Gen Z Doesn’t Trust Anyone: Is It Because They Aren’t Religious?
(ANALYSIS) The amount of cynicism in the world is sometimes hard for my mind to grasp. I really struggle watching TV shows and movies that have a really bleak view of the world. I don’t want to watch ”The Golden Girls” all the time (although it is a really great thing to put on the TV right before bed), but I just can’t spend a lot of my time meditating on the evilness of the human experience over and over again. I think it’s bad for my soul, to be honest.
The internet only makes it worse. During the college football playoffs, the Indiana Hoosiers went on an absolute heater. They were playing out of their minds. In the semi-final game against Oregon, they blew them out of the building, winning by 34 points.
On the first play from scrimmage, an Indiana player (D’Angelo Ponds) intercepted a pass and ran it back for a touchdown. After the game had ended, an equipment manager from Oregon found Ponds on the sideline and presented him with the ball that he had intercepted to start the game. It was an absolute class act.
While most of the comments were positive, a few of them were so incredibly cynical:
“Staged. Only doing it because of the cameras and for clicks.”
“He’s just doing that in the off chance that they get Ponds to enter the portal and transfer to Oregon next season.”
It almost feels like there is a growing group of people who can see no goodness in the world. And that viewpoint is being celebrated and amplified on social media.
I get the foreboding sense that Americans just don’t trust each other anymore. They think that everyone is selfish, cruel, and without a moral compass. People don’t start a company to build a great product; they do it to make themselves a fortune. Politicians don’t run for office because they want to make life easier for their fellow citizens; they do it because they are power-hungry.
You can read the rest of this post on Substack.
Ryan Burge is an assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, a pastor in the American Baptist Church and the co-founder and frequent contributor to Religion in Public, a forum for scholars of religion and politics to make their work accessible to a more general audience. His research focuses on the intersection of religiosity and political behavior, especially in the U.S. Follow him on X at @ryanburge.