Notes from Midwestuary

On Cynicism and Hope in Conversation with Rod Dreher

In his article about Midwestuary, Rod Dreher recalled a late-night conversation on the first night of the conference with three Gen Xers and a Boomer. As it turns out, I was that Boomer. The talk stretched past midnight with the urgency of people who didn’t want to stop. Rod and the Gen Xers voiced their sympathy for the younger generation’s sense of alienation and drift toward nihilism, even their disgust with our cultural moment. They were right: the disillusionment is real. We have failed through our politics, our institutions, our communal life—and, most profoundly, through religious institutions that have too often faltered in their ability to form, to guide, and to sustain meaning, leaving space for lesser powers to take their place. And while the perennial weaknesses of human nature are certainly on display, this moment feels graver—something sharper and more severe than what history has always carried. It feels, as John Vervaeke has put it, like a meaning crisis.

As Rod himself wrote afterward, “the thing that weighs most heavily on my mind is the broad sadness and alienation I encountered there. To be very clear, Midwestuary was not a meeting of the morose. People really seemed to love being there and having fun, but it definitely was a gathering of the walking wounded (that includes me, by the way).” His words capture the paradox of the event: a genuine joy in community joined to a deep awareness of woundedness and loss.

Rod’s sorrow leaned heavily into cynicism, a mood the others at the table shared and even seemed to draw comfort from. Their critique mixed disillusionment with resentment, naming factions to blame while denying their own share in the failure. It felt like indulging both the dark spirit of cynicism and the self-righteousness of blame—posing as critics without responsibility and turning a shared crisis into a clash of factions.

And here I cannot help but speak of religion. We often imagine it as the great anchor of meaning in ages past, though that picture is at least partly illusion. What we have now is not decline from some lost golden age, but the continuing weakness of Christian institutions—too fragile and divided to bear the weight we long for. I wish it were otherwise—I want Christianity to gather and enact our highest values. But I cannot escape the sadness of sensing that the religious landscape of our age is too thin and fractured to meet the depth of our need.

Despite the broad agreement at the table, I felt my perspective was different—shaped, I think, by being a Boomer. Part of this difference has to do with how I was formed. I grew up in a cultural moment shaped first by the moon landing. I still remember being a boy, sitting with my family in a hotel room, watching that grainy image on the television. It symbolized a culture of sincerity, a collective achievement that seemed to bind us together in a common purpose. Yet not long after came a different kind of moment: watching Saturday Night Live in its early years. I still recall Dan Aykroyd’s line—“Jane, you ignorant slut”—and my father, normally reserved, breaking down in laughter. It was brash, funny, but also a marker of a cultural shift. If the moon landing represented a culture of sincerity and shared achievement, this was the rise of a culture of authenticity, where the goal was less about living up to shared roles and responsibilities, and more about expressing one’s true self—often through sarcasm, irreverence, and cynicism.

That cultural turn, born in the 1970s, has grown darker with time. What was once rebellious humor now shades into a pervasive cynicism, a posture that delights in tearing down but rarely builds up. It was this spirit I felt in the conversation that night: the comfort of shared criticism without the hard work of sustaining the very values and institutions that make life together possible.

I recognize and agree with much of the diagnosis. Our institutions have failed us, and young people are right to feel disillusioned. But I cannot follow the turn toward cynicism. It is self-indulgent, a surrender to dark spirits that sap energy rather than direct it. What is needed is an explicit commitment to fortify and reform the values that remain within our institutions—politics, medicine, education, civic life, even Christianity. Yet it grieves me to say that of all these, Christianity feels the weakest, its witness so fractured and thin that I struggle to place it beside the others. Still, these institutions—including the church in whatever strength it still holds—are not beyond repair; they remain vessels through which our higher ideals can be pursued, if only we have the courage to defend them.

I left the conversation with a sense of lament, knowing my defense of institutions and values is increasingly out of step with the cultural mood. Yet I remain committed to it. For if there is a way through what we are calling a meaning crisis, it will not be found in despair or in the self-righteous comfort of blame. It will come only by renewing our covenant with one another through the institutions we inherit and inhabit, and by a shared effort—however faltering—to live up to the enduring values that hold our common life together. And perhaps that is why Midwestuary itself, as Rod described it, felt so important: for all the sadness we encountered there, it was also a glimmer of hope, a place of refuge where a new seriousness and a fragile optimism could still take root in this bleak season.