Atheist Says Christians Can Be Leaders in Society, Anxious Generation Review, Part 2

Last week, I wrote a synopsis of four action steps The Anxious Generation author Jonathan Haidt recommends to end the current epidemic of mental illness. Haidt calls for a return to the play-based childhood which will require simple, but necessary, changes by parents, schools and governments. I’m linking to it below in case you missed it.

The Anxious Generation: A Book Review, Part 1

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Distracted from God

In an April interview, Jonathan Haidt, author of The Anxious Generation, put forth the idea that when it comes to ending the phone-based childhood, “Christian families and Christian schools really have a chance to lead on this.”

Haidt, an atheist, lays out a compelling case that giving kids internet connected devices is causing mental illness. There are Christian leaders who have dipped their toes in this water, but Haidt has made his argument on a much larger stage. In fact, he included in his NY Times best selling book an entire chapter on religion, entitled “Spiritual Elevation and Degradation.”

Before jumping into the chapter’s message, we need to know who Haidt is. Pulling from his bio, his writings, and his interviews, he identifies himself as a social psychologist, atheist, husband, father of two, ethnic Jew, and professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business. He received his PhD from UPenn and previously taught at UVA. If the Christian community is looking for someone to give us instructions on how to stop the mental health crisis that is plaguing today’s teens, Haidt doesn’t quite fit our typical mold. Yet, to support his arguments, he quotes Jesus, the Torah, King David, Christian apologist Blaise Pascal, and Martin Luther King Jr. Full disclosure: Haidt also pulls from Hinduism, Buddhism, and his favorite Sociologist, Émile Durkheim in the religion chapter of his book.

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

The Claim

“The phone-based life produces spiritual degradation, not just in adolescents, but in all of us,” writes Haidt.

Whoa. That’s a big statement. But is it true? Can a meaningful, scripture backed, case be made that a life tethered to the internet is pulling us away from the holy? Haidt isn’t dogging on flip phones or landlines, he is making a particular case against smartphones, social media, tablets, internet connect video games, and entertainment based uses of computers.

Laying out six spiritual practices, Haidt postulates that the phone-based life “is incompatible with many of the behaviors that religious and spiritual communities practice.” Because of this, he puts forward the idea that religious people in particular are extremely capable of taking a leadership role in changing culture. I think he is on to something here. Let’s dive into three of the six practices and consider what role Christians can play.

“Shared Sacredness”

Haidt correctly points out, “Strong communities don’t just magically appear whenever people congregate and communicate.” Humans need to experiences things together - in time, in space, and in unison. In other words, we need collective experiences. Christians have collective experiences such as Sunday worship, communion, and directed prayer. We have these experiences, in collective locations like church buildings. In those locations, we recognize collective objects that are meaningful, such as an image of the cross, stained glass windows representing a Biblical narrative, or a pulpit. Émile Durkheim called this the “sacred world.” The humdrum daily routine of life, Durkheim labels as the “profane world.” (It is important to note that even a large sporting event could be considered “sacred” in the sense that it is a collective experience. But this isn’t Sociology 101, so let’s move on.) Durkheim, and Haidt, say we live mostly in the profane world, so these moments of sacred are especially meaningful, and necessary, to human life.

Photo by Greyson Joralemon on Unsplash

“In the virtual world, there is no daily, weekly or annual calendar that structures when people can and cannot do things. Nothing ever closes, so everyone acts on their own schedule,” writes Haidt. For example, we might choose to skip a Sunday morning worship gathering and stream it later that day while folding the laundry. The message from the pastor is the same, but the experience is different. Continuing to draw from Durkheim, Haidt says in the online world, “Everything is available to every individual, all the time, with little or no effort. There is no Sabbath and there are no holy days. Everything is profane.” When everything is profane, we don’t have collective experiences. Even the natural rhythms of the church calendar can be forgotten or seen as oppressive. What does this mean for community and our place in it? What does this mean for kids and teens who are in process of learning what society is?

The Church is uniquely situated to address the mental health epidemic precisely because we continue to have collective experiences. The days of joining a network or club have all but disappeared in society as more people have moved their “social time” online (think of the Kiwanis Club or Junior League). Instead of floating aimlessly through the virtual world, Christians should keep the Sabbath holy and talk to our friends and neighbors about how to reclaim time and space as it was intended to be. In Hebrews 10:25, followers of God were told to not give up meeting together. In other words, we were told to have collective experiences. 2,000 years later it is still true.

“Stillness, Silence and Focus”

“The phone-based life makes it difficult for people to be fully present with others when they are with others, and to sit silently with themselves when they are alone,” writes Haidt. Don’t we all feel that it’s hard to be fully present? Look around during church services, in meetings, at playgrounds, in waiting rooms, at restaurants, or in your own living room. Everywhere you look people are physically present with others and yet staring at a screen. If you are under the age of 18, you can’t remember a time when this wasn’t true.

As to sitting silently, I’m reminded of 1 Kings 19 when the prophet Elijah is (to put it mildly) at a low point in his life. Verses 11-12 tell us, “then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake came a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper.” Sometimes God gets our attention in big ways, but most often it is in these quiet, still moments that the Holy Spirit speaks to us.

Photo by Roberta Piana on Unsplash

Haidt makes the case that humans need stillness and silence and to achieve it, “we must reduce the flow of stimulation into our eyes and ears.” The Bible tells us in Psalm 46:10, “Be still and know that I am God.” When we raise our children with constant distraction just a click away, we are robbing them of the opportunity to deepen an awareness of the Holy Spirit.

Stillness. Silence. Focus. Prayer. These things are more vital than Haidt even begins to understand.

“Be Slow to Anger, Quick to Forgive”

Pardon the long quote, but Haidt’s words are too good to pass up:

We are too quick to anger and too slow to forgive. We are also hypocrites who judge others harshly while automatically justifying our own bad behavior. As Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount, “Do not judge, so that you may not be judged. For the judgement you give will be the judgement you get, and the measure you give will be the measure you get.” Jesus was not telling us to avoid judging others entirely; he was warning us to judge thoughtfully, and to beware of using different standards for others than we use for ourselves. In the next verse he says, “Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye but do not notice the log in your own eye?” He urges us to fix ourselves first, before we criticize anyone else. Social media trains us to do the opposite. It encourages us to make rapid public judgements with little concern for the humanity of those we criticize.

Is Facebook helping us engage in thoughtful discourse or just making us angry at those who thinking differently than us? Do group texts lead to more understanding or more sarcasm?

Getting angry quickly and being unwilling to forgive a wrong, doesn’t contribute to developing strong relationships. Teaching our sons and daughters to see everyone as being made in the image of God must be done in real life, not behind a screen. In the virtual world, the nature of the platforms encourage curt responses and scrolling on to the next post.

Garbage & Next Steps

Haidt rightly points out, “There is a hole, an emptiness in us all, that we strive to fill. If it doesn’t get filled with something noble and elevated, modern society will quickly pump it full of garbage.” When it comes to media, “we need to take back control of our inputs. We need to take back control of our lives.” Haidt doesn’t believe that the “God-shaped hole” Pascal wrote about can be filled by the Almighty. For those of us who do, would rejecting the modern norm of smartphones for teenagers help us point people to Jesus? Would it help point our own kids to Jesus?

These devices, these always on, never leave our side, constant companions, are leading to spiritual degradation according to Haidt. Dear Christian Parent, I believe we can train our sons and daughters on how to exist in community, how to pray, and how to forgive. We can teach them that there is eternal value in being in-person, in being quiet, and in being kind. To do it well, Haidt say we need to rethink giving smartphones to kids and teens. A lot of people in the secular world are taking note. So, my Dear, fellow Christian Parent, where do we go from here?

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Next Monday is Labor Day so I will be taking a week off here at Dear Christian Parent and not sending out a new article. In the mean time, you can read more about Haidt’s charge to Christians here:

Want to learn more? I’d encourage you to pick up a copy of Haidt’s book or check out his Substack,

After Babel

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