THE UNHINGED AGE

Jimmy Kinnaird
1 day ago
9 min read

The Fog and the Iron

It was the iron that betrayed them.

When the RMS Tayleur launched in 1854, she was a miracle of the modern world.¹ Her hull was a fortress of riveted iron plates, designed to shrug off the Atlantic waves that turned wooden ships to matchsticks. She was faster, bigger, and stronger than anything that had come before. She was the Titanic of her day, six decades before that name would become a synonym for hubris.

But as she sailed down the Irish Sea, carrying her cargo of hopeful emigrants and gold-seekers, a silent catastrophe was unfolding on the bridge. The compass needle, that ancient and faithful guide, had been seduced. The massive iron body of the ship was exerting a magnetic pull, dragging the needle away from the true north. The captain, standing on the deck of his technological marvel, believed he was sailing south into open water. In reality, he was sailing west, into the dark.

The Tayleur smashed into Lambay Island not because she was weak, but because she was disoriented. She possessed power without perception. She had speed without direction. And when the rocks tore through her iron skin, she sank with a terrifying swiftness, taking nearly four hundred souls down with her.

We are all sailors on the Tayleur now.

We live in an age of miracles. We carry the sum of human knowledge in rectangles of glass and silicon in our pockets. We have conquered diseases that once decimated empires. We have built a civilization of iron-clad certainty, a "Machine" of unprecedented efficiency. Yet, look around. Do you feel safe? Do you feel oriented?

Or do you feel the wobble?

Pew Research Center reports large majorities of Americans saying political debate has become less respectful and less fact-based over the last several years.² Gallup reports historically low confidence levels in major institutions, with Americans’ average confidence in the set of institutions it tracks remaining near record lows.³ Whatever you think the causes are, the effect is hard to deny: people are increasingly unsure whom to trust—and increasingly tempted to trust whatever confirms their existing fears.

That’s what unhinged means. . . and we are living in the Unhinged Age. It is not merely that we are divided; it is that the compass itself has broken. We have lost the ability to agree on which way is North. We possess more data than any generation in history (and “data centers” are going up all over the place). And yet we suffer, as my favorite philosopher Dallas Willard diagnosed, from a "disappearance of moral knowledge."⁴ We can tell you the chemical composition of a tear, but we cannot tell you why it is tragic. We can map the neurons of the brain, but we cannot find the location of the soul.

The door has slipped its hinge. The frame is warped. And when the frame breaks, the door doesn't just stick; it slams.

The Men Without Chests

As you scroll through the digital public square known as social media, you will see the casualties of this disorientation. You will see, as in the previous blog, what C.S. Lewis called "Men without Chests."⁵ It is as contagious as the flu in winter.

Lewis warned us decades ago that if we debunked the "Tao"—the objective moral law that spans human history—we would not produce a race of liberated supermen.⁶ We would produce spiritual amputees. We would create a society of people with big Heads (intellects sharp enough to rationalize anything) and big Bellies (appetites demanding to be fed everything), but with no Chests—no trained affections, no stable character to mediate between the thought and the urge.

Viktor Frankl, Holocaust survivor and psychiatrist wrote,

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”⁷

Frankl is telling us, and rightly so, that to not be at the mercy of our impulses, we must focus on increasing our “space.” We lose that space if we do not internalize the “Tao” in our “Chests.” The alternative to filling it with the Good, the True and the Beautiful is it being filled with a confusing and empty fog.

The modern "Empty Self," as J.P. Moreland diagnosed it; is the fulfillment of Lewis’ prediction.⁸ We are Infantile; demanding that the universe swaddle us in comfort and shield us from the "suffering" of disagreement. We are Narcissistic; treating God like a cosmic vending machine and our neighbors like background characters in the movie of our lives. We are Passive; outsourcing our conscience to Silicon Valley, catching the latest moral outrage like a common cold—not because we truly care, but because we are too bored and lazy to form an immune system of our own. (Apologies for another "disease" analogy!)

We are Hurried; running from silence because in the silence we might hear echoes of the hollowness of our lives. We are terrified of the dark, not because of monsters, but because without the "likes" and the "shares" and the constant reflection of the screen, we are not sure that we matter, or more frightening, that we exist at all.

The Transcendentals

This is where the transcendentals come in.

Most Christian people have never heard the word “transcendentals,” and that is fine. We don’t need the word to need the reality.

The basic idea is simple:

Truth is what corresponds to reality as God made it.
Goodness is what aligns with God’s moral order and purposes.
Beauty is Truth and Goodness with the lights turned on. It isn't just a decoration; it is an undeniable signal that catches the eye, captures the heart, and forces the soul to look up.

In the classical Christian tradition, thinkers often spoke of “the true” and “the good” as inseparable from being itself—deep features of reality, not mere preference.⁹ That matters because modern people are tempted to treat truth as a personal possession (my truth), goodness as a negotiated contract (what our tribe approves), and beauty as a marketing category (what performs well).

But when truth becomes personal and goodness becomes tribal, beauty becomes manipulative. It becomes propaganda with an annoying soundtrack.

The Bible refuses that collapse.

It tells us that truth has a name (“your word is truth,” John 17:17), and goodness has a source (“no one is good except God alone,” Mark 10:18), and beauty is not merely aesthetic but moral (“worship the LORD in the splendor of holiness,” Psalm 29:2). Even when Scripture doesn’t use the philosophical vocabulary, it insists on the reality.

And then the Apostle Paul does something that feels almost subversive in a distracted age: he tells Christians what to think about.

“Whatever is true… honorable… just… pure… lovely… commendable… if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things” (Philippians 4:8, ESV).

That verse is not a greeting card from Dollar Tree. It is a strategy for soul survival. It is a refusal to let the mind be discipled by ugliness.

The Fog of Tashlan

In the final days of Narnia, the end didn't come with a bang. It came with a fog.

A clever Ape named Shift told the Narnians that "Aslan"—the Christ-figure, the Lion of Judah—and "Tash"—the multi-armed demon god of Calormen—were the same person. "Tashlan," he called it.¹⁰

It was a masterstroke of the Unhinged Age. The Ape didn't ask the Narnians to become atheists. He just asked them to be "nuanced." He asked them to accept that truth was fluid, that good and evil were just different cultural expressions of the same divine reality. He blurred the lines until the Narnians were too exhausted to fight. They stopped looking for the True North because they had been convinced that all directions were valid.

This is the "Fog Test" of our time. We are surrounded by a culture that conflates the True with the Loud, the Good with the Popular, and the Beautiful with the Arousing. We are told that "Love" means affirming every impulse, and that "Freedom" means having no master.

But true freedom is not the absence of a master; it is the choice of the right master. The compass needle is only free when it is enslaved to the magnetic pole. If it is "free" to point anywhere, it is useless.

Love the Lovely, Hate the Vile

We finally come to the big question on our minds: how do we fix the direction of the ship? How do we recalibrate the compass before we hit the rocks?

We must reject, as Willard did, the "Gospel of Sin Management"—the vampire Christianity that wants Jesus’s blood for forgiveness but not His life for renovation.¹¹ We must realize that the "fog" is a lie.

We must become Unshaken.

To be Unshaken is to have a "Chest." It is to be a person who has trained their heart to love what is lovely and hate what is vile. It is to practice the "VIM" of discipleship: a Vision of the Kingdom that is more beautiful than the world's machine; an Intention to obey that is stronger than the impulse to drift; and the Means of grace that anchor the soul in the deep waters of God.¹²

It means recovering the "Magic" of the Shire. In Tolkien’s epic, the world is saved not by the mighty, but by the small.¹³ It is saved by Hobbits—by people who love simple things, who keep their promises, who refuse the power of the Ring because they know that character is more important than control.

Appreciating Values

This is where “values” enter the conversation, not as a trendy buzzword, but as a diagnostic tool.

Philosophers use “value theory” (axiology) to ask what things are good and how goods should be ranked.¹⁴ You don’t need the academic term, but you do need the insight: every life ranks goods. Every person says, with their time and attention and money and stress, “This matters most.”

In an unhinged age, people often “rank” or “value” not only the wrong things, but also right things in the wrong order.

And then we wonder why character collapses.

Because character is values not only made visible, but also durable.

If you value comfort above holiness, you will not develop courage.

If you value approval above truth, you will not develop integrity.

If you value self above neighbor, you will not develop love.

This is why the next posts will keep returning to a simple principle: you cannot change your life long-term without addressing what you love. Long-term change is impossible unless it is rooted in something you love.

The Goal is Not Critique, but Formation

The purpose of this series is not to make you a better critic of culture. The purpose is to make you a better disciple of Christ.

It is possible to hate the world’s confusion and still be shaped by the world’s formation.

A Christian can be “against” the world and still operate with the world’s values: outrage as identity, consumption as comfort, suspicion as wisdom, cynicism as sophistication. As a pastor I’ve seen it in the church. As a denominational worker, I’ve seen it at all levels.

A former mentor described it as, “Picking up the devil’s tools to do God’s work.”

We are going to do something different.

We are going to rebuild the hinge.

We are going to recover truth, goodness, and beauty—not as museum pieces, but as discipleship essentials. We will talk about values because they are the compass. We will talk about virtues because they are the habits that train the compass to hold steady.

And we will do all of it under one banner: becoming like Jesus in the heart, head, and hands.

Because Jesus does not merely win arguments. He forms people.

Caution

The Tayleur sank because her iron heart blinded her to the stars. We do not have to follow her down. The stars are still there. The True, the Good, and the Beautiful have not moved.

The King has not abdicated.

We just need to clear the iron from our souls, look up, and steer.