Scott Blakeman loved watching the reactions when he casually told new friends at house parties and barbecues that he had brain cancer.
He deployed it like a joke, deep into conversation, timed for the most comedic effect. It didn’t matter to him that he was usually the only one who thought the sudden, sputtering shock of it—that transition from light banter to morbid reality—was funny. He even nicknamed his cancer: Boomer the Tumor. (The smaller tumors that formed later were baby Boomers.)
As he lost some of his vision, tried numerous medications and radiation therapy, got dangerously thin, and had six surgeries in as many years, Scott was often laughing.
His hope wasn’t shallow; he didn’t use jokes to pretend he wasn’t suffering. Theological questions and lament came just as easily to him. He grieved. He saw how broken—how cursed—creation must be for cancer to exist.
But through it all, he joyfully loved God, his wife, his neighbors, and his city.
He categorically rejected despair.
I don’t know about you, but I can start to slip into despair if I have a cold that lasts a little too long or if I have too many emails to answer in one afternoon. How was my friend Scott able to resist that temptation while he faced a trial unthinkable to his peers?
In The Sickness unto Death, 19th-century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard argues that in this fallen world, everybody begins in a state of despair. Some people might think they aren’t, but they just haven’t been forced to reckon with it yet. (And they will, eventually, have to reckon with it.) The opposite of despair, Kierkegaard argues through a pseudonym representing the Christian ideal—what allows people to reject it, for good, once they’ve recognized it—is faith in God.
Scott had faith that he belonged to Jesus. He had faith that God is good and loves us more than we can know. He had faith that death isn’t the end. And he had faith that one day, Christ will make all things new. Not in some vague, spiritual sense but instead a bodily resurrection of all people, the final defeat of evil, grace poured out to believers, and eternal joy in God’s presence.
Scott’s faith gave him a hope that could last. He lived abundantly and triumphantly while he walked through the valley of the shadow of death.
In recent years, many young people have found they can’t defy despair like Scott did—and some don’t seem to want to defy it at all. A sense of hopelessness, nihilism, and dread haunts them en masse. I am not referring here to mental illness in general. I’ve had postpartum depression and anxiety, and I know just how powerful hormones and chemical imbalances can be. I’m talking instead about a generation that has weighed existence, has found it wanting, and is increasingly deciding against it. Their despair has been considered and thought through.
For example, it is common for young people to say they’ve decided to never have children. Some point to finances or health conditions. But many others cite fears that the future holds only endless climate catastrophes and wars. They don’t want their kids to have to live through it. Self-imposed annihilation, after all, is its own kind of answer to those problems.
Might it be better for humanity not to exist?
That’s on the extreme end. Plenty of others are just skeptical that conditions could ever improve.
With this, young people are partly doing what Kierkegaard expects of everyone: They’re recognizing their own despair in a sinful, broken world. But the solution he presents to it—faith in God—isn’t usually where newer generations are landing. Their responses have also sharply differed from those of the many people in the past who didn’t land on faith either but who still tried to forget their despair and make the most of their circumstances.
Maybe this impenetrable anguish can be blamed on smartphones and social media—we are exposed to more suffering around the world, in real time, than ever before—or simply how difficult their formative years have been amid a global pandemic and extreme political division. But I don’t think those reasons fully explain it. People around the world have seen troubled eras and worse many times over.
What is different is that many of today’s young people have been brought up on a kind of scientific nihilism—believing humanity is a cosmic accident, existing for nothing in particular and destined for nowhere at all. All that awaits us is the heat death of the universe. Often, they are completely untethered from the theological foundations of Christianity. As a result, many of them have weakened defenses against despair.
Their hopelessness—and their occasional pursuit of some alternative antidote to it than Kierkegaard’s answer of faith in God (a favorite pastime of his intellectual successors)—is showing up in the stories we tell ourselves.
One such story: The 2022 film Everything Everywhere All at Once. At first glance, it’s a zany science-fiction multiverse adventure. But the assumptions it makes and the conflict at its heart reflect the weary, all-encompassing pessimism of a generation.
The dimension-hopping antagonist of the film, when confronted with infinite parallel universes, decides nothing matters. She wreaks havoc as she tries to find a way to erase every version of herself from existence. Her parents (well, their doubles from different worlds) try to stop her, even though they can’t quite verbalize why she’s wrong.
They defeat her nihilism with this message: “Be kind.”
It’s a good rule to fall back on if nothing else makes sense. But very few people, if any, can be kind to everyone, everywhere, all the time. That answer also falls woefully short of truly confronting sin, death, and suffering—the fundamental reasons we are driven to despair.
Still, it deeply resonated with young people for holding a mirror to their own gnawing nihilism and their desperate desire, in spite of it, to be good and do good. Being kind for its own sake might forge a self-made meaning in a perceived void of meaninglessness. Maybe, irreligious young people wonder, kindness is enough reason to carry on, even if nothing really matters. We might have gotten here by accident, and we might be going nowhere, but we can at least try to build a just society—an Eden of our own—while we’re alive.
This mindset is still a form of faith used to overcome despair, but instead of relying on God, it is rooted in ourselves and what we think we can accomplish.
Our own works can never produce a hope that will endure, though. We can try to love others as fiercely and tenderly as Jesus does, but without him, death and despair still knock at the door.
Scripture rejects this ultimately-still-nihilistic worldview with clarity and hope. It tells young people the truth: Life not only matters, but each person is also infinitely valuable, made in God’s own image. Christ loves us so much—even while we were all still sinners—that he entered our world, suffered, died for us, and defeated the grave to rescue us from our sinful rebellion.
Jesus is the true and better answer to the film’s conclusion to be kind: He loves us with a radical, selfless, incomprehensible love—and he calls his followers to love their neighbors and even their enemies the same way.
Some of the most common barriers for modern people to place their faith in God align with two of Kierkegaard’s descriptions of despair: One form of despair, in his telling, comes when a person doesn’t want to be who they are before God. They feel hopeless about a sin they can’t get rid of, an illness they bear, some weakness or frailty that comes with being human in a fallen world. They don’t believe God can change their situation. They can’t imagine he could actually forgive their sins, heal them, or make them a new creation. (In our culture, this doubt is even deeper; it’s hard for us to trust he exists at all.)
Another form of despair comes when, before God, a person essentially wants to be their fallen self instead of being made perfect.
Faith, for Kierkegaard, is instead being “grounded transparently in God” and his will for us.
If we need that kind of faith to really defy despair, are we supposed to hunt for it within ourselves like squirrels in the autumn, trying with all our might to find enough acorns of faith, somewhere, to save us? I do love squirrels, but that isn’t the image presented by the Bible.
“For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith,” the apostle Paul writes in Ephesians, “and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast” (2:8–9).
I’ll avoid getting into dense theological arguments about God’s sovereignty and free will here—I don’t fully understand the mysteries of God and wouldn’t want to pretend to. (For his part, Kierkegaard views faith throughout his writings as both a gift from God and an action we have to take.)
I do know this: In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus promises that his Father gives “good gifts to those who ask him” (Matt. 7:11). Sometimes, all we can do as we pursue him instead of despair is echo the cry of the father who sought his son’s healing from Jesus: “I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief!” (Mark 9:24).
It’s a prayer I’ve had to come back to over and over again. An image in Dane Ortlund’s book Gentle and Lowly has encouraged me in this, reminding me of the relationship between our fragile faith and Christ’s love: We are like toddlers holding an adult’s hand. We can try our best to hold on, but we are weak. Even still, and even if we get distracted, squirm, and have wet, sticky hands (as toddlers somehow always do), God is stronger. He holds on to us.
“I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish,” Jesus says of his followers in the Gospel of John. “No one will snatch them out of my hand” (John 10:28).
My friend Scott died in the summer of 2023 at the age of 34, after battling cancer for seven years. He wanted to live. But his faith in Christ cast out despair.
As he walked to the grave—and to glory—Scott held on to Jesus’ hand, and Jesus held his hand even tighter.
Shortly after his death, hundreds of people packed into the Church of the Resurrection on Capitol Hill to celebrate his life. They sang hymns, mourned, prayed, wept, laughed about his old jokes, and remembered the promise in Revelation 21, that God “will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away” (v. 4).
Then they did what the church has done all along. They went back into the city, back to their neighborhoods, and kept loving people the way Jesus has called them to—while defying despair and showing others how to do the same—until he returns.
Haley Byrd Wilt is a mom, journalist, occasional science-fiction writer, and former despairer.
A version of this essay was originally published in the Center for Christianity and Public Life’s 2024 Journal of Ideas.
The post You Will Have to Reckon with Despair appeared first on Christianity Today.