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Welcome, this is Jubilee Coach. The French Protest Too Much. That is how the writer Thomas Chatterton Williams began an essay in the Atlantic on October 7th. Five Blunt Words. Williams is an American writer who lives in Paris. He is also a father. In early October, his daughter's junior high school was caught up in the unrest. The school wrote to parents about repeated attempts to set fires by people from outside the school. Then the authorities stopped all classes. Ten days after his essay appeared, things grew much worse. On Saturday, October 17th, French authorities counted about 550,000 marchers across the country. The organizers claimed about 800,000. Masked groups set fires, they looted hundreds of shops, they attacked public buildings. The historic city hall in Limoges nearly burned to the ground. By Sunday, at least 2,400 people had been arrested. What is happening to France? And how should we, as Christians, read it? Let me begin with the schools. The protests started in mid-September at a high school just outside Paris. Teachers went on strike over empty positions and missing funds. The students joined them. Soon, schools all across France followed. Their demands were concrete: more teachers, smaller classes, buildings that are not falling apart, fairness between rich schools and poor schools. Williams grants that some of these demands may be valid. I agree. Many of these young people sit in crumbling classrooms. Their complaints deserve a hearing. But Williams argues that the violence has very little to do with schools. He points to a deeper wound. The French, he says, have come to feel that the future will never equal the past. They doubt the government can deliver what it promises. So life begins to feel like a pie of fixed size. Every group guards its own slice. Retirees will not give an inch, neither will high schoolers. The anger builds quietly, and then it boils over. He points to videos that spread online. A masked 15-year-old burns a woman's face with a homemade flamethrower. The lobby of a brand new high school goes up in flames. A smiling teenager tells a reporter that the end justifies the means. Williams calls this nihilistic resentment, rage with nowhere to go. Then he makes his sharpest point. France, he says, has a long and bloody tradition of revolt. It runs back through the student uprising of May 1968 all the way to the revolution of 1789. Seen that way, the young rioters of every background are behaving very much like French people. That is a sobering thought. The urge to tear things down is not an import. It is part of France's own inheritance. A Dutch Christian statesman named Gron van Prinsterer saw this back in 1847. In his book Unbelief and Revolution, he argued that the French Revolution grew out of unbelief itself. Once people reject the authority of God, every other authority begins to look arbitrary. Revolution becomes a constant temptation. Abraham Kuyper later built his whole political movement on that insight. We still hear the echo. Williams reports that one mayor near Paris told students that violence can, at some point, be legitimate. The Jacobins would have recognized that logic right away. Now, some of the videos carry religious language. Shouts in the name of Allah, a song that mocks the terror attack at the Bataklan Theater in 2015. Many observers say this proves the whole thing is an Islamist uprising. Williams firmly rejects that reading. He notes that the protesters come from every background. Young white girls even film themselves singing that same song inside a Catholic church. I would push back on Williams in one place. He lumps together everyone who blames Islam as racists and propagandists. That brush is too broad. Not everyone who worries about Islamism in France is a racist. Still, his evidence matters. The French scholar Olivier Roy has argued for years that much of Europe's radicalism works this way. Young people do not begin with deep faith and then turn violent, they begin with rebellion, then they borrow the most defiant language they can find. There is one more thing worth noticing. The revolutionary left and political Islam disagree on almost everything. They hold opposite views on homosexuality and on the place of women. Yet in recent years, parts of both have marched side by side. Some call this the Red-Green Alliance. In 2013, two scholars, Emmanuel Karajanis and Clark Macaulay, studied it. They found the two movements united by shared themes: opposition to capitalism and opposition to what they call Western imperialism. In other words, they share an enemy more than a vision. That enemy is the West, a civilization deeply shaped by Judeo-Christian thought. An alliance like this cannot build anything together. It only agrees on what to tear down, and it finds room to grow in a house that has been swept empty. Jesus once told a story about a house. An unclean spirit leaves a man and wanders. Later it comes back, and listen to what it finds. Then it says, I will return to my house from which I came, and when it comes, it finds the house empty, swept, and put in order. That is Matthew 12, verse 44. Then the spirit brings seven others worse than itself. Jesus spoke those words about his own generation, but I believe the picture fits a civilization too. A society can sweep God out and tidy up the rooms. It can tell itself it is now neutral and safe. But a house does not stay empty for long. Something always moves in. So the deeper question is not only who is rioting, it is why has a generation lost hope? The German philosopher Karl Löwith gave one answer in 1949. He argued that the modern faith in progress grew out of Christian hope. Christians believed history was going somewhere because God would bring it to its end in Christ. The modern world kept the direction and dropped God. Progress took the place of providence. That borrowed hope worked for a while. Each generation expected to live better than the last, but progress cannot carry the weight of eternity. When the economy stalls and the future looks smaller, there is nothing left underneath. Frustration turns into despair. Despair turns into rage. When there is no God who owns and gives, life becomes a fight over a shrinking pie. Scripture shows us a different economy. In the Law of Jubilee, God told Israel, The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine, for you are strangers and sojourners with me. Leviticus 25, verse 23. That law was given to Israel, not to modern France, but its heart still speaks. When God is the owner, we can hold things with open hands. That is why our ministry bears the name Jubilee. Christ is the one who sets us free to live. Now, are we watching signs of the second coming of Christ? I believe the honest answer is yes, but in a specific sense. Jesus said, And you will hear of wars and rumors of wars. See that you are not alarmed, for this must take place, but the end is not yet. A few verses later he added, All these are but the beginning of the birth pains. The Reformed tradition reads these words with care. The New Testament says we have been living in the last days ever since Christ came, so every upheaval in history is a birth pain. And labor pains do not mean the world is dying, they mean something is about to be born. So France is not on a prophetic timetable. Scripture does not name it, and we should not set dates. Jesus was clear, but concerning that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father only. Still, the shaking of nations reminds us where history is going. The King is coming, and his people have already been told how to respond. Now when these things begin to take place, straighten up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near. Christians do not run around saying the sky is falling. We lift our heads. So how should we then live? Francis Schaeffer used that question as the title of a book in 1976. It is still the right question. Let me offer four simple answers. First, we refuse fear. Hebrews tells us we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken. A city hall in Limoges can burn, governments can fall, the kingdom of Christ cannot be shaken. Worship is where we remember this week after week. Second, we seek the good of the city. God told the exiles in Babylon, seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile and pray to the Lord on its behalf. We can pray for France. We can pray for French Christians. We can pray for exhausted police officers, frightened shopkeepers, and angry teenagers alike, and we can work for peace in the places where we live. Third, we speak of our hope gently. Peter tells us to be ready to give a reason for the hope that is in us, yet do it with gentleness and respect. That includes how we speak about immigrants and our Muslim neighbors. We can name dangerous ideas honestly, but every person bears the image of God, and some of them may be searching for the very hope we have. Fourth, we tend the home. The faces in those videos belong to children. A 15 year old does not invent nihilism on his own, he absorbs it. Passing on faith does not wait for elections. It happens at our own kitchen tables. France is shaken, but the Christ's kingdom will not.