“Spying and novel writing are made for each other,” John le Carré once wrote. “Both call for a ready eye for human transgression and the many routes to betrayal. Those of us who have been inside the secret tent never really leave it.” Le Carré’s enigmatic gift as a writer wasn’t simply that he could draw on his experience of having once been a British spy. He brought a novelist’s eye into the secret world, and the habits of espionage to his writing. Far more than knowledge of tradecraft, this status—at once outsider and insider—enabled him to uncover truths about the corrupting nature of power: His novels are infused with the honesty of an outsider, but they could only have been written by a man who knows what it is like to be inside the tent.

In the worlds le Carré created, truths are rarely self-evident. So it was in his own life, as we learn in a recently published book of his letters. On the surface, he progressed naturally from his youth to the inner sanctum: His adolescence was spent in English public schools immediately after World War II, where the boys did military training in uniform, jingoism was the norm, and—at least for one final generation—empire was an inheritance. He studied foreign languages. He served in the British army’s Intelligence Corps. He attended Oxford. He taught German at Eton. By the time he joined MI5 in 1958, his biography read, well, like a lot of other recruits’.

The deeper truth is more interesting. His father, Ronnie Cornwell, was an inveterate con man, in and out of money and trouble with the law. His mother left them when he was 5 years old, so young David Cornwell, as was his birth name, was enlisted as his father’s accomplice. He entered the secret world early, engaging in deceptions on behalf of his father but also to protect himself against a man who drank, gambled, and wasn’t above beating his son. “Spying did not introduce me to secrecy,” le Carré wrote in his memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel. “Evasion and deception were the necessary weapons of my childhood.”

His own service as a spy was short-lived—including a few years undercover in Germany with a cover identity as a junior diplomat in the early 1960s. Still, it was an auspicious and life-changing period. The Cold War was at its apex, at the moment of the Berlin Wall’s construction and the Cuban missile crisis. Meanwhile, British intelligence was rocked by the revelation that it was harboring two high-ranking Soviet double agents: George Blake and Kim Philby. The British elite were scandalized. MI6’s networks were decimated. The British secret services were discredited in the eyes of the Americans.

During this period, Cornwell rose early and wrote three novels under the pseudonym John le Carré: Call for the Dead, A Murder of Quality, and, in 1963, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. This last book, which turns 60 this year, recast the Cold War: The conflict was not a morality play of good versus evil, as leaders of both sides presented it; rather, it was an ambiguous addendum to World War II waged by gray men in the shadows, broken by their own betrayals and the bureaucracies—capitalist and Communist—that treated them as expendable. The novel became a global best seller, making his (invented) name. In any case, David Cornwell’s career as a spy ended the year after his breakthrough novel was published: Philby, it is widely believed, blew his cover.

[Read: The singular achievement of “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy”]

For the rest of his life, he would be John le Carré the writer. Despite his accurate protestation that he “was a writer who had once happened to be a spy, rather than a spy who had turned to writing,” le Carré never really separated himself from his time on the inside. He was not a genre writer. He was motivated less by portraying cloak-and-dagger conceits and more by a searching need to understand the overreach of empires, be they British, Soviet, or American. He wove stories of how individuals and nations reveal themselves through the secrets they carry. In a way, every book he wrote is a symphonic variation on The Spy Who Came in From the Cold—in which a British agent poses as a Communist defector in order to take down a brutal East German foe, only to learn that his own service has betrayed him and the innocent are left to suffer the consequences. It is an unsparing look at the cost of moral compromise in pursuit of so-called national interests.

Two years after his death, we now have a voluminous collection of le Carré’s letters, assembled by his son Tim Cornwell and published late last year: A Private Spy: The Letters of John le Carré. Through his correspondence, we learn a lot about le Carré’s habits as a writer. There are literary feuds, frustrations with critics, and glimpses into how some of his books became successful film and television productions (and how some didn’t). Despite his success, you get the sense that le Carré never let go of his insecurities about being taken seriously as a novelist; we see him seeking—and reveling in—the approval of writers such as Graham Greene, Philip Roth, and Tom Stoppard. Clearly, he wanted to be known as more than a spy or a spy novelist.

There is less material that reveals le Carré’s secret lives. The correspondence during his time as a spy often reads like an opaque curtain veiling his cover—a litany of logistics and family updates. Le Carré had numerous infidelities during his two marriages, a habit that doubtlessly benefited from his experience in subterfuge. According to his son, le Carré “covered the tracks” of his infidelities—but there are occasional revelatory exceptions. “Dear heart, try to understand a mole too used to the dark to believe in light,” he wrote in one letter to Susan Kennaway, with whom he began an affair in 1964. “If you live, as I have, so long in the dark, you can’t always, if you are me, have faith in the light.” Clearly, le Carré felt the burden of living secret lives, which must have contributed to his capacity to conjure characters who feel the agony of betraying loved ones while hiding away their truest selves.

His letters also reveal a man who cared deeply about how his work was consumed by the wider world. In 1966, he wrote an open letter to a KGB-controlled literary journal that had critiqued The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. In it, he acknowledged drawing equivalences between the Soviet Union and the United States, but not between communism and Western democracy—the issue, instead, was how the West betrayed its own ideals in the methods it used to wage the Cold War. To le Carré, the real tragedy was the wreckage of human lives all around: “The problem of the Cold War is that, as Auden once wrote, we haunt a ruined century. Behind the little flags we wave, there are old faces weeping, and children mutilated by the fatuous conflicts of preachers.”

The letter can be read as a mission statement for le Carré’s politics at the time. Notably, though, it was published in Encounter, a magazine funded by the CIA—le Carré was expressing his outsider’s viewpoint in a publication that was very much a part of the inside, the same machinery that he was critiquing. This irony recurs in his letters: Le Carré repeatedly offers withering indictments of the powers he served, but he never seems to cast them aside. Later in life, he wrote nostalgically to Alan Judd, a fellow novelist who once served as a soldier and diplomat, of his time at MI5 and MI6: “I miss the Office … In a sense, they are the only places, apart from writing.”

Yet, in other places, he could be withering about the people who become spies, himself included. He explained himself to a friend who learned that le Carré spied on him at university: “I was a nasty, vengeful little orphan with a psychopathic liar for a father and a boy-scout self-image as an antidote.” The description is eerily similar to one le Carré offered of Philby in a letter to a journalist: Philby was “a nasty little establishment traitor with a revolting father, a fake stammer and an anguished sexuality who spent his life getting his own back on the England that made him.” But again, there’s that tension—le Carré was no romanticist for England, but he maintained a righteous rage at Philby for betraying it. Ahead of one of his trips to Russia, le Carré was approached about meeting Philby to hear his side of the story. Most writers would have jumped at the chance; le Carré refused.

What he did do was travel the world researching the settings, characters, and themes of his novels. Many of his letters testify to his doggedness. He pursues guides to far-flung places like a spy recruiting sources, and reports back his findings through novels—often by putting us inside the experiences of those on the wrong end of power. He understood this as a key to his own success—a mixture of empathy and exactitude—which depended upon other people trusting him. “Each novel I have written has been a complete life,” he writes to Vladimir Stabnikov, a Russian literary figure who was le Carré’s guide on trips to Moscow. “The novels I wrote about Russia were lives that you enabled me to lead. And when I moved on to other lives: to the Middle East, to Africa, and to Latin America, other people opened doors for me and I was again the beneficiary of kind strangers who became kind friends.”

Although he wandered widely, he returned—again and again—to the profession he knew best. He produced a shelf of books about a British intelligence service whose concerns mirrored the nation’s struggle to determine what it was without an empire. Many of his later books act as broadsides against an American national-security apparatus filled with the hubris of an empire that didn’t know it was hastening its own decline. To le Carré, this wasn’t just a matter of writing what he knew; these books were a useful vehicle for telling the stories he wanted to tell. “If you are a novelist struggling to explore a nation’s psyche,” he wrote in his memoir, “its Secret Service is not an unreasonable place to look.”

His letters reveal just how much the United Kingdom and the United States had let him down by the end of his life. “My response to the political scene is vehement,” he wrote to a journalist in 2018. “I hate Brexit, hate Trump, fear the rise of white fascism everywhere and take the threat very seriously indeed; the craving for conflict is everywhere among our pseudo dictators.” Shortly before his death, he sought and received Irish citizenship. Finally, a cord was cut. To an Irish bureaucrat, he wrote, “You have given me back my long friendship with Europe.”

Paul Spella / The Atlantic; Terry Fincher / Daily Express / Hulton Archive / Getty

In 2017, I finished eight years working at the center of American national-security policy in the White House. Exhausted by lack of sleep, haunted by world crises unresolved, disoriented at moving from the inside to the outside, and rattled by Donald Trump’s presidency, I sought out reasons to travel. In a bookshop in Hong Kong, I bought a set of le Carré’s first three novels—the ones written when he was on the inside. Near the beginning of the first, Call for the Dead, he introduces us to his finest creation, that owl-eyed observer within “the circus,” le Carré’s analogue for Britain’s secret services: George Smiley.

He learnt what it was never to sleep, never to relax, to feel at any time of day or night the restless beating of his own heart, to know the extremes of solitude and self-pity, the sudden unreasoning desire for a woman, for drink, for exercise, for any drug to take away the tension of his life.

I couldn’t stop reading. Here was a man working things out through his writing, trying to make sense of forces that could be soul-crushing—particularly, in this case, for people on the inside.

Something about being on the inside opened the floodgates that allowed le Carré to begin constructing his own canon. By the time I reached The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, I marveled at the immediacy with which le Carré was able to distill things that could never have been captured in an intelligence report or a diplomatic cable. Spies seek information to buttress national power; writers seek the truth of the human experience. Le Carré noted this reality in a 1974 letter to Graham Greene: On one of his many research trips, he traveled to Saigon toward the end of the Vietnam War. There, with the Vietcong winning the war, he reread The Quiet American, a 1955 novel that foreshadowed America’s defeat through a piercing story of American hubris. “The sheer accuracy of its mood, and observation, is astonishing,” le Carré wrote to Greene. Greene, like le Carré, had been a spy. Greene’s novels, like le Carré’s, convey truths that elude those who serve power.

[Read: John le Carré goes back into the cold]

On that trip to Southeast Asia, le Carré was researching what would become The Honourable Schoolboy, about a British agent named Jerry Westerby. In the process of unmasking a Soviet intelligence operation in Asia, Westerby’s loyalties shift from his government to a woman. Still, he does the work. Pulling a thread that leads him through war-ravaged Laos to Thailand, Westerby ends up at an American military base just as Saigon falls.

Le Carré describes an exhausted outpost of empire, a bookend to The Quiet American. Through Westerby’s eyes, we see how “a flow of air-force personnel was drifting in and out of the camp, blacks and whites, in scowling segregated groups … The mood was sullen, defeated, and innately violent. The Thai groups greeted nobody. Nobody greeted the Thais.” Westerby meets his contact, an American major drinking brandy while absorbing the news of his nation’s defeat. “I want you to extend to me the hand of welcome, sir,” the major says to Westerby. “The United States of America has just applied to join the club of second-class powers of which I understand your own fine nation to be chairman, president, and oldest member.” Westerby, who has traded dreams of empire for the pursuit of love, responds cavalierly: “Proud to have you aboard.” Later, though, he takes in his surroundings with the eyes of a spy and the insight of a novelist: “This is how they tried to win, Jerry thought: from inside sound-proof rooms, through smoked glass, using machines at arm’s length. This is how they lost.”

In le Carré’s letters, he expresses flashes of anger at being slotted as either a Cold War writer or a former spy. There was, he knew, something more enduring about his work, even though it depended on the knowledge he’d acquired inside the secret tent: It was literature. So often, ambition in public life can be tethered to achievement in the moment—rising through the ranks, reaching the heights of bureaucracy or political office. But by melding his insider’s knowledge with his outsider’s perspective, le Carré ascended to a greater height. When empires die, the most powerful thing they leave behind are stories. David Cornwell told them.

What do you get when you buy something? The thing, of course—a Big Mac, airline transit to Miami, the right to stream Bridgerton. This is the hard product. But you receive secondary goods and services as well: the box in which you can transport your burger, complimentary Wi-Fi with your SkyMiles membership, the kinship of watching a show with your family. Call this the “soft product.” If you don’t get the hard product, you’ve been swindled. But that soft product has a value too: Without it, you’d feel shortchanged.

The distinction between hard and soft products helps explain the controversy about changes Netflix is making to its streaming service—along with many other changes in the internet-enabled service economy. In recent months, Netflix has started preventing subscribers from sharing an account across multiple physical locations without paying extra. Last year, the company tested the idea in Latin America, and this month it modified the policy and expanded it into Canada, New Zealand, Portugal, and Spain. U.S. subscribers aren’t yet affected by the change, but Netflix has implied that it’s coming everywhere, as the company looks for ways to boost revenue amid a downturn affecting the whole streaming sector. (A Netflix spokesperson didn’t respond to a request for more details.)

With this change, Netflix has also attempted a rebrand: People used to talk of “password sharing,” but last year the company started to refer to “paid sharing.” If you’ve felt confused or even angry about this change, it’s probably because a Netflix account had previously offered a soft product that the company is now retracting. Worse, the way Netflix is reframing “sharing” seems to imply that you might have been a cheat for ever getting that soft product in the first place; the new definition both highlights a feature you probably didn’t think about and scolds you for having taken advantage of it.

A password is meant to be secret. That makes sharing it intimate but also clandestine. For years, Netflix exploited that sense of intimacy as a marketing strategy, most famously in a tweet its official account posted: “Love is sharing a password.” This pitch came after the phrase Netflix and chill had solidified as a euphemism for casual sex, and Netflix capitalized on the idea that its service might, well, bring people together. Even though the terms of service have long said that an account is supposed to be for people who live in one household, Netflix never seemed to mean it.

[Read: This is what Netflix thinks your family is]

Sharing an account became characteristic of the Netflix brand, and one with real value to the company. Beyond the marketing benefit, user profiles meant that Netflix could perform data segmentation on its viewership, which in turn allowed the company to target recommendations to help retain subscribers. This segmentation likely also helps sell ads for the cheaper tier of its service. When Netflix (and all the other streaming services) started encouraging users to set up separate profiles, they created a new kind of group affinity. You’d launch the software on your television or phone and see your crew—Mom and Dad and Caitlin and Buzz, maybe. These profiles could be customized with icons, allowing users the ability to signal something about their current sense of self—or to make jokes or statements about others by changing up their avatars.

In this context, sharing an account became a first-order social act, and one facilitated by Netflix’s soft product. When your kid moves out, they’re still there, in a way, on the Netflix page. Or maybe you set up profiles for Grandma and Grandpa, who can’t afford to subscribe or wouldn’t know how, when you go visit. Then they appear on your page and you on theirs every time one of you watches TV.

When Netflix decided that this practice amounted to freeloading, it should have known that its customers would object viscerally. Not just because they didn’t want to pay for multiple accounts—although that’s probably also true. Netflix had made sharing a part of its soft product: a tiny, subtle, intimate connection with the people you care about, all hate-watching Emily in Paris together. Before, sharing an account wasn’t just allowed; it was encouraged, both by the operation of the software and the company’s marketing of the service. To suddenly reframe that affordance as theft feels offensive because the company had previously positioned it as a kind of love.

The press played on that offense by presenting the situation as one in which the streaming service was cracking down on password sharing, making Netflix seem like a greedy scrooge accusing its customers of larceny. Netflix tried to take control of the narrative with a recent post by its director of product innovation titled “An Update on Sharing.” Of course, it had seen this backlash coming: In a statement to its investors last month, the company said it was anticipating “some cancel reaction” in response to the shift.

But even so, Netflix may have misconstrued just how central shared accounts, as a soft product, have become to the overall offering. People simply expect the ability to share accounts after 15 years of Netflix streaming. Other platforms that followed Netflix’s lead allow it, after all. The idea of “paid sharing” feels a bit like charging extra for the hamburger box. It is akin to going back to metered text messaging or charging a long-distance toll for video calls.

Companies have a hard time acknowledging how the service economy works, even as they take direct advantage of it. A service is intangible, and that can make its offerings feel secondary or even valueless. Soft products tend to feel especially intangible. Today, with big-tech stock values falling and user growth stalling, companies such as Netflix have undertaken desperate measures to increase revenue. That makes the soft product feel suddenly concrete the moment before it is taken away.   

[Read: The internet is Kmart now]

Back when digitization first took hold, nobody was sure whether the consumer public would tolerate paying cash money for so many intangibles. But in a way, everything became a soft product. The feeling of delight (or hatred!) you find on Facebook or YouTube is why you use social media, not the information the platforms deliver. The convenience of reliable, fast delivery is why you pay for Amazon Prime, not to access the products in the boxes. The sense of community and affinity you get from “sharing” a Netflix account is a big part of why people use it instead of (or in addition to) Prime Video or HBO Max. Being able to share an entertainment experience—especially an exclusive, platform-locked one—whether from the same couch or across the country, was and remains a fundamental part of Netflix’s offering. You pay the monthly subscription fee not just to stare at a screen, but to be able to watch and then talk about Stranger Things or Glass Onion with your friends.

And yet, companies regularly erode their soft product anyway. If you’ve ever struggled with glitchy Wi-Fi on a flight, you know that airlines consider carriage—transport from one place to another—to be all that they’ve sold you. Amazon Prime subscribers thought they were buying reliable, two-day access to almost any consumer good, but nowadays “Prime shipping” might mean anything—ships in two days, or four, or a week, or who knows when. It’s “Prime” because Amazon is shipping it. An Uber is no longer necessarily easy to find, quick to arrive, or cheap to ride, but merely available, if even that.

As more of the intangible service economy becomes pressurized by economic forces such as consolidation and plateaued growth, expect more of these soft products to vanish. The hardest part of that loss of soft goods is that you probably didn’t even realize you were relying on them in the first place. That leaves behind an emotional hurt (a sense of betrayal) rather than a rational one (a loss of value). It’s a feeling you’d better get used to.

Repressive regimes tend to be unimaginative. They persecute and censor their opponents, herd them into concentration camps, torture and execute them in ways that rarely vary from country to country, era to era. As the outrages pile up, public opinion becomes exhausted.

Once in a while, however, a story surfaces that is so startling, so malicious, so unheard of, that people are jolted out of their fatigue.

Recent news about the mysterious 1973 death of Pablo Neruda, the Chilean Nobel Prize winner and one of the greatest poets of the 20th century, has created such an occasion. According to Neruda’s family, a new forensics report conducted by a group of international experts has concluded that he was poisoned while already gravely ill—a victim, most probably, of the Chilean military he had politically opposed. Even the most jaded onlookers should feel disturbed enough to pay attention—not just for what this development reveals if it is in fact true, but for how it might shape the legacy of one of history’s most complicated and most talented poets. Neruda’s own reputation is already blemished, his considerable moral failings as a person having overshadowed the once-universal acclaim for his art.

For many years, I believed that Neruda had died of prostate cancer in a Santiago hospital on September 23, 1973, 12 days after the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende. Neruda’s widow, Matilde Urrutia, had told me that this was the cause of his death, even though she’d emphasized that the destruction of democracy and of the peaceful revolution her husband had so enthusiastically embraced had hastened his passing.

Even then there were rumors that he had been killed by an agent of General Augusto Pinochet’s secret police, but I dismissed them over the years as unfounded, because, I asked myself, why would the military go to the trouble of assassinating someone who was already dying? Why risk something that scandalous being discovered and further soiling their already foul international image?

[Read: The legacy of the Pinochet trial]

In retrospect I wonder if perhaps I was so tired of tales of torture and disappearances, so full of death and grief, that I could not deal with one more affront. I preferred to shield the sacred figure of Neruda from the violence. This became even truer when Chilean democracy was restored in 1990 and my fellow citizens had to retrieve from sand dunes and caverns and pits so many remnants of men and women who really had been slaughtered by the state. Why not let Neruda, at least, rest in peace?

I began to change my views in 2011, when Manuel Araya, Neruda’s chauffeur, announced that he was sure the poet had been poisoned, that the cause of death was a substance injected into his abdomen. The Communist Party to which Neruda had belonged demanded an inquiry, which led to the exhumation of his body two years later. A first examination certified that Neruda had died of cancer, but a second panel of experts in 2017 rejected cancer as the cause of death and determined that his demise was probably because of a bacterial infection, without establishing whether its source was endogenous (having originated from within his body) or exogenous (introduced into his body externally, by someone or something else).

And now, six years later—oh how slowly the wheels of justice move—Neruda’s nephew says he has seen the report of a panel of experts from Canada, Denmark, and Chile who have concluded that Neruda’s death can be attributed to Clostridium botulinum—the same toxin that causes botulism—that may have indeed been injected into his body. Yesterday, the report was sent to a judge who will have to rule officially on the findings and, presumably, stipulate what measures should be taken to ferret out the alleged culprits, though it is doubtful that anyone will ever be put on trial.

If the shameful half century that has passed since his death seems to guarantee the impunity of those who may have ordered his execution and carried it out, the discovery surfacing precisely in 2023 alters the previously accepted history of both Neruda and the country he loved in ways that are significant and unique.

For starters, as the 50th anniversary of the 1973 coup approaches, the apparent manner of the poet’s death suggests once again what Pinochet and his civilian accomplices were capable of, reminding Chileans and so many others around the world of the atrocities of a perverse dictatorship, making it more difficult, as conservatives in Chile would like, to whitewash the past and erase their own sins. As for Neruda himself, the reports of assassination come at a peculiar moment of his afterlife following a series of terrible disclosures.

In the early 1930s, Neruda married a Dutch woman, Maryka Antonieta Hagenaar, who gave birth in 1934 in Madrid to a daughter, Malva Marina. But the little girl was born with hydrocephalus, an inflammation of the brain that causes the head to swell disproportionately—a deformity that Neruda was clearly unable to endure, especially after he fell in love with another woman. He abandoned his family, and Malva died at the age of 8 in Nazi-occupied Holland. Neruda reportedly did not send funds to Hagenaar or ever visit his child’s grave. Added to this revolting conduct was Neruda’s own admission in his posthumously published memoir, I Confess I Have Lived, that he had raped a servant girl in Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) many decades ago. This man, known for his defense and compassion for the victims of the world, had himself been a predator.

The fact that Neruda now becomes one more in an array of martyred revolutionaries who died fighting for the freedom of Latin America does not make his personal transgressions any less disgusting or disheartening. But the notion that he was murdered may, one would hope, ultimately inspire readers to rediscover how his poems still speak to us today.

Younger generations in Chile have had their back turned on Neruda for a number of years, and not just because of what is now known about his personal life. They have favored instead the feminism and tender severity of his fellow Nobel laureate Gabriela Mistral or the sardonic, corrosive anti-poems of Nicanor Parra. When I ask young people about Neruda, they almost unanimously declare that his solemn, grandiose style and torrent of interminable metaphors do not sit well with these fractured, uncertain times, with their own drifting, deracinated lives.

And yet, Neruda’s verses continue to have extraordinary relevance. Most obviously, they could teach readers in our current anxious and disembodied epoch to celebrate love and sex, and to battle the persistent loneliness that afflicts young and old today. But Neruda matters also because he sang into sensuous existence the most modest and ordinary objects of life—tomatoes, artichokes, socks, bread, air, copper, fruit, onions, a clock ticking in the middle of the night, the foaming waves of the sea, the everyday things and moods like tranquility and sadness that, after the poet has illuminated them, we can no longer take for granted. And for those who want to make sense of modernity and its discontents, there are the hypnotic poems of Residencia en la Tierra, which explored the dreams and nightmares of our hallucinatory era in ways that rival the work of any other author, dead or alive.

But there is more. This year Chile is planning to establish for itself a new constitution. Neruda can rouse his fellow countrymen and women to ask themselves about their deepest, tumultuous identities. At a time, for instance, when the question of the planet’s durability is paramount, a supremely ecological Neruda spurs us to care for nature; teaches us to venerate the stones of Latin America, its sands, raw materials, unbridled vegetation and serene grains; proclaims that the mountains and fields are demanding a society as generous as the land itself; brings back to life the Indigenous vision that insists that a different relationship with the Earth is possible. He was the author who, in his Canto General, prophetically reimagined our whole Latin American continent, plunged into its minerals, peeled back the hidden layers of its virulent history of betrayals and insurrections, giving a voice to the humble, trampled, rebellious workers of the past and offering words of encouragement to the rebels of the future.  

[Read: A collection of Pablo Neruda’s love sonnets]

The question of whether one can love the art while deploring the artist is not unique to Neruda, and it’s a dilemma being confronted not by just the young. Neruda’s moral failings are real, and this news of how he seems to have died might not change the revulsion that many feel and that has tainted his poetry for them. But it is also possible that the knowledge that he was most likely assassinated might inspire some readers to revisit him, recognize his imperfections, and still come to appreciate those stanzas of his that allow us to become more human.

Listen to him: “Here are my lost hands. / They are invisible, but you / can see through the night, through the invisible wind. / Give me your hands, I see them / over the harsh sands / of our American night, / and choose yours and yours, / that hand and that other hand / that rises to fight / and will again be made into seed. / I do not feel alone in the night / in the darkness of earth /… From death we are reborn.”

It would be ironic and somehow fitting if the death that his enemies willed upon Neruda leads readers back, 50 years later, to verses that tell us that poverty can be vanquished, that injustice is not eternal, that oppression can be resisted, that the dead can be rescued from silence.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Over the past few weeks, U.S. military aircraft have shot down four “objects” over North America, one of which U.S. officials claim was a Chinese surveillance balloon. This is unusual but not a cause for panic.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

The inconvenient truth about electric vehicles Margaret Atwood: “Go ahead and ban my book.” The sleek truth in Rihanna’s halftime show

99 Red (Chinese?) Balloons

Almost everyone of, ahem, a certain age will remember the 1983 hit song “99 Red Balloons” by the German singer Nena. A classic bit of Cold War pop culture, the lyrics tell a story of a girl buying some balloons and letting them go into the air—where they are promptly misidentified as a threat by the world’s militaries, who then mistakenly launch World War III and destroy the planet. The song ends leaving Nena “standing pretty” in “this dust that was a city.” (Or, if you prefer the original German lyrics, die Welt in Trümmern liegen [“the world lies in ruins.”])

So let’s start by noting that whatever is going over the United States and Canada, it’s not that kind of threat. There are some objects over our shared continent, and these objects, according to both Washington and Ottawa, don’t belong there. Four of them have been shot down, including one taken down in an operation by NORAD, the joint U.S.-Canadian command that has been defending North American airspace since the early days of the Cold War. This is a first: Until last week, NORAD had never shot down anything.

These facts don’t tell us very much, and with so much still unclear, the Biden administration isn't sharing a whole lot at the moment. So let’s consider a few possibilities.

The simplest answer is that these objects are Chinese surveillance balloons. The National Security Council coordinator for strategic communications, John Kirby, said today that China “has a high-altitude balloon program for intelligence collection” and that at the present time, the program isn’t very good, but it’s improving. In a clapback at the administration’s critics, Kirby noted that the Chinese program “was operating during the previous administration, but they did not detect it. We detected it.”

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer on Sunday claimed that the object downed on February 4 off the coast of South Carolina, along with two other objects taken down over Alaska and Canada, were all surveillance balloons. This assertion is especially plausible given the alacrity with which the Canadians, after consultation with the Americans, ordered their jets to destroy the object over the Yukon. (The Canadian rationale was that the object posed a threat to commercial aviation, but Canada’s defense minister noted that it was “potentially similar” to the first balloon downed off the U.S. coast.)

Beijing, according to Center for a New American Security’s CEO, Richard Fontaine, has been ever more assertive in testing North American skies with these balloons. Although the Chinese so far are in high dudgeon over these accusations, officials have admitted that another object spotted over Latin America belonged to the People’s Republic; they claimed that it was a meteorological balloon blown off course, and later reportedly apologized to Costa Rica for entering that country’s airspace. But the strongest evidence that the Chinese have been surging balloon flights over North America—where they could linger over targets as mobile observation posts—is that Beijing is now accusing the United States of doing exactly the same thing over China, an allegation the United States has denied.

In authoritarian regimes, many accusations are confessions.

Chinese mischief, however, doesn’t seem to explain the things that do not seem very balloonlike, including “octagonal” or “cylindrical” objects such as the ones destroyed by NORAD over Lake Huron and the Yukon. When asked yesterday to speculate about possible extraterrestrial origins of these objects, the NORAD commander General Glen VanHerck said, “I haven’t ruled out anything at this point.” That’s really just a military boilerplate answer when no one knows what’s going on, and Kirby today dismissed theories about aliens.

But if they’re not aliens, what are they? One possibility is that they’re other civilian airships, or junk of some kind floating around in the atmosphere that until now fell below NORAD’s definition of a threat. Remember, NORAD was created in the late 1950s to defend the U.S. and Canada against Soviet missile and bomber attacks, not to look for slow-moving balloons.

Now, as one U.S. official put it, “we basically opened the filters,” meaning that North American air defenses are now intentionally looking for smaller objects. As the Atlantic contributing writer Juliette Kayyem notes, if it seems like we’re now finding more of them, it’s because we’re actively looking for them. And as Kirby noted in today’s briefing, pilots flying at hundreds of miles an hour are trying to identify essentially stationary objects, so it’s too early to ask for a precise description.

Still, if both the U.S. and Canadian governments are confident enough about what they’re seeing to issue orders to open fire on these objects, the public may wonder why its leaders are not saying more about the targets.

As usual with military and intelligence operations, there are several reasons to hold information close at this point. We don’t want to tip off adversaries about how much we know, how much we were actually able to see in detail, and how quickly we could spot these objects. The United States has already begun to recover some of the debris, but it is never a good idea to share exactly how much of an opponent’s technology is in our hands.

(By the way, the armchair generals who are eager to send up more jets to shoot down yet more things should step back for a moment. The decision to engage an unidentified object always carries the risk of a mistake or an accident—or of endangering civilians on the ground. To return to 1983 for a moment, recall that the former Soviet Union had an itchy trigger finger when it came to incursions of its airspace, which is why in September of that year, a Soviet fighter jet shot down a South Korean civilian airliner, killing all 269 people aboard.)

For now, Washington and Ottawa have determined that these objects were violating U.S. and Canadian sovereignty, that they posed a real threat to commercial aviation, and that they had no business being where they were. We are unlikely to get more than that, other than confirmation of who owned these things—which is clearly making the Chinese somewhat sweaty. As is so often the case in national-security affairs, this is a time for patience and analysis rather than intemperance and panic.

Related:

The simple explanation for all these flying objects China’s balloon-size blunder is a huge opportunity.

Today’s News

About 100,000 protesters from across Israel gathered outside Parliament in Jerusalem to oppose the sweeping judicial overhaul that Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has proposed. President Joe Biden fired the architect of the Capitol after allegations that he had misused government resources. A Georgia judge ordered the partial release of a special-grand-jury report investigating efforts by Donald Trump and his allies to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

Dispatches

Up for Debate: Twelve readers describe how they prepare for natural disasters.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Ben Hickey

The Enduring Romance of Mixtapes

By Andee Tagle

Six years ago, when my now-husband was still just a friendly old flame from my high-school days, I sent him an Apple Music playlist of my favorite songs of the moment. This was not unusual: Song swapping, album recommendations, and musical one-upmanship had kept us in touch for nearly a decade. Instead of a coffee date, it was “Have you heard of Noname?” In lieu of a lengthy phone call, it was “Listened to the new GoldLink album yet?”

On this playlist, the final track was “Saved” by the R&B artist Khalid. “But I’ll keep your number saved / ’Cause I hope one day you’ll get the sense to call me,” goes the swoony chorus. “I’m hoping that you’ll say / You’re missing me the way I’m missing you.” It was an innocent offering, I swear! But for my now-husband, it was an opening. “That song told me there was a chance,” he told me years later. In 2022, we added it to the must-play list at our wedding.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

The future of long COVID Ukraine has the battlefield edge. Photos: Superb Owl Sunday VII

Culture Break

Netflix

Read. These are some of the best books to read with a person you love.

Watch. The Empress, on Netflix, a German-language period drama about “a Habsburg Meghan Markle,” as our writer puts it.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

Okay, so maybe it’s not Chinese balloons. Maybe the aliens are about to invade. If so, I have the perfect soundtrack for you.

Back in 1978, the British musician and producer Jeff Wayne came up with the brilliantly weird idea of turning the classic H. G. Wells book The War of the Worlds into a rock musical, and thus was born an offbeat but wonderful double-album set, released that spring. Wayne stayed true to the source material, even hiring Richard Burton to do the narration. The musicians and cast included Phil Lynott of Thin Lizzy, Justin Hayward of the Moody Blues, David Essex, and Julie Covington. Despite mixing orchestral music with rock and disco, the whole thing works, and Hayward even scored a hit in America that fall with the haunting “Forever Autumn,” a song that’s been one of my personal favorites for more than 45 years. The album has remained a popular seller, and in 2011, it was rerecorded with a new cast, with Liam Neeson sitting in for the long-deceased Burton. (I am, however, not a fan of the remake.) It has also been performed live in various venues.

To this day, whenever I hear someone talk about aliens, all I can hear is Hayward singing, “The chances of anything coming from Mars are a million to one, he said.” (This is after Burton talks to the astronomer, Ogilvy, who pishposhes away concerns about the green flashes on the Martian surface that turn out to be the invading rockets.) And I still get chills hearing the electronic “ULLA!” that in the book was the Martian death rattle, but that Wayne reimagined as their battle cry. It’s one of the strangest albums in rock history but well worth an extended listen, if only to hear Burton’s whiskey-and-velvet voice one more time.

— Tom

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

In the pre-balloon era, China was busily engaged in a charm offensive. Following October’s Communist Party congress, at which Xi Jinping won an unprecedented third term in office, Beijing made moves to stifle the combative and confrontational group of diplomats known as wolf warriors. Xi hosted German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in the capital, and condemned Russia’s threats to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine. The tone of China’s leading diplomats noticeably softened. Vice Premier Liu He, meeting with corporate executives in Davos, Switzerland, emphasized that China was back and open for business. And for the first time in almost six years, Xi planned to host a U.S. secretary of state in China.

Then a Chinese spy balloon drifted across the U.S., and into America’s consciousness. The very brazenness of the act upended Beijing’s carefully tended diplomatic campaign and forced it into damage-control mode. At the same time, the balloon handed the United States, already engaged in heightened competition with China, a rare opportunity to rally both public concern and international solidarity.

[Read: Red Zeppelin]

Xi and his team must wish it weren’t so. Even before an F-22 fired a Sidewinder missile into the Chinese airship off the South Carolina coast, Beijing’s miscalculation was clear. Secretary of State Antony Blinken postponed his visit, the Biden administration denounced the violation of American sovereignty, and Republicans alternately blamed Beijing for launching the balloon and Biden for not downing it sooner. Now the United States has shot down three more airborne objects—possibly balloons, potentially Chinese, perhaps engaged in espionage—over Alaska, Canada, and Lake Huron, galvanizing further attention. Whether a product of hubris or incompetence, the Chinese-spy-balloon affair has derailed Beijing’s charm offensive and raised grave suspicions among Americans.

And not only, it turns out, among Americans. Soon after the first balloon appeared over Montana, a second one was detected floating across Latin America. Beijing claimed that it, like the first, was simply an errant meteorological airship blown off course—but apologized for violating Costa Rica’s airspace nevertheless. Taiwan then reported that it had been subject to dozens of spy-balloon overflights in recent years, and Japan launched an investigation to identify potential Chinese intrusions in its airspace. London began a security review and warned that balloons may have crossed British territory, while NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg observed that the spy balloon “confirms a pattern of Chinese behavior,” requiring allies to “step up what we do to protect ourselves.”

In recent years, U.S. policy makers and politicians have tried to raise public awareness of the challenge posed by China. Beijing wishes to revise the international order, they’ve argued, in accordance with its own vision of autocratic rule. China’s economic and technological power radiates illiberalism and creates national-security threats. Beijing steals intellectual property, conducts cyberattacks, and is building a world-class military. The United States and its partners must, policy makers have said, gird for long-term competition against a formidable adversary—a task made far more complex by our deep economic interdependence.

Their warnings have been only partially heeded. Americans have, according to polls, become somewhat more concerned about China in recent years, but it does not top their priority list. Allies and partners have grown more skeptical of Chinese intentions, and more interested in working with America to resist them, but they also wish to avoid any confrontation with Beijing. Here the balloon stunt—visible, politically salient, and transfixing—provides an opportunity.

There are rough antecedents, including the Soviet shootdown of Francis Gary Powers’s U-2 spy plane flight in 1960, and the collision of a U.S. Navy EP-3 surveillance plane with a Chinese fighter jet in 2001.  Despite—or perhaps because of—the secrecy of those missions, the public fallout far outweighed the value of any intelligence that the operations obtained. The same is true today.

The Biden administration is already making the most of its opportunity. Officials now publicly refer to a fleet of Chinese balloons that have conducted surveillance over five continents. The State Department briefed representatives of 40 countries on the flights just days after the first balloon’s appearance. National-security officials are providing multiple public briefings as well, and they are moving to declassify information about Chinese activity. The continued appearance—and forcible downing—of airborne objects will keep attention focused squarely on Chinese activities.

This is the stuff that heightens public anxiety and brings about greater international solidarity. Protected by friendly neighbors and two oceans, Americans are unaccustomed to violations of their physical sovereignty by foreign nation-states. Exhortations to beware threats to the liberal international order, or warnings about Chinese activities in the South China Sea, can’t be half so effective at focusing public attention as huge airships spying on U.S. military installations. Learning that their own airspace may also have been violated by the Chinese government, for years, is likely to stiffen spines abroad as well.

[Garrett M. Graff: A history of confusing stuff in the sky]

Numerous countries have seen public opinion on China turn on a specific episode. For Australia, it was Beijing’s interference in domestic political affairs in 2019. In Canada, it was the seizure and detention, for more than 1,000 days, of two of its nationals. In India, border skirmishes turned the national mood, and in Britain it was the extinguishing of Hong Kong democracy. As strange as it sounds, for America and for others, Beijing’s spy balloons may supply a similar turning point.

For China hawks, however, this poses its own challenges. Yes, Beijing’s diplomatic harm offensive is convincing the skeptics to take Chinese ambitions seriously. The balloon will likely make the adoption of competitive strategies easier and quicker than if it had never taken flight. China’s miscalculation could lead to a broader awakening.

Yet policy makers must guard against overreaction as well. The United States has not calibrated its responses to past national-security shocks terribly effectively. America is slow to boil but quick to boil over. Those dismissive of the balloon stunt—it’s just a balloon; let’s not get worked up about a trifle—have it wrong, given the scale of Chinese ambitions and the means with which Beijing pursues them. But that does not imply that those aiming rifles in the air have it right. Competing effectively with China requires avoiding needless confrontation.

The news cycle will eventually turn away from Beijing’s balloon fiasco. Chinese leaders may recalibrate once again, and attempt to catch more flies with honey than helium. Yet this episode will likely shift perspectives for good, certainly in America and possibly abroad. For all the recent increase in tensions, the public has lacked a dramatic, concrete illustration of Chinese activities, one that would raise both public consciousness and the demand for action. Just as it was attempting to allay the fears and suspicions of the international community, Beijing supplied the fulcrum for a broader and more resolute coalition seeking to frustrate its designs.

Chinese foreign ministry says balloon spotted over Colombia is of a 'civilian nature and used for flight tests'.

• Beijing: Balloon over Latin America is China's • Chinese spy balloons under Trump not discovered until after Biden took office • Analysis: What to know about the balloon • Opinion: Did Trump have own balloon issue?

A Chinese spokeswoman says the aircraft is for civilian use, but "deviated" from its intended route.

Upon joining the Presbyterian ministry, in the mid-1970s, I served in a town outside Richmond, Virginia. New church buildings were going up constantly. When I arrived in Manhattan in the late ’80s, however, I saw a startling sight. There on the corner of Sixth Avenue and West 20th Street was a beautiful Gothic Revival brownstone built in 1844 that had once been the Episcopal Church of the Holy Communion. Now it was the Limelight, an epicenter of the downtown club scene. Thousands of people a night showed up for drugs and sex and the possibility of close encounters with the famous of the cultural avant garde. It was a vivid symbol of a culture that had rejected Christianity.

I began to notice “repurposed” church buildings all over the city. They were now condominiums, gyms, art galleries, coffee shops, pubs, and clubs, a trend that continued as my time in the city went on. In 2014 the New York Archdiocese of the Catholic Church announced that it was closing dozens of empty church buildings, and hundreds of other Protestant congregations faced dwindling membership and were unable to maintain their church homes.

[From the October 1942 issue: Will the Christian Church survive?]

In moving to New York City, I had entered a different world than the one I’d known in Virginia. Here society was secularizing; religion in general and Christianity in particular were in sharp decline. In 1989 my family and I started Redeemer, a new church in Manhattan. We faced cultural attitudes toward Christianity that ran from deep indifference to mockery to shouting-out-loud hostility. Meanwhile, in the middle of the country, churches continued to multiply and some grew to enormous sizes.

What I’ve experienced in New York for decades has now spread across the country. As of 2021, the number of “religious nones”—people who don’t identify with any established religion—in the U.S. had grown to nearly 30 percent of the population while professing Christians constituted 63 percent, down from 75 only a decade ago. The Pew Research Center recently projected the future of this trend: In three of its four scenarios, the percentage of Christians plunges to less than half the population by 2070, and in none does the trend reverse and the Church grow.

Should we expect to see most church buildings in the country repurposed or torn down? Is it inevitable that we will become an ex-Christian society, or could the Church experience a renewal?

Why should anyone besides Christians like me care whether the Church revives? Many Americans would say the fate of the Church is inconsequential to them. Others want very much to see the Church continue to shrink. I believe both attitudes are mistaken.

Many secular social theorists—including ​​Émile Durkheim and Jonathan Haidt, to name two—show how religion makes contributions to society that cannot be readily supplied by other sources. Cultural unity, Durkheim argued in the 1890s, requires a “conscience collective,” a set of shared moral norms that bind us together in a sustained way. These norms are understood to be grounded in something sacred and transcendent, not created by culture. Durkheim recognized the difficulties secular cultures have in cultivating moral beliefs that are strong and unquestionable enough to unite people.

[Faith Hill: They tried to start a church without God. For a while, it worked.]

Consider the evolution of America. In the classic 1985 book Habits of the Heart, the sociologist Robert Bellah and his co-authors showed that the social history of the United States made it the most individualistic culture in the world. American culture elevates the interests of the individual over those of family, community, and nation. Yet for two centuries, Americans’ religious devotion counterbalanced this individualism with denunciations of self-centeredness and calls to love your neighbor. The Church demanded charity and compassion for the needy, it encouraged young people to confine sexual expression to marriage, and it encouraged spouses to stick to their vows. Bellah wrote that American individualism, now largely freed from the counterbalance of religion, is headed toward social fragmentation, economic inequality, family breakdown, and many other dysfunctions.

At a local level, churches provide community and support to people in their congregations who lack strong family ties or other kinds of emotional and social support. They also serve neighbors who do not attend church, particularly in poorer neighborhoods. More than 20 years ago, a University of Pennsylvania study of Philadelphia congregations concluded, “Congregations are vital to the social fabric of Philadelphia and take a major role in caring for the needs of people in the neighborhoods.” The study authors estimated the replacement costs of churches to communities and government would be about $250 million annually, in 2001 dollars—in the Philadelphia metro area alone.

While a revival of the Church would benefit society, that will never happen if the Church thinks of itself as just another social-service agency. Christians seek spiritual renewal of the Church not because they see religion as having social utility, nor because they want to shore up their own institutions. First and foremost, Christianity helps society because its metaphysical claims are true; they are not true because Christianity helps society. When Christians lose sight of this, the Church's power and durability is lost.

So: Can Christianity grow again? Yes it can. Even the Pew report concedes that “events outside the study’s model” could lead to a revival of Christianity. The events mentioned include “immigration patterns or religious innovations.”

First, as I see it, growth can happen if the Church learns how to speak compellingly to non-Christian people. For a millennium, Western institutions instilled in most citizens Christian beliefs about morality and sex, God and sin, and an afterlife. If non-Christian people entered a church, what they heard was likely not strange or offensive to them. That has changed, but the Church has not yet learned how to communicate to outsiders. As a result, most evangelical churches can reach only the shrinking and aging enclaves of socially conservative people.

But change is possible. In our church in Manhattan, over the years, we learned to reach young secular progressives by adopting the way St. Paul told the good news to nonbelievers in his own day, as described in I Corinthians 1:22–24. He affirmed their best aspirations and longings, yet challenged the inadequate ways in which they were seeking to realize these hopes, and redirected them toward Jesus Christ.  

Second, the church in the U.S. can grow again if it learns how to unite justice and righteousness. I have heard African American pastors use this terminology to describe the historic ministry of the Black Church. By righteousness they meant that the Church has maintained its traditional beliefs in the authority of the Bible, morality, and sexuality. It calls individuals to be born again through faith in the atoning blood of Jesus Christ. By justice they meant that the Church has an activist stance against all forms of oppression.

White Protestant churches in America tend to pick one or the other. Liberal mainline Protestantism stresses justice but has largely jettisoned ancient affirmations of the Christian creeds, such as the preexistence and divinity of Jesus, the bodily resurrection, and the authority of the Bible. Evangelicalism stresses righteousness and traditional values, but many congregations are indifferent or even hostile toward work against injustice. However, if the Church at large could combine these two ideas the way the Black Church has, it can begin to rebuild both credibility and relevance, rebutting the charge that it is merely another political power broker. A church that unites justice and righteousness does not fit with the left on abortion and sexual ethics or with the right on race and justice. Instead it is a community that addresses the timeless longings of all people for meaning, hope, love, and salvation.

Third, the Church in the U.S. can grow again if it embraces the global and multiethnic character of Christianity. By 2050 nearly one in five Americans will be foreign-born, and these immigrants will likely come from the more religious parts of the world. Immigrants bring their faith with them. Christianity in East Asia grew from 1.2 percent of the population in 1970 to 10.5 percent of the population in 2020. In turn, Chinese and Korean immigrant communities have started as many as hundreds of churches in New York alone since the late 1970s. Protestantism in Latin America has also grown explosively, particularly through the Pentecostal and evangelical denominations, and these Christians are coming to the U.S. The combination of secular Americans having fewer children and the increasing immigration of religious people leads some observers to argue that secularization is likely to stall in America by 2050.

Established majority-white denominations often welcome “ethnic congregations” in order to grow their numbers, but don’t always open the doors of power and leadership to them. If the fast-growing nonwhite U.S. churches are supported by the Church’s power structure in a non-paternalistic way, and if their leaders are consistently embraced and included at all levels, then the public face of the Church will look very different and much more credible.

Fourth, the Church in the U.S. can grow again if it strikes a dynamic balance between innovation and conservation. A church must conserve historic Christian teaching. If a church simply adopts the beliefs of the culture, it will die, because it has nothing unique to offer. But the Church has always, especially in times when the faith seemed moribund, introduced unexpected innovations.

There was no such thing as monasticism—through which pagan Northern Europe was turned Christian—until there was. There was no Reformation until there was. There was no revival that turned Methodists and Baptists into culturally dominant forces in the midwestern and southeastern United States—until there was. There was no East African Revival, led primarily by African people, that helped turn Africa from a 9 percent Christian continent in 1900 into a 50 percent Christian continent today—until there was. Christianity, like its founder, does not go from strength to strength but from death to resurrection.

Fifth, the Church has in its favor what the Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor called “the unquiet frontiers of modernity.” He makes the case that Western culture is deeply conflicted about faith and God. Modern secularism holds that people are only physical entities without souls, that sensations of love and beauty are just neurological-chemical events, that there is no meaning other than what we construct, and that there is no right or wrong outside of what we in our minds choose. Yet most people feel that life is greater than what can be accounted for by naturalistic explanations.

The modern self is exceptionally fragile. While having the freedom to define and validate oneself is superficially liberating, it is also exhausting: You and you alone must create and sustain your identity. This has contributed to unprecedented levels of depression and anxiety and never-satisfied longings for affirmation. The modern self is also fragmenting, as Bellah argued, its individualism leading to the erosion of family, community, and unity of shared values in the nation. The breakdown of neighborhoods and communities means that, more and more, our lives are run by faceless, massive bureaucracies and inhumane technologies aimed solely at economic efficiency.

In stark contrast, Christianity offers grace and covenant. Protestant Christianity teaches its members that salvation is by sheer grace, not by one’s moral efforts or performance. We are adopted as sons and daughters of God, so the cosmic ruler becomes our unconditionally loving heavenly father. And all who unite with God as father are brought into a family of faith, which is based not on contractual relationships, sustained only as long as they benefit both parties’ interests, but covenant relationships, in which all parties pledge to serve one another in sacrificial love.

What may happen is this: Even though the secular world markets its highly individualistic view of the self as objective and universal, the rest of the world sees that it is parochially Western and shot through with nonempirical assumptions about human nature. As time goes on, secular Americans may begin to see that the rest of the world has developed cultures that are modern but nonetheless religious. Young, secular Americans may feel themselves to be in a kind of wasteland and begin to question their unbelief. All of this, Taylor thinks, may cause secularism to “become less plausible over time.”

All of these factors in Christianity’s favor will not necessarily trigger a renewal. For that to happen, three things need to be accomplished by at least a significant sector of the U.S. Church.

The escape from political captivity. American evangelicals have largely responded to the decline of the Church by turning to a political project of regaining power in order to expel secular people from places of cultural influence. But a demographically shrinking Church that identifies heavily with one narrow band of political actors will not be relevant in America. A dynamically growing body of believers making visible sacrifices for the good of their neighbors, on the other hand, may indeed shape the culture, mainly through attraction rather than compulsion.

[From the January/February 2023 issue: The reinvention of the Catholic Church]

A union of “extraordinary prayer.” All religions promote and call for prayer. But historically, during times of fast growth and renewal, Christian movements have been marked by an extraordinary amount of communal prayer. During the early years of the explosive Christian movement in Korea, all-night prayer meetings were common, and they remain so in many parts of the country to this day. During the 18th-century Great Awakening in America, Jonathan Edwards wrote of the “explicit agreement and visible union of God's people in extraordinary prayer for the revival of religion.” Unions of believers for prayer—both large and small gatherings—have an empowering effect. The renewed growth of the Church in the U.S. will not happen without it.

The distinguishing of the gospel from moralism. In a relativistic culture the Church will have to clearly declare that there are moral absolutes—which will be unpopular, to say the least. It will be called domineering and abusive, but it must not flinch. Yet there is danger on the other side too.

The Christian gospel is that we are fully forgiven by God because of what Christ has done, not because of anything we have done. In traditional Protestant thought there are two ways to lose one’s grasp on this gospel. The most obvious is “antinomianism,” the belief that I can live any way I wish. But the other way is legalism, the belief that through my moral goodness I can put God in my debt, so he is obligated to bless and favor me. Both reject God as Savior and make you your own savior and Lord.

Langdon Gilkey was a young man in China during World War II and was confined to an Japanese-run internment camp, as he recounts in Shantung Compound. Also imprisoned with him was Eric Liddell, the former Olympic star and missionary to China whose story inspired the film Chariots of Fire. Gilkey, who was not a Christian believer when he was interned, is honest about how the many missionaries in the cramped and difficult conditions of the camp not only behaved in selfish and ungenerous ways, but often added sanctimonious rationales for their behavior. Liddell, however, stood out. He poured himself out for others and was overflowing with humor, kindness, and an unmistakable inner peace. When Liddell died suddenly of a brain tumor, all mourned.

Gilkey concluded that religion and moralism do not produce love. Often they make self-centeredness worse, especially when they lead, as they will, to pride in one’s moral accomplishments. Liddell, however, believed the gospel of sheer grace through Christ. In Liddell, Gilkey had a picture of what we could be if we are at the same moment humbled yet profoundly lifted high by the knowledge of God’s unconditional love through undeserved grace. Gilkey, quoting the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, wrote: “Religion is not the place where the problem of man’s egotism is automatically solved. Rather … the ultimate battle [takes place] between human pride and God’s grace.”

For the first five years after my family and I started Redeemer in Manhattan, we saw seasons of remarkable spiritual revival and growth. Scores of people embraced faith who most would have considered unlikely to be Christian converts. Looking back on that time, the most important reason for this was that we were offering God’s grace as a unique path, different from either religious moralism or secular relativism. And going forward, a renewed Christian Church must focus on this identity-altering, life-changing, community-forming message in the same way.

Is Christianity going away in the U.S.? No. And although no one can predict when it will happen and how rapidly it will happen, there are many reasons to believe that growth will resume.

But it will not happen until the Church applies this famous saying of Jesus to itself: “But whoever would be great among you must be your servant … even as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve.” If the Church aims at loving service to one’s neighbor while clearly speaking the truth, it will grow again and may have cultural influence. But if it aims at influence rather than humble service, it will have neither.