A low apocalyptic hum runs beneath the culture now. The institutions, the climate, the future, all felt to be sliding toward some slow collapse, and underneath it a paralyzing question: why build, why try, why bring children into a world that is ending? Doomerism wears the clothes of realism, and it can feel like the only grown-up response to hard facts. But look closely and it often turns out to be despair in a realist's coat, and despair, conveniently, excuses us from responsibility: if it is all doomed anyway, then nothing I do matters, and I am off the hook.
Christianity offers no denial. It is unflinching about a broken world; it practically invented lament, and hands you whole books of it, whole psalms of raw complaint. It does not ask you to paste a smile over real grief. What it refuses is despair, and it can refuse it because its hope was never optimism about human progress in the first place. Christian hope does not rest on the belief that we will fix everything. It rests on a God who does not abandon what he made, who promises, 'Behold, I make all things new.'
Christian hope was never optimism that we will fix it. It is trust in a God who is not finished with the world.
This produces a strangely durable kind of person: one who can grieve without giving up. There is a line often attributed to Martin Luther, that even if he knew the world would end tomorrow, he would still plant a tree today. That is the posture exactly, honest sorrow and stubborn labor held together, caring for the world not because we are certain we can save it, but because it belongs to God and he is not done with it. The doomer stops planting because nothing matters. The Christian keeps planting because Someone else is bringing the harvest.