Mission for an Evolutionary Christianity

We are living through tumultuous times. Political polarization intensifies, violence against vulnerable populations escalates, and the foundational principles of human dignity face erosion. For many, the cognitive dissonance between professed values and lived reality has become unbearable. How do we reconcile claims of “In God we trust” with systematic abandonment of the most vulnerable? How do communities of faith respond when institutions weaponize religious language to justify harm? Yet amid this darkness, I find inspiration in resistance movements and communities willing to risk everything for justice. Their commitment signals something essential: the possibility of authentic faith engaging real-world crises. The question facing Christianity today is not whether to engage the world’s struggles but how to do so in ways that genuinely feed humanity’s capacity for hope, meaning, and transformative action.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin offers a framework for understanding Christian mission that transcends dichotomies between sacred and secular, contemplation and action. His concept of the “divine milieu” reveals God’s pervasive presence radiating through all levels of reality. Every human activity, every dimension of material existence, offers potential encounter with the divine. Engaging deeply with the world—scientific research, technological development, social improvement, creative work—is itself communion with God. The divine milieu pervades all things, making every authentic human activity potentially sacred. Mission does not mean withdrawing from worldly engagement; it means plunging into it with heightened awareness of its spiritual dimension. Scientists advancing knowledge, engineers building infrastructure, social workers addressing poverty, artists creating beauty—all participate in God’s creative work when they act with love and consciousness. Teilhard insists that evolution is not merely biological or social but fundamentally spiritual. The entire evolutionary process aims toward emergence of higher consciousness, greater interiority, deeper capacity for love and understanding. Matter itself holds spiritual potential; evolution actualizes that potential. Christian mission means helping humanity recognize evolution’s spiritual dimension and consciously participate in what he called the ongoing birth of God in the cosmos.

Thomas Berry spoke of “the Great Work” facing humanity: transitioning from devastating industrial exploitation to mutually enhancing human-Earth relationship. Teilhard would recognize this Great Work as evolutionary mission itself. Teilhard recognized Christianity and evolution as synergistic, viewing evolution not as a threat to faith but as the very mechanism through which divine creativity unfolds. For him, to be Christian means being sent to help humanity navigate this critical evolutionary transition—one that is both material and spiritual—bringing wisdom to interpret our cosmic moment and practical engagement to consciously participate in the ongoing creative work of God. Christians become, in essence, midwives to the next stage of consciousness, helping humanity recognize that we are not passive observers of evolution but active collaborators in the evolution of divine love. The mission is daunting but energizing. Evolution depends on every person to choose whether human evolution will continue creatively or collapse destructively. Every authentic act of love advances evolution. Every increase in consciousness, every act of justice, every gesture toward unity contributes to building what Teilhard called the “noosphere”—the sphere of human thought and collective consciousness—and hastening convergence toward Omega, the fulfillment of cosmic purpose. We are sent not as passive messengers but as active co-creators, entrusted with the sacred work of helping the universe become what it is meant to be. This is mission for an evolutionary age, namely, to be profoundly engaged with the material cosmos as the very body of the cosmic Christ, emerging through our cooperative labor.

Yet precisely when this mission becomes most urgent, humanity faces what Teilhard identified as its greatest danger: not physical destruction but psychological collapse—the loss of will to continue. He called this phenomenon the loss of “zest for life,” and contemporary culture manifests it in multiple, converging forms. Modern consciousness faces unique challenges. Scientific materialism, while revealing evolution’s scope, can make human existence seem insignificant—random accidents in a meaningless universe. Philosopher John Vervaeke calls this the “meaning crisis”—a widespread sense that existence lacks inherent purpose. This manifests particularly in popular culture: cosmic horror’s appeal, absurdist comedy’s “nothing matters” ethos, explicit nihilism in music and art. The rise of “blackpill” and “doomer” subcultures represents nihilism’s darker edge—communities explicitly embracing hopelessness, arguing that all improvement efforts are futile. While some represents dark humor, much reveals genuine despair, particularly among young people facing shrinking economic opportunity, darkening climate futures, and failing political systems.

Teilhard’s category of hedonism—pursuit of immediate pleasure excluding larger purposes—describes contemporary consumer culture. Same-day delivery, streaming on demand, instant communication, fast everything—all optimized for immediate gratification with little regard for long-term consequences. This manifests politically in “hyperbolic discounting”—radically devaluing future costs compared to present benefits. Climate change provides the clearest example: we know the catastrophic future costs of present emissions yet struggle to accept modest present sacrifices for future benefit. The opioid epidemic and rising substance abuse represent hedonism’s pathological extreme. When present pain becomes unbearable and future hope disappears, chemical escape becomes rational choice. “Deaths of despair”—from drugs, alcohol, and suicide—speak to epidemic loss of zest. Social media rewards cynical takes—the clever critique, the devastating takedown, the exposure of hypocrisy. Sincere idealism gets mocked as naïve; genuine enthusiasm reads as cringe; passionate commitment appears suspect. This creates “irony poisoning”—the inability to express or feel genuine conviction about anything. Political cynicism threatens democracy itself. When majorities believe “all politicians are corrupt” and “voting changes nothing,” democratic participation declines. The cynicism becomes self-fulfilling: as idealistic people withdraw, corruption increases, validating the cynicism that caused withdrawal. This cycle represents evolutionary reversal, convergence collapsing into fragmentation. The concept of “pre-traumatic stress disorder”—trauma over anticipated future catastrophe—captures something real about our moment. Unlike previous generations who feared nuclear war but could imagine preventing it, many young people see ecological collapse as inevitable, their agency meaningless. Surveys show majorities of young adults believing humanity is doomed, that having children is ethically questionable, that their lives will be worse than their parents’.

Perhaps most insidiously, the sheer volume of crises produces exhaustion. Every day brings fresh horrors: mass shootings, species extinctions, democratic backsliding, refugee crises. Social media ensures constant exposure to global suffering. The result is “compassion fatigue”—the inability to continue feeling and responding to endless emergencies. This exhaustion manifests as numbing—people shut down, stop paying attention, focus on private concerns because the public sphere has become overwhelming. But numbing is precisely loss of zest.

The convergence of these forms of lost zest creates a perfect storm precisely when humanity most needs passionate engagement. We face what scientists call the “decisive decade” for climate action. We face potential destabilization of democratic governance globally. We face technological transformations—AI, biotech, geoengineering—requiring wise guidance. All of this requires massive collective motivation, sustained effort, sacrifice of present convenience for future benefit, cooperation across divisions, maintenance of hope through difficulty. In other words, it requires precisely the zest that is draining away. This is what Teilhard meant when he said evolution could fail “at the crucial moment of self-aware direction.” For billions of years, evolution proceeded through unconscious processes. Only with humanity does evolution become self-directing, requiring conscious choice. If conscious choice falters, if will fails, the entire project stalls. Without motivated human participation, the noosphere ceases developing. Convergence reverses into fragmentation. The entire evolutionary project—billions of years in the making—could collapse.

What makes our moment particularly dangerous is that these losses of zest are not merely personal failures but are systematically produced by economic, political, and technological structures. Late capitalism requires consumer hedonism—the economy depends on people seeking immediate gratification through purchases. Digital platforms profit from addictive engagement regardless of whether that engagement is meaningful or toxic. Political systems reward cynicism and polarization. Media business models depend on provoking outrage and anxiety. This creates a particular crisis for Christian mission. If the very institutions meant to feed humanity’s zest for life are instead draining it, the mission must include not just going into the world but also transforming the structures—including ecclesial ones—that produce despair. Although the Catholic Church makes efforts toward social justice and climate engagement, its structures and medieval metaphysics thwart its best intentions. The Church wants to be part of a world that is becoming but it wants to do so with a God who is unchanging—immutable. Teilhard understood that evolution requires a new theology and mature, conscious participation. When religious institutions infantilize believers—treating them as children who need to be told what to think, feel, and do—they undermine the development of consciousness that evolution requires.

Teilhard insisted that humanity must become self-directing, consciously choosing to participate in evolution’s movement toward greater complexity, unity, and love. Religion that produces passive recipients of doctrine rather than active co-creators of the future cannot serve evolutionary mission.

Teilhard’s vision demands Christianity recover its this-worldly dimension. The Incarnation means God enters matter, validates materiality, commits to earthly transformation. Resurrection means not escape from bodies but their transformation. The reign of God is not simply “up there” but breaking in “down here” through human cooperation with divine energy. Christianity that loses engagement with material reality drains rather than feeds evolutionary zest.

Feeding humanity’s zest for life requires transformation at every level—personal, social, economic, political, technological, and religious. Christian mission cannot exempt institutional religion from critique. When wells meant to provide living water run dry—or worse, become poisoned—the thirst becomes unbearable. This transformation will be difficult, contested, and slow. Institutional inertia is powerful; vested interests resist change; genuine reform threatens comfortable arrangements. But the alternative—institutional Christianity that fails to feed humanity’s zest when that zest is most desperately needed—is unacceptable. The stakes are too high, the mission too urgent, the gospel too important to allow institutional dysfunction to continue unchallenged.

Christians are sent into the world to enkindle collective will for evolutionary advance, to channel energies of love that drive cosmic convergence. But we cannot fulfill this mission through institutions that betray it. The call goes out not only to transform the world but also to transform the Church—recognizing that these tasks are inseparable, that both participate in evolution’s movement toward the fullness of Christ-Omega.

To be Christian is to be sent. It means doing something more than preserving one’s life. It means participating in the evolution of love, becoming professional maintainers of hope, cultivators of meaning, committed feeders of the passion for existence and futurity. This is not naïve optimism ignoring difficulty but mature hope engaging it fully. It is not therapeutic distraction from problems but energizing empowerment to address them. It is not false comfort but true consolation—strengthening people for the work ahead by connecting them to sources of meaning, purpose, and power greater than themselves.

The birth of God in evolution succeeds not through argument but through witness—communities so genuinely alive, so evidently meaningful, so palpably hopeful that others are drawn to share that life. When people encounter communities that actually feed zest rather than drain it, that actually cultivate capacity for engagement rather than resignation, that actually sustain hope through difficulty rather than collapse into despair—they recognize something worth their lives.

This is work worth doing, hope worth maintaining, life worth living with full zest. This is mission for an evolutionary age: feeding humanity’s passion for its own becoming until the entire cosmos reaches fulfillment in Christ-Omega—the point where maximum consciousness, maximum unity, and maximum love converge in the fullness that gives all existence its meaning and purpose.

Idealistic? Perhaps. But without a vision large enough to meet the magnitude of our crises, without hope robust enough to sustain us through difficulty, without communities capable of genuinely feeding the human zest for life—we will not survive. The evolutionary moment calls for nothing less than communities of radical hope, passionate engagement, and transformative love. This is the heart of Christian life. This is the mission we cannot refuse.