March 7, 2023
Dear Leland and Everett,
It’s hard to overstate the level of acrimony and antipathy in America today, at least relative to my lifetime and the lifetimes of anyone I know. To be fair: the hostility doesn’t seep into daily life for most Americans; most of us like our neighbors, like our communities, and generally feel safe and secure with the people we encounter face to face. But on the news, and on social media, we are exposed to an undigestible amount of boorish behavior, including violence, ignorance, and blatant tribalism. The tribalism is perhaps the most shocking to me: we pretty regularly see otherwise rational individuals convince themselves of incredible falsehoods, whether it be rationalizing the behaviors of the members of their own tribe, or demonizing the members of other tribes. Perhaps even more remarkable: all tribes have convinced themselves that they are the rational ones, and that the rest have lost touch with reality. The truth, so far as I can tell, is that all our tribes have lost touch with reality. And I speak from some experience: I’ve experienced the destabilizing effect of spending too much time watching the news or social media, and I’ve watched others go through similar experiences.
In our current culture, our default is to blame: it’s the MAGA Republicans! Or the Woke Democrats! Or the mainstream media! Or social media! We either blame another tribe for our individual and collective problems, or we blame the institutions we think should be protecting us from the bad guys.
I’ve spent a lot of time and energy disengaging from the ritualistic dance of our time, whereby we identify some boorish behavior via social media or the news, and get righteous and judgmental, only to have members of another tribe dismiss our concerns. Then another tribe will identify some boorish behavior, and then my tribe trivializes, dismisses, or justifies the behavior (or even blames the offended tribe of being the original cause of the boorish behavior). It’s all very…juvenile. And yet practically our whole society is currently sucked into participating in this dance of righteousness and judgement.
There are several contributing factors to today’s bitterness and hostility. The internet and especially social media are a new communication paradigm, where we haven’t yet established the rules for governance (interesting thought exercise: Adolph Hitler rose to power partly because he leveraged the new but as yet unregulated communication technology of his day: the radio; we later created rules of governance, establishing clear boundaries around what was acceptable behavior over the airwaves. But bad actors exploited the lack of rules before they existed). Our political parties are becoming more polarized, for reasons too complex to explore today. But one, I think, under-examined cause of today’s acrimony is the decline of spirituality and religion in our population.
Spirituality is almost impossible to define, so I’ll use religion as a proxy. From WWII until 1985, more than 70% of Americans claimed to belong to a church (or synagogue, or mosque, etc). From 1985 until almost the end of the millennium, church membership hovered in the high 60s% to low 70s%. Since about the start of the millennium, church attendance has fallen in an almost linear fashion, such that by 2020, only 47% of American claimed membership. Church membership has declined in all age groups, but the older (58% of baby boomers) retain church membership at much higher rates than the young (36% of millennials).
I am one of those who dropped out. My family attended church almost every Sunday while I was growing up; we also attended Sunday School, Sunday night youth group activities, and Wednesday night dinners at the church. Later, I attended church sporadically in college while I explored my beliefs. After college, I attended churches and served in youth groups until around the age of 30; since then I’ve rarely attended church.
The biggest reason for my dropping out is, I think, common: churches were designed with families in mind. The assumption was that families would join the church, where the family could get all the benefits that the church had to offer (typically with activities arranged for each member of the family, tailored by age, gender, and/or interest). As my generation (and those behind me) delayed marriage and kids, we didn’t really sense we had a place in the church.
And then there were the neo-evangelicals. For much of my younger life, Christians were in the news primarily when conservatives expressed moral outrage or banded together for political purposes. The neo-evangelical churches grew, partly because they solved some of the problems traditional churches struggled to overcome: they were more inviting, typically helped you find a small community right away (helping provide a sense of belonging), and provided activities to get you engaged (deepening your commitment to the community and cause). The problem was that the theology tended toward rigidity and shallowness. Traditionalists scoffed at the lack of nuance, but what the neo-evangelicals lacked in nuance they made up for in confidence and esprit-de-corps. Unfortunately, the intellectually inclined, especially amongst the traditionalists, wanted to distance themselves from the dogma of the evangelicals, and came to associate Christianity itself with the behaviors of the evangelicals. Today, particularly living on the coasts, one weighs the potential social stigma of joining a church.
Why does the decline in church membership matter? For one thing, a shared faith gave Americans some shared values. This helped people sort out their differences by appealing to common values. Today I find that we have few shared values, and hold few things commonly sacred. A lack of shared values makes compromise almost impossible beyond pure horse-trading.
Religion also acts as a governor on poor behavior. Religions provide us with a bit of moral code; the irreligious still have moral codes, but I find that individually-designed moral codes tend to be more malleable and fluid than religious morality. (To be clear: the religious have no monopoly on piety, and have indeed perpetrated innumerable atrocities. What the irreligious sometimes miss is that bad behavior is part of the human condition, and the religious are by no means immune). Point being: what some define as bad behavior is evolving remarkably rapidly, to the degree that our moral code lacks intellectual consistency.
But I think the biggest problem with our rapidly declining religiosity is that we’re neglecting our spiritual selves. As much as we try to convince ourselves that we are becoming homo rationalis, humans are spiritual beings. One could argue that our spirituality is a ‘bug’ (computer programming slang for flaw): it highlights the limitations of our capacity for rational thought, tacitly acknowledges that our rational minds are universally flawed, and at times exposes practitioners to pure superstition. I would argue that our spirituality is in fact a feature, insofar as our spiritual sides give us access to wisdom that, for whatever reason, our rational minds do not possess.
It was my own recent spiritual exploration that helped me see that my own hyper-focus on rationality was a dead-end, and that I had access to far more wisdom and awareness than I was utilizing. I realized that my focus on rationality was making me miserable, but was a burden I didn’t have to carry. I realized that a refocus on spirituality would give me peace, comfort, and clarity on a number of topics that were causing me too much pain and suffering. I still don’t go to church, but I think this is temporary: I anticipate I will find a spiritual community soon.
My prediction is that others will experience a reawakening similar to mine. As I mentioned previously, we’re pretty overwhelmed and miserable right now; I think others are ready for some peace and calm. Part of me believes that our current acrimony is a manifestation of our resistance to hearing God’s call to us. What I found, and what I think others will discover soon enough, is that letting go of the resistance to God’s efforts to communicate with us can bring us more peace, wonder, and joy than we can imagine (and certainly more than we would anticipate in our spiritual slumber).
I’m not sure that we’ll ever go back to a world where 70% of Americans are members of a church where they passively attend worship services led by high priests. I anticipate spirituality will become more active. But I do think we’ll rediscover our connection to the infinite, which will help us understand how connected we are, which will help us treat even our ‘enemies’ with empathy and compassion.
Here’s hoping I’m right. The alternatives are not pleasant.
I love you,
Eric
Letters to Leland 