide reveals the terrain of the land that the sea has shaped. High tide covers the sea’s effects, but when the tide is low we see things that had before been obscured.

In the same way, secularization has revealed Christendom’s effects in a new way. Perhaps the influence of the Jesus Movement has never been more starkly apparent. Those with eyes to see it have a fresh opportunity to appreciate the power of Christ’s kingdom and the dangers of spurning it.

High-Tide Humanism

High tide can be a time of spiritual complacency. Think, for instance, of the humanistic Deism of Thomas Jefferson or Benjamin Franklin. As they wrote the Declaration of Independence, they were founding a nation on the powerful idea of inalienable human rights—rights they considered “self-evident” (although the first draft of the Declaration referred to those rights as “sacred and undeniable”). But the self-evident nature of human rights is the kind of belief you can only hold when it’s supported by Christian assumptions.

T. S. Eliot articulated the problem. In his 1929 essay “Second Thoughts About Humanism,” he wrote that when faith in our Creator recedes, these “self-evident” human rights also disappear: “If you remove from the word ‘human’ all that the belief in the supernatural has given to man, you can view him finally as no more than an extremely clever, adaptable, and mischievous little animal.”

This removal of “the supernatural” is exactly what low tide has revealed. Without the Creator’s endowment, the only thing self-evident about rights is that they aren’t self-evident. They are, and have always been, biblical.

As Tom Holland put it in Dominion,

That all men had been created equal, and endowed with an inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, were not remotely self-evident truths. That most Americans believed they were owed less to philosophy than to the Bible: to the assurance given equally to Christians and Jews, to Protestants and Catholics, to Calvinists and Quakers, that every human being was created in God’s image. The truest and ultimate seedbed of the American republic—no matter what some of those who had composed its founding documents might have cared to think—was the book of Genesis.

This is the sort of truth only really felt at low tide. “Those who had composed” the Declaration—thinking of Jefferson and Franklin—were buoyed up by a Christianity they felt themselves to be rejecting, or at least transcending. In truth, Christianity was so all-pervasive it had become invisible to them. But it’s becoming more and more visible to us. A quarter of a millennium on, we’re starting to understand the “high-tide humanists” better than they understood themselves.

Between the two poets we’ve mentioned—Arnold and Eliot—we could place a third. Friedrich Nietzsche certainly wrote poetry alongside his philosophy, but perhaps most of all we should think of him as a prophet. At the end of the 19th century, the tide was still high as regards church attendance. But Nietzsche didn’t only prophesy the death of God; he also foretold the death of high-tide humanism. In Twilight of the Idols, he contends the two are profoundly linked:

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