Carl Trueman: Hope for anxious teens

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Tuesday, October 8th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard. Coming up next, social media and teen suicide. The recent death of a young Japanese girl is a reminder of the despair epidemic many teens face…and social networking apps are only making matters worse. Here’s WORLD Opinions contributor Carl Trueman.

CARL TRUEMAN: Anyone with even a passing acquaintance with young people in America knows that anxiety and depression are everyday fare. Abigail Shrier and Jonathan Haidt are just two of the more well-known cultural analysts who have pointed to the problem. And they say it’s being made worse by the increasingly online, disembodied, and thus disconnected existence that many teenagers now experience as normal daily life. Talk of a teenage wasteland of despair and anxiety is everywhere, and anecdotal evidence of a mental health crisis on college campuses is not hard to find.

Given the comparative affluence and stability of many Western societies today, this problem should be a cause for concern. The typical college undergraduate in the United States does not live in daily fear as earlier generations did They do not have to flee the Luftwaffe’s nightly bombing raids, as my father did as a small child in England during the Second World War. Nobody is being drafted to serve in an overseas war. And there are no dust bowl children living in shanty towns as depression sweeps the country.

Even so, this does not make the anxiety of today’s young people any less real. Take just one important difference: The world I grew up in was one where I had friends who were a real, physical presence in my life. Nobody’s opinion of me beyond them counted. Indeed, I had no way of knowing what others that I had never seen and didn’t really know thought of me. A falling out with someone I did know was costly and could easily end with fists flying. It didn’t happen very often, but when it did, it was rarely of any great duration.

Today, social media makes members of the pool of approvers or disapprovers vast. Insults come cheap. Indeed, the very medium incentivizes nastiness and despair and helps to fuel the anxiety and insecurity of young people for whom their online image is sometimes, perhaps often, the most real thing in their minds. More than once, online bullying has contributed to tragic teenage suicides in the United States in recent years.

Of course social media is not the only pathogen. The forces driving this social sickness are complicated and varied, and the situation can press even Christians toward despair of finding a solution. Yet Christianity is nothing if it is not a religion that repudiates despair and is supposed to embody its opposite. Reading the New Testament, and especially the letters of Paul, it is clear that hope lay at the theological and experiential heart of his ministry…even amid all the chaos he experienced, the church disputes that kept him awake at night, and the persecution he endured.

That is where Christians today need to engage in serious self-examination. The forces that have created teenage angst and catapulted young people toward suicide may be beyond our power to change at a macro level, but Christian witness offering hope to those around us can have great power. We all exert some influence on the people in our congregations and even those who read our social media accounts. And such a witness needs to eschew the idioms of anger and despair that are infused into our culture and point by way of contrast to something better.

It is sobering to ask ourselves how much Christian hope—hope in God’s sovereign purpose of redemption—characterizes the public statements of those whose social media platforms lay claim to the name of Christianity. Anger at the desecration of God’s world is certainly in order—combined, of course, with humble acknowledgment of our own complicity in this. But our hope must be obvious to all. If we do not have the solution to the despair that leads young people to decide life is not worth living, then who does?

I’m Carl Trueman.

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