With Alarming New Reports On American Youth, What Should Religious Leaders Be Doing?

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(OPINION) Religion writers, like many other Americans, doubtless find a February report on the well-being of American teens from the federal Centers for Disease Control nothing short of alarming.

There are religion-beat angles in these numbers. The question is whether religious leaders have figured that out yet. As we say here at GetReligion: Hold that thought.

Meanwhile, many news reports focused on the reported plight of teenage girls. The CDC survey in 2021 found that 57% persistently feel hopeless and sad — a 60% increase over the past decade and double the rate for boys — while 31% considered taking their own lives. The incidence of girls suffering sexual violence increased 20% in just the four years since 2017. Also, attempted suicide afflicted 22% of LGBTQ students.

Meanwhile, the media have lately put new emphasis on the troubled situation of boys and men.

Last August, Psychology Today said young and middle-aged men are more lonely than they’ve been in generations. A major consideration is that men are typically happier and healthier when married or partnered.

Internet dating is now a huge source of romantic connections, but 62% of users are men because “women are increasingly selective.” Men’s lack of relationship skills is said to produce less dating, more singleness and thus less contentment.

That’s buttressed by a Feb. 22 article from The Hill: “Most young men are single. Most young women are not.” New York University psychology professor Niobe Way’s view contrasts with the CDC, saying young adult men’s “social disconnect” means their suicide rate is quadruple that for women. And we all know distressed teen and young adult men are responsible for much of the national epidemic of mass shootings.

Young women, better-educated than men, “are getting more choosy” and are less likely to settle for problematic mates. Meanwhile, millions of young men have great relationship skills — with their digital screens.

A Valentine’s Day posting by the Pew Research Center said nearly half of U.S. young adults are single, with 34% for women and a remarkable 63% of men.

A broad-brush analysis of implications came in a Feb. 25 CNN interview with Scott Galloway, a New York University business professor. He says the solid manufacturing base of the past led to formation of married households in which couples were active citizens in their communities, economically stable and unlikely to commit crimes.

“The happiest, the most prosperous, the most purposeful people in America are middle class families,” he says. But today too many women “can’t find a man they find economically or emotionally viable,” resulting in a slump of “household formation” with fewer children, leading to declines of the middle class and eventually prospects for the U.S. economy.

We could go on, but you get the picture.

What caused all this? New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg admits she’d like to blame the advent of Donald Trump-type politics, but problems worsened notably beforehand, around 2010. Joining psychologists like Jean Twenge, the author of “iGen” and the forthcoming “Generations,” Goldberg puts major blame for youths’ downward spiral on increased intensity of social media use.

Others cite widespread pornography — another form of addiction to screens. And in The Wall Street Journal, psychoanalyst Erica Komisar cites ignored results from legalization of today’s highly potent marijuana, including more suicides and 3 in 10 consumers hit with “cannabis use disorder.”

What’s missing? This exceedingly important discussion usually slides past a huge societal disruption in the early 21st century, the palpable decline in vitality for much of American religion, with shrunken youth groups, disappearing Sunday school programs, slumping worship attendance by teens and young adults — and with it the loss of congregations as natural places for young people to meet possible mates.

Writing about the CDC report for World magazine, Allie Beth Stuckey adds a spiritual crisis to all the other ills. She contends that social media help exchange “the god of self” for the true God through constant focus on ourselves, as in “how we feel, how we look, how we sound, what we want, what we like.”

We hear constant calls to teach girls “to love themselves more.” Yet she suggests that such “self-idolatry” is “driving teens into feelings of purposelessness and depression.”

Solutions do not come from the place where girls’ problems lie. Instead, people throughout history “have needed purpose, joy, and satisfaction that exists outside of themselves, namely in the God who created them.”

So the agenda for religion writers to mull with good sources runs leaders to questions such as this: To what extent does the Great Recession in American religious faith create a vacuum that’s filled with escalating psychological woes, not to mention sexual predation? If so, what can houses of worship, and American culture as a whole, do to heal the land?

Richard Ostling is a former religion reporter for The Associated Press and a former correspondent for TIME Magazine. He’s also worked in broadcast TV and radio journalism covering religion and received a lifetime achievement award from Religion News Association. This piece first appeared at GetReligion.org.