Finding hope this Easter in the age of doomscrolling - Gavin Matthews

Optimism seems to be at a low ebb. Only a few years ago the prevailing mood was that humanity was striding in the right direction. At the demise of the Cold War, George Bush Snr declared that a “New World Order” had arrived. When the former nuclear weapons rivals stopped planning their mutually assured destruction and worked together to liberate Kuwait – the possibilities for good seemed endless. Not long afterwards, protests for democracy arose in China and Gordon Brown claimed to have “put an end to the damaging cycle of boom and bust”. US social theorist Francis Fukyama rather ambitiously declared ‘the end of history’, in a vision of the world united around democracy, liberalism and free trade.

Well, that was the plan anyway.

That optimistic spirit of that age has been dealt a series of life-threatening injuries since those heady days. The Chinese protests for democratic reform came to bloody end in Tiananmen Square; 9/11 re-polarised the world and preceded American-led military interventions which spawned conflicts which continue today. By 2008 a crisis in the sub-prime mortgage market became a ‘credit crunch’ which became a full recession leading to austerity. When the Covid-19 virus became a pandemic, it led to the most severe curtailment of civil-liberties in peacetime history. Then, as we limped vaccines-in-hand (well in bicep, at least) from that crisis; Putin invaded Ukraine and the new-Cold War began in earnest.

Where’s the dream of peace, prosperity and plebiscites? It seems to have given way to plagues, poverty and Putin.

Gavin Matthews of Solas

Just as important is the question: where has the sense that the problems we face as humans are within our grasp to fix, and that the right people are in charge, gone? Chaos and scandal in Westminster and the bin-fire that is Scottish politics doesn’t really inspire confidence.

The collapse of optimism has led to an epidemic of “doomscrolling”, a word from the Twittersphere, which entered the dictionary in 2018. Defined as ‘the obsessive or addictive consumption of bad news stories, especially on social media’; doomscrolling has been blamed for various poor physical and mental health outcomes.

In an age marked by doomscrolling, in which the optimism of a new world order has crashed spectacularly, millions of Christians will be gathering this Easter to defiantly celebrate hope. However, we will not be proclaiming a hope in our human ability to unite to fix everything. Rather the Christian hope is based on the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. He is the God who meets us in our troubles and redeems us from our failures; and in the resurrection narratives in the gospels, we encounter the one who can breathe life into a hopeless world and into our hopeless situations. The Christian hope is that if we embrace him by faith, this same Christ will meet us in our troubles today; and promises one day to return to bring the kind of peace, justice and perfect rule, for which we all deeply long but which we cannot build ourselves. In him there really will be a tangible New World Order, one we can have a foretaste of, in our souls, by faith in Christ today. It’s time for hope-scrolling!

Gavin Matthews for Solas