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Cultural Apologetics Column
This article was published exclusively online in the Christian Research Journal, Volume 49, number 01 (2026).
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[Editor’s Note: This essay contains spoilers for Pluribus.]
Streaming Series Cultural Commentary
Pluribus
Created by Vince Gilligan
Showrunner Vince Gilligan
Starring Rhea Seehorn, Karolina Wydra, and Carlos-Manuel Vesga
TV–MA
(Apple TV, 2025)
Vince Gilligan’s Pluribus (Apple TV, 2025–) offers viewers a world that has achieved what modern people are endlessly promised but never quite attain. No one is screaming. Nothing is on fire. There is a stability of mood, a smoothness of life, and seeming contentment across the board. The sharp corners of human existence have been rounded down until everything fits together without friction. It looks, at first glance, nothing like a dystopia. Yet the longer one looks, the more unsettling this picture becomes. Happiness here looks far less like joy than like compliance.1 It is the emotional equivalent of climate control: uniform, regulated, and designed to eliminate discomfort. Disagreement is both impolite and pathological, and grief is a defect to be corrected. In the world Gilligan and crew have created, all human “interiority” disappears — the capacity for lament, repentance, longing, moral struggle, and all the tensions that make love costly and therefore meaningful.
That sort of unease hits viewers with particular force in a culture already drifting towards the performance of well-being. Modern Western individuals — especially Americans — are encouraged to be okay by appearing okay, which looks like maintaining the proper emotional temperature and smoothing over anything resembling dissonance. Even religious communities are not immune to this cultural thermostat. A faith built on psalms containing profound anguish can (and often does) mutate into a spirituality of perpetual reassurance, wherein genuine sorrow starts to feel like failure and honest doubt like disloyalty.
Pluribus asks a question as old as Eden and as contemporary as the latest algorithm. If you could eliminate the ache, the longing, at the center of human life, what else would vanish with it? And would the world left behind still be recognizably human or simply easier to manage, pleasant, cooperative, and strangely hollow?
Today’s Climate. The aforementioned cultural thermostat scales upward. The same instinct to eliminate friction in an individual’s life begins to shape common life as well. And this makes a certain amount of sense. After all, if things like sorrow, conflict, and ambiguity are treated as defects in the soul, they soon become intolerable in the public square. A society habituated to emotional management will naturally gravitate in the direction of systems and frameworks that promise stability at scale, organizing anxiety, assigning blame, and maintaining the illusion of coherence.
In other words, the longing for a frictionless inner life quietly prepares the ground for a corresponding social order. What begins as therapeutic self-regulation eventually matures into a hunger for collective harmony, even if that harmony must be purchased at the cost of depth, texture, contradiction, dissent, or truth.2 It is at this precise point, where the management of feeling becomes the management of belonging, that the themes of Pluribus elevate from being unsettling fiction to unnervingly recognizable reality.
Today, the pressure to stabilize and regulate the emotional climate of public life finds one of its most potent expressions in politics. But not politics as the ordinary and often tedious work of governing a shared life, but politics as identity, as a comprehensive story about “who we are” and who threatens us and where salvation is to be found. In that mode, political belonging begins to function less like civic participation and more like a substitute religion, offering community without real proximity, moral clarity without introspection, enemies without ambiguity, rituals of outrage without any sort of repentance in view, and a sense of meaning that feels both immediate and total.3
What it requires in return goes beyond agreement to emotional synchronization. These days, you do not simply vote, but “perform allegiance.” You must feel the right outrage at the right moment, display the correct sympathies in the correct contexts, and adopt the approved tone towards current events and public figures. To deviate emotionally is to risk suspicion, even a kind of social exile (i.e., “cancelled”).
Here, the American flag itself becomes ironic and oddly illuminating. It contains three colors, but the cultural script increasingly insists there are only two legitimate colors to which one can belong. The complexity of a plural people is compressed into a stupefyingly reductionistic binary of friend and enemy, us and them. The church, however, does not originate in that binary. It does, in fact, predate the nation. It has outlasted and will outlast political parties. It locates its ultimate loyalty in a kingdom not reducible to either camp.4 And when Christians fuse their identity to partisan alignment, they trade a transhistorical inheritance for a temporary coalition and forfeit the distance necessary to critique both.
Sentimentalism. Sentimentality accelerates this collapse because it prefers comfort to truth, nudging people toward whichever tribe offers the warmest assurance: these are good people; those are bad ones; you are safe here. At its core, sentimentality is emotion detached from reality, from proportion, from moral seriousness.5 It replaces the hard work of discernment with the immediate relief of reassurance. Instead of asking, “What is true?” it asks, “What feels stabilizing right now?”
In a sentimental context, moral reality is simplified into something emotionally manageable, stripped of ambiguity and the uncomfortable possibility that righteousness might actually cut across the lines that define our own loyalties. But Scripture refuses such neat sorting policies. Its “heroes” often fail spectacularly — Abraham passes his wife off as his sister to save himself, Moses disobeys God in anger, David commits adultery and arranges a death to conceal it, Peter denies Jesus in the courtyard. Its villains sometimes repent unexpectedly — the violent city of Nineveh turns at Jonah’s reluctant preaching, the persecutor Saul becomes Paul the apostle. Its prophets deliver their fiercest rebukes not only to foreign enemies, but also to their own people — Nathan confronts David in his palace, Amos denounces Israel’s religious complacency, Jeremiah warns Jerusalem even as Babylon gathers at the gates.
Seen in this light, the hive mind presented in Pluribus looks like an exaggerated portrait of ideological assimilation. A society that cannot tolerate dissent within becomes remarkably easy to steer from without. When happiness is defined as agreement, then disagreement ceases to feel like error or even sin. Instead, it feels like cruelty, something to be corrected and marginalized or absorbed.
Social Isolation. One reason this temptation lands so forcefully right now is that it intersects with another phenomenon widely discussed across secular and religious circles alike: loneliness. We are, by nearly every measurable index, living through an age of profound social disconnection. Though people are increasingly socially surrounded, they are relationally starving. Major institutions have begun to speak about this with frankness, and public health officials describe loneliness as a serious societal condition.6
Why now? Probably because, at least in part, the structures that once sustained thick, durable communities have thinned almost everywhere at once. We move constantly, which resets relationships before they can develop. We live much of our lives online, which fragments presence into curated glimpses. We treat institutions with suspicion, which makes belonging provisional and optional. We sacralize autonomy, which turns dependency into embarrassment. We replace place with platform, so that community becomes audience and neighbors become followers. The result is paradoxical: people are more visible than ever, yet less known. Visibility is not intimacy, and exposure is not recognition. One can broadcast endlessly and still feel unseen.
Into that vacuum, politics often rushes as a substitute for community. And outrage, in particular, is a potent bonding agent. Nothing creates rapid solidarity like a common enemy. Loneliness, therefore, produces sadness on one hand, and a kind of tribal rage on the other. The emotional charge (which, due to pervasive sentimentality, is paramount) feels like connection but is brittle and conditional. Ironically, it depends on the continued existence of the enemy.
The sum of these integers is that of a vicious cycle. Tribal belonging discourages relationships outside the tribe, which deepens isolation, which drives deeper tribal immersion. People can be hyper-connected politically and terribly alone personally, surrounded by allies in abstraction while lacking companions in flesh and blood. Pluribus exposes the endpoint of that logic. If loneliness stems from the pain of being a separate self, then the ultimate “solution” is to eliminate separateness altogether, to merge into the whole with no disagreement.7
But absorption is not communion. Communion requires distinct persons who remain themselves while giving themselves in love. Absorption, which Pluribus deals in, eliminates the very difference that makes love meaningful. Christian community, at its best, presupposes that kind of distinction. It is meant to be a place where people who would not naturally choose one another learn to belong to one another because of Christ (see Galatians 3 and Romans 15). The fellowship within the church is one rooted in reconciliation rather than similarity. And when the church instead mirrors the same cultural sorting mechanisms as the surrounding society, loneliness intensifies. The one institution quite literally designed to transcend those divisions begins to reinforce them, and disappointment cuts deeper because the expectations are higher.
Loneliness vs. Solitude. This leads to a harder question, which is what place, if any, does loneliness have in the life of the Christian? Modern Western culture tends to treat loneliness as inherently pathological, something to be eliminated as quickly as possible. But historically, Christianity has never regarded loneliness in such purely negative terms. In fact, Christianity has always contained a measure of built-in loneliness. Truth obviously creates tension in a world that runs on falsehood. And faithfulness can place believers at odds with prevailing assumptions and narratives. To belong ultimately to God is to belong only partially to any earthly order. Jesus Himself embodies this paradox. He is misunderstood by His family, opposed by authorities, abandoned by friends, betrayed by a disciple, and goes to the cross alone.
Accordingly, the Christian tradition has long distinguished between loneliness and solitude. Loneliness might be defined as the pain of lacking needed human communion. Solitude, however, is the chosen space in which one encounters God and confronts oneself honestly. It is the space in which one is effectively remade. Modern sentimentality collapses this important distinction and treats all aloneness as failure, assuming that emotional comfort and social affirmation are the highest goods.
But Christian maturity does something almost scandalous in the modern West by making room for sorrow and longing without the need for performance or the need to fill up that space immediately. It acknowledges that not every ache can be anesthetized without cost on this side of eternity. Christians often experience loneliness precisely because they do not belong anywhere. Peter describes those believers he is writing to as “sojourners” and “exiles” (1 Peter 2:11 ESV), citizens of a kingdom not identical with any earthly nation or movement. They live within cultures without being reducible to them. In a society as polarized as ours, this can feel like standing between camps. And to refuse total alignment with one side is to risk suspicion from both. That partial belonging can be experienced as isolation. Yet it is also the ground of real freedom. Because ultimate loyalty lies elsewhere, Christians are not required to sanctify any temporal order uncritically.
When the American church becomes sentimental, when it trains itself to generate a particular emotional atmosphere week after week, lonely people begin to realize that if they tell the truth about their interior life, they risk disrupting the “vibe” or the “mood.” If the church’s primary goal becomes reassurance, then something like lament feels like sabotage. So people hide — they master the smile, the polite greeting, the “acceptable” testimony. And loneliness deepens within the very space that is meant to heal it.
The world of Pluribus is not entirely alien. It exaggerates tendencies already present: the desire to smooth away discomfort and eliminate dissent, to maintain some kind of emotional equilibrium at any cost. The show asks what would happen if those instincts were allowed to run to their logical conclusion. And that conclusion isn’t tyranny (at least, not in any overt sense), but something subtler and somehow more sinister. It’s a hand on the thermostat, not a boot on the throat. Life is quietly suffocated and nothing unresolved is allowed to remain unresolved. In such a world, there is no need for courage because there is nothing left to resist, no need for repentance or hope because there’s nothing to confess and nothing to wait for. Everything is calm and managed and “fine.”
Yet something irreducibly human has been traded away: the very capacity to ache, to struggle, to cry out, to love at cost to oneself — the very mess that God likes to plunge His hands into, the things that make us Christians in the first place. Pluribus leaves us with the suspicion that a world purged of loneliness and sorrow might not be heaven after all, but a kind of anesthetized existence. The question the series presses and that our own moment cannot easily evade, is whether we are willing to endure the risks of being fully human or whether we would prefer the quieter bargain of a life made pleasant, cooperative, and ultimately hollow.
Cole Burgett is a graduate of Dallas Theological Seminary and the Moody Bible Institute. He currently serves as the Assistant Director of Online and Nontraditional Learning at Corban University and as an Assistant Professor of Theology. He writes extensively about theology and popular culture.
NOTES
- Abby Olcese, “‘Pluribus’ Turns Happiness into a Virus, and Peace into a Problem,” Sojourners, January 7, 2026, https://sojo.net/articles/culture/pluribus-turns-happiness-virus-and-peace-problem.
- There is much to be said here about the oft-discussed “moralistic therapeutic deism” (MTD). Suffice to say, MTD is what has been (for about twenty years now) used to describe the “spiritual temperature” of American youth. It is basically the belief that God exists mainly to ensure people are happy and self-fulfilled (hence “moralistic” and “therapeutic”). In this framework, God intervenes only when needed, while otherwise remaining distant from daily life (hence “deism”). The most significant text analyzing this idea is Christian Smith with Melinda Lundquist Denton, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (Oxford University Press, 2005).
- For a further discussion of this point in a modern American Christian context, see Ryan Burge, “Why ‘Evangelical’ Is Becoming Another Word for ‘Republican,’” The New York Times, October 26, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/26/opinion/evangelical-republican.html.
- Augustine’s City of God remains a particularly illuminating guide as a theological framework for understanding why no earthly polity can bear the weight of ultimate allegiance. Written in the aftermath of Rome’s crisis in the early fifth century, Augustine distinguishes between the earthly city and the City of God. Christians, he argues, necessarily inhabit both, but they cannot collapse the latter into the former without losing their distinctive identity. In a cultural moment that demands total alignment with one faction or another, Augustine’s vision offers a posture with a much lower center of gravity. To read this classic Christian text, see Augustine, City of God, trans. Marcus Dods, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, vol. 2, ed. Philip Schaff (Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1887), revised and edited for New Advent by Kevin Knight, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1201.htm.
- See Daniel Strange, “I’m (Not) Getting Sentimental over You,” Themelios 42.3 (2017): 440–445, https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/themelios/article/im-not-getting-sentimental-over-you/.
- In a widely cited advisory, the U.S. Surgeon General warned that social disconnection has become a pervasive public-health crisis, linked to both mental distress and serious physical risks. See Office of the U.S. Surgeon General, Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation: The U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory on the Healing Effects of Social Connection and Community (Department of Health and Human Services, 2023), https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/surgeon-general-social-connection-advisory.pdf.
- For an important discussion of the connection between “new tribalism” and advancing technologies published by the journal of the Witherspoon Institute, see Thomas D. Howes, “Smartphones and the New Tribalism” Public Discourse, December 10, 2025, https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2025/12/99688/.
