Those of privilege have all that power. All the marginalized have is their story.
People can only believe God is sovereign by cutting off people who are the spitting image of God not being sovereign.
People who say God is near those his people are drawing away from are lying.
Something unfalsifiable can’t be true. There is no failure condition for “God’s tender care”.
Often, Christians are leaving your life for the same reason you’re not one.
I’ll believe in the power of prayer when I see those in power trying to suppress it as vigorously as they do voting and collective bargaining.
Mixed-faith marriages are common, while mixed-class ones aren’t because what matters most is God’s opinion of you, not your opinion of him.
People abhor your fatalism and yet they employ it as they’re judging you.
The idea that God is near to those on the margins is unfalsifiable because those on the margins have no voice so anyone experiencing the opposite is shut up rather quickly.
I go to church. People blather on about hope, but they use conjecture when judging me. I figure if conjecture is being used on me, it’s worth using.
A kinder world disproportionately benefits the neurotic and the weak, which is why it’s looked upon with suspicion by the strong.
People tell you to pray in faith, but that means if people were praying in faith for you to get that good job, they would have to treat you like you already had that good job! So you would be treated well in church no matter what.
People don’t like to admit it but without belief you are nothing to God. This is true for the Evangelicals where belief gets you to God and without it you’re dammed. Even though you are required to play lip service to the idea that you are being loved unconditionally, you aren’t.
On a more universal perspective the placebo effect you get from really believing in God is largely what makes you experience his peace. The first thing to go in a dying faith is the placebo response and once that’s totally gone everything else deteriorates rapidly after. The placebo effect is a sweet, beautiful thing, there was a Ketamine study where the group that got the drug and the group that got the placebo both showed signs of their depression improving. Hope is powerful and we shouldn’t ridicule those who try to get it by any means necessary.
Mental illness is rising, but teen girls have taken the worst of it. My take is different than most people’s:
Mixed messages about their worth as human beings. Innate worth or no is the soul’s inner ear. You have to navigate the world with it one way or the other, you can’t navigate it by switching back and forth. Modern psychology seems to think a human’s innate worth is axiomatic when it is, in fact, aspirational. Humans having worth was a Judeo-Christian ideal rooted in God’s commandments and was always something one strived towards as a part of sanctification. It was never a given and one could opt entirely out of this.
Modern psychology took the innate worth ideal and made it a centerpiece of their philosophy not realizing that it’s something people had zero incentive to opt in to. The worth of a person with nothing to offer will not be seen unless the person doing the seeing is commanded to do so and obeys the commandment. Outside the Judeo-Christian system, the command still might be there but it’s more toothless because it comes from modern psychology whose rules are optional rather than Judeo-Christian whose rules are commanded. On a more practical level, it means there is a chasm between how people expect to be treated (as if they have innate worth) and how they are treated (as they don’t). The imperative to value people beyond what they offer becomes an unfinanced mandate.
Lack of kindness in the world. A kinder world is worth more than all the therapists in the world. A culture that doesn’t see people as moral agents suffers because it can’t even measure the problem. Modern psychology wants us to believe that humans are basically good and this sets us up for misery when expectations of people’s behavior don’t match reality. Kindness has been conflated with weakness and is discouraged in many circles. The world is more competitive so one must often play dirty to get ahead.
The other issue is the internet amplifies all the existing unkindness. Bullies used to not have access to people once they left the schoolyard but now with Instagram, they have access 24/7. It doesn’t help that a lot of men are checking out of relating to women in a healthy way and finding misogynistic communities like Redpill/Incel.
Mixed messages about being your “authentic self.” It’s like flooring the gas and the brake. There has never been a time when one was expected to conform and be their “authentic self” simultaneously. You can’t have a blank avatar, you must dress it up, but you have to do it in such a way that expresses your individuality while simultaneously appeasing your peers. And navigating ever-shifting norms handed down by an amorphous authority driven mainly by algorithms.
Young people are kept from ascertaining the blowback of being their “authentic selves.” In the past teens would make the calculation to suppress part of themselves to fit in but that doesn’t happen as much anymore. This is because individual expression is the highest good and being closeted is the worst thing a person can be. I think there is some truth to this, but one must make the calculation carefully which many people aren’t encouraged to do by society anymore.
More knowledge. You would think more knowledge would be good, but it’s not. Part of teen girls’ mental illness struggles stem from seeing how women are treated in society, for example, #metoo. Also, being connected online with older generations, they see how tough it is to make it in the world and how hard finding a good relationship is.
Frequent malignant spaces. For all the criticism one could levy against traditional institutions, their spaces (schools, churches, government, etc..), while being easily corruptible, did not have corruption baked in. One can’t say the same about the spaces teen girls frequent. Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok are all designed to keep you addicted and feed you content to get you hooked regardless of whether it’s healthy. YouTube algorithms will provide men with misogynistic Redpill content if they start watching Jordan Peterson videos. Internet companies are not held to a higher good like traditional institutions; they are accountable to their shareholders. That’s how capitalism works (something the younger generation is turning against).
Grim collective future. Modern society is exceptionally individualistic which is an unnatural state of being in the context of most of history. This means our entire mental health treatment program is focused on the atomized individual and as long as our future improves things will look up. But humans are communal creatures and deep down know the hyper-focus on the individual divorced from the larger group is an aberration. A lot of mental illness comes from experiencing and reflecting on things collectively. The lack of kindness in the world, the lack of people to look up to, the dying planet, the refugee crisis, the war on women’s healthcare, threats from AI and adversary nations, etc.. All these things can’t be swept away with breathing exercises. Even if one is well off individually this collective miasma is still playing out in the background. Mindfulness and focusing on the present and the individual self will not help much because we were meant for community and a hopeful future, and we have neither.
As my powers of articulation wane I leave more thoughts about why those who are mentally ill often don’t stick with the faith.
Psychotic breaks often involve what the sufferer perceives to be direct revelation from God and/or experiences of demons/the devil. After recovering one is expected to renounce these experiences as merely artifacts of the mind. But to recant what to you felt like firsthand experiences of the divine is in many ways more difficult spiritually than simple apostasy because you weren’t turning away from something you believed, you were turning away from something you had firsthand experience of (even if it was revealed later to be psychosis, it wasn’t experienced as psychosis or remembered that way in your mind). There becomes a dissonance where people around you are pushing the faith on you yet denying your experiences of God while psychotic. This dissonance, coupled with the fact that renouncing the experiences of God you had while psychotic already felt like an apostasy makes the second apostasy, actually leaving the faith, almost effortless.
There’s a kind of “kinetic materialism” that comes from the experience of mental illness. After my psychotic break I was on so much anti-psychotic medication that for a certain while I had zero inner monologue, no original thoughts, and I hardly talked. My dose was eventually dropped down but that experience stuck with me and gave me a more philosophically materialist view of the person. If a mental illness (or drugs treating said illness) could do so much damage to a person that to the outside observer it seemed like their soul was severed from their body (this blog’s namesake) then personhood must be seated in the confines of the brain and the mind is just what the brain does.
Mental illness makes you less of a good person by torpedoing the machinations of the conscience by jamming the channels of negative emotion that were supposed to be used by your conscience. Instead of feeling shame and guilt when appropriate you are inundated with these negative emotions. You don’t know which guilt to feel guilty over or which shame to be ashamed about. It also prevents you from feeling good when you do good. Treatments for mental illness like SSRI antidepressants generally numb negative emotion and mitigate stress but this can also cause you to lose touch with your conscience because there is not the correct amount of negative emotion to ground you. So it becomes easier to be assertive regardless of the consequences which is a double edged sword because this can be done for good or evil.
God’s absence is felt more acutely than his presence and sickness spreads more easily than health. Mental illness isn’t something people talk about because it smashes their neat little world of votive candles and comfort food. Chaos begets chaos. It can be an intractable problem and in a world where everything is supposed to have a fix this is off people’s map.
Hot on the heels of an article showing only 36% of millennials belong to a place of worship I give you some reasons I think the younger generation are leaving in droves:
We don’t “experience God”
Let’s face it, for the younger generation mental illness is rampant, some surveys say half of them struggle with one. Seeking an experience of God while depressed is like drinking salt water. Anxiety is basically God not showing up, hard. In bipolar and schizophrenia one’s experience of God can even turn against you telling you to do all kinds of crazy stuff to mess up your life. People selling Christianity double down on the promise of experience of God because people want it and a lot of the mentally healthy people (who generally have the wealth and charisma) can do a serviceable job of feeling it. The rest of us not so much.
Inability to perform.
Let’s face it, Christianity is performance art. A lot of being in the faith revolves around selling the idea to others that you are, in fact, a Christian. It’s an image thing, the same way one has to produce an image to try to “make it” in any scene. A cornerstone value of millennials and zoomers is authenticity which flies in the face of this. They want to be real and they want to be loved for who they really are, flaws and all. The fact that they are leaving the church in droves shows that they aren’t finding acceptance there.
Short attention spans.
Computers and smartphones have shortened people’s attention spans so much that it takes a lot of effort or is even impossible for some people to get anything out of the writings of the church fathers and other texts that require fixed attention. In the age of Tik Tok sermons go over people’s head.
Branding certain identities sin.
Being anti LGBTQ is a non-starter with zoomers. Identity is a huge part of who they are, so much so that on their Twitter handle they often have emoji’s to show it off. For example a wheelchair symbol and a rainbow mean someone has a disability and is queer. Biblical admonitions against sexual sin were attempts to attack an act but modern Christians have decided to attack actual identities that happen to encompass certain sins. Of course they are selective with this, they won’t attack greedy people who are rich because that isn’t a marginalized group. Any attack on identity is a direct attack on a person’s core being. Older people often don’t realize this because identity wasn’t so important for most of history.
Church is too loud and the lights are too bright.
The idea of worship being a performance has been driven more by the boomers than the younger generation. But they can sell it as being for the younger generation because we all like to be entertained. Unfortunately a lot of younger people are on the autistic spectrum or have other issues with loud music and bright lights. The younger generation is awash in more entertainment than they could enjoy in 100 lifetimes; what they want is authenticity and love which is a lot harder and more sacrificial to perform than Sunday worship.
We are too much for Christians.
People with mental illnesses (which millennials and zoomers often have) need more self care and thus can’t perform up to a level society and the church expects of them. Because of the often conservative bent of churches this gets them branded lazy and accused of committing sins of omission. We need people who are going to do the dirty work of being part of our self care instead of trying to get us to perform more when we don’t have the mental bandwidth to do so. Sometimes this just means spending quantity of time with us from which quality time often coalesces. It’s counter cultural but the culture isn’t serving all but the people on top’s interests now. In my own life being bipolar 1 I’ve noticed that I’m “too much” for pastors and Christian friends so they ghost me when I open up to them.
We fail at late stage capitalism.
Let’s face it, my and many other poor people’s experience shows that if you don’t have money you get treated like garbage in church. Part of this is just American culture which equates your worth as a person with how well you perform at late stage capitalism. Christianity often goes a step further in the health and wealth gospel and the progress-oriented “Purpose Driven Life” gospel implying that there is a spiritual deficit in the lack of material success. Men without money are branded manfails. Millennials and zoomers often struggle financially because there are less good jobs than there are people and housing is ridiculously expensive. A lot of them have turned away from capitalism entirely embracing socialists like Bernie Sanders. To a lot of them any faith wed to an economic system they already find abhorrent (as it finds them so in return) is a non starter.
Inability to concoct a redemptive narrative.
The Christian story, like many stories, involves suffering and heartache but ultimate redemption in the end. This has seeped into people’s individual stories, now people of faith are expected to concoct redemptive stories of their own life how “God was at work” or whatever regardless of how difficult astroturfing the bad stuff to make things make sense in hindsight is. Millennials and zoomers have lived through wars, recessions, (often) divorces and other trauma. They have been brought up in a culture that believes bad things are just bad and often leave a permanent stain or worse. To expect them to concoct a redemptive narrative out of a life that could involve rape, abuse, destitution, mental illness, disability, injury, etc.. is just too hard of a slog. Also when you add mental illness this makes people more likely to see their life without a positive spin (maybe the people who pay 10k of therapy can concoct a redemptive narrative out of their situation). As for me I lost my ability to live on my own and half of my friends to a psychotic break. Disability based prejudice and mental illness have made me a net drain on society instead of a net gain and (obviously) made me persona non grata in church.
Hell doesn’t play well.
You could make the argument that hell never played well but it certainly doesn’t now. The younger generation has skyrocketing rates of mental illness and are in their heads a whole lot. Saying you are going to be tortured for eternity over something that is subject to the vagaries of your mind is cruel and unusual. People have enough psychological trauma as it is. People are already afraid enough of death but Christians just have to make it worse. I get that it was a deterrent to keep people from bad behavior and before technology aided policing was pretty successful at keeping people in line. They need to find something better to keep people in line that doesn’t ruin some people psychologically.
Most of Christianity promises positive experiences of God for adherents and converts. The experience of mental illness is exactly the opposite of this. So if Christianity could cure or even do a serviceable job of treating mental illness we would expect the zoomers to be the most religious generation (as about 50% of them have a mental illness). However what we end up seeing in the opposite. Each successive generation has more mental illness and less religiosity than the previous one. I don’t think this is a coincidence because in my and many other’s experience religion doesn’t help with mental illness at all. If religion truly helped mental illness churches would be packed with millennials and zoomers.
People pushing religion have doubled down on their extravagant promises of “God’s presence” but are finding fewer takers because the people who can concoct some kind of experience of God with their brains that isn’t toxic are few and far between.
One of the things God really hates is Twitter. He hates it because it’s ugly and nasty. What do you expect the true voices of the marginalized to sound like, puppies and rainbows? The whole thrust of Judeo-Christian religion involved telling those on the bottom the lie that God was close to those on the margins mainly so they would shut up and not fight for their rights. The truth is anything you say about those on the margins is unfalsifiable because people with no voice say that runs counter to those in power’s narrative will be shut down quickly. That doesn’t happen on Twitter! You can shout those on the margins down but you can’t shut them up.
Another reason God hates Twitter is more nuanced. According to the Bible the secret things of a person’s heart were meant to be judged by God, not people. Twitter short circuits this with campaigns like #metoo and #blacklivesmatter. It’s as if people’s sins were resting in a cocoon until judgement and humankind via Twitter cut the cocoon instead of letting the sins emerge and take flight in the seat of judgement.
It seems that society has shifted where you used to have to give an answer for the hope that was in you (1 Peter 3:15) where now it’s expected of you that you give an answer for the hope you don’t have. For me there is a real good reason for this because I have a visible physical disability which makes my every interaction with the world an incursion.
Yes they have gotten rid of those ugly laws of the early 20th century but don’t think things have improved much as people would like you to believe My whole life I have been rejected for jobs because of my disability and it’s gotten worse in the past three years. In fact one recruiter even blatantly said I need to somehow make people comfortable with my physical disability (as, as I already understood at the time, it was an incursion on the abled world). A subsequent interview I brought up my visual impairment about three quarters of the way through the interview and they were like, “we thought you couldn’t see”. At least they were honest.
I’m grateful for the Black Lives Matter chant, “no justice, no peace”, but I’d like to add to that, “no goodness, no hope”. I have found no goodness in the vocational world so am under no obligation to hope. People in power strongly dislike the fact that a lot of us are hopeless because hopelessness by definition means that something in the environment has to change in order to restore hope. Asking for goodness in the wasteland of late stage capitalism is just too much of an ask.
To take it further modern psychology’s imperative to hope makes even less sense than Christianity’s. With Christianity you ideally have a supportive community around you and (if you have the capacity to believe it) a good thing coming in the afterlife. Modern psychology (which is the primary driver of late stage capitalism) gives an imperative to hope without giving an imperative to virtue. People need to pay into the system via virtue to be able to withdraw from it in the form of hope. Goodness is what germinates hope, when there isn’t goodness people still want to be seen as good so they still give you the imperative to hope and trust. But this just does more harm than good as you are just immobilized by the blowback of shitty people.
Helping professionals generally have empathy but they can’t put them selves in the shoes of the average businessman who will be much more judgmental than them when it comes time to give jobs. Because if this they mistakenly believe you have more hope than you actually do.
I’ve gotten a lot of flack from liberals for not believing man is basically good. My experience has shown that a good portion of people are shitty when you need them most. Of course with all my pathologies I’m not one that generally attracts good people in the first place. Good people are like castles, they are generally moated and won’t let you in unless you have a lot to offer.
I think the battle verses good and evil is one each one has to fight within our selves. Most of us actually do OK so the statement that most people are good is true, but people extrapolate that to assume that man is basically good and that doesn’t hold water. This whole thing about abolishing the police is absolutely ridiculous. Five percent of the population commits 90% of the crime and these bad apples will run rampant should you dial back the policing of them.
I’m don’t hold a Calvinist view believing in total depravity but I understand that back in the olden days when you had a society that wasn’t so heavily policed you had to get people to behave and make their morality internal and the stick does a better job with that than the carrot. But I don’t think man is as good as modern psychology makes us out to be. I think that’s largely because psychology draws upon the experience of upper class people in developed countries who have generally been in a place of law and order and relative comfort.
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