Note: This article emerged from Emily Lange’s time as Professional-in-Residence at Regent College, January–March 2026.

I began the lecture on “How Worldviews Shape International Politics” by quoting from a book on Christian Spirituality. An odd start, but I have often come back to Richard Foster’s seminal opening lines where he points to a deeper reality we so easily let slip through our clumsy fingers, a weighty reminder when approaching our current international politics: “The desperate need today is not for a greater number of intelligent people, or gifted people, but for deep people.”¹ 

When it comes to international politics, we have a vast amount of intelligent and gifted people. Where are the deep thinkers? When part of our current confusion comes from reactive conversations, superficial assessments, and sweeping statements, it would seem urgent to somehow carve space for reflection and recover conversations that dare grapple with the deeper questions of our age. 

This is what “A Deeper Revolution: How Worldviews Shape International Politics” (both lecture and book) conclude. The story begins with a crash course through the last five hundred years of international political history in the West,² led by our chosen tour guide, Martin Wight, a British historian and international theorist whose contributions were made in a post Second World War and Cold War period. I developed my doctoral thesis in International Relations by drawing from Wight’s suggested interpretive lens for this five hundred year period: to look out for the recurrent blaze of political conviction and fanaticism, which led to waves of violent and disruptive international revolutions. He named these “doctrinal conflagrations,” and identified three within this timeframe: the Protestant Reformation, the French Revolution, and the Russian Revolution. All these were periods of heightened ideological politics which led to disruption and violent revolutionary wars. They were also watershed moments in developing (or dismantling) political principles and structures, introducing increasing secularism in politics, and breaking up the dominance of monarchic rule by ushering in republicanism and liberal democracy. Yet they also gifted us the secular suspicion (and bias) of religion, a fragmentation and delegitimization of Christianity and disastrous totalitarian dictatorships. 

Seen in this light, the last five hundred years in the West are a story of convulsion and conflict. This is not a pretty Western “family photo album,” and certainly not the one usually presented in schools or paraded in front of other world cultures. The preferred narrative is one of civilizational prowess, the success of coming out of "dark ages" into an enlightened era—a slow but steady ascent up the ladder of progressive development. However, convulsion and revolution are part of the family history; this alone should give us pause when bringing forth judgements over the conflicts happening in other parts of the world. The usual triumphant narrative fails completely at explaining the horrors of the twentieth century (some of which were then exported internationally) and of our current confusion. Yet it is only by digging deeper and talking for longer than a sound bite that we get to the real picture. And so, while developing my thesis I felt the need to take things down a level and introduced "worldview" into the analysis, a rather unusual step for the three-tier lens conventionally deployed in International Relations theory: world (system) – nation-state – individual.³ 

My conviction was that all political doctrines transported assumptions about reality—they have a worldview. What if the shifts in political doctrines and principles over these five hundred years was happening also because of changes in underlying assumptions? I drew from Martin Wight’s first principles of political theory and developed a framework to think of worldview in three elements: anthropology, theory of history, and epistemology. 

Anthropology: What is human nature? Is it inherently good or bad (sinful)? Are humans made in the image of God or an evolutionary product? Can human nature be perfected (through evolution, education, etc.)? Is human nature neutral (i.e., culture or structures are the ones that are corrupted)?

Theory of history: How do “things” work? Is history cyclical (ancient view), linear, progressive (“we are going somewhere”), critical (made of critical moments, i.e., the Incarnation), or providential?

Epistemology: How do we know what we know? Is it through revelation, reason, or subjectivism? Is there absolute truth? Whom do we trust as authorities of knowledge?​

In A Secular Age, Charles Taylor asks, “Why was it virtually impossible not to believe in God in, say, 1500 in our Western society, while in 2000 many of us find this not only easy, but even inescapable?”⁴ Working with the same timeframe, I traced a worldview arc over my three “doctrinal conflagrations” and came to a similar proposition. 

The Protestant Reformation came out of a world, as Taylor puts it, where it was almost impossible not to believe in God. Human nature could be conceived as “good” only in the sense that people were created in the image of a good God; yet more often it would be seen as inherently bad, since original sin had affected everything. There was also an assumption that history and society were being directed by God (often through humans—namely, his divinely-appointed rulers). By the time we get to the French Revolution, Christianity is not only declining, it is divided: there was now more than one option of being a Christian and thinking about rulership; the (albeit generalized) unified sense of Christendom was shattered. Deism grows, which increasingly detaches the reality of daily life from the divine and transcendent. Human nature is now good, or can be made so. These are radical shifts. The Russian Revolution, in many ways, pushes deeper into what was started in the French Revolution. Being human is about being the master of your own making, transcendent “windows”⁵ are closed, and human-led revolution (certainly not God) will now usher in the ultimate perfect society here on earth. 

The predominant worldview in the West currently is secular humanist and post-Christian. Human beings tend to be seen as an evolutionary product; transcendent and divine connections have been relegated to private preferences and have no bearing on our nature nor the course of history. From theology as the prime discipline, and religious ministers and theologians as trusted knowledge bearers, we have moved through philosophy to the social sciences, but perhaps listen now mostly to the markets and social media. The world has been fashioned and is being led by humans. 

Returning to Taylor’s question, someone might say, well, what’s the problem of having lost God along the way? Within politics, one of the problems is that the secular humanist worldview undermines the principles of a liberal democratic order.⁶ We could say, baby Jesus was thrown out but a lot of the bath water went too. If being human now is solely a product of a biological evolutionary process, why seek fairness (nature is not fair), or equality (biologically, we are not equal), or justice (isn’t life just about survival)? The challenge is that most of the liberal democratic values we want to preserve in Western societies come from a Judeo-Christian worldview. Can they be sustained without it?

Zooming in on this anthropological element of worldview, we have come a long way from a Christian understanding of human nature, where humans are made in the image of a personal God, which makes them persons before they are individuals, and relational beings set within communities. The secular humanist conception—in gross generalization—portrays an atomized individual, freed from connections, traditions, and obligations; but also an impersonal being, when a product of a biological evolutionary process, or a self-constructed being, when fashioned around a socially-constructed reality.   

This “sovereign self”⁷ is appealing to our modern feelings, obsessed with liberty and autonomy.⁸ We think it only our right to resist any external ordering or self-limitation. Yet how does this work when one groups several of these kinds of individuals together? This sort of radical individualism is not conducive to living in society or to democratic processes. This impersonal anthropology also cannot sustain a healthy place for the human being as a full person. On the one hand, we see a liberated individual, freed from all shackles. But this self-sovereignty is mythical (we cannot birth ourselves) and has placed a huge burden on individual shoulders, who not only need to decide who and what they want to be, but also need to provide their own validation. This has led to a lot of individual angst, loneliness, and crises of meaning.⁹ The seriousness of our situation is visible when governments start appointing Ministers of Loneliness.¹⁰

On the other hand, this individual—so lonely and vulnerable—loses themself in the masses, engulfed into sweeping mob movements, faceless virtual groups, identity politics, and nationalism, or is just engulfed into the hungry techno-managerial society, another cog in a faceless system. A system that does not treat people as fully human dehumanizes.

Hannah Arendt chillingly describes a similar conflation of the atomization of the individual and the increase of loneliness in her On the Origins of Totalitarianism,¹¹  where she tries to account for the emergence of Nazism and Stalinism and the horrors these perpetrated. When disconnected from selves and community, individuals will be more susceptible to the claims of charismatic leaders and vulnerable to mass movements and totalizing ideologies. 

“What does it mean to be human?” is one of the central questions of our times. But the fact is, we already provide an answer every day. Arendt points out that “ideological thinking becomes independent from all experience”¹²—ideologies detach us from reality, which makes this worldview question even more serious. What is the reality we are drawing from and believing? How do our political theories, our public politics, and our conversations reflect our anthropology? 

This is why I argue we need a “Deeper Revolution.” On the one hand, we need it to recognize and grapple with the fact that there has been a titanic shift in assumptions about reality that have had and continue to bear real implications in our political and societal living. On the other hand, it is an invitation to go deeper. “Business as usual” is driving us into the ground. But every crisis holds an opportunity. In this case, to dare to stop and think, to remember where we have come from (history matters), to reflect on what we are assuming (worldview matters), to take a step back before reacting to the next irritating political jibe, to carve out space for pause and reflection, to push further and go deeper in conversations, to meet people and remember they are just that—perhaps these small steps, taken within the relationships and communities in which we move, might just start helping us recover and learn what it means to be human.