Written by Carolyn D. Gorman |
Monday, April 1, 2024
For the vast majority of children, mental-health treatment will not be necessary. Kids are resilient. Just as a smoker who quits will immediately boost his life expectancy, kids who spend less time and attention on platforms designed to be addictive and anxiety-inducing have a chance to bounce back. Haidt’s proposals can help give them that chance.

In 2018’s The Coddling of The American Mind, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt contended that kids are inherently “antifragile”—that is, they benefit from adversity. But instead of “preparing the child for the road, not the road for the child,” parents have surrendered to bad ideas and practices that foster a culture of emotional fragility, with its calls for safe spaces, trigger warnings, and censorship.
Haidt’s new book, The Anxious Generation, is a thematic extension of this argument. It describes how Gen Z—those born after 1995, the first “to go through puberty with a portal in their pockets”—has been made fragile by the transition from a play-based to a smartphone-based childhood. The virtual environment of social media, Haidt contends, amplifies extreme ideas and worsens cognitive distortions, swelling this cohort’s rates of depression, anxiety, suicide, and self-harm.
Haidt chronicles how the shift to a phone-based childhood affects learning. It deprives children of experiences that make them productive participants in a democratic society. One reason that kids play is to practice adult skills like independently resolving conflicts. Virtual environments don’t offer this practice—kids can just log off or leave a chat to avoid disputes—while crowding out time spent on real-world activities that do. Unsupervised physical play, with opportunity for low-cost mistakes and even some criticism and teasing, are crucial for learning interpersonal skills and building resilience.
Ironically, while we overemphasize protecting children from the slightest physical or emotional harm in the real world, the virtual world has greater potential for danger. In this realm, parents can’t reward kids with increasing levels of responsibility and independence as they get older. Age does not exist online; little more is needed than, say, checking a box without verification to access a webpage meant for those over 18.
Social media exploits our natural sensitivity to others’ opinions and actions. Haidt describes how evolutionary pressures have rewarded those who learn to conform and who pick the right people to copy. Millions of followers or likes on a post tell young people what they should do to fit in. Social media’s architecture is designed to make the most extreme content go viral. It’s easy to see how constant exposure to the pseudo-norms of a virtual environment, whether radical political ideas or unattainable standards of wealth, beauty, and success, can lead to sustained negative feelings.
The virality of social media presents other dangers. A social miscalculation among a few kids on the playground can help children calibrate their behavior; the same mistake on the Internet can result in thousands—or even millions—of harassing comments and will live online forever.
Haidt also recounts concerning examples of social contagion, such as viral posts by users with Tourette Syndrome prompting an exploding number of teenage girls to develop tics.
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I hope the people who supposedly had a powerful encounter with God at Asbury aren’t chasing after signs and wonders (Matthew 12:39). I hope they’re not chasing for a new high. Though the churches near Asbury haven’t been impacted by the “revival,” I hope somewhere, at a church, they’re listening to ordinary preaching that produces an extraordinary change in one’s soul. 

It’s been a year since the beginning of the Asbury “revival” in Wilmore, Kentucky. Last year, from February 8th to February 24th, up to 70,000 people visited Asbury University’s chapel to experience what they called an “outpouring,” an “awakening,” or a “revival.”
For two weeks many of the tens of thousands of people who visited Asbury responded to altar calls and witnessed “prophecies,” “speaking in tongues,” “casting out demons,” and “faith healing” at the chapel.
It was one of the biggest news stories at the time. It received attention from every major news outlet from CNN to Fox News. Conservative political commentators like Ben Shapiro, Tucker Carlson, and Charlie Kirk also talked about it on their shows.
What was happening at Asbury immediately became a sign of hope for Christianity and conservatism in America. Therefore, for some, the Asbury “revival” quickly became a test of the sincerity of some people’s relationship with God.
One revivalist preacher compared the Asbury revival to the Ark of the Covenant. He said:
“Do not pay attention to ‘arm-chair quarterbacks’ writing and critiquing Asbury Revival. They are much like Uzzah putting their hand on the ark. Let God do in this and through this moment what He desires and wills.”
Another preacher responding to those who expressed caution about the revival said:
“This revival is revealing the hearts that have lost intimacy with the Lord.”
When I shared my concerns about Asbury, I received hundreds of comments saying:
“You sound like a Pharisee questioning Jesus,” “The Pharisaic legalist mindset is showing up, just like when Jesus showed up and didn’t fit their mold,” “I find this so sad. Reminds me of the religious leaders in Acts,” “You’re a Doubting Thomas,” and “You’re blaspheming the Holy Spirit.”
Another comment said:
“I have no doubt God is going to use this movement to change churches and people.”
So a year later, what happened to the Asbury revival? Has God used the revival to change churches?
This week I called churches near Asbury University in Wilmore, Kentucky asking if they’ve experienced significant additions to their church membership or major changes in the lives of their church members because of the “revival.”
Every representative of the churches I spoke to said: “no.”
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This life is filled with many trials and hardships. Satan and his minions would tempt us away from God and His Word. An unbelieving society would assail us, persecute us, and call us traitors to our own species. They may even throw us in prison or kill us for having the audacity to hold fast to the Word of Christ. The pandemic lockdowns have even brought with them actual persecution during corporate worship gatherings, eerily reminiscent to the setting of this psalm of ascent. Yet the confident assurance of the psalmist must be ours. Though we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, we need not fear, because He is with us and keeps us for all eternity.

Wandering eyes are bad harbinger in Scripture. From the opening chapters of Genesis, when Eve looked at the tree and saw that it was good for food and “a delight to the eyes,” humanity’s false reliance on sight is a consistent theme. From Lot to David, whenever an individual sees that something appeals to their sense of sight, sin and disaster follow closely behind. The opening line of Psalm 121 then should immediately strike us with an impending sense of disaster. This sense is exacerbated by the object of the psalmist’s gaze: the hills. Written to be sung on the march to Jerusalem for worship, the worshippers were quite literally passing through a valley of the shadow of death. Vandals and thieves inhabited those hills, lying in wait for the estranged traveler to traverse those hidden and treacherous roads alone. They would jump out from the many hidden places to attack and steal. The road to Jerusalem was a dangerous way. The listeners to Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan, who was attacked in this very manner, would have understood the situation perfectly. So when casting one’s eyes up to the mountains, the natural question is exactly what follows: where does my help come from?
The answer of the psalmist is immediate and definite. The Lord is his help, the Lord who is Creator of all things. The contrast is sharp: the thieves may inhabit those hills, but it is the Lord who made them and who commands their very existence. The psalmist expresses swift confidence that he has nothing to fear on his journey to worship, because the God that he worships is the maker of heaven and earth. But this confident assurance is not mere comfort for the psalmist; it is polemical. Notice how the personage switches from first to third: “He will not let your….” The psalmist’s profession of faith is not merely personal but is instructive for all those who walk the same path. The psalmist almost wills that his readers and singers express the same trust that he displays. But what further evidence does he provide for the recipients of his message?
The psalmist highlights two truths about God by using two images: sleeping and shading. In verses 3-4, the psalmist reminds the listener that God doesn’t sleep.
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