Hope for the Anxious Generation
Digital technology has forever changed what it means to grow up. A rich Christian inheritance of religious practice offers a way out.
By Will Bryant
When I was growing up, Saturday and Sunday followed similar schedules. My siblings and I would wake up earlier than any of us wanted, get dressed in auspicious clothing, eat a hurried breakfast, and rush out the door. On Saturday we’d drive to the soccer field behind the middle school and on Sunday we’d drive to church.
At both places we would gather with other kids, and our parents with other parents. At both places, a few adults took on the responsibility of instructing the kids on matters of morality, discipline, and integrity. There was time for quiet focus and time for collective celebration, time for individual excellence and time for intentional collaboration. Both church and the soccer field bound us together in pursuit of goodness.
Many religious people bemoan that America is a secular society, which is no doubt true in part. Church attendance is at an all-time low. But the secularization story hides the fact that we still follow many forms of religious life, even in places as unlikely as a middle school soccer game. In all times and places, it is unavoidable for people to gather across age and family structure to recommit themselves to the common good, and to do so through the sharing of symbols and rituals.
In his book The Anxious Generation, the psychologist Jonathan Haidt entertains these sacred structures and rituals as an antidote to the ways in which smartphones are radically reshaping the cultural character of adolescent life. His solutions are correct on the merits, but by the end of this essay I hope to show that they are ultimately incomplete. Spiritual practices require underlying supernatural content in order to be lived out: on their own, Haidt’s psychological rationalizations are insufficient. As the authors Tom Holland and Ayaan Hirsi-Ali have recognized, sincere belief transforms cultural Christianity from dead ritual into a living and active religion.
In Haidt’s view, the phone-based life produces spiritual degradation because it pulls people too strongly away from their religious instincts and downwards to the profane.
Haidt approaches the spiritual life from a scientific background in social and moral psychology. He spends the bulk of The Anxious Generation making the argument that smartphones are responsible for the precipitous decline in adolescent mental health of the past two decades. After seven chapters of data-driven psychological analysis, he steps back to consider the moral and spiritual dimensions of this crisis. He accepts the sociological premise articulated by Emile Durkheim and others that “in every society,” people distinguish between the sacred and the profane. “Whether or not God exists,” Haidt writes, “people simply do perceive some people, places, actions, and objects to be sacred, pure, and elevating; other people, places, actions, and objects are disgusting, impure, and degrading.” The good life consists of the appropriate balance of sacred and profane experiences. People always need to care for the basic material conditions of life, even when they are disgusting or impure. And the highest and finest moments of the human life occur when a person is “pulled up” by a concentrated experience of joy or beauty, whether in solitude or collectively. These are religious experiences. Put simply, Haidt assumes that religion is natural to all people.
In Haidt’s view, the phone-based life produces spiritual degradation because it pulls people too strongly away from their religious instincts and downwards to the profane. For adolescents, excessive screen time—and especially time on social media—prevents the development of the social habits and institutions that provide sacred experiences. Social media trains young minds to engage with others on the basis of physical appearances and material possessions—that is, the profane. The sensory experience of using a smartphone also points to the profane. It is isolating, sedentary, and does not demand anything of the higher human faculties.
School and youth sports are not without their problems, of course, but they nonetheless educate kids on the importance of a common life of celebration.
As smartphones “pull down,” Haidt considers six spiritual practices that “pull upwards” towards the sacred. These habits and social conventions provide the structure necessary for regular experiences of collective effervescence. They are demanding, yes, but in the right way: they cultivate human instincts for community, contemplation, and beauty. Haidt’s principles are not only essential for growing up, but are also much more accessible in today’s secular age than Haidt recognizes—that is, these principles are encouraged by the institutions that define the lives of young people in America: school and sports.
The first practice is shared sacredness, or “the consensual structuring of time, space, or objects around which people can use their ancient programming for sacredness to create religious or quasi-religious communities.” For Haidt, the actual religious content of these structures is not important. He only argues that, when social life collapses into the smartphone, people lose a sense of shared spaces and times for celebration. In a smartphone-dominated 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.” Without a sacred structure, people lose the opportunities for regular gathering and celebration that are essential to human flourishing. Without these opportunities, people can become isolated from one another and our social fabric can begin to fray.
Haidt paints a bleak picture with this principle, and fairly so. Smartphones do present a rare and grave threat to this kind of shared sacredness. But I think that he overstates the case. Common life in America may lack overt religion, but it has the “quasi-religious” in spades. The regular schedule of sports, for example, both youth and professional, provides the opportunity for celebration and collective effervescence (I wrote about this for a previous issue of Fare Forward, in an essay titled “The Game of Inches”). For kids and their parents, the rhythm of sports is intertwined with the rhythm of school and extracurricular activities, which also provide occasions for shared sacredness: the drama of a hard-won soccer game, for example, or the beauty of a Christmastime school choir performance. These are not strictly religious occasions, but they provide a regular opportunity to celebrate the highest human faculties. So on this first principle, there is much to be hopeful about. School and youth sports are not without their problems, of course, but they nonetheless educate kids on the importance of a common life of celebration.
Haidt’s second principle is embodiment. He writes, “Once time and space are structured for sacredness, rituals can proceed, and rituals require bodies in motion.” Haidt notes that synchronous movement during religious rituals is “an experimentally validated technique for enhancing feelings of communions, similarity, and trust, which means it makes a group of disparate individuals feel as though they have merged into one.” It is easy to see that a social life mediated by smartphones would lack embodiment, and the accompanying feelings of unity and trust.
On this principle, Haidt’s warnings feel more appropriate. Religious American have for some time neglected the important of embodiment (Time Magazine reported in 1997 that two-thirds of Americans who believe in the afterlife do not believe that they will be resurrected with physical bodies), and year by year screens encroach ever further into the classroom. Nonetheless, Haidt notes that though “sports are not exactly spiritual… playing them depends on some of spirituality’s key ingredients for bonding people together, like coordinated and collective physical movement and group celebrations.” Youth sports are the last holdout of a shared, embodied ritual life for kids in America. The threat from smartphones is dire, yes, but we need only to look to the joy of playing a sport as a reminder of the importance of embodiment.
Smartphones have robbed us of stillness, silence, and focus.
Third is “stillness, silence, and focus,” which according to Haidt “confer mental health benefits” and “has been found to reduce depression and anxiety.” There is a growing body of empirical evidence for the psychiatric and medical benefits of mindfulness practices. Smartphones have robbed us of stillness, silence, and focus. Time spent waiting—for the train, for the school bus, etc.—was once cause for mild boredom and still contemplation. Now, it is filled with bright little machines that make lots of noise. The effects on kids are especially harmful, because their developing minds become reliant on near-constant stimulation.
Traces of the practice of stillness remain in schools, but they are often poorly structured. The silence and discipline required to sit through a lecture or an hours-long standardized test can be cognitively stressful, especially for adolescent boys. And the ubiquity of smartphones has made it harder for everyone to focus, kids and adults alike. Again, I think the last vestige of this spiritual practice remains with youth sports, where the virtue of focused, disciplined, and solitary practice is celebrated. Unlike in moments of concentration in school, the payoff for silent focus in sports is self-evident: practice makes perfect.
Fourth is self-transcendence: the ability to forgo the egocentricity of normal life (what Haidt calls the “default mode network”) and connect with a higher spiritual or moral truth. On this principle, Haidt identifies the right spiritual principle, but he misses the point. He lists the harmful effects of self-centered social media without providing a positive description of what self-transcendence actually is. As a result, his proposed solution lacks real substance. He gestures towards the contemplative resources of the Buddhist tradition and the ego-denying effects of psychedelics, but he can’t offer anything with purchase in popular American life.
The collective experience during a college football game or a live concert is a more relevant case of self-transcendence. Because of an agreement about the sacred—in these cases a football team or a musician—people can let go of their ego and experience the collective celebration of their object of quasi-worship. Haidt’s key insight is that these experiences do not require belief in the supernatural and, in this way, they are much more easily accessible today despite widespread secularity. Self-transcendence only requires the right kinds of social structures and conventions.
The first four principles are about the relationship of the self to the sacred, and how this relationship is mediated by the community. Haidt assumes that some kind of sacred belief system exists which puts his principles into motion, but he does not describe anything specific about that belief system. On his last two principles—forgiveness and experiences of nature—Haidt’s unwillingness to be specific about the content of the sacred is much more noticeable. Unlike the first four principles (which rest on a natural human inclination for the sacred), the spiritual merit of both forgiveness and nature are non-obvious. At face value, they have nothing to do with the sacred. Forgiveness is confined to the profane world of human-to-human relationships, and the value of nature is similarly confined to the material world. Because the spiritual value of principles is non-obvious, Haidt’s explanations of them are platitudinal, not substantive.
The cultural structures of school, youth and college sports, and music all provide spiritual, if not religious, outlets for kids as they grow up.
Despite this blind spot, Haidt is right about the spiritual benefits of both forgiveness and experiences in nature , and both are readily available in America today. In a recent conversation at the Veritas Forum, Haidt described how he had encouraged some of his students at NYU to take daily walks in Central Park without their smartphones. He encouraged his students to seek meditation or spiritual contemplation while on these walks, and of course, many of them reported that they had powerful experiences of the beauty of nature. With a little bit of guidance, the same trees that thousands of commuters walk by every day can become sources of intense spiritual fulfillment.
The benefit of forgiveness, too, becomes apparent with a bit of social encouragement. One of the last remnants of the postwar American consensus on Christian moral norms is a persistent emphasis on other-centered kindness. When I was in middle school, we had a seminar with the guidance counselor at least once a month in which we were drilled on the definition of “empathy.” It was important, we were taught, to “step into the other person’s shoes,” consider things from their perspective, and extend forgiveness. Any moral education beyond this basic principle was rare, but at least the foundation was clear.
There is reason to hope, then, that the damage done to adolescent mental health by smartphones might be healed. The spiritual solutions that Haidt identifies—shared sacredness, embodiment, stillness, self-transcendence, forgiveness, and experiences of nature—are available, even though we live in a secular society. The cultural structures of school, youth and college sports, and music all provide spiritual, if not religious, outlets for kids as they grow up. These structures offer opportunities for friendship, shared celebration, and moral education.
The trouble is that his secular psychological rationalization will never actually convince anyone to take up his solutions.
Haidt’s spiritual diagnosis of the smartphone crisis is correct in its assessment that, though they are threatened by digital technology, we have not lost all forms of religious life in America. The instincts towards the shared sacred that Haidt identifies still drive secular life.
However, this puts Haidt in a dilemma. If his solutions are so readily available today—through the institutions of school and sports—why aren’t they working? They aren’t working because Haidt fails to identify the importance of the supernatural content that drives those solutions. His last two principles show hairline cracks in his secular rationalization of spirituality. He gives post-hoc evidence for the psychological benefits of forgiveness and the experience of nature, but no good reasons why a person should follow those principles rather than some alternative. Put another way, Haidt fails to recognize that people are not spiritual because it is psychologically beneficial—they are spiritual because they actually believe in the underlying supernatural content. The importance of forgiveness and of nature in American life both have long histories, and both developed in explicitly religious contexts. Forgiveness, of course, is a central feature of Christian teaching no matter the place. In its post-war cultural dominance, the mainline church in America cemented forgiveness and many other features of Christian politeness into the fabric of our social life, even as it lost theological depth. The American obsession with nature reaches to the Transcendentalists of the early 1800s—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and many others—who looked to nature as a primary source of divine revelation. Their spirituality was unconventional, yes, but it was also deeply indebted to the Christian tradition.
In defending these two principles, Haidt says more than he knows. Thanks to his inheritance of an American culture that emphasizes forgiveness, nature, and many other aspects of a shared sacred, he happens to prescribe the correct diagnosis for our present spiritual crisis. The trouble is that his secular psychological rationalization will never actually convince anyone to take up his solutions. These kinds of spiritual practices require genuine supernatural belief in order to be lived out.
They both defend the social implications of Christianity while denying its supernatural claims.
By way of a conclusion, I want to show where Haidt’s recommendations sit in the ongoing discussion about the role of Christianity in American life. For many years and in many books, Haidt has led what could be called a defense of “cultural Christianity” in America (though he might not call it that). His training in moral psychology led him in his book The Righteous Mind to appreciate, though not uncritically, the role of religion in forming the moral basis of society. His work with Greg Lukianoff in The Coddling of the American Mind can be understood as his critique of secular America’s sickly view of the sacred. The Anxious Generation completes this arc by recommending quasi-religious solutions to the young adult mental health crisis. All the while, Haidt has maintained that he is an atheist and does not recommend that people turn to actual religious belief. For these reasons, we can say that Haidt is a “cultural Christian” or at least a “cultural religionist.” He advocates for the social and moral benefits of religion but eschews the underlying supernatural content.
Outside the American context, Haidt has a counterpart in the former New Atheist Richard Dawkins, who has recently described himself as a “cultural Christian.” Though Dawkins made his name in past decades as a leader of the New Atheist movement—an aggressively rationalist reaction against all forms of religious belief—he has since come to appreciate the cultural benefits of a Christian society. He arrived at this conclusion by way of comparison with Islamic culture, as it has emigrated to Europe from the Middle East in the past several years. The same fervor with which he once derided Christianity Dawkins now reserves for Islam, and he has instead a kind of sheepish gratitude for the guarantees of tolerance and human rights that Christianity offers. Though it began in a different place, Dawkins’s view of Christianity resembles Haidt’s. They both defend the social implications of Christianity while denying its supernatural claims.
Cultural Christianity can get a lot right. Haidt’s antidotes to the spiritual threat of smartphones are sound and actionable, and though Dawkins sometimes falls into culture-warrior mode, his defense of the Western view of human rights is basically admirable.
Christianity promises a living and active connection to the sacred.
However, there are compelling alternatives to Dawkins’s cultural Christianity, found in the likes of Ayaan Hirsi-Ali and Tom Holland. In some ways these two could not be more different: Hirsi-Ali is a Somali-born ex-Muslim human rights advocate and Holland is a historian and cultural Anglican from the south of England. But in the past year both have begun to take seriously the personal demands of Christ, after long careers spent appreciating cultural Christianity but avoiding the religion itself. Hirsi-Ali had been a New Atheist like Dawkins, and a strong voice against human rights violations motivated by Islam in the Middle East. In an essay published late last year, she announced that she had converted to Christianity because she saw no other antidote to the global illiberal threats now positioned against the culturally Christian West. On a more personal level, Holland recently survived a bout of cancer and has spoken about the role that prayer played in his recovery. This personal crisis catalyzed a spiritual turn that had been brewing for many years in his academic writing. His book Dominion traced the roots of Western culture to what he described as the “Christian revolution” that followed the life of Jesus. Like Haidt and Dawkins, Holland and Hirsi-Ali came to an appreciation of cultural Christianity, but they recognized afterwards that, on its own, cultural Christianity is incomplete.
It is lamentable that no similar recognition has occurred in America. We are missing a domestic counterpart to the voices of Holland and Hirsi-Ali. Too often, cultural Christianity and personal religious faith are pitted against one another. The cultural practice of cradle-Catholics and staid Episcopalians and the anti-institutional faith of non-denominational Christians are seen as mutually exclusive. This is a Sophie’s choice: either reject the cultural inheritance of Christianity or reject its promise of personal spiritual transformation.
In reality, both sides of the Christian life are necessary and available in America. The cultural traditions of Christianity which Haidt defends in The Anxious Generation are vitally important to respond to the mental health crisis among young people caused by digital technology, and they persist even in secular institutions like school and sports. But, as Holland and Hirsi-Ali have realized, these traditions are only effective when they are paired with sincere religious belief. Haidt’s psychological justifications are ultimately incomplete.
Christianity promises a living and active connection to the sacred. It allows ritual celebration to invade all aspects of life, so that we can rejoice in a Saturday morning soccer game and in a Monday afternoon school assembly—both equally undergirded by the deep reality of the service at Sunday church.
Will Bryant lives in Washington, DC, and works in clean energy policy. He graduated from Dartmouth College, where he studied Religion and Quantitative Social Science, in 2024.
