Roots in Uncertain Times

Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash

What will the world be like by this time next year? What will have happened that we felt sure would never happen in our lifetime? What percentage of people will think their lives got better—or worse—in 2025? Who will be unemployed, and why? How far will AI have gone? What will the federal government look like? Who will America’s allies be? What wars will have stopped or started, and for what reasons?

Fear thrives among all these unknowns. When people have no roots, when they do not belong to anything bigger than they are, they have to face this year’s turmoil alone, trying to get the best deal they can. Rootless people live whack-a-mole lives, never able to get enough solid information in time to make a good decisions. Anxiety goes through the roof.

If R. R. Reno's premise is on target in his book, Return of the Strong Gods, rootlessness is so widespread today because conventional wisdom since the end of WWII teaches that strong roots are bad. Roots cause wars. So after 1945 we formed the United Nations, froze national boundaries, and made sure the history books painted Hitler and Nazism as the most evil political movement in history. We also campaigned against any absolute truth or any strong sense of national identity so that no one would go to war again over those things.

It worked, sort of. There has been no WWIII. There have been horrific wars—Sudan, Afghanistan, Syria, Gaza, Ukraine, and all across Africa—but many were civil wars. The human cost of war fell mostly on ordinary people who felt a strong sense of rootedness in a particular ethnic and/or religious group, supposedly proving the point that roots are bad.

Reno agrees that roots are dangerous but he also sees them as necessary for psychological and social health. They are like a prescription medicine that helps in small amounts but kills you if you take too much.

He believes that the anti-roots campaign of the last 80 years is falling apart because it went too far. It refused to see that some roots can provide healthy benefits such as security, identity, and purpose. It got rid of all roots, and it did not provide anything to replace them. It left people uprooted, insecure, and aimless.

Reno does not get very definitive about where and how to grow healthy roots, though as a Catholic theologican he does think God and morality must be involved. His aim in this book is to explain the problem, not outline a biblical solution. SYNC does not claim to have a complete solution either, but during Roots Season we try to get people going on a biblical path in that direction.

Spoiler alert: The path starts with Abraham and the POTF breed of human—People of the Future. It is not a political analysis or action plan but a path to a power that does what politics cannot do.

Unlike other social and religious roots that naturally lead to conflict between groups, roots in Abraham lead naturally to peace and blessing for all groups—global shalom. Abrahamic roots only lead to conflict when they are misunderstood, as when Jews and Arabs (both descended from Abraham) carry on their family feud or when Christians make their national or ethnic identity more important than their roots in Abraham. They head blindly down unbiblical warpaths, sprinkling a little holy water (a few Scripture verses) as they go, trying to convince themselves they are on the right track.

In this most unpredictable year, roots planted in healthy, Abrahamic truth give us what we need to stay positive and take positive action no matter how bad things get. This is not naïve optimism. It is real life in the real world, rooted in the Abrahamic past and in SYNC with the Messianic future.

Discover what that means and you can face every turbulent minute in this chaotic year because the peace and love of the future flow into you. To see how SYNC can help you in that discovery, read on. Tool Kit for Roots Season, March 5 – April 12, 2025