“It’s Been a While Since I’ve Done the Church Thing”

I had a conversation this morning with a young woman in a bad place. Abusive boyfriend, unstable living arrangements, struggling to afford groceries. I offered her a grocery card, my best wishes. Prayer. She looked at me sheepishly at the mention of prayer, meeting my gaze for almost the first time since our conversation began. “Thanks… You know, it’s been a while since I’ve really done the church thing.” “Well, no time like the present,” I said. “You’re always welcome.” She said she’d think about it. A lot of people say they’ll think about it.

This young woman is hardly alone. It’s been a while since lot of people have “done the church thing.” There are many reasons for the decline of the institutional church in the West. I know them well, you probably do, too. But that’s not what’s on my mind this morning. I couldn’t help but think of this young woman’s comment in connection with the theme of yesterday’s post, about how our attention spans are being obliterated in the age of the infinite scroll and on-demand everything. If ever we were in need of a narrative of meaning beyond ourselves and our own desires, it would be now.

I recently listened to Ezra Klein’s interview with Jonathan Haidt, whose book The Anxious Generation has been generating quite the buzz. Haidt’s basic thesis is that smart phones and social media are destroying young minds and should be heavily regulated before at least age 16. I enthusiastically agree with him. What struck me about the interview wasn’t so much the terrifying data (I’m relatively familiar with this by now), but with the rationale Klein brought up at various points in the interview. Instead of appealing to negative mental health outcomes or suicide stats or evidence of relational dysfunctions or all the usual suspects, he talked about things like moral formation, human flourishing, even virtue:

Kids need moral formation. They need a structure, a shared moral framework. Morality only works like language. You can’t have your own language and you can’t have your own morality. It only works as a shared system, an order. And once kids move on to social media, it’s just a million little fragments of nonsense. There’s no moral order…

I was listening to a conversation with you [Haidt] some years ago and you said something like, it is just bad for teenage girls to be endlessly posting pictures of themselves on the internet for other people to rate…  And I, I remember thinking that’s so unbelievably f**king obvious and so much not how we actually just talk about it. Because what you were making there was fundamentally moral judgment…

I know behind it, there’s evidence and, but I do find that within the conversation about social media and the way we’re, we’re constructing childhood, there is this demand to bring the studies. And I’ve said this before. I think if you could prove to me that it doesn’t matter at all for anxiety at 16 or earnings at 23, whether or not kids spend 2.5 hours or three hours a day on TikTok, I think it would change my view of whether they should do that 0%.

Because I just think it’s a bad way to live and it’s a bad way to live for other reasons. I think it’ll create by nature, it creates self obsession… And even if I couldn’t find correlates there of bad outcomes, I have a view on what it means to be a, like a flourishing human being. That should not include too much of that… And this is where things feel like they, they ran aground to me. And a lot of the debates, I feel like parenting and the culture parents come from now, unless you are in some form of church, basically is incredibly insecure about making these judgements…

I think this is a huge failure in parenting culture. This just inability to say we have views on what is good or bad. And they don’t require sixteen years of randomized controlled trials. They’re just actually our views on virtue….

I couldn’t agree more. I don’t need to see the mental health data. Even if, by some miracle, the kids were all doing just fine, if they were hitting it out of the park academically, if their relationships were solid, if their social skills were developing normally, if they were out there earning and adulting in healthy ways, I would still think that spending four hours a day staring at a phone flicking through garbage content would be a poor way to spend a human life. We were made for more than this.

Back to Ezra Klein. Klein is, so far as I can tell, a more or less secular Jew. But he acknowledges that the kinds of moral frameworks that can make sense of arguments like his have tended to come from religion.

And at some point the religious counter forces weakened so much that the system fell out of equilibrium. And now the religious forces are just not very powerful at all. I’m not myself highly religious, but I I do think that these were countervailing players and we just don’t have them anymore. And like the evidence of that being a problem is actually all around us.

I’m always fascinated by people who say, “You know, I’m not myself religious, but hmm, religious frameworks sure seem to have provided some things that I kinda wish were still around.” Sometimes I feel like saying, “Perhaps if you dislike the world irreligion is producing you might, I don’t know, consider being religious yourself? It’s a crazy thought, I know. But hey, the world is weird place!”

Obligatory caveat:  Yes, I am well aware that “becoming religious” doesn’t magically solve every problem, that religious people can be just as lost in the infinite scroll as anyone else, that religious people can be narcissists, too, etc., etc., etc. I get it.

But still. At the very least, we have a coherent language of human flourishing and virtue that sure seems necessary these days. As a culture, it’s been a while since we’ve done that church thing. Maybe it’s time to give it a try?