What memorable experience of pop culture can you recall from this year so far? When was the last time a movie, TV show, or musical release had everyone talking? Most of us struggle to answer. Even the things that do approach mass-culture saturation—like last month’s release of a new Taylor Swift album—lack the buzz they used to have and feel retread and uninspiring. Perhaps the biggest bona fide sensation in pop culture recently has been KPop Demon Hunters, a surprise hit on both Netflix and music charts. But this too will be quickly forgotten as the churn of streaming content moves on. With few exceptions, pop culture right now feels stagnant, forgettable, disposable, ho-hum, and low-key bland. There are ever fewer Big Things that shape cultural discourse; all we have now are ephemeral trending topics, TikTok crazes, and meme-sparking pseudo-events like this summer’s Coldplay fan cam incident. And when viral infidelity memes are the best we’ve got as a culture, something has gone terribly wrong. The stagnation has been long brewing. In The Decadent Society (2020), Ross Douthat’s definition of cultural “decadence” includes a “cultural and intellectual exhaustion at a high level of material prosperity and technological development.” Even as digital tech gives us unprecedented access to culture, precious little of it feels fresh or enlivening. Most feels stale and repetitive. We’re unmoved, bored, numb. Why is contemporary pop culture so blah like this? And what might this mean for Christianity amid the malaise? Technological Explanation: Algorithms, AI Slop, and Brain-Rot Junk Food Digital technology has created cultural stagnation on both the consumption side and the production side. Audiences are fragmented by algorithms and fed a numbing stream of “content” (note the linguistic shift from “culture” to “content” in the internet age) meant to capture their attention but not necessarily nourish them. Pop culture has largely ceased to be a meaningful source of water-cooler conversation or community building. It’s merely isolated consumption, encapsulated in the prophetic Apple iPod ads from the early 2000s: solitary shadows of people with music in their ears, dancing to their own thing. Even as digital tech gives us unprecedented access to culture, precious little of it feels fresh or enlivening. Most feels stale and repetitive. We’re unmoved, bored, numb. Digital technology’s “democratization” of culture making (bypassing gatekeepers; platform building via social media savvy) has diversified the cultural landscape, yes. But it has also created a wildly oversaturated explosion of content, much of it mediocre at best. If everyone is a culture creator via Garage Band, YouTube, or TikTok, the act of culture making loses prestige and cultural products become cheapened in their ubiquity. The glut is aggravated by the convergence of all content into video, as well as the ongoing ascendence of generative AI. When we open our feeds we’re mostly seeing video content we didn’t ask for and heaps of AI slop. The algorithm feeds us the equivalent of lunch-line mystery meat from the hair-netted cafeteria lady. Are we supposed to be impressed and captivated? It’s not working. We are digitally fatigued. Young people especially are highly aware of “brain rot” and growing more hungry for meatier, analog alternatives. Meanwhile, creative industries are struggling to penetrate increasingly skeptical consumer defenses. Some artists simply accept the fragmentation and create work that will only appeal to a specific niche—churning out ear-tingling candy for echo chambers. For artists seeking bigger audiences or broader cultural influence, often their only recourse is spectacle or shock: creating something so over the top, incendiary, or transgressive that it might just get attention. But even these bold swings have by now become so bourgeois and rote that they barely register. Audiences catch on to the marketing gimmicks of aging pop stars desperately trying to stay relevant. It all starts to feel sad and empty. Political Explanation: Beauty Bogged Down in Agendas Rather than telling good stories, many culture makers today are more interested in advancing their narrative. Rather than seeking to capture broadly appealing goodness, truth, and beauty, much in pop culture is now driven by partisan polemics, DEI representation quotas, or provocative moral transgression. Culture has become more a battlefield for ideological warfare than an arena of shared appreciation of excellent things. Pop culture has become more a battlefield for ideological warfare than an arena of shared appreciation of beautiful things. Consider the growing examples of LGBT+ propaganda in children’s entertainment, or Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, which has been breathlessly praised by the film critic community but is essentially a three-hour call to arms for leftist “resistance” in Trump’s America. Or note the selection of Bad Bunny as this year’s Super Bowl halftime show performer. Even five months before the event, the conversation is about the political implications of this choice—nothing about his music. For understandable reasons, everyday folks are leery of entertainment’s agenda because so much of it feels like preaching more than entertaining. We’re exhausted by this. And when artists can’t find motivation to create work that’s deeper or wider than politics, cultural stagnation naturally results. Spiritual Explanation: De-Storied Secularism At its core, cultural stagnation is downstream from spiritual emptiness. Consider movies as one cultural genre that’s particularly stuck. Hollywood is in a full-fledged crisis. The two factors mentioned above are certainly part of the problem. But the more fundamental reason is that Hollywood has no new ideas. It merely recycles the past and follows old formulas. Douthat says it well when he observes, “A society that generates a lot of bad movies need not be decadent; a society that just makes the same movies over and over again might be.” Cultural stagnation is downstream from spiritual emptiness. Audiences are growing tired of the endless recycling of IP (franchise sequels, prequels, reboots, remakes, and live-action versions of animated classics), yet these are the only sorts of movies that make money. Eighteen of the top 20 highest-grossing movies so far in 2025 are IP-driven movies. The original movie exceptions—Sinners and Weapons—are too infrequent to motivate Hollywood to green-light unproven stories. This cycle is killing cinema by slowly rendering it irrelevant. As Thomas Flight describes it in a recent long-form video essay, With almost no development of new original worlds, stories, ideas, IP, major blockbuster films have become a kind of cultural ouroboros. Cinema no longer creates the narratives that define the culture, instead it relies almost exclusively on its own past cultural influence or existing worlds, characters, and stories from other forms of media for its success. But Hollywood’s inability to develop new worlds goes beyond risk-averse business decisions. It stems from the broader malaise of a secular age. Compelling stories involve heroes and villains, goodness and evil, beauty contrasted with ugliness. But all these are undefinable without the moral foundation that’s either assumed or explicitly avowed in a Christian culture. That’s why so many movies now blur the lines between good/wicked and hero/villain—or rework these labels according to partisan political frameworks (e.g., white men usually the villains, intersectional minorities usually the heroes). Yet category-confusing drama is a bore. And politically motivated drama is annoying. Audiences intuitively want what secular creators increasingly can’t deliver: stories anchored in transcendent truth. Opportunity for Christians I was recently at a Paul McCartney concert in a massive stadium. As McCartney performed iconic Beatles songs like “Let It Be” and “Hey Jude,” I looked around at the 50,000 people singing along, many hands raised in a pseudo–worship pose. It struck me that this is the secular-culture equivalent of a religious experience. It scratched an itch rarely scratched these days: a hunger for mass-culture unity around beauty that brings people together, an appetite for something so good that it rises above fragmented narratives. Slickly repackaged nostalgia is the best our present stagnant culture can offer: retrieval of the bygone days when Western culture was still close enough to its Judeo-Christian heritage that it produced works of galvanizing wonder, beauty, and substance. But people are hungry for more than mere nostalgia. Even a stirring sing-along to “Hey Jude” is merely a passing pleasure. Who will rise to the occasion and create art that actually moves people—and changes culture? People are hungry for more than mere nostalgia. Christians have an opportunity here. The late-modern cultural rut is leaving people hungry for real encounters with beauty. The church can provide this. Perhaps this is part of why we’re seeing an uptick in church attendance among Gen Z in particular. When so much else in culture feels like hastily made, disposable slop, the weekly liturgies of Christian worship—largely unchanged for two millennia—feel substantive, solid, nourishing, and transformative. Christian art that unapologetically rehearses and flows from theological truth also has potential to fill the void. Perhaps this is why Christian music is having such a moment, why The Chosen broke records for the most translated season of a TV show ever, and why streamers like Prime Video are hungry for shows like House of David. In all these cases, it’s not just Christian art breaking through; it’s quality Christian art where excellence of craft makes the message compelling. In a culturally stagnant age that’s getting more dank by the day, Christianity can be the fresh, flowing, cleansing water that breaks the stalemate and brings replenishing life once again.