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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“People see religion as a personal matter. They think it’s about feeling and experience more than it is about dogma or doctrine or ritual. They don’t think it takes place inside institutions. They think it takes place in the human heart. How does that idea make its way into contemporary American consciousness? I think one big way is through the books that were published by Exman.”

(RNS)—Boston University religion professor Stephen Prothero doesn’t believe in fate. Or in divine providence.
But about a decade ago, the universe tapped him on the shoulder and gave him a job to do.
Prothero, who lives on Cape Cod, was at a Labor Day party when Judy Kaess, who lived nearby, asked him a favor. She’d inherited some old religion books from her father and wondered if he’d come by and look at them. By the time he’d arrived at Kaess’ house a few months later, she’d passed away of cancer. But her husband welcomed Prothero and led him to the family’s library.
Prothero thought he spend an hour looking at the books.
Ten years, later he’s still at it.
Those books—from legendary authors like Harry Emerson Fosdick, Dorothy Day, Howard Thurman, Albert Schweitzer, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr and Bill Wilson, one of the co-founders of Alcoholics Anonymous—traced a history of American religion from the heyday of mainline Protestantism to the rise of the spiritual but not religious. The man who connected them all together was Eugene Exman, Kaess’ father and the longtime religion editor for Harper & Row, who had published them all.
Prothero knew he was on to something when he opened up a copy of “Strive Toward Freedom,” King’s 1958 account of the Montgomery bus boycott, and found a handwritten note from King’s wife, Coretta Scott King, thanking Exman for his help with the book. Then he found a similar note in a first edition of the Big Book of AA, this time from Wilson to Exman.
“Who is this guy that I’ve never heard of,” Prothero recalled thinking at the time.
That question sent Prothero on a search for Exman’s story and how the editor’s spiritual quest and knack for finding big ideas helped reshape religious publishing and American spirituality. He found the answers in a treasure trove of the Exman’s papers—stored in the family’s barn and file cabinets—including Christmas cards from Wilson and ethicist H. Richard Niebuhr, which Prothero rescued from a trash bag bound for the dump.
Those documents detailed Exman’s publishing career and his spiritual quests—which ranged from a boyhood encounter with God that haunted his life, to founding an ill-fated spiritual commune, to traveling to Africa to visit Schweitzer, to dropping LSD. Prothero tells that story in “God: The Bestseller,” due out March 14 from Harper One.
Prothero spoke with Religion News Service recently about the new book. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
The book opens with the story of visiting the home of a neighbor and discovering what her father had left behind. When did you realize there was a book here?
When I first visited the house, I didn’t know why I was there. Usually, in a case like this, people want me to tell them what a collection of books like this is worth—and how to get rid of it. But Walter said, ‘No, no, no, we don’t want to sell the books. We want to give the books away.’ He said, ‘My wife has passed away recently. I’m worried that if I die, this stuff’s just going to end up in a yard sale.’
I started cataloging the books, and as I’m doing that, Walter keeps showing up with boxes, and I keep going through them. I got really curious.
It didn’t take long before I thought somebody’s got to write a book. And obviously, it was me. This was too perfect. I’m not really a providential or even a synchronicity person, but it felt kind of uncanny.
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Beginning in Eden, the Scriptures tell the story of God’s unconquerable purpose to advance His saving reign on the earth. And this purpose is one that all creaturely agents, whether human or demonic, are powerless to oppose. God will reign. He will have His people. He will have His kingdom. And every enemy, including death itself, will come under His dominion or else be destroyed.

Make your vows to the LORD your God and perform them; let all around him bring gifts to him who is to be feared, who cuts off the spirit of princes, who is to be feared by the kings of the earth. (Psalm 76:11–12)
It has never gone well for the kings of the earth when they have attempted to oppose the God of heaven. Whether we are thinking of the ancient king of Ai, whose last moments were spent strung up in a tree (Josh. 8:29); or the thirty other kings of Canaan who soon followed suit (12:7–24); or Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon, who was driven out of his mind until he was willing to admit that “the Most High rules the kingdom of men and gives it to whom he will” (Dan. 4:32); or that old weasel Herod who was eaten by worms for failing to give glory to God (Acts 12:23) — whatever example we select, there is always one conclusion to be drawn: and that is that the only proper recourse for the kings of the earth is to bow to the Christ who is the Ruler of kings (Rev. 1:5). As the psalm so forcefully puts it, “[…] let all around him bring gifts to him who is to be feared, who cuts off the spirit of princes, who is to be feared by the kings of the earth” (vv. 11–12).
To put this another way, the Bible’s political theology is, minimally, one of indomitable triumph.
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