Why Something Awful Is Happening to Our Friendships

And why the real crisis may be deeper than politics, technology, or culture wars

Something painful is happening in many friendships.

Conversations that once felt relaxed and mutual now feel fragile. A passing remark about the news can suddenly derail a meal. People we once enjoyed talking about life with now sound as though they are speaking from entirely different worlds — worlds that sometimes leave us bewildered, or even appalled.

You may have felt it too.

One friend sees Western civilisation as fundamentally oppressive and in need of radical transformation, if not complete dismantling. Another sees that same civilisation as fragile, under attack, and in need of recovery. One believes identity is something we discover deep within ourselves by being true to our inner feelings. Another believes identity is something given — by biology, by God, or through relationships, tradition, and community.

The same headlines. The same events.

Yet we seem to inhabit completely different realities.

And if we are honest, the pull toward certainty and tribe — the desire to resolve the anxiety and distress this creates — is not only “out there.” Many of us can feel it within ourselves as well: the temptation to interpret the whole world through a single cause, a single outrage, a single explanation that promises to calm the storm and make sense of everything.

What is striking is that this same pattern appears across very different movements. Progressive activists, nationalist movements, culture-war Christians, and even people who claim to reject ideology altogether can begin to interpret the entire world through a single moral lens.

Many people assume the crisis we are living through is political.

Others believe it is technological — the result of social media, algorithms, and misinformation.

Some argue that it is behavioural or neuroscientific — the product of cognitive dissonance, bias, and our poor capacity for critical thinking.

All of these explanations contain some truth. But the deeper crisis may be far more unsettling.

It may be a crisis about reality itself.

Our culture often describes the moment we are living through as an identity crisis. But identity crises do not appear on their own. The identity crisis of our age is rooted in a deeper crisis about the nature of reality itself.

When people lose confidence in what reality is — what it means to be human, where identity comes from, what truth is for — identity becomes something we must construct rather than receive.

And when identity becomes unstable, ideologies rush in to provide meaning, belonging, and moral certainty.

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A New Series: When Reality Fractures

Photo by Umberto on Unsplash

Over the coming weeks I’ll be exploring this deeper crisis in a new series called When Reality Fractures.

Together we’ll explore questions shaping this strange cultural moment:

• Why identity has become the central battleground of our age

• Why ideological movements increasingly function like substitute religions

• Why some evangelicals, disillusioned with consumer Christianity, end up radicalised by causes

• Why both progressive activism and Christian nationalism can hollow out the gospel

• Why recovering a deeper Christian vision of reality may be the most radical response available

None of this is entirely new. Christians have lived through moments like this before.

Again and again, when the world around them felt unstable, they rediscovered something surprisingly solid.

Reality itself is not ultimately held together by ideology, tribe, or outrage. Reality is held together in Christ.

And if that is true, it may change how we understand identity, truth, politics, and even our fractured friendships.

The series begins later this week with a question many people are quietly asking:

Have All Your Friends Become Radicalised?

Subscribe if you’d like the first essay in the series delivered to your inbox later this week.