Over 40 years ago, filmmaker Steven Spielberg terrified theatergoers with a movie that quickly embedded itself in the American cultural imagination. Like most scary stories, Poltergeist first lulled the audience with the familiar—a suburban home in a newly built housing development. It then disrupted that familiarity by injecting ghosts who are not content to occasionally moan or rattle a chain but create havoc and terror.
The malevolent spirits in Poltergeist upend the entire household and drive the family to the point of insanity. In the end, it’s revealed that the placid neighborhood is built on top of desecrated graves. The poltergeists’ goal is to cause panic, to overload the inhabitants’ limbic systems in order to revert the house to a place of deadness.
As I listened recently to a young Christian describe the way he saw the world around him, I wondered whether the Poltergeist story was a generation too soon, and whether that haunted house could be a metaphor for our present moment.
Discussing the statistics around the mental health crises among his age cohort, this man said that he was less concerned about the medical situations of anxiety and depression among people he knew—because those could be treated—than about the fact that the “whole world seems to be going through a panic attack.” He stopped himself and wondered if panic was the right word.
“It’s like everything is in a crazy cycle,” he continued. “We seem to be bouncing back and forth between panic and boredom.” He stopped again, pondering whether cycle was the right word. “I mean, it makes no sense,” he said. “Everything seems out of control and scary—and boring and dead—at the same time.”
This young man is hardly alone in sensing a kind of bored panic and panicked boredom in the world today. But he is wrong in thinking of boredom and panic as two contradictory realities. In fact, they’re closely related.
In his book Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart, Nicholas Carr cites studies demonstrating that the neural pathways of the brain crave dopamine so much that it is “the most insatiable of all drives, outstripping even lust.” A rodent in front of a lever wired to send a pulse through that part of its brain will press that lever to the point of exhaustion and collapse.
Social media algorithms, Carr argues, remove the kind of “friction” that humanity has relied upon to keep this “seeking instinct” in check. The algorithms are programmed to learn what a person is looking for and deliver more and more of it, seemingly world without end, regardless of whether the sensations sought are arousal, fear, disgust, loathing, anger, or plain distraction.
“The real world can’t compete,” Carr writes. “Compared with the programmed delights of the virtual, it feels dull, slow, and, poignantly enough, lifeless.” Thus, the end result of a limbic system that’s always “on” is boredom.
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Cistercian monk Thomas Merton scouted out this cultural trend in 1948 when he wrote:
We live in a society whose whole policy is to excite every nerve in the human body and keep it at the highest pitch of artificial tension, to strain every human desire to the limit and to create as many new desires and synthetic passions as possible, in order to cater to them with the products of our factories and printing presses and movie studios and all the rest.
The end result of this artificial tension is the same as what comes after any kind of prolonged panic: paralysis and apathy. The boredom then seeks some semblance of life by stimulating the libido to the point of frenzy, which leads to more boredom, and the process starts again.
Panic is exactly the right word to describe our times. And like most words, panic is a kind of fossil record, embedded with meanings that most of us never investigate but that have shaped our use and understanding of the term. The word is haunted by a poltergeist of significance, and to get at it, we must ask whose grave is beneath our feet.
The word panic comes from the ancient Greek god Pan, the deity of shepherds, herds, and wild places. He was known for his libido, seeking to sexually violate nymphs and to inflame the erotic passions of those in contact with him. He represented wild power, the sort of violence that we see in the scarier aspects of nature. He could also soothe and hypnotize by playing his pipes, freezing listeners in place in ecstasy. And maybe most importantly of all, he could induce mind-scrambling fear. He was, in other words, the god of panic.
“Pan’s military weapon is quite unique: it is his loud voice, his panicked scream, carried on the wind,” wrote Jungian psychologist Sharon L. Coggan in 2020.
In the military encampments or on the battlefield, when the whole company is thrown into panicked flight, this is the telltale sign of Pan’s effect. It is “his eerie, disembodied haunting cries” that constitute his arsenal. His weapons are essentially psychological: panic acts to dissolve social bonds and turn members of a mob to savagery.
Another mark of Pan was his “instinct for self-preservation,” notes another Jungian, Sukey Fontelieu. Pan used confusion and surprise attacks to get what he wanted, Fontelieu adds, and “both his enemies and the nymphs typically reacted to his advances with panicky retreats. These two themes, panic and self-preservation, are connected.”
The ancient historian Plutarch recounted how, around the time of Jesus’ birth, sailors heard a voice announcing, “The great Pan is dead!” Ever since, those seeking to describe the disenchantment of a world no longer teeming with gods have repeated Plutarch’s words in lament. If Pan is the god of panic and passion, modernization has been linked to the death of Pan and the beginning of boredom.
For instance, Scottish literary genius Robert Louis Stevenson said in 1881 that modern science “writes of the world as if with the cold finger of a starfish.” The answer to this boredom, he continued, was to reclaim the spirit of Pan, to return “to the old myth, and hear the goat-footed piper making the music which is itself the charm and terror of things.”
Likewise, English novelist D. H. Lawrence argued a century ago that the death of Pan is synonymous with technological progress. We have set out to conquer the universe around us, Lawrence stated, and to a large extent we have succeeded through our efforts.
But “a conquered world is no good to man,” he wrote. “He sits stupefied with boredom upon his conquest.” The answer, Lawrence proposed, was to return to what the ancient pagans meant when they invoked Pan: the idea that everything—all the wildness of the cosmos and of our own natures—is very much alive and active, unpredictable and unconquerable.
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Well, if Pan was ever gone, he’s back. Despite the fact that we live in more economic affluence and technological advancement than any generation before us, we also live in a time of generalized anxiety and resentment and fear—seen in our divided politics, our discredited churches, and our angry social media fights.
In our day, the wildness of uncontrolled human impulses and the deadness that comes with technological mastery are not the answers to each other. They are both part of our problem. We are panicking ourselves to boredom and boring ourselves to panic. But why?
Contemporary sociologist Hartmut Rosa argues that much of our problem is that we now expect the world around us—including our own lives—to be predictable, directable, engineerable, and useful. Our smartphones reinforce that. We have access to virtually everything, or at least to everything virtual.
The irony, he explains, is that this expectation of controllability is driving us crazy with “monstrous, frightening forms of uncontrollability.” What we are missing, he says, is what he calls “resonance”—the ability to be spoken to, affected, and changed by what we cannot control.
Think of the sort of delight a child feels, Rosa says, when waking up to the first snow of winter. One could engineer that. The parents could buy snow cannons and blast icy flakes outside the window. But that’s not the same experience. The experiences of looking out onto a mountain range or standing at the foot of a massive waterfall or staring into the eyes of a newborn baby for the first time all find their meaning because they are not predictable, producible, or controllable.
We can now find groups of people online who think exactly as we do or who have interests completely aligned with ours—but we are lonelier than ever. We can converse with an artificially intelligent program and feel as though we’ve found a friend who completely “gets” us or a partner who is deliriously “in love” with us, without the risk and unpredictability of real relationships that can break our hearts. But even the most self-deluded person knows there’s nothing real or alive about it.
Our dual expectations of controllability and resonance leave us with neither, cut off from what could actually give meaning and purpose. We become cold, unaffected by anything and thus numb to wonder, joy, and love. Or we become hot, driven by our libidos and then angry or terrified when the world, our institutions, our culture, our families, our politics, and our religion fail our expectations.
What we expect to control—and can’t—now becomes what Rosa calls a “point of aggression.” And like those who imbibe a little more whiskey to cure their alcoholism or take one more hit of cocaine to end their drug addiction, we think that the way of Pan is our way out of panic.
Bored panic and panicked boredom help clarify why the entire world seems to be throbbing with resentful culture wars—what philosopher Mark Lilla recently called “political nostalgia”: a longing for a supposedly lost golden age that results in raging against those who have supposedly stolen it. Some people with political nostalgia, Lilla writes,
become paralyzed, incapable of taking nourishment from what life still offers, and begin to waste away. Or they feel the coffin closing and panic; adrenaline races to their hearts, and they become capable of anything. The original philosophical question—how should I live?—has little meaning for them. When to live?—that is the question. And Now is not an acceptable answer.
A decade ago, I led a van full of American Christians on a tour of the biblical sites in Israel and Palestine. I couldn’t wait to show them one of my favorite places there: the mountains of what was once known as Caesarea Philippi. There, Jesus said to Peter, “On this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (Matt. 16:18, ESV throughout).
As I walked with my tour, I noticed a small group of Europeans dressed in all black, huddled together and murmuring as they looked at the ground. “Are they praying?” I asked our Israeli tour guide.
He laughed and rolled his eyes. “Well, kind of,” he said. “Sometimes Neopagans want to come here because, you know, this used to be a special place for that kind of thing. This is where they once worshiped the god Pan.”
Secularization isn’t evaporating spirituality but rather is rechanneling it, as cultural observers such as Tara Isabella Burton have documented. People, like the Pan worshipers, are finding new spiritual tribes and self-styled rituals and practices, with some seeking to reclaim the “old gods” of ancient paganism.
Part of the attraction is that these spiritualities appear ancient but are also free from any traceable organizational history. Much of the disillusionment with institutions today is due to those organizations’ failures to live up to their own ideals. These spiritualities, on the other hand, have ideals without having to show historically how they impacted structures and communities.
The tour guide made fun of the modern-day Pan worshipers. “It’s all just made up, you know,” he said. “There are no real pagans left. Pan has been dead a long time, and he isn’t coming back.”
The European pop-pagans may have been piecing together a “made-up” spirituality, but they weren’t wrong about part of the meaning of that location. The place is known to Christians as Caesarea Philippi, but its modern name is Banias, an Arabic version of Panias, after the god Pan. The significance of the varied meanings of this place was highlighted in 2020 when an archaeological dig uncovered an ancient Christian church beneath the site dating to the AD 400s.
This is not surprising. After all, it would make sense to build a church where Jesus promised to do so—upon the rock. But the archaeologists found underneath that church yet another structure of worship, this one dating back to about 20 BC: a temple to the god Pan. A scholar explained to the press that the worship of Pan had happened in that place since at least 300 years before Christ.
When Jesus spoke to Peter in Matthew 16, he did so over this ancient site of Pan. Perhaps no chapter in the Bible is more evocative of our current crisis—and not for the reasons many Christians think.
Handwringing believers will cap off some expression of panic with the words from verse 18, saying, “But we know that Jesus said the gates of hell will not prevail against the church.” This is usually spoken as a kind of forced hopefulness, similar to telling a grieving widow at a funeral, “Well, at least your husband’s not in pain anymore.” But in so doing, we do to these words what we have too often done to other majestic passages: turn them into decontextualized slogans and thus empty the words of their power.
The truth is that what Jesus said matters as much as where he said it. When Jesus stood in Caesarea Philippi and spoke in Matthew 16:13–28, he knew this was a place of panic, of devotion to the god of the pulsing libido and the raging fist. He also knew that this place now belonged to the house of Herod, whose son Philip named it after himself and the Roman emperor. The place represented what again seem to be opposite poles—the chaos of natural wildness and the control of political power, the panic of nature and the panic of history.
But Jesus recognized that human power and natural wildness are not separate things. They are one. The power of Caesar that crucified Christ is represented later throughout the Book of Revelation as humanity aspiring to ultimate, godlike power and control. But in so doing, the truth of Caesar is revealed to be wild and animalistic—in fact, a beast.
Jesus revealed his own power at Caesarea Philippi. But his power is starkly different from both the way of Caesar and the way of Pan.
Matthew situates the encounter of Jesus with Peter in between two important revelations in Jesus’ ministry: the feeding of the 4,000 and the Transfiguration. It’s a series of tests that reveal a fundamental aspect of the panic-boredom matrix we all now face. In each case, Jesus breaks the power of the panic cycles.
Chapter 16 begins with the Pharisees and Sadducees demanding to see a sign (v. 1). They wanted the question of ultimate meaning to be confirmed and deemed engineerable. But Jesus told them, “An evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of Jonah” (v. 4).
Similarly, Jesus caught his disciples worried about their lack of bread (v. 7)—a controllable fulfillment for their unmet appetites. But Jesus told them they’d missed the point: “How is it that you fail to understand that I did not speak about bread?” (v. 11).
Then, at the place of Pan, Jesus marked Peter with his new identity as a “rock.” Yet the stability of this rock was immediately thrown into question. Peter responded to the idea of the Cross with the throbbing impulse of self-protection, threatening to fight off anyone who would attempt an arrest of Christ (v. 22). Peter revealed not only that he didn’t really understand what Christ meant but also that he didn’t know himself well enough to know how he would respond in the ultimate crisis.
Peter would have fought anyone who suggested he was a worshiper of Pan or a sycophant of Caesar. In fact, he had been the first disciple to announce—there at Caesarea Philippi—that Jesus is “the Christ, the Son of the living God” (v. 16). But within a paragraph of this profession, Jesus said to him, “Get behind me, Satan!” (v. 23). This was because, Jesus said, Peter was not setting his mind “on the things of God, but on the things of man.”
More specifically, what Peter wanted was to save his life and the life of Jesus—he wanted a defeat of their enemies and for his life to follow the blueprint outlined in his affections, appetites, and intellect. He emanated the hypervigilance of the panicked, relying on a firing limbic system to assert dominance in the face of threat. Jesus, however, said the answer was not in engineering the future or in defeating enemies or even in guarding one’s own life.
Instead, he said this: “Whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it” (v. 25).
At that place of panic at Caesarea Philippi, Jesus was unnervingly tranquil. We might think panic purveyors would suggest that Jesus didn’t know what was coming. But the outside world is too familiar with panic to think that. It can recognize the kind of “confidence” that is really the frantic bravado of Peter and distinguish it from the strange calmness of Jesus.
When the world of Pan and Caesar sees a frenzied, angry, resentful, vengeful movement bearing the name of Jesus, they recognize it for what it is. They can identify it as the same varied-but-empty answer they would give to the question “Who do you say that I am?” (Matt. 16:15). They can see that movement setting its mind on the things of man and not on the things of God.
Unlike Peter and his proposed show of force, Jesus overcame the place of panic with his voice. He spoke, and he was heard. The question “Who do you say that I am?” could not be answered by crowdsourcing or cunning or feats of strength. Answered meaning, fulfilled appetites, overcoming danger, even saving one’s own life, all relied on Jesus’ promise alone—an intangible word that cannot be conjured up or revealed by “flesh and blood” (v. 17).
What Hartmut Rosa and other observers of this age call “resonance” speaks to what the Bible tells us about the reality of the world, like deep calling unto deep (Ps. 42:7). We need a voice like Jesus’ in the midst of our panic, someone outside of our control to break in and awe us like a first snow.
In describing the way of discipleship, Jesus used the imagery of sheep with a shepherd—the very sort of nomadic herds that were supposed to respond to Pan. The voice of the shepherd Jesus, though, does not create panic. It destroys it. And the sheep respond to—resonate with—the shepherd’s voice, following him into an undiscernible and uncontrollable future (John 10:3–5). That can also be scary in its own way, but it’s the kind of scariness that leads us out of, not toward, panic.
We cannot do much about the panic all around us. We cannot undo the kind of hot panic that manifests itself as political aggression, seeking to divide the world into friends to be rewarded and enemies to be defeated, powering the libido until we see other people as objects to be sexually or economically exploited. We also cannot do much about the cold kind of panic that prompts people to numb themselves to life with substances, achievements, or the burnout of detached cynics who have yielded to despair.
What we can do, though, is make ourselves reachable. We can pray for what Jesus called ears to hear and eyes to see (Matt. 13:15–16). We can cultivate true meaning through worship, prayer, community, and immersion in the Bible.
Such things cannot engineer meaning or holiness by their own power. But they can place us beside Peter where he once stood in the place of Pan. And there, we can hear the voice that changes everything.
That is itself distressing, just as it was for Peter. We want control and reassurance and predictability, even if such things would only leave us with more deadness. Yet the voice is always just ahead of us, calling us onward not by activating our limbic systems but by renewing our minds.
The story is what it always has been. It’s Peter versus Pan. We can choose to save our lives or to lose them, to indulge our appetites or to cultivate longings for something better, to plan our futures or to entrust ourselves to the unknown. We can choose fleeting wins or eternal salvation.
In this whirlwind of our own Caesarea Philippi, we should deafen our ears to the pipes that are playing all around us and listen for a different voice. The question posed to us is neither how to read the signs of the future nor how to defend ourselves from danger. The query before us is “Who do you say that I am?”
Only when we keep that question in mind can we look down and see the solid rock on which we stand—and recognize that this is no place for panic.
Russell Moore is editor in chief at CT.
Onward: A column by Russell Moore
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