Social psychologist, Jonathan Haidt, has once again secured a spot on The New York Times Best Seller List with his latest book, The Anxious Generation. In this work, Haidt offers evidence-based insights into the psychological and sociological rationales leading to increased anxiety in Generation Z compared to Millennials. Specifically, he investigates the cultural, social, and psychological factors contributing to declining mental health trends, and he offers an analysis of why today’s youth are more anxious. The short answer: the invention of the smart-phone, access to social media, and the advent of what he calls “phone-based” living, which resulted in the loss of a “play-based” childhood. He also touches on how increased academic pressures, over-protection and safetysim (which he introduces in his previous book, Coddling of the American Mind) in parenting have influenced adolescent mental health.
I picked this book up this past summer, as an invested mental health provider, the current parent of Gen Z and Gen Alpha kids, and a college professor who interacts with Gen Z daily. The data and findings of how smartphones and social media have massively impacted children and young adults were not overly surprising to me. However, Haidt’s ability to communicate and articulate his research to a general audience and his claims regarding how we can, in fact, reverse this phenomenon were fascinating. There is something empowering about how Haidt provides statistics and data to convey how technology has failed us—and I think his book gives language to phenomena that many of us older folk might not be able to articulate.
Personally, I could not stop thinking about this book. More specifically, I was struck by Chapter 8: Spiritual Elevation and Degradation. In this section, Haidt asks the question, “How is technology changing us?”1 His conclusion: it is leading to spiritual degradation. Haidt argues that a phone-based life is pulling humanity downward, and the cost has been a spiritual harm. Haidt makes the claim that this spiritual harm impacts both individuals and society.
This idea was interesting to me because it was written by a self-identified atheist. However, as I was reflecting on his work, I couldn’t help but think about how I might apply a Christian perspective to his theories in my classroom.
As a professor of social work at a Christian college, I am careful to frame social work theories within the bigger story of creation, fall, redemption, and restoration. This secular piece of work, unbeknownst to its author, has also done just that.
In her book, Development on Purpose: Faith and Human Behavior and the Social Environment, my friend and colleague Dr. Lisa Hosack beautifully articulates the connection between psychological and sociological theory and biblical revelation. She frames this connection by illustrating how relationships in the Garden of Eden were full and “untarnished”—a complete harmony known as shalom. She goes on to argue, “[m]any developmental theories emphasize the need to grow and develop” and the “creational design is important because it serves to facilitate shalom in our relationships.”2In other words, human development and flourishing ultimately point back to God’s original design for harmony and well-being in our relationships, or shalom, which was present at creation.
If we use Hosack’s framework, it’s easy to see how Haidt’s ideas are reflective of this point. For example, he describes a loss of the natural, “play-based” childhood—a time when children thrived in face-to-face relationships, reminiscent of the harmony that God originally intended for humanity in creation. Haidt, pulling from the work of Jean Piaget and Marie Montessori, reminds us, play is the “work of childhood”3 and that as embodied creatures we flourish in strong, healthy relationships.
A large portion of Anxious Generation is pointing out how smartphones and social media have contributed to the profound suffering of Generation Z. Haidt describes this suffering as a result of spiritual harm and degradation. I immediately recognized this idea to mirror the consequences of the fall. As a Christian social scientist, I view this spiritual harm, marked by anxiety and isolation, to reflect the deep disconnection brought about by sin. Just as sin separated humanity from God and one another, Haidt argues that technology now exacerbates this disconnection, pulling us downward. This brokenness is a tangible manifestation of the separation from God and community that the fall introduced.
However, in recognizing this disconnection, we are reminded of the hope found in Christ’s redemptive work. In Haidt’s book, he believes and advocates that things can improve—that society can reverse the damage done by smartphones. Although Haidt doesn’t propose a fully spiritual solution, he is optimistic for change. As a Christian, I can view this optimism as part of a larger plan of God’s redemptive work. Through Christ, we are called to restore broken relationships and lead others toward shalom, modeling a life rooted in meaningful connection.
In his article, “Christian Worldview and Christian Education,”4 Dr. Gregg Allison states, “[a] well developed and practiced Christian worldview enables us as Christian educators to transmit this framework to our students and to inculcate in them not only a cognitive understanding but a genuine embrace of this vision.” Dr. Allison’s article reminds us that a Christian perspective or worldview, is a lens through which we can understand both the created world and humanity, and then live in with this truth. Christian higher education emphasizes the integration of faith and learning, where students can critically engage with secular ideas while filtering them through this Christian lens and, as educators we should work to provide this perspective to our students, helping them understand it intellectually as well as embrace it in their lives.
Footnotes
- Haidt, Jonathan. Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. (Penguin Press, 2024), pg. 199.
- Hosack, Lisa. Development on Purpose: Faith and Human Behavior in the Social Environment (Botsford, CT: North American Association of Christians in Social Work, 2019), pg. 31.
- Haidt, pg. 51.
- Allison, Gregg. “Christian Worldview and Christian Education,” International Alliance for Christian Education Journal, accessed 10/4/2024 https://iace.education/journal-blog/christian-worldview-and-christian-education.
Reading Dr Hollenberger’s helpful review of the work of Jonathan Haidt, and her insightful linkage of it to the Christian story and its meaning in her own teaching setting, I was reminded of the works of previous non-Christian cultural commentators who often accurately recognise contemporary cultural malaises, but who in the end are bereft of an adequate solution as to how to redress those problems. However, in their insights, these analysts also provide Christians with important inroads into the public debate
A great example from another era was the powerful work of Columbia University’s Neil Postman (1931-2003). Postman published The End of Education in 1995. In it, he recognised that education is never neutral, and that we all need a big story to live by. He then lamented the fact that public education was short-changing children by replacing the nurture of traditional cultural metanarratives with mere utilitarian, consumerist imperatives and the associated forlorn hope that technology would lift us out of this moral decline.
As with Haidt, Postman’s cultural critique was insightful, but the five big picture solutions that he offered, around which education should be structured, though interesting, still relied upon human goodness and benevolence which his earlier cultural critique had already pointed to as being inadequate foundations for any resilient and long-lasting cure.
As Dr Hollenberger indicates however, the insights of scholars such as Postman and Haidt give Christians a very useful on-ramp into the public debate. Following the example of Paul in his missionary ministry in Athens, recorded for us in Acts 17, we can first identify with the patterns and critiques of pagan cultural commentators, and show how their solutions lack any real, long-lasting hope. Second, we can then point to God’s glorious gospel story in the person and work of Jesus Christ as the mechanism to redress countervailing cultural forces that would strip us of genuine human-ness, with this gospel being the only true metanarrative and solution to the meaning and purpose of life.
As Christian educators, living in the light of this, in all things including our academic lifestyles and our educational aims, structures and pedagogies, we have the biblical gospel metanarrative for addressing the disquiets of cultural commentators. We can also note that in our current age, there seems to be an interesting acknowledgement by several former atheists such as Tom Holland, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Neil Wilson, and Rodney Stark, that the Christian story is in fact not only the foundation of the blessings and freedoms enjoyed by many in modern times, but it is the one and only big story that society needs to return to if there is to be any real hope for humanity into the future.
Dr. Hollenberger: Thank you for this reminder of the dangers of over use of technology…We have seen it with our own children, and certainly with the younger generation we work with in church and school.
Perhaps some practical suggestions for faculty at Christian universities interested to reach GenZ with the Gospel can be gleaned from several of my previous CSR blogs, among them, extending radical hospitality and getting involved missionally. My recently defended DMin dissertation, “Reaching GenZ with the Gospel,” is in the works to be published shortly by Wipf & Stock.
Thanks for the article, a very important topic. I’m teaching a church Sunday morning class on Richard Niebuhr’s classic 1951 Christ and Culture, and he discusses technology in his “Christ Against Culture” model. It’s not my favored model, but in this case it’s appropriate, something from the culture that we need to be very wary about.