A case for Christian optimism in 2025

Billions of people around the globe recently celebrated another successful orbit of the Earth around the sun. How successful that orbit was depends, of course, on who you ask. During the orbit we know as 2024, many saw their optimism about last year rise skyward only to explode and turn to ash. Historic inflation, devastating hurricanes, ongoing wars, and—for nearly half of Americans—national election results contributed to dashed hopes. For slightly more than half, those same results signal a brighter future.

An Associated Press–NORC poll found that 69 percent of Republicans believe their lives will improve in 2025, in stark contrast to only 19 percent of Democrats. A similar disparity exists about whether the United States will be better off in the new year, with 71 percent of Republicans versus a meager 7 percent of Democrats expressing optimism.

A case can be made that—if we look not along the political but along the spiritual axis—the disparity should appear even more glaring. A distinguishing mark of true Christian spirituality is that we are not trapped inside what Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor famously branded “the closed immanent frame.” The Christian’s world is open and multitiered. It is a rich metaphysical landscape where love, virtue, justice, human rights, redemption, beauty, grace, meaning, and other non-material realities exist as more than mere human projections because, as Francis Schaeffer reminded prior generations, “God is there and He is not silent.”

The reality of the transcendent has everything to do with whether we can say “Happy New Year!” and mean it, or whether we dutifully recite it like a cheap slogan.

There is a kind of cheerfulness that is uniquely Christian. There is a glass-clinking, quick-to-laugh, deep mirth that comes from knowing that we are not sentenced to live and die in the box of a closed cosmos. There is a sovereign God who created and sustains the cosmos. It follows that whatever seems (epistemically, or so far as we know) meaningless is not (metaphysically, or in reality) meaningless. God graciously reaches into the cosmos and condescends to our lowly blue marble to redeem fallen image-bearers like us. It follows that whatever seems, from our immanent perspective, to be lost and busted beyond repair is hardly so irredeemable as we may think. Christ entered the world as Immanuel—God with us—died, rose again, and ascended. It follows that the death and despair of the present age only appear to have the final word, but the empty tomb proves otherwise.

The Christian life can, therefore, be lived with a kind of gratitude and gladness that are only accessible beyond the immanent frame. We can say, with G.K. Chesterton: “You say grace before meals. All right. But I say grace before the concert and the opera, and grace before the play and the pantomime, and grace before I open a book, and grace before sketching, painting, swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing and grace before I dip the pen in the ink.”

As Paul reminded the Thessalonians, “Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you. (1 Thessalonians 5:16–18). God is not a cosmic killjoy, rather He wills our moment-by-moment gladness and gratitude.

To keep us from taking such robust and realistic Christian joy for granted, let us ponder for a moment Schaeffer’s famous image of a two-story house. For modern man, there is a lower story where facts, science, and rationality can be found. But apart from the God who is there, all the facts, science, and rationality in the world can never bestow something like hope, meaning, or, frankly, a reason to roll out of bed in the morning. Such realities exist only in “the upper story,” and there are no rational steps that modern man, starting from himself, can take to ascend upstairs.

In Taylor’s categories, the closed immanent frame (Schaeffer’s lower story) offers us nothing to justify our hopes and deepest existential desires as anything more than the inconvenient by-products of a mindless process of random mutations and natural selection.

But, Schaeffer argues, such soul-deep cravings for transcendent purpose are not so easily suppressed. So modern man must make an irrational leap into the upper story. Among such leaps of faith, Schaeffer examined the use of psychedelic drugs in the 1960s counterculture, surrealist art, hippie “happenings,” New Age spirituality, the search for a nonrational existential “authenticating experience,” and more. As we ponder the new year, Yves-Marie Hilaire identified moments of mass celebration—the “festive,” as she dubbed it—as yet another attempt of modern man to reach the upper story and tap into transcendent meaning.

There is such a thing that we may call “transcendence envy,” experienced by those whose disenchanted worldviews afford them no real basis for the kind of meaning, peace, and joy historic Christianity offers. Many find themselves trapped on the bottom story where every Dec. 31, they throw a contrived party, complete with make-believe optimism and enough alcohol or other fleeting chemical rushes to fool their brains into thinking they are having an upper story good time.

May 2025 be a year in which we indulge such a robust Christian joy, a realistic joy centered on the real, resurrected person of Jesus, that the watching world would want to join the better party, the eternal wedding party of the Son (Matthew 22:1–10). God exists, God speaks, God rules, God redeems, Christ is risen, and evil loses. No blind upper-story leap is required. Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we live!