Connecticut Democratic Senator Chris Murphy and the Biden administration are saying there’s an epidemic of loneliness among Americans.
That’s true. There is an epidemic of loneliness in the country. But their proposed solution is, “What if we actually use the government to fix loneliness?”
Murphy is positing some sort of legislation to establish a national strategy to combat loneliness and promote social connection. He says kids are addicted to algorithms and that evidence shows a decade ago, when teenagers actually had to do more work to find things they cared about or to make connections with their peers rather than depend on the algorithm, they were actually happier.
That’s true — but it’s not the real reason why kids are lonely. Yes, the algorithm is addictive. No, I would not give my kids cell phones with apps on them or access to social media. But blaming it on the decline of parental capacity to stop kids from accessing social media is wrong. The loneliness is really about the decline of community.
Where is that decline of community coming from? Obviously, it’s coming from a decline in religious affiliation.
According to a brand new Gallup poll, the percentages of Americans who believe in five religious entities (God, angels, heaven, hell, and the devil) “have edged downward by three to five percentage points since 2016.” 74% believe in God right now, which is down from 90% in 2001. That is a marked decline.
And there is a very strong correlation between political affiliation and religious belief. The poll data shows, “Between 78% to 87% of Republicans believe in the five entities.” Only 56% to 66% of Democrats believe in God, angels, and heaven. Further, “less than half say they believe in Hell and the devil,” which makes perfect sense.
Less than half of Democrats believe in hell and the devil, because that might actually imply actual punishment for doing bad things.
If you believe there is no punishment in the afterlife, there goes one of the incentive structures for not committing sins in this life for hedonistic purposes. The decline in religious affiliation is not just a matter of “do you believe in God or not?” I don’t believe in the phrase “believe in God.” I don’t think anybody sits around and mulls about God other than philosophy majors. Even people who are religious don’t sit around thinking about God all the time.
They act in God. They live in God. They live based on certain godly principles, and then they enact those in their daily lives.
Many agnostics and atheists are operating from religious principles. They just don’t acknowledge it. If they believe there’s a moral right and wrong, that is a religious principle; it is not discernible from evolutionary biology. If they believe the universe is a place you can actually understand, that your brain reflects eternal truths in the universe, that’s a religious principle. You can’t get that out of evolutionary biology or deterministic biology. You just cannot.
So if you live in that world, you’re living in a religious world. If you acknowledge that, then you might form communities of interest around those values. That’s where churches come from. The decline of church is directly correlated to the rise in loneliness because church is where people used to get together. It still is for a huge number of people.
My family is not lonely because, not only do we have kinship connections, but my parents, my wife’s parents, and two of my sisters also live close. We have an incredibly close friendship group. We have a religious community with hundreds of families, all of whom are generally religiously like-minded; that allows for a certain commonality of interest. I have people for my kids to play with.
It gives you a social safety net. It makes you feel as though you’re involved. When you atomistically remove people from their church, which is the only place that has been durably proven to actually have social connection, then you end up with loneliness.
However, Democrats like that loneliness because church comes with strings.
But every community comes with strings.
Everybody likes to pretend community is just you and your friends being nonjudgmental with each other. But that’s not true. Even you and your friends have a judgmental set of values with regard to people who are not you and your friends. Every group requires a buy-in. Every group requires skin in the game.
What the Democratic Party and many members of the Left believe is, there should never be skin in the game. They believe if you require skin in the game to be part of the group, that’s an inherent imposition on you and your authentic identity. That’s going to break down into atomistic individualism pretty quickly, which breaks down into loneliness because now you are removed from the commonality of interest, the skin in the game, the sacrifice necessary to be part of a group.
And then you’re shocked when loneliness abounds? Yes, social media has exacerbated all of this, but one of the things I’ve noticed is that there are a ton of kids in the community where I live, and some of them have social media. But loneliness rates aren’t anything like what they are like in secular society, where the kids don’t associate with each other outside of school, where there isn’t a 25-hour period every week where kids go to synagogue or church together. And when I say there’s no substitute for church, I mean there is no substitute for church, synagogue, mosque. There isn’t.
But there’s been an attempt to create ersatz communities of interest. You see that sometimes in college groups, a country club, or a bowling league. It is not the same thing.
Secular humanism does not fill the gap because religious observance is more than simply the relationship between you and God. One of the things Judaism makes very clear is that there are commandments oriented between you and God. You can do them on a personal level. If I say a blessing over food, that is between me and God.
But there is also a question of me and my fellow man.
The relationship between me and my fellow man and my relationship with God are two separate commandments, but the idea is that God is involved even in the relations between men. If you’re talking about how you treat your fellow man, that has to exist within the context of God. There’s a third player. When you remove the third player, it turns out the relations between you and your fellow man tend to disintegrate.
This should not be a shock, but that’s exactly what the Democrats cannot allow because it might actually require a religious obligation — and that might undercut a lot of the arguments they like to make about value systems. So they are simply going to pretend it’s about the algorithm. It’s not about the best way to fight the algorithm, which is religious church attendance.
It’s amazing that this idea even has to be said.