Posted November 18, 2025
Tom Cruise received his first Academy Award this week, an honorary Oscar presented at the sixteenth annual Academy Governors Awards. He told the assembled gathering, “Making films is not what I do, it is who I am.”
He added, “I will always do everything I can to help this art form. To support and champion new voices, to protect what makes cinema powerful. Hopefully without too many more broken bones.”
Equating what we do with who we are, our performance with our identity, is not a worldview unique to Mr. Cruise. We are made with a “God-shaped emptiness,” to paraphrase Blaise Pascal. But if secularized people will not turn to God, they will turn to anything else to fill the void. For many in a materialistic culture, our gods are therefore material measures of success such as performance, possessions, and popularity.
Accordingly, perhaps we should not be surprised that Gallup is now reporting the current “drop in US religiosity” as “among [the] largest in the world.” In 2015, 66 percent of US adults said religion was an important part of their daily life. Today, only 49 percent agree. This seventeen-point drop “ranks among the largest Gallup has recorded in any country over any ten-year period since 2007.”
In a brilliant analysis of our cultural moment, the author and cultural commentator John Seel asserts that “we are living through a civilizational inflection.” He describes this inflection:
The late sociologist Philip Rieff called our moment a Third Culture—a social order that has severed its link to the sacred. First Cultures, in his analysis, lived within mythic transcendence; Second Cultures, such as Christendom, drew moral authority from revelation. The Third Culture rejects both. It affirms freedom without form, choice without covenant, progress without purpose, overwhelmed with information without the capacity to live within a meaningful, orienting story.
It was not always this way.
I have begun reading American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson by Joseph Ellis. In it, the acclaimed historian explains the background behind Jefferson’s immortal Declaration of Independence assertion:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.
According to Dr. Ellis,
These are not quite the words Jefferson composed in June 1776. Before editorial changes were made by the Continental Congress, Jefferson’s early draft made it even clearer that his intention was to express a spiritual vision: “We hold these truths to be sacred & undeniable; that all men are created equal & independent, that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent & unalienable, among which are the preservation of life, & liberty, & the pursuit of happiness.”
I like Mr. Jefferson’s first draft much better than the final version. Even the noted skeptic of orthodox Christianity believed that we live in a world ordered by the “sacred.”
However, many Americans would apparently not agree with him or with me today.
Of course, as anyone knows who has ever built a jigsaw puzzle, the problem is that the wrong piece will not fill the right hole. Wedging the “self-evident” into the “sacred” doesn’t replace the sacred.
Idols made by humans “have mouths, but they do not speak; they have eyes, but do not see; they have ears, but do not hear, nor is there any breath in their mouths” (Psalm 135:16–17). Terrifyingly, “Those who make them become like them; so do all who trust in them” (v. 18).
In a letter to the editor, British writer G. K. Chesterton observed, “The answer to the question, ‘What is wrong?’ is, or should be, ‘I am wrong.’ Until a man can give that answer, his idealism is only a hobby.”
The solution to what is wrong with us is not doing more of what makes us wrong. Self-reliant self-fulfillment does not fulfill the self, as the current epidemic of depression, anxiety, and other mental health issues illustrates.
To this point, my analysis of secularized culture may not feel relevant to spiritual people reading a spiritual article like this. But we must beware that the same is true even of religious self-reliance: working for God is not the same thing as walking with him.
Oswald Chambers was right: “We will set up success in Christian work as the aim; the aim is to manifest the glory of God in human life, to live the life hid with Christ in God in human conditions.”
Brother Lawrence testified, “There is not in the world a kind of life more sweet and delightful than that of a continual conversation with God.” When we agree with Paul—“Whatsoever you do, do all to the glory of God” (1 Corinthians 10:31)—we will experience the “glory of God” in our souls. And not until then.
The hymn writer prayed:
Riches I heed not, nor man’s empty praise:
Be thou mine inheritance now and always;
Be thou and thou only the first in my heart;
O Sovereign of Heaven, my treasure thou art.
Who—or what—is your “treasure” today?
“Nothing in or of this world measures up to the simple pleasure of experiencing the presence of God.” —A. W. Tozer
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