America is a rich country, far richer than when I was coming of age. But life is lousy for young people.Reno could have added the epidemic gender dysphoria, suicidal ideation, and serious mental health problems experienced by so many of our children and adolescents.
If your parents are rich and ambitious on your behalf, you’ll be fed into the spiritual meat grinder of meritocratic competition at school, travel teams in sports, and endless activities aiming at enrichment.
If your parents are middle-class, they’re likely to be divorced. You probably attend public schools, which are run in accord with therapeutic principles that ask very little of you. Meanwhile, the smartphone colonizes your mind.
If you have the misfortune to be poor, your parents won’t have married, mom will be on her third live-in boyfriend, and some of your friends will have drowned in the ocean of cheap fentanyl.
As for love and romance, the dating game is almost entirely dysfunctional across all social classes. The country’s political culture isn’t healthy, either; it has been poisoned by sanctimonious Baby Boomers. Institutions are not trustworthy; employment is nakedly transactional.
These dysfunctions and misplaced priorities are not true of everyone, of course, maybe not even a majority, but they're certainly much more prevalent today than they were fifty years ago.
Why is that? Why is it that in the richest country in the history of the world - a country even the poor of which are far better off in terms of physical comforts than were the very wealthiest people living as recently as a century or two ago - why in such a country is there unprecedented malaise?
The answer, as even many agnostics have suggested, may be that life has become meaningless and empty for millions, and it has become meaningless and empty because we are in the process of deeming irrelevant the only thing that could make life genuinely meaningful.
Like a plane that has run out of fuel it can continue to glide for a time, but it will gradually lose altitude and it will ultimately crash.
The fuel of Western culture has for over a millenia been a Christian worldview grounded in a transcendent God and out of which has sprung amazing achievements in science, medicine, art, music, morality, freedom, human rights, charitable organizations, and so much more that we moderns take for granted.
Tragically, though, the fuel that produced these wonders is in danger of being exhausted, and if that should happen, none of those blessings will survive.
To roughly paraphrase the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, the attempts to sustain our culture apart from Christianity and the Christian God are like the attempts of children who, wishing to transplant a flower that pleases them, pluck it from the roots that seem to them unpleasing and superfluous, and stick it rootless into the ground.
Without Christianity the blessings of our culture will not endure, just as without roots there can be no flower.