We live in an age of longing—for significance, permanence, purpose. We see it in the stories we tell, the goods we consume, and the goals we pursue. And amid what some have called our meaning crisis, these longings have intensified because our civic and religious lives have been hollowed out, leaving us with  a profound sense of emptiness. While this existential ache takes many forms and has many sources, the existentialist philosophers were spot on in thinking that we feel the pain most acutely when it comes to our choices.  We know this pain all too well. We feel it in those key moments where we know the decision we make could change the course of our lives. Do I take this new position with more pay and more responsibility, even though it will keep me away from my spouse and children? Should we move across the country for a new opportunity, even though we will leave behind everyone we love? Faced with the life-altering consequences of these choices, we go searching for the deeper values within us to help make the decision more clear. Some, however, are left wanting. Lacking some larger story which grounds their decisions, the search within only compounds their crisis. It was assumed that liberating ourselves from any story not created by ourselves would make us feel freer, more alive. But the opposite has occurred. As the West unmoored itself from both religious and institutional authority by redistributing it among the masses, it has simultaneously increased and undercut the very freedom it sought. It increased freedom by removing restraint—only to find that the conditions for freedom actually lie not in the removal of all restraints, but in the acceptance of the right ones. Without a shared story that we tell ourselves, we live these dizzying and disorienting lives and call it freedom. Freedom is a profound burden in a storyless world. Freedom is a profound burden in a storyless world. What the empirical and the rationalist philosophers of the Enlightenment did not fully grasp is the incalculable importance of values. David Hume recognized that the philosophical foundations of Western values were already tenuous. But could he have foreseen where the Enlightenment project would take us? Values are in some senses pre-rational; they go before all of our choices and frame the conditions in which a choice can rightly be deemed rational. These values, in turn, emerge from the big stories we tell to make sense of the world—stories that speak not only to the material order of things, but to our immaterial longings for meaning, justice, and love. Institutions arise from shared commitments to those values, serving as durable projects that preserve and promote them.  But in locating the center of authority in individual autonomy—the freedom of each person to choose—we severed ourselves from the very stories that gave rise to those values and from the institutions that embodied them. In so doing, we dismantled the framework that once helped us make our most important decisions. Our Strange Inheritance To understand how we got here—and why choice feels uniquely fraught today—we need to consider our cultural context. Andrew Wilson is helpful here in his book Remaking the World: How 1776 Created the Post-Christian West. Wilson, modifying the famed “WEIRD” acronym to become “WEIRDER”, succinctly frames the historical, social, ideological, and economic background of this crisis of choice. Social scientists have been using the acronym for a while to describe people in the West: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. Wilson adds to this that we are Ex-Christian and Romantic. Each of these traits shapes not only how we arrived at this crisis but also why we seek spiritual fulfillment the way we do. Think about how our education teaches us to question authority, our democracy makes us value choice above all, and our ex-Christian memory leaves us with Christian instincts (e.g., every human being is valuable) but without doctrinal clarity (but why?). This cultural inheritance explains why we feel so disoriented. We are free to choose but with little guidance on what is worth choosing. We hunger for transcendence––the feeling of being part of something larger than ourselves––but feel the boundaries of Charles Taylor’s “imminent frame” pressing all around us. Decisions are the real pain point. Not one, or two, or even the everyday mundane decisions; rather, the decisions that we intuit will shape our lives when we make them (marriage, children, and so on), or the ones we have made only to see years later that they’ve had lasting consequences.  For instance, I recently heard Second Lady Usha Vance recounting Vice President Vance’s conversion to Catholicism, and the many discussions that naturally ensued about how they would raise their children in light of one of them being Catholic (J.D.) and the other (Usha) being Hindu. Two competing stories make it difficult enough to make the most important decisions of our lives. Imagine the difficulty without any stories.These sorts of decisions, like an itch in our throat, send us searching for deeper wells from which to draw. In these moments a crisis of choice emerges. This existential ache of choosing, with enough time and occurrence, can bring about profound anxiety. To cope with the underlying crisis of choice, people often adopt spiritual practices in search of peace, even if these practices are devoid of belief in spiritual realities. Whether it be yoga, mindfulness, or fasting, many want the transcendent benefits while limiting themselves to an immanent frame. From Crisis to Calling As Christians living in this modern age, we know this crisis all too well. We weren’t and aren’t immune to its effects. But what we do have is a better story to tell. Part of the problem of adopting various spiritual practices and beliefs is that they always lack coherence and connection. As Chris Watkin has shown, Christianity as a story coheres across multiple domains of existence, and in that sense makes truth claims that correspond to reality. It uniquely accounts for the material order (the intelligibility and structure) while also addressing the immaterial longings (meaning and purpose, love and justice, and so on) in mutually inclusive ways. Lesser stories want to take up one side or the other, but Christianity dignifies both aspects of our experience of the world. Christianity does not just correspond and cohere. It also provides the tools to reconnect the concepts and ideas that have been fractured in modernity. Modern spiritualities don’t have the conceptual capability to connect the physical and the spiritual, facts and values, or truth and meaning. But Christianity tells a story in which all of these are aspects of a connected whole. As Christians engaging in the marketplace of ideas, we tell the story in which the world is created in love by a triune and transcendent God who draws near through his Son and Spirit. In this story, the brokenness of the world is not due to imbalance or illusion but rebellion and disorder that affects persons, relationships, and the entire material universe. The problem of adopting various spiritual practices and beliefs is that they always lack coherence and connection. This is a redemption story, one in which souls, bodies, peoples, and places are made new. “How?” your skeptical friend might ask. By God himself entering the story through Jesus in the incarnation. In Jesus, the immaterial and material meet, making him the source of healing for both through his substitutionary death on the cross and his resurrection from the dead. His resurrection is not only the promise of personal renewal but the firstfruits of new creation, where all things are being made whole. This story is big enough to explain the universe and fulfill our deepest longings.  Søren Kierkegaard called anxiety “the dizziness of freedom,” understanding it as the cost of moral responsibility. But in Christ, freedom is no longer the anxious burden of limitless choice; it’s the glad responsibility of living within wise restraints—where our choosing becomes a joy, not a crisis, and our limits become a path toward fulfillment.