Psychology is a Science and its Scope is Narrow
What psychology fails to understand is that if you want all the privileges of a being a science you also have to shoulder all the responsibilities of it. That includes the admission that while what you prognosticate is based on science it only applies to the subjects experimented upon. The people experimented on are generally middle to high class, from western developed countries, educated, and mostly white. You can’t make generalizations to the population at large based on these experiments just like I can’t say my research on a COVID vaccine applies to an AIDS vaccine.
Platitudes thrown around in a culture steeped in modern psychology like, “by and large social risks and vulnerability will pay off”, “humans basically want to do right by each other”, “sex is pleasurable physical fitness”, “I am happiest when I express my identity to the fullest extent”, “people want to talk to me” sound nice rolling off the tongue. And all these phrases hold true for the demographic psychologists experiment on but far less for those they don’t. It’s like a vaccine that works far worse on variants.
Additionally practices like setting boundaries backfire for the large proportion of the marginalized who are generally in exploitative or abusive situations. In most of the world one must mute their identity just to survive. You can’t be out and proud in Afghanistan or anywhere Pentecostal Christianity has taken power. Also individualism is a luxury of rich countries. In poor ones you are stationed in webs of interdependence and if you were to go it alone you wouldn’t make it very far.
They Lie, You Die
As you may well know over 1,000 people are dying of COVID per day as of today September 4, 2021. About 95% of COVID deaths are of unvaccinated individuals. That means if everybody were vaccinated we’d contend with around 50 deaths per day instead of 1,000. Basically a we’d have a September 11 every two months instead of more than twice a week.
What makes these deaths especially emotionally rending is a lot of these people didn’t realize they were being lied to. And the authority they were bending to such as posts on social media is amorphous so there is no way to hold any single entity culpable. We were hunter gatherers most of our evolution and assigned a chieftain to lead the tribe. He was not a despot. If he didn’t lead well securing food and water for the tribe his days of authority were numbered. With the authority we have now which often comes via the media and social media there is no real way to hold someone’s feet to the fire. In ancient Mesopotamia in the Code of Hammurabi an engineer could be put to death if the building they designed fell on people. What we have now is exactly the opposite, nobody is culpable for anything using the cover of “free speech”.
However when we look to how things perform in the engine of late stage capitalism we discover there are forces put in place to make things work with the grain of our nature. For example finding jobs often works more like our tribal nature where a friend vouches for you for a position the idea being that if that hire didn’t turn out their feet are put to the fire. And when an incident actually goes against the grain of late stage capitalism it is set right right away. For example when a day care center painted Disney characters on their wall they got sued right away.
But capitalism and social media algorithms don’t care about life, they are just designed to get us addicted and spending as much as possible. It’s especially heart wrenching when the lies produce unnecessary death.
A Couple Things That Feed Depression in the Modern World
The fact that you have to perform security. Psychologists and people cutting you off will slap the “insecure” label on you. That’s all well and good but what the insecure label really means is you aren’t performing security. Let’s face it, interactions in modern life are very stratified. There is income, appearance, and power asymmetry and this makes interactions (particular for those at the bottom) fraught. Those of us on the bottom, even though we are generally regarded as little more than part of the furniture, are expected to believe the delusion that, in fact, we are in an egalitarian space and use what little charisma we have to make the room appear this way. Naturally, putting on this act is taxing and depressing for those on the bottom.
The fact that lying to yourself produces negative emotion. One thing that undergirds modern psychology is the idea that there is no absolute truth, everything is just malleable and pliable and the highest good is getting the most performance out of the self the same way with better technology they can squeeze more horsepower out of a car’s engine. A large portion of modern psychology is just you playing cognitive tricks in order to get more of what you want out of life. I even read an article that said you should try to think negative thoughts about eating ice cream when you are eating it so you eat it less. There was no mention of what this deception would do to your psyche. Cognitive reframing is another thing. You are taught by therapists to interpret people’s judgements of you as a negative of them instead of you. You can do this for a while but eventually a good friend who cuts you off is going to expose that yeah, people are rejecting you because of you, not some insecurity in them. Cognitive tricks can help in the short term but in the long run deceiving yourself is just going to net you deeper depression.
Reasons Millennials and Zoomers are Leaving the Church
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.
On Insecurity
People tend to gaslight you calling you “insecure” when society thinks you’re a piece of shit and you internalize it. What they fail to realize is value merits a quantitative assessment, not a qualitative one. If you are of low value then yeah you are going to feel bad about yourself, that’s telling you your place in society and keeping you from being “too big for your britches”. “Security” is something society expects you to perform. You are doing so to keep others comfortable, not for yourself. In a world where you can be fired, cut off, or divorced for any or no reason there really is no security to be had.
Religion and Mental Illness
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.
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