Overcoming Apathy
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An Undeceptions podcast. How was the movie? Ah, from what I saw, it was pretty good. Yeah, what do you mean from what you saw? Well, I didn't actually get to see the whole movie. Yeah, why not? I was kind of making out.

You were making out during Schindler's List? That couldn't happen. We hadn't been alone in a long time. It just got the better of me. During Schindler's List? We're both living with our parents. Did anybody see you? Did anyone say anything? No, I don't think so. I saw Newman as I was leaving, but he didn't see me. Oh.

That's Uche Anasor. He's a associate professor of theology at Biola University in California.

He's also the author of Overcoming Apathy, named last year the Christianity Today Book of the Year. And as we've just heard, Uche reckons we live in a Seinfeld culture. If you're not familiar with the show, Seinfeld revolves around four main characters. There's Jerry, the central character, and his two friends, George and Elaine. And then there's Jerry's quirky neighbor, Kramer.

They float through life shrugging off various mishaps that come their way with very funny results. It's comic genius and still revered today. In fact, it tops the list of the most rewatched shows on streaming services during the COVID lockdown, at least here in the US. And

And they expand these and they make episodes about ridiculously little things. While in the midst of those episodes, they mock the meaningful things. So there's an episode where Jerry is at the movie theater watching The Schindler's List. And he's concerned about his parents or someone seeing him make out with his girlfriend at Schindler's List. So Schindler's List, hugely significant movie about a hugely significant historical event. But the whole episode is sort of like this poking fun at Schindler's

the serious thing while fixating on that which is pretty insignificant you know like a kiss or making out or things along those lines and the show is all about that kind of a thing jerry was necking during schindler's list yes and a more offensive spectacle i cannot recall

And so what I call a Seinfeldian sort of society is a society that is selectively passionate about certain things and dispassionate or lacking in care towards the things that really matter. It's a highly selective sort of society.

In the aftermath of extended pandemic lockdowns, headlines lamented how our world had changed for the worse. From Time magazine, it's harder than ever to care about anything. New York Times, we have all hit a wall. CNN, American indifference will be the death blow for democracy. And the Financial Times, a lament for the age of apathy.

We asked ChatGPT to define apathy and it gave us, quote, "the lack of interest, enthusiasm or concern about something or someone, a feeling of indifference."

I reckon that'll do, I guess. Certainly better than when I asked it recently to list authoritative articles about Kleinfelter syndrome. It completely made stuff up. And when I pressed it, it admitted that it made stuff up. Anyway, Uche says our apathy, our feeling of indifference, is selective. As a culture, we've become numb to the meaningful and alive to the trivial.

This is something new. The concept of apathy goes back a long way. Ancient philosophers debated whether it was cool not to care. And indeed, there was a time when apathy, in a particular sense of the word, was actually considered a virtue. Thousands of years later, though, Uche argues apathy has morphed a little and is now perhaps our culture's hidden vice.

We're not careless, he says. We're care adrift. It's care misplaced. We care about some stuff, but sometimes we're blasé about the meaningful stuff. A bit like Jerry and his buddies.

Thankfully, though, Uche, with some far older experts, has some answers on how to snap out of and overcome societal apathy. I'm John Dixon, and, well, who cares? MUSIC

This season of Undeceptions is sponsored by Zondervan Academic. Get discounts on master lectures, video courses and exclusive samples of their books over at zondervanacademic.com/undeceptions. Don't forget to write Undeceptions.

Each episode we explore some aspect of life, faith, history, science, culture or ethics that's either much misunderstood or mostly forgotten. And with the help of people who know what they're talking about, we're trying to undeceive ourselves and let the truth out.

This episode of Undeceptions is brought to you by Zondervan Academics' new book, ready for it? Mere Christian Hermeneutics, Transfiguring What It Means to Read the Bible Theologically, by the brilliant Kevin Van Hooser. I'll admit that's a really deep-sounding title, but don't let that put you off. Kevin is one of the most respected theological thinkers in the world today.

And he explores why we consider the Bible the word of God, but also how you make sense of it from start to finish. Hermeneutics is just the fancy word for how you interpret something. So if you want to dip your toe into the world of theology, how we know God, what we can know about God, then this book is a great starting point. Looking at how the church has made sense of the Bible through history, but also how you today can make sense of it.

Mere Christian Hermeneutics also offers insights that are valuable to anyone who's interested in literature, philosophy, or history. Kevin doesn't just write about faith. He's also there to hone your interpretative skills. And if you're eager to engage with the Bible, whether as a believer or as a doubter, this might be essential reading.

You can pre-order your copy of Mere Christian Hermeneutics now at Amazon, or you can head to zondervanacademic.com forward slash undeceptions to find out more. Don't forget, zondervanacademic.com forward slash undeceptions. Let's define the terms. What is apathy?

It's a word we use a lot, but it must have a definition for you to write a whole book about it. Yeah, indeed. It depends on who you're talking to. So in some of the psychiatric literature, they'll talk about apathy mainly in terms of a loss of motivation, or they might talk about it as a loss of emotion or a loss of...

intention. What I'm talking about when I think about apathy is I'm thinking about spiritual apathy. And what I mean by that is a lack of motivation toward those things that would define the Christian life. Things that are meant to bring flourishing to a Christian and to others around us. But these are the very things that we find ourselves indifferent toward, lacking in motivation toward, feeling a lot of emotional lack toward.

I've reflected a lot on last year. Around this time, there was this monumental event that happened March 27th or something like that. In Southern California, it was when Will Smith slapped Chris Rock during the Academy Awards. And this sort of dominated the news cycle for two or three days. I'm out here. Uh-oh. Richard. Oh, wow. Wow. Wow.

Will Smith just smacked the out of me.

But if you paid attention to the news cycle during that time, there were things going on like the Ukrainian war. Mariupol was going to be taken over by the Russian. There were wildfires. There were things that were plaguing the U.S. as well as beyond the U.S. But the thing that sort of captured our attention, that swamped Twitter feeds, were these kinds of things. And so this is not to say that we absolutely do not care about meaningful things. It's just a

point out that oftentimes we get ourselves all the more exercised over trivial things than we do over meaningful things. It's not an either or, but it's just trying to point out that this weird significant sort of inconsistency, I guess, in our souls where for some reason the things that should really matter little, they will occupy our minds and our Twitter engagement for days on end. Sometimes though, this general trivializing apathy becomes something more serious.

You mentioned the psychology literature. I'm curious to know what you feel is the relationship between apathy and depression.

And whether it's not surprising that we're seeing these both at the same time in this moment. Yeah, precisely. Yeah. There is certainly a relationship. So in the literature, when you look at what's called clinical depression, so that's sort of like pervasive, long-term kinds of depression, apathy is one of the more common symptoms of depression. And so you kind of have to tease out as we're thinking about apathy, you have to tease out, is this apathy?

apathy a symptom of a greater issue, clinical depression, or is it its own thing? Just quickly, apathy and depression are two distinct things. Depression is a mood disorder that results in persistent feelings of sadness, emptiness, or hopelessness.

Clinical depression, the type that Uche is talking about here, is a severe form of that which requires a combination of ongoing counselling and often medication. People working through depression, however, will often experience apathy.

One concerning brief released by the World Health Organization in 2022 found that there'd been a 25% increase of anxiety and depression worldwide, which by extension means there's an increase in apathy towards some things.

Back to Uche. Because there are other forms of depression that are sort of mild forms of depression in which apathy doesn't necessarily show up as a symptom. But when we're talking about sort of the clinical depression, apathy is one of the most common symptoms. But what it is, is it's a pervasive apathy. So...

What I find sort of unique between apathy and clinical depression is that apathy tends to be selective, whereas with clinical depression, the apathy pervades everything, not just certain areas of life. It sort of pervades everything. There's a lack of energy and motivation towards almost everything. Whereas with apathy, I'm convinced that it just sort of targets certain things and oftentimes targets the most meaningful things.

Have you got a sense of why apathy is so widespread in our culture? I mean, what do you think are the underlying causes at the greater societal level for this apathy that we see? Yeah, there could be a number of things, and I don't claim to be an expert, but one of the things I would identify is that there's an increasing level of the trivial that pervades our day-to-day life, that swamps our day-to-day life. What I mean by that is,

Because of the amounts of information, whether good or bad, but oftentimes it's just Twitter kinds of information that flood our lives on the day-to-day, what ends up happening is our minds are no longer able to distinguish between meaningful and not meaningful. And so what we end up doing is we end up treating the meaningful and the not meaningful equally.

in terms of disengaging from them all. So I actually think there, if I was to identify something on this end of writing the book, if I could identify one major theme, it's just the loss of meaning, the loss of a sense of meaningfulness. It's not that we've lost meaning altogether, but it's a sense of how do I feel what is meaningful when meaningful things and not meaningful things are presented as equally urgent, equally important things.

And so I think that's an underlying issue, not just for the younger generation. I think it's for all of us who are information consumers, who are just citizens in this world, in this particular age. You identified doubt in that section about causes of Christian apathy. You identified doubt. But one can imagine that this is an underlying sort of the general cultural malaise, that like we are doubting people.

doubting everything. And it's partly because there's so much information. We just go, you can't tell what's right anymore. That's right.

Yeah. And if you doubt, you lose purpose. I think that's exactly right. And I've even had those kinds of conversations with my children where they're not trying to be relativists, but there's so much out there. There's so many different, like, even interpretations of scripture. How do we know what's right? And so that loss of a measure of chastened certainty, that loss is a major contributing factor to a loss of a sense of meaningfulness.

Apathy of a certain kind hasn't always been seen as a bad thing. The word comes from the ancient Greek term apatheia, from pathos or passion, with an apathy.

at the beginning, which means not or without. So apatheia is to be without passion, free from strong emotion. In this sense, apatheia was one of the key ethical goals of the ancient Stoic philosophers. We talk today about someone being Stoic, and what we mean is that they endure things without complaint, with a stiff upper lip, as the Brits say.

Well, this sort of does reflect the views of the ancient Stoics who reckoned true wisdom, true freedom, was being able to stand above your emotions, whether bad emotions like grief or anger, or even good ones like excitement and joy. You can stand above all of them, and you're meant to.

Stoicism started with a philosopher named Zeno, nearly three centuries before Jesus. But the greatest Stoics were people like Cicero, Epictetus, and especially Seneca, all roughly around the same time as Jesus.

But the ancient Stoic best known today is the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius. His book Meditations is a collection of sayings from his reign, which is 161 to 180. It's still hugely popular. I see it in bookstores all the time today, particularly in the business or self-help section.

I'm actually half thinking of writing a book about Stoicism and why the Romans eventually abandoned Stoicism in favour of Christianity. Or maybe it's just a podcast. Producer Katie. What do you mean, just a podcast? Oh, sorry. I meant an awesome podcast. Yeah. From which I can write a book. Anyway, here's an extract from Marcus Aurelius' Meditations.

And when you do become angry, be ready to apply this thought: that to fly into a passion is not a sign of manliness, but rather to be kind and gentle. For, insofar as these qualities are more human, they are also more manly.

It is the man who possesses such virtues who has strength, nerve and fortitude, and not the one who is ill-humored and discontented. Indeed, the nearer a man comes in his mind to freedom from unhealthy passions , the nearer he comes to strength.

"Just as grief is a mark of weakness, so is anger too, for those who yield to either have been wounded and have surrendered to the enemy." To be free of the passions helped one achieve equanimity, or a calmness of the soul. And there's a truth here, a virtue of sorts. And this idea of apathy can be seen in parts of the ancient church too.

The so-called Desert Fathers, a group of scholar monks from the 3rd and 4th centuries, practiced an asceticism, you know, denial of bodily pleasures, that was shaped by and aimed at apatheia, detachment from worldly distractions. Let's wind back to the ancient world, a happy place. Tell us about what the ancients, particularly the philosophers, did.

said about this topic of apathy? Because they said rather a lot. Yeah, yeah. Apathy, or in the Greek term would be apotheia, was seen as, by and large, a virtue.

And so what it was as it relates to humans, apatheia is this sort of constancy, this ability to sort of weather the vicissitudes of life, the ups and downs of life without having your passions evoked or without you going up and down sort of emotionally with the ups and downs of life. And so it was a virtue. It was a virtue for humans. And then as Christian ancients sort of adopted

adopted this thinking. They sort of Christianized it. And so apathy or impassibility was something that we would ascribe to God, right? So God is not moved by the ups and downs of human life. God remains constant, immutable, impassible. And so it's the ultimate virtue in that God is able to constantly love us

and not move up and down with how we behave. His love is constant and pursuing regardless of the ups and downs of life. And so as Christians, and specifically those who reflected on this in the monastic life, they saw Christ

a Christian version of impassibility or a Christian version of apatheia as that which we're aiming to be. We're aiming to be those who are constant in our pursuit of God. And you can imagine how someone in a monastery would need that kind of constancy because the emotions are going to be going up and down when you're sitting in a solitary cell. But apatheia is that ability to basically stay in the cell, pursue the things that God has called you to do, and not be swept up by the passions.

Apathea, in the sense of bringing your emotions into disciplined proportion, was taken pretty seriously by some church leaders. Take Gregory of Nyssa in 4th century Asia Minor or modern day Turkey. He definitely gets his own episode one day. But in a sermon on the Lord's Prayer, he described Apathea as a true spiritual goal.

So if we ask that the Kingdom of God may come to us, as per the Lord's Prayer, the meaning of our request is this: I would be a stranger to corruption and liberated from death. Would that I were freed from the shackles of sin and that death no longer lorded it over me. Thus darkness vanishes before the presence of light and illness passes when health has been established.

Apathy of a certain kind wasn't seen as a problem in the ancient world. It was a goal, certainly among Stoic and other pagan philosophers. But there was also a Christianized version of it.

So was there a particular Christian view of the emotions that was simultaneously endorsing not being driven by emotions, but unlike Stoics nonetheless said, the feeling of pity for the poor is pure and good, whereas a Stoic didn't think that?

Yeah. And it wasn't just the Stoics. You had others, Aristotle and others, who spoke positively about apatheia. I think as Christians took apatheia on, it wasn't so much a distancing from emotion per se. It's an issue of...

What directs and drives the Christian's engagement with whatever it is that God has called them to do and be? And so, am I being driven by, because passions and emotions aren't quite the exact same kind of thing, but am I being driven by unruly, ungoverned emotions?

emotion. I think that's more of what we're talking about, I think, when we're talking about passions, whereas there are emotions that are still ruled and governed by the rational self, so to speak, that are directed towards positive ends, i.e. toward God, toward that which God calls us to, toward love of neighbor, and those kinds of things. So, I'm just wondering, this idea of the impassibility of God's own apatheia,

is sometimes like there's a caricature of it that people run away from. So I just want to dwell on this idea of God's good apathy before we then move on to other kinds of apathy and its danger. Can you give us a really clear account of this? Because I do not want people to end up thinking of God as Brahman, this sort of impersonal force that can't be moved. And I know you have a very clear thought about this. So can you unpack that for me? Yeah, so I think...

One of the hard things we have to reckon with, and the good thing we have to reckon with, is Scripture's way of depicting God's engagement with us. And so Scripture depicts a God who is, for lack of a better term, passionately engaged with us. In terms of His love, the constancy of His love toward us, His constant pursuit of us, the anger, the joy, all these different kinds of ways in which Scripture presents God's engagement with the human sphere and with humans in particular. But if we step back and we try to get a sense of who God is individually,

in himself, God is, as the theologians talk about, he's pure act. He's actus purus. He's pure actuality. He just is, right? I've got my Aquinas set just out of camera. There you go. Brilliant. Yeah. And so there's a sense in which we have to reckon with the fact that God just is, and he's not responding, for lack of a better term, in himself to

Yes, I got a little excited at this point because Uche's answering in a way that echoes the medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas, a bit of a regular on the pod. Aquinas has this important language of potentiality and actuality.

That derives from Aristotle, but Aquinas certainly fine-tuned it. Things that are potential, not actual, can be changed. They can be made hot or made cold. They can be influenced to be happy or sad and so on. They're fickle. They're bumped around by the circumstances. But the actual, the thing that has all potentialities realised...

in other words, God, is stable, not fickle, reliable, not capricious or swept along by circumstances. And that is to be truly free. Here's a bit of Aquinas from the 13th century. Everything that has in its substance an admixture of potentiality, to the extent that it has potentiality, is liable not to be.

Can you bear just a little bit more? Aquinas goes on.

Although in order of time, that which is sometimes in potentiality, sometimes in actuality, is in potentiality before it is in actuality. Yet, absolutely speaking, actuality is prior to potentiality, because potentiality does not bring itself into actuality.

Okay, that's enough.

And so when we talk about God's impassibility, we're simply just saying, this is God's name. This is who he is. God is the one who is. And so as the one who is, God is the one who loves in freedom. And that simply refers to the fact that God in his being is one who loves as an absolutely free being.

So then, what that means for divine constancy or apatheia is that God's love does not go up and down. His justice does not go up and down. His power does not go up and down. It doesn't increase or decrease. It just is. And why that's good news for the Christian and for everyone else is that we can have a rock-solid confidence that when God says he loves, loves us,

That is not going to change. So I'm speaking very practically here. That's not going to change because I've had a bad day or even because I've acted in ways that are just unseemly and contradictory to who I say that I am. God's constancy is sort of a synonym of his impassibility. It doesn't go up and down because of the ups and downs of human life.

And that's good news in the ancient context, isn't it? Because the gods of the Iliad, they're infatuated. They're arbitrary. And then they're angry. Yeah, it's fickle. It's all the way down. That's right. Let's press pause. I've got a five-minute Jesus for you.

In the discussion of apathy, there are really two extremes to avoid. At one extreme, there's the denial of the goodness of emotion, of passion, so that we quash both anguish and bliss. On the other hand, there's the belief that any emotion I have can and should be followed as an expression of my authentic self.

The first is the path of Buddhism, I guess. And it's always interested me that Stoicism amongst the Greeks has much in common with Buddhism. The basic idea is that we are essentially rational beings and our emotions are, in a sense, defects that should be quieted in the path of detachment.

The opposite path tells me I'm principally an emotional, psychological, soulish being. The sparks of pleasure or anger that punctuate the malaise of apathy are to be embraced as moments of true existence. The questionable assumption here is that emotions don't need any training, any guardrails, any virtuous formation. Both of these

a million miles from the biblical picture of God, especially as we find it in Jesus, and they're very far from the picture of the Christian life as we have it in the New Testament. Unlike the Buddha, or say the God of Einstein, the Bible's God is not pure rationality. There is anger there, there's joy, displeasure, and love in the heart of God.

In the Old Testament, God speaks with fiery anger at the unjust treatment of the poor, for example. Then again, he describes himself as a jilted lover when Israel goes off and worships other gods.

We see this especially in the life of Jesus, who, quite unlike those Hollywood movies from the 60s and 70s, when Jesus sort of hovers above the earth, was in fact very much a man in touch with his emotions. Weeping at a funeral, angry at the hypocrisy of the religious leaders.

and frequently speaking of his joy or the full measure of his joy. You can particularly find that in the Gospel of John in chapters 15, 16 and 17.

But we never get a picture of Jesus simply following his emotions out of control or allowing emotions to cloud his better judgment. On the contrary, the emotions of God and Christ are perfect expressions of his complete virtue. They're not expressions of him getting caught up in the moment. They're expressions of him upholding the good and shunning the bad.

Here is where the picture drastically differs from that of the ancient Greek and Roman gods, who could be all of the same things we see in the life of Jesus, but without any consistent pattern, no moral framework.

They can be celebratory one minute and perversely deceitful the next. And there won't be any rhyme or reason in it. They are the very definition of capricious. Steadfastness, faithfulness, consistency. These are not qualities of the Greco-Roman pantheon. But they are almost defining features of God and Christ in the Bible.

And as a result, the Christian life is neither stoical nor fickle. For Christians, our emotional life is sacred, but it's also to be trained by our rational comprehension of the truth, particularly the truth about the love of God.

At the dawn of the fourth century, there's this wonderful discussion of emotions by Lactantius. He was a professor of rhetoric from Nicomedia and a devout Christian, and he just escaped by the skin of his teeth from the severe persecution at the very beginning of the fourth century. Anyway, he provides a lengthy critique of the two extremes of Greco-Roman ethics on the question of emotions.

The Stoics forbade the emotions. The peripatetics, the sort of wandering philosophers, said that we should follow emotions as a duty.

His argument, though, is that emotions like pity and even anger are good if they're guided by the proper ends. Thus, he writes, it is good to walk straight and bad to go astray. So, too, it is good to be emotionally moved in the right direction and bad in the wrong direction.

How should our emotions be formed? Well, Lanktantius says, "By the love of God." God is compassionate to those in need, and we must be too. Never static in apathy. Never led astray through emotion. When we're trained in the love of God and the model of the compassion of Jesus, our passions will be properly formed for the sake of others.

It's all perfectly summarized in a statement of the Apostle Paul in Romans 12. This is one of my favorite lines in all of Scripture, both for what it's saying about God, but also what it's saying against the philosophical options of Paul's day, especially the Stoics. Here's what it says: "Rejoice with those who rejoice, with those who mourn. Emotions are good when schooled by the compassion of Jesus."

You can press play now. So now we're talking about how good apathy is. Rightly understood. So let's take a turn. How do we move like conceptually from apathy as a good thing, a sort of constancy to apathy as a vice?

What is that move? What's going on when we think of this same notion in two very different modes? Yeah, so apathy in the ancient mode is, again, like it's this virtue and it's a pursuit of a certain kind of way of relating to the world. The turn is going to happen when we start to view apathy akin to something more like what the ancients called sloth or a term called Acadia.

Our sixth combat is with what the Greeks call "aesidia", which we may term weariness or distress of heart.

This is akin to dejection, and is especially trying to solitaries, and a dangerous and frequent foe to dwellers in the desert, and especially disturbing to a monk about the sixth hour, like some fever which seizes him at stated times, bringing the burning heat of its attacks on the sick man at usual and regular hours.

And, when this has taken possession of some unhappy soul, it produces dislike of the place, disgust with the cell, and disdain and contempt of the brethren who dwell with him or at a little distance, as if they were careless or unspiritual.

It also makes the man lazy and sluggish about all manner of work which has to be done within the enclosure of his dormitory. It does not suffer him to stay in his cell or to take any pains about reading, and he often groans because he can do no good while he stays there, and complains and sighs because he can bear no spiritual fruit so long as he is joined to that society

and he complains that he is cut off from spiritual gain and is of no use in the place, as if he were one who, though he could govern others and be useful to a great number of people, yet was edifying none, nor profiting anyone by his teaching and doctrine. John Cassian, The Institutes, 420 A.D.

That's the work of John Cassian, also known as John the Ascetic. He's a monk who lived in the 4th and 5th centuries. He's writing there about ascetia, a state of distraction and restlessness that had been observed over time in the strict, regulated day-to-day of the monastery. It commonly afflicted monks sometime around 10am because, you know, they've been up working since 4am, so it's the middle of the day.

The idea of acedia had been around for quite some time, as John mentioned there. The ancient Greeks referred to it as akadeia. It refers to a state of carelessness. It can be found as far back as Homer's Iliad, written around the 8th century BC. And over time, it came to be known as the noonday demon.

And this acedia became the sin of slothfulness on the traditional list of seven deadly sins. Acedia shaped how we understand apathy today. And so then apathy becomes this thing now, which is like, it still is sort of an indifference, but it's an indifference towards the meaningful.

It's an indifference towards God's calling. It's an indifference towards God. It's an indifference towards love of neighbor and things along those lines. And so again, while retaining the notion of indifference, its target now is towards those things which we should not be indifferent toward. Is that its definition? That it's sort of indifferent toward things you should be indifferent to?

committed to? Yeah. So this term, I've used it a couple of times now, Acadia or Acedia, it's pronounced a number of ways and I still don't know how to pronounce it. I've asked several scholars, but it's typically translated as sloth. And in its earliest-ish context, the context was the monastery. There was a monk named Evagrius of Pontus. That's another cracking mid-fourth century monk who spent much of his life in Turkey before moving to Jerusalem and finally Egypt.

He actually taught our friend John Cassian. And among his sort of eight deadly vices, he treats Akkadia as the chief, basically, of the vices. And he describes it as a demon, actually. So he calls it the noonday demon or the demon of Akkadia. And what he's trying to describe is, I want you to imagine you're a monk and you're sitting in your cell in the middle of the Egyptian desert. And your job is to basically pray,

meditate on the scriptures, and every now and again you enter into forms of work, but you're basically isolated for most of the day. And so the reason he calls Akedia the noonday demon is sometime between, typically between 10 and 2 in the afternoon, our time, so to speak, the monk becomes really restless in the cell and doesn't want to engage in all the things that they're meant to

to be engaging, like the very purpose for being in the cell. They just want to be distracted. They want to do literally anything else than that. And so Akedia actually has to do with avoidance, distraction, trying to sort of evade God's calling. And so it's a selective indifference. Man, you're describing my 11 a.m. this morning.

And I have an espresso machine three meters over there in my office. Lucky you. I raced to it. But those poor monks in Egypt didn't. They did not. But it's so interesting that we can be so distant, not just sort of historically, but just even in terms of context.

context. They're in a cell. We're in modern West, so to speak, and we have everything that we could possibly imagine. They have very little that they could possibly imagine. And yet the temptation is the same thing. This desire to distract ourselves from the meaningful. This is partially why I really press in hard on apathy is selective. It's highly selective. It's not everything that we're apathetic towards. We're often apathetic towards the primary things that we are called to do. And that's what's going on with the monk as we think about Akedia.

I'm sure you agree the noonday demon wasn't confined to ancient monasteries. Acedia is always lurking in the background, getting an unwanted foothold in our lives. But are we becoming more apathetic, as Uche and the media claim? Some might say that tools like social media have actually helped us to care more about the world around us. We're going to ponder that after the break.

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Britain lurched around a corner confronting the worst of its colonial racist past Sunday as protesters at a Black Lives Matter march in the port city of Bristol toppled a statue of 17th century slave trader Edward Colston, then trundled it through the city's tarmac... That's from CNN's coverage of the removal of statues across the world in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests back in 2020.

We explored BLM in our episode Racist Church. That's episode 37. Or just check out the show notes. We're not going to re-litigate that here. But the BLM movement saw millions of people take to the streets around the world to protest centuries of inequality. It's an example of the world feeling something passionately on a mass scale. There's no apathy there.

Can I ask you maybe a controversial question that just popped into my head? It just dawns on me that right in the middle of this apathetic mood in Western culture are some explosively passionate causes like Black Lives Matter. I'm thinking of the Black Lives Matter thing, which I only observed really as an outsider. I wasn't living in America during that year of protests and so on.

So is the Black Lives Matter passion where there was not just protests, but rioting and expressing anger at objects and so on? Is this a contradiction of what you're saying about apathy? Or is there in some way, when people found a genuine cause, it unleashed the passions that had been

unduly kept it by. Yeah. So I do not think, so I don't want to overstate the case of my book or even overstate my case that everyone is apathetic. I don't think that's the case. That's just an overstatement of the case. And in fact, I think what you pointed out actually substantiates the point I'm trying to make that people were able to find a sense of meaning

And functionally, that's what all these things are in my own view. It's just latching on to some sense of transcendental purpose, something bigger than my drab day-to-day life. They find it.

And that could be the African-American person who feels maybe a personal sense of ownership. It could be the white compatriot who feels like I have a sense of meaning in allying myself with this or whatever it is, but it's a sense of meaning that awakens at least something in us, whether we agree or disagree with the actual cause itself. There's something that wakes us up in the morning. And so for me, even when I see that, I see that as a good, actually, even though there are questions I have about some

some of these specific things, I see it as a good that a heart could actually be awakened to something that borders around the meaningful. It's pointing to like a meaningful human real life issue that should wake us up in the morning because it's about love of neighbor and we should be passionate about love of neighbor. And if that's waking people up in the morning and giving them something to do beyond checking their Twitter feed a hundred times a day, I'm all for that. Passionate about love of neighbor. Yeah.

That's what the Bible says God demands of all of us, whether we're believers or not. But believers should be particularly aware of that and particularly good at it, right? Yeah. Let's talk about the church.

Okay. And let's be as brutal and honest as you like. I mean, I have plenty of skeptical listeners, so they won't mind you being honest about the church. They'll rather like it. My Christian listeners might not. But in what ways do you see the church as apathetic? Yeah. So I'll be honest. So even as I think about apathy, I don't want to be, I don't want to overstate the case again. So I think what I find most perplexing about apathy, especially as it pertains to Christians and the church, is that I think in our heart of hearts,

We love the Lord. We love the things that God loves and all that kind of good stuff. So allow that to be a caveat. However, what ends up happening is that we might find ourselves fixating on things that are just of little importance. So I think the sort of selective dimension of apathy is,

is there in the church. Obviously, that was exacerbated by things like COVID and all the political strife that came along with that, where churches on some level were seeking to do right, to love the Lord, love their neighbor. Some failed miserably in terms of just an over-fixation on things that aren't of primary importance. Now, again, because apathy is selective, they were apathetic towards particular forms of loving neighbor and extremely passionate about other forms of what they deemed to be

loving neighbor. So in the life of the church, if you asked anybody, is your church passionate about, now fill in the blanks, passionate about scripture reading? Not really. Like even ones that, you know, are notoriously like scripture churches, not notoriously, but like typically scripture churches, are

If you actually polled how many people read the Bible on a semi-regular basis, the numbers are going to be abysmally low. Evangelism, mission, giving, all these kinds of things that, again, I think, sort of define the Christian way of being in the world and define life in the church. These are the things that we would

vocally, like we would proclaim this is what being a Christian is all about, but the numbers bear out in terms of just how much Christians are engaged in these things that define us. And so I would identify that as a form of Christian or churchly apathy, or at the very least, an inconsistency with who we actually say that we are. And that to me is what I find remarkably perplexing about apathy.

What do you think are the best remedies for apathy, Christian apathy and just life apathy? Yeah. And so what are the things that bring passion in its appropriate form? Yeah. So I begin thinking that whatever the cure for apathy is going to be, it has to be in some measure connected to Jesus Christ, connected to the gospel. How does the gospel intersect with apathetic people?

because people who have a sense that they're not where they should be or their passions aren't, or their emotions toward God or affections toward God are not where they should be. A lot of people are aware of this, but they're just kind of like, what do I do with that? Some walk around with this vague sense of just guilt and a vague sense of sort of like powerlessness. And so I'd want to begin by saying, okay, so if we understand apathy as in some measure,

a sinful disposition or a sinful posture towards God and the things of God, then the gospel is the remedy in that the gospel says not only is this apathy forgiven in Christ, so even right now as you're not where you should be, your apathy is forgiven in Jesus. Your apathy is actually healed in Jesus.

Past tense, present, and future, actually. It's being healed, and you will fully be healed of it. And apathy as a form of bondage and slavery, so to speak, so that the gospel and Jesus Christ free us from that. What about the doubting, by which I really mean the skeptical, not yet Christian listener? What have you got for them? Or put another way, in what way do you think the Christian faith, the Bible, the gospel...

can provide a wisdom to someone who's listening who really relates to what you've been saying about

They feel like their life is in that malaise. Yeah. What's the Christian wisdom for them? Yeah, the wisdom would be that we combat, I want to say this carefully, but we combat vices in our life through the cultivation of certain ways of being or virtue in our lives. And the Christian and the non-Christian can cultivate virtue. The Christian is going to say the cultivation of virtue begins with

understanding the true nature of virtue, which we see in the face of Jesus. And then it's a virtue that's empowered by the power of the Holy Spirit. However, we don't want to be absolutist here and say that there's no sense in which a non-believing person can cultivate virtue. And so I think the antidote to apathy is slowly and patiently seeking to cultivate anti-apathy sort of

habits and ways of being in this world. And so the five things that I suggest in this book in terms of areas to cultivate, I think they apply to the non-believer as well. The five things Uche recommends are honesty, accepting the symptoms that pertain to apathy, affection, that's training our hearts to admire the wonderful and beautiful things around us and not to be swayed by things that are simply mediocre,

There's fortitude, the ability to withstand hardships in our day-to-day and withstanding adversity. Meaning, having an ambition for each day that is outside yourself. And finally, generosity, making it a habit to find ways to help others around us.

Uche had a little bit more to say about those last two in particular, with a little bit of help from sociologist and Harvard professor Arthur Brooks in his amazing 2006 book, Who Really Cares? The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism. The research shows those who make a habit of

of being generous, not just financially, actually. It's being generous with their time. And Brooks even goes on to talk about those who are even generous with their giving of blood, you know, things like that. Volunteering, giving of blood, giving of money, that they actually find themselves with way better mental health, way better physical health. And even those who are generous find themselves

better off financially. And he even expands it to go on to say nations that are more generous, find themselves more prosperous. And he's not going to go as far as saying it's a causal relationship, but he's saying, isn't it an interesting correlation at the very least? Can you think of one of the other five that you think would be beneficial for the listeners who aren't sure what to make of Christianity? Something they can put in their lives to sort of combat apathy.

I would say cultivating a sense of meaning. So we've already said that meaning or the loss of meaning or a sense of meaningfulness is just one of these pervasive themes that's sort of underlying our apathy. And so the non-believing person

is able to have a sense of what is my life about? So what am I waking up every day with an intention and purpose to achieve? It could be something that is relatively self-focused, but typically it's going to be more beneficial if it's focused outside of ourselves. But a person...

Christian or not, is able to say, okay, if I want to cultivate a sense of meaning, there are things that I can do. For instance, I can practice the ancient wisdom of Sabbathing, of finding a way to have rest as a way of taking stock of my life, taking stock of my week, of seeing myself in the

I'm not just about what I produce. There's more to life than just what I produce. Hey, you might remember we did a whole episode on this fascinating research about how rest contributes to creativity and output. It's episode 60, Resting Well, with Dr. Alex Pang.

I loved that episode. Check the show notes for a quick link where you'll also get a link to a little video we shot around that topic. And so Sabbath is one of God's gifts to step back from the grind of six days and take stock of what really matters. So that's one way to gain perspective or gain a sense of meaning. I think we can also do things like finding those moments, whether it's once a month, once a quarter, where we actually ask ourselves, so what am I about?

What is my life about? Like, what do I actually feel convinced of in terms of like, what are my deep lying convictions that I want to live my life out of? Like all of us find ourselves busy scrambling day in and day out. And we're doing things that we, in the back of our mind, we know that these are meaningful things, but we've lost a sense of what these things are connected to. And so I think anyone, if they were brave enough to sort of build that into their schedule,

once a quarter, once a week, even better. I think that this would reconnect us with a sense of, ah, here's what my life is about. And here's why I'm getting up this morning. All right, let me do it. Rather than slowly finding ourselves over the course of weeks and months of not doing this kind of thing and finding ourselves disengaged and dispassionate about what we should be passionate about.

Uche's book is more than a self-help manual. It's a guide for combating apathy on a spiritual and a practical level. It's a path out of the Seinfeldian prison we may sometimes find ourselves in. At the end of our time, I asked Uche to read out one of his favorite recorded prayers. It's sort of half poem, half prayer.

It appears in his book because he reckons it captures one of Christianity's most brilliant ideas, an idea that could be the antidote to apathy, namely that God cares for us even when we struggle to care ourselves. Can you do two things for me? Can you tell us what is this thing you're about to read and why it's relevant to your whole subject and then just

give it to us. So I'm about to read the poem. It's called, or it's a prayer called the Valley of Vision. It's the opening prayer in a collection of Puritan prayers. This one itself is not one of those Puritan prayers, but it's written by the man who edited the book. And it talks about the paradox of God's grace, that it's in the valley, it's in these lowest places that we actually meet the power of God. It's

just a riff on the Apostle Paul's God's powers made known in weakness. And so allow me to read the Valley of Vision. Lord, high and holy, meek and lowly, thou has brought me to the Valley of Vision, where I live in the depths, but see thee in the heights. Hemmed in by mountains of sin, I behold thy glory. Let me learn by paradox that the way down is the way up,

that to be low is to be high, that the broken heart is the healed heart, that the contrite spirit is the rejoicing spirit, that the repenting soul is the victorious soul, that to have nothing is to possess all, that to bear the cross is to wear the crown, that to give is to receive, that the valley is the place of vision. Lord,

In the daytime stars can be seen from the deepest wells, and the deeper the wells, the brighter thy stars shine. Let me find thy light in my darkness, thy life in my death, thy joy in my sorrow, thy grace in my sin, thy riches in my poverty, thy glory in my valley.

so

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The ancient Greeks referred to it as akadia. That sounds like akadaka.