You’ll rarely find me ready to admit that my brain has run dry of words. And yet, the busyness of the past few days was as a black hole pulling into its twirling mass every last particle of my energy, and with it, not just thoughts that popped into my mind that typically become a few paragraphs here and there, but also the will to actually form them. It was a kind of gravitational pull toward emptiness—a reminder that even those of us who trade in words can find ourselves staring at a blankness that feels alive, swallowing thought after thought.

For me, in order to reconcile all the supposed “good ideas” I may have lost to the void last week, I think the point is not necessarily to fear the situation, but to recognize it as part of the cycle. In one sense, it was a pause before creation, a stillness from which the next torrent of keyboard taps would eventually emerge.

And those taps are happening right now.

I should say I do remember one random thought from last week that managed to stay with me. It might seem silly in the scheme of things, but since it’s the only thing that comes to mind right now, I’ll share it.

There was a moment while driving when I wasn’t sure if I still liked Star Wars. Yeah, weird. I’m the guy in your feed with a life-sized Darth Vader in his basement. I also have a Stormtrooper costume on display, one that was sent to me by the gent at Shepperton Studios in England who designed the original molds for the 1977 film. The trooper is armed with a holstered E11 blaster and all standard-issue equipment. I have some, but not all, of my original Star Wars toys from the 80s, too. My AT-AT stands beside my bar. The Millennium Falcon hangs by wires from the ceiling above it, with Vader’s TIE fighter in pursuit of an escaping Han and Chewy. Among countless eye candies scattered throughout the space, I can assure you, I’m no ordinary Star Wars fan.

But here’s the thing.

Perhaps that strange realization that startled me while driving was because, for most of my life, the Star Wars saga has been a wellspring of imagination and awe. But since Disney took over, what was once rich and expansive has now been drained of its mystery. It seems almost every corner of the galaxy is retooled and franchised into ideological submission, and now a void is staring back. Disney’s current trajectory—with its insistence on imposing LGBTQ, Inc.’s nonsense, combined with prioritizing quantity over wonder, and spectacle over soul—has transformed a universe once supercharged with myth into a factory line of shallow narratives, each one closing doors instead of opening them.

Thinking this through right now on my keyboard, I suppose my disenchantment isn’t necessarily a betrayal of my younger self, but a natural response to watching a beloved story collapse into an insatiable gravitational pull, leaving me waiting for the emptiness to let go, and for creation to feel alive again.

That said, this is simply where we are as a culture.

And if that sounds abstract, it isn’t. The point has faces and names. Just last night, sitting at my dining room table with Dr. James Lindsay and Chloe Cole, our conversation turned to this very thing—the strange willingness of our age to normalize what is gross, confused, or destructive, while shunning what is good, true, and beautiful. We agreed that the inversion isn’t accidental. It’s become a cultural reflex. In so many ways, the very same pattern that gutted Star Wars—trading mystery for ideology, and reverence for rebellion—now governs how society decides what deserves its affection.

It’s a pattern that doesn’t stop at Hollywood or politics. It seeps into everything, showing itself to be a symptom of something far deeper.

I guess what I’m saying is that we live in an age where tradition—what’s sacred—is no longer cherished, but instead repackaged until nothing generationally transcendent remains. In other words, we’ve been slow-burning the inherent wonder that makes most anything worth loving in the first place. What has happened to Star Wars is a cautionary tale in that sense. It mirrors what we’ve done to our own world—draining meaning for sellable content, trading soul for profit or popularity, and leaving ourselves with universes that look full but feel strangely empty.

Again, that said, you may not like what I’m going to say next… but… well, whatever.

I’d say the Church in America has not escaped this same gravitational pull, especially when it comes to worship. More and more, mainstream evangelicalism mirrors the same logic that gutted Star Wars—a reliance on endless production, flashy effects, and emotional manipulation designed to keep an audience engaged rather than a people fed. The holy spaces have become stages, and the pastors are little more than TED Talk speakers. The liturgy, if there is one, is a syrupy playlist of songs that repeat the same three lines twenty times, sometimes without even mentioning the God the people claim to worship. Every moment must be filled with lights, sound, and extraneous distractions.

I have a theory about this.

Not long ago, I saw a video from a megachurch memorial service. The pastor was speaking, but just over his shoulder, in clear view of the camera, a keyboardist played soft music the entire time. Why?

The theatrics of emotional manipulation. What is theater without its soundtrack?

Unfortunately, this wasn’t anything unique. It’s just one example of a wider pattern in megachurch (and smaller wannabe megachurches) culture where reverence is replaced with stagecraft. My theory is that these churches deliberately avoid reverence—with its quiet, cruciform ponderance—because it risks exposing how thin they are in substance. We’re told they’re attempting to be relevant, but it looks and feels suspiciously like entertainment—like franchising—running the sacred through the machinery of consumer demand. Just as Disney ruined Star Wars by trading the mythical for market share, churches are trading the sacred for the secular, reverence for relevance, mystery for marketing, and the otherworldliness of what’s holy for trendiness. The tragedy is that in trying to be accessible (which proponents of the “attractant model” insist is necessary), they end up being disposable—thin words paired with even thinner ditties that fade with the next generation. Christianity becomes a gathering of generic platitudes that stir the senses for a moment but leave the soul unanchored for the moments to come.

But unlike Star Wars, what I’m describing isn’t fiction. It’s the very lifeblood of the Church being stripped of its substance and wonder and, ultimately, sold back to us as theater.

The plain truth is that churches that adopt this theology and practice are not the ones that survive the fires of time. I said as much during my speech at yesterday’s conference. Charlie Kirk agreed with me. Dr. James Lindsay affirmed that he did, and primarily because both know that history has long proven it. History shows these forms of religiosity rise for a time, swelling in number and noise, but like fast food, they fill a generational moment, ultimately leaving that generation’s people malnourished. And when the next cultural storm hits—whether persecution, political upheaval, or even just the slow burn of the same societal disillusionment that we’re experiencing now—the thin scaffolding of lights and slogans simply cannot hold. And again, why? Well, it’s the same inversion we talked about in my dining room last night—the reflex to applaud what deforms and to yawn at what sanctifies, which leaves people brittle precisely when meaning is most needed.

Simply put, syrupy Christianity isn’t up to the challenges brought by real suffering. In those moments, people actually need the God who is holy, transcendent, and present where He promised to locate Himself.

By the way, I have a theory about this, too. I think that in the end, the even more profound tragedy isn’t that churches like the ones I’ve described eventually disappear, but that in their wake they leave generations who think they’ve “tried” Christianity, when in truth they’ve only tasted a diluted version of it. And so, they walk away, not only from Christ, but from a franchise built in His name that they mistakenly think He commissioned. In other words, people having a false impression of what Christianity actually is, that, I fear, is a far greater problem than the fading cultural mythos of even something as beloved as Star Wars.

You may or may not agree with me. That’s okay. In the end, though, I suppose what matters is not whether the Church can keep pace with the culture or stay in step with the latest trend, but whether we are anchored to something that can actually withstand the storms. The world can afford for Star Wars to become disposable entertainment. It cannot afford for the Church to follow suit. When churches trade away their sacred identity—when they sacrifice reverence for relevance—they train their people to crave sugar instead of bread. When famine comes, they starve. What the world needs is not another franchise in God’s name, but the God who breaks into our shallow emptiness, exchanging this world with the sacredness of the world to come. Strip that away, and you may have a show. Keep it, and you have a Church. And that is the difference between extinction and endurance.