This post has been a long time coming – a result of thoughts that have been mulling around in my brain for a while now. I wrote it in fits and starts, still struggling to squeeze time in to write in the crevasses of the eat-play-sleep schedule.
Motherhood can make you feel like you simultaneously have a lot of time but also not enough time, at least for the focused task of writing.
So, the continuation of the pregnancy and labor series will have to wait. Meanwhile, here is the beginning of some thoughts I’ve had on the post-pandemic loneliness epidemic, the mental health crisis and how the church fits into all of it.
It is no secret: we are a lonely people.
The numbers say that 36% of Americans report “serious loneliness” – that is feeling lonely almost all or all of the time – with the youngest generation (ages 18 – 25) feeling the loneliest, 61% of them reporting feeling this way.
I work part-time at a startup that looks at mental health at the workplace, with loneliness being a significant core driver, so I feel like I’m constantly swimming in this data.
How COVID-19 caused many more of us to feel the ill-effects of social isolation only brought to light what had long been hiding in the shadows:
loneliness and isolation represent profound threats to our health and wellbeing.
In May of this year, the U.S. Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy, published a public health advisory on loneliness, naming it one of the top crises of our time.
In the advisory, he shares data that we had in fact known back in 2015, thanks to research done by Julianne Holt-Lunstad and others:
Loneliness increases our risk of death by 26%, more than smoking 15 cigarettes daily. It is associated with a 29% increased risk of heart disease and a 32% increased risk of stroke, along with anxiety, depression and dementia.
This lack of connection is also deeply tied to the rising rates of mental illness.
One of the best books I’ve ever read on mental illness was “Healing: our path from mental illness to mental health” by Thomas Insel, former director of the National Institutes of Mental Health.
In it, he recounts a friend telling him that the key to mental health was 3 P’s. Insel racks his brain and thinks, “All right, three Ps. You got Prozac, Paxil, or I guess it could be psychotherapy, because technically that’s a P.”
But then he says,
“[the friend] kind of just looked at me, you know, out of the corner of his eye, still shaking his head. And he said, “Look, it’s really simple, man. It’s people, it’s place, and it’s purpose. Those are the three P’s. We don’t address those three P’s in our traditional medical care.
But if we want people to recover, if we want to see someone have a life, we have to think about people’s social support.
We’re going to make sure they have a place, a sanctuary where they have a reasonable environment with reasonable nutrition, and a place that they know is home.
And they need a purpose…Of the many things I think we don’t understand about people with serious mental illness, we don’t fully appreciate how loneliness is such a major part.”
So what do we do about this epidemic of loneliness?
I attended an online conference this past weekend called “Building Connected Communities” run by the Harvard Human Flourishing Program that aimed to answer just that.
It featured speakers like Robert Waldinger who ran the famous longitudinal Harvard study on what makes us happy (answer: positive relationships) or Robert Putnam, the political scientist who studies the decline of social capital in America.
What surprised me, however, was the inordinate focus on the power of religious community.
According to the highest quality evidence available (meta-analyses of longitudinal studies), regular religious service attendance is associated with a 27% reduction in mortality, a 33% reduction in odds of depression and 84% reduction in suicide.
Not to mention effects on other measures of health including life satisfaction, levels of civic engagement, prosocial behavior and substance abuse.
As this talk was going on, the chat side bar started blowing up with messages, echoing variations of this one person’s sentiment which I copy here:
Do you think perhaps there is value in decoupling spirituality (divine connection) from religiosity? And is it religion that’s supportive? Or the connection to a faith in divine connection and presence of community?
In other words, what is it exactly about religion/going to church that is producing these amazing effects in health outcomes?
And is there any possible way to replicate this effect without the church/organized religion? Is it enough for me to connect to God via my own derived spirituality?
Another quote elucidated further this allergic reaction to religion and the church:
I loved the idea of people supporting each other and serving the world together. But I also left church after a decade as it became clear that most churches weren’t offering true belonging to everyone. I started looking for ways to facilitate community outside of religion, believing that neither conformity nor perfection should be a prerequisite to belongingness.
In other words, the church is not offering true belonging, because one has to conform or be perfect in order to belong to it.
Granted, this remark probably comes from this person’s personal experience of church, but even so, I think it still echoes a sentiment shared among many.
So, given the incontrovertible data of the effect of religious service attendance on health outcomes (loneliness, mental health and overall mortality amongst others), is it possible to replicate the beneficial effects of going to church apart from actually having to go to church?
And is it true that real belongingness and community is found outside the church, rather than within?
It is to these two questions that I now turn.
(Note: The studies I cite above on the effect of religious service attendance were not done solely on church goers (as opposed to mosque-goers for e.g.), although as the respondents were mostly from North America/Europe, I gather this would not be too far of an approximation.
But I write about the church, mainly because this is the religious community I am most familiar with and so can speak with some degree of authority.)
What about other communities?
Are the health benefits attributable to religious service attendance unique to church or does the community at your local yoga studio count?
To my knowledge, there hasn’t been a study comparing the effects of secular and religious community, although having any kind of relationship where you find emotional and instrumental support will no doubt have a positive effect on your mental health.
To that end, I’m all for encouraging more ways to connect, whether it’s at your local library or finding new places to volunteer.
I do believe, however, that purely secular communities face the following limitation:
if we are just specks of dust in an uncaring cosmos who are motivated by evolutionary advantage, then all relationships are necessarily for our interest, out of convenience and as long as it makes us happy.
We have friends at the local yoga studio because it incentivizes us to go to yoga more so we can live healthier.
We stay friends until we move to a different yoga studio and it’s too inconvenient to maintain those relationships.
Then, we cancel those relationships once they get too complicated or get in the way of our path to self-actualization.
Relationship has been commodified as a means to make us happy, to assuage our mental illness.
(To be clear, this does not mean that the all secular people have relationships like this. In fact, it is entirely possible that secular people have more self-giving, loving relationships than the religious. What I’m saying is that there is nothing within the secular worldview that should motivate a non self-centered relationship.)
And yet, don’t we all want more?
Don’t we believe deep down inside that people can show up for us even when we’re not of any use to them?
Or want to believe that we ourselves can escape our own self-centeredness to love even when it’s inconvenient?
And if so, what is the resource that could possibly motivate a self-giving love?
What in a secular, naturalist story could explain these longings?
What about the church?
The church is fundamentally different from other communities because it is built on the belief that true relationship emerges from the right constraints.
While the cultural notion of relationship is “you are free to do as you want as long as it makes you happy”, the Christian belief is that this is not true freedom.
There is a reality to which we are all bound.
Marriage, for example, is a relationship with constraint. You are bound to one option for the rest of your life.
Yet, its constraining nature is paradoxically the reason we can be free to lean into fully loving this other person, without fear of them leaving.
It is only by closing off other options that we learn to love when it’s not convenient, to keep showing up even when the other does nothing to enhance our reputation.
In the same way, the premise of the church is that you don’t get to choose who you do church with, and yet we are called to love “friends-with-no-benefits”.
The foundation of that premise being that at the very center of reality is love poured out on the cross by the Son of God for all of humanity.
He gave up his life for the unlovable. He committed himself to a people who couldn’t do anything for Him.
So we should do the same.
What is the best model for true inclusiveness and belonging?
So if this is true, which community provides the best model for true inclusiveness and belonging?
Is the narrative that religious communities are the most homogenous and thus least inclusive accurate?
In a fascinating Nature article released in August 2022, Chetty et al. explore the 2 factors that determine whether we make friends of a different socioeconomic status (SES) than us – exposure and friending bias. Exposure being the frequency of interaction and friending bias the likelihood you become friends after interacting.
They argue that friending bias is at the core of the socioeconomic divide in America as even though there have been many policy attempts to increase exposure across SES, we are still unlikely to willingly associate with those who have no benefit to us.
The one surprising finding in their extensive research on how friending bias varies across settings:
the only setting where people of a low SES were more likely to have friends with a higher SES than them were in religious groups.
In every other setting, from high school to workplaces to neighborhoods, the rich make friends with the rich and the poor with the poor.
Neighborhoods were in fact the most socioeconomically divided.
The article goes on to say that the poor were about 20% more likely to befriend a rich person in their religious groups than in their neighborhood.
If this were the case across all settings, most of the disconnection between the rich and poor in the U.S. would be eliminated.
In other words, it is in all the other communities – our workplaces, our alumni associations, our startup founder network, even our neighborhoods – where we make friends who are most like us.
But for some reason, there is something unique in religious community that fosters unlikely relationship in a way no urban planning policy or social connection campaign can.
The study doesn’t attempt to explain the surprising result, but I think it has something to do with what premises of reality motivate non self-serving relationship.
What, then, is the solution to this crisis of loneliness, and by extension, the looming shadow of mental illness we never can seem to escape?
I do not purport to know the answer to what may very be one of the biggest questions this generation will face.
Neither do the latest systematic reviews on all the loneliness interventions that exist.
Instead, what I know is this – we all want to be deeply known and loved beyond how much happiness we are able to give someone else.
We desire relationship that goes past social niceties but one that connects to the very core of who we are.
We want to believe that we will one day find a love that does not calculate or check out when it’s inconvenient.
In a way, I understand the big cultural shift away from organized religion.
The rise of the Nones is not because we don’t believe in God anymore, but because of a whole host of complex issues related to the sexual abuse scandals in the church and the resultant mistrust of institutions and leadership, political polarization and how the church got wrapped up in it, unanswered questions on LGBTQ+ and women issues.
These are real, valid concerns and issues the church needs to do a better job of addressing.
We need to learn how to better engage with those different from us, and be truly followers of the Jesus who welcomed the stranger and ate dinner with sinners.
At the same time, leaving Christianity because of the sins of the church would be like leaving the endeavour of science because scientists fake their data.
One thing society has gotten right is putting its finger on the right problem: our loneliness, left unaddressed, is killing us.
Where we are mistaken is what we’re putting our hope in to turn back the tide.
For if we were to put our hope solely in psychological therapy, community programs or the latest AI-powered technology to alleviate our loneliness, I believe we will end up sorely disappointed when we find them insufficient to answer the deepest longings of our souls.
