Culture Friday: The poison behind teen girls’ depression

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It's the third day of March 2023. Glad to have you along for today's edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning. I'm Myrna Brown.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I'm Nick Eicher. Joining us now is John Stonestreet. John is President of the Colson Center. He is host of the Breakpoint Podcast and he is here now, John, good morning.

JOHN STONESTREET: Good morning.

EICHER: John, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, released a study that found almost six in ten teen girls feel persistently sad and hopeless, and that rate is twice the rate recorded for boys. Over the course of the last decade that persistent sadness and hopelessness has risen almost 60%. And the same study found also that a third of teenage girls in 2021 considered killing themselves. Now, I imagine it is more than fair to lay some of this at the feet of our social media platforms. But let me read a bit of what Allie Beth Stuckey wrote about in WORLD Opinions, she wrote this. "It's not just the overt messages teen girls are receiving via their phones that are dragging them into depression. It's the implicit message that all of them carry, which is that we are our own gods." She goes on, and I'm quoting still here, "A popular response to this new study will likely be we need to teach girls how to love themselves more and more self-care, more self-empowerment. But what if that's exactly what's killing them? What if it's not just the social media itself, but the self-idolatry it represents? That's really driving teens into feelings of purposelessness and depression? How do you answer those questions?

STONESTREET: I think she's right. I do think that it's not one thing, it's everything. And I think that the untethering of almost all of reality, from anything fixed, anything certain, anything predefined, which, of course, is exactly if we want to keep going back. And I know, you know, the going back game eventually leads us to the garden, right? But, and the temptation to eat of the tree of the knowledge and good and evil, but I do think in a very real way, these are the inevitabilities of modernism, they're in the inevitabilities of trying to create a world without God. And I remember in my early days of doing apologetics and worldview and listening to the folks, you know, talking about how naturalism and basically, whether that's an overt atheism, or whether that is kind of a God as your own personal private friend secularism. Either way, you're untethering the universe from any defined realities. And pretty soon, this kind of godlike complex that we have to define morality and to define reality and now increasingly to define everything becomes less of a joy and more of a burden.

I literally had this conversation this week with a group of teachers about this particular study. And that's what they say, it's just the, the idea that you can be whoever you want to be, which we've been telling kids now for decades. And it starts being way, way, way too much pressure. And now, I'll say that, and then let me also say this, social media is the most direct way that these messages get into these kids ear. And you don't have huge social shifts without stuff. And what I mean by that is what we call cultural artifacts. You know, you don't have the Protestant Reformation without the printing press, you don't have the sexual revolution without the pill, you don't have this revolution of mental health crises that's particularly facing a young girl without Instagram and Tiktok.

And I, you know, as a good kind of Reformed worldview thinker, I have almost an allergy of condemning an entire group of things that are used wrongly, you know, it's this theological distinction between what's called structure and direction. You know, I grew up in an environment where we oftentimes would condemn all structures, you know, you should never dance because some dancing is bad, and you should never go to movies because some of these are bad and I, I have an allergy to that sort of thing. But I am ready to say this. You would never allow your toddler to swim in a pool in the backyard unsupervised. It would actually be a cruel thing to do. It is time to take teenage girls off social media. It is time. It is like putting a megaphone right up to their ear, where 24/7 all they're hearing is that they're wrong in some way, that they're ugly in some way, that they just don't measure up, that they're not enough that they're bad that they're, you know, born in the wrong bodies, that they don't look pretty. I mean, it is just absolutely giving them a loaded weapon and hope they don't misuse it. I mean, it's just that it is time to do that. So I agree with what Stuckey writes in WORLD, I think she's hitting on things that are really important. But I also don't want to downplay the stuff, the actual thing that's delivering this message, like an intravenous poison right into their brains. And that's what's happening with social media platforms right now.

EICHER: You know, John, I wasn't planning to do this, but I got an email. And just as you were talking there, I was reminded of that email, it was nice email from a listener who had heard you last week, saying in response to a question from Myrna. It was the Supreme Court question, considering the case against social media. And you made the statement, social media is bad as essentially as you have here. And he thought that you overstated that case, and he thought I should have pushed back. So fair enough on that I will push back on his behalf now. This is Matthew brink of Owensboro, Kentucky, and he recorded his comment. So let me just play a portion of it and let you react and clarify or whatever you want to say,

MATTHEW BRINK: with respect to my brother, I believe that is sloppy thinking. The truth is more nuanced. Social media algorithms can be bad. Social media. leadership's motives can be bad. Social media, leadership, power moves can be bad social media leadership, censorship can be bad. Social media user attitudes can be bad, social media usage patterns can be bad, and much more. But let's continue thinking and making assertions with care.

EICHER: Well, there you go. Instant feedback, John.

STONESTREET: I'm ready to say, look, I appreciate the question. And that's my theological angst that I just mentioned about structure and direction. And I think there are remarkable things being done on social media right now to introduce people to Jesus, to actually get good arguments out there. But that's not coming from teenage girls. So how about I say social media is bad for teenage girls, always. And boys. So yeah, I mean, look, I get it. I mean, I do think that there's an amazing work that's done when people run into war zones, and try to bring truth and care and healing for victims. But we wouldn't send teenagers into a war zone. And that's what we're doing. And there's so many analogies here. And again, I get the angst, I just communicated the angst that we have to distinguish biblically between structure and direction. God created the world structurally good. It's directionally been taken bad. Humans can create structural goods that can directionally be taken bad. But you don't, that doesn't mean you allow incredibly vulnerable people there. And right now, teenage girls, there's I don't think there is a scenario right now where a teenage girl should be on Instagram or Tiktok.

BROWN: Well, John, we heard a lot about President Joe Biden's visit to Ukraine last week, much coverage by so-called mainstream media on his speech. But we heard very little, if anything in this country about the speech, Vladimir Putin made around that same time. I want you to listen to a bit of his speech that's been translated, and I would add herd around the world.

VLADIMIR PUTIN (TRANSLATED) Maybe they should take a look in the Scripture, into the holy book of any great religion. It says that the family is a union between woman and man. And these holy texts are now being increasingly doubted in the West. The Anglican Church is now considering the idea of a gender-neutral God, what can we say?

BROWN: Okay, granted, Putin is no saint, not by a longshot. But he sure sounds like a right-wing conservative there. So here's my question, John, how do Christians saying essentially the same thing is Putin respond to those who criticize that commonality?

STONESTREET: Yeah, I mean, look, I didn't have agreeing with all kinds of people on my bingo list for 2023. You know, I find myself sometimes seeing clips of Bill Maher going, Man, I didn't know I was gonna agree with him. And, and here we have Putin, and then we have others. But, look, I mean, part of this is, we just have to call balls and strikes. And the fact of the matter is when it comes to the social agenda of radical sexual activists, their activities are far more totalitarian than we often call out. They want to force reality to bend to an ideology, and there are people who still are able to see reality. In this respect, Putin is one of them. Now, there's so many bad things about Putin's ideas and his behavior and, and his leadership that I, look, we can say that too. And just because, you know, I find myself agreeing with a particularly harsh statement. I mean, Putin is not wrong. You cannot build society, you know, without, you know, the family. He's exactly right on that. And he's exactly wrong on military aggression and Russian history and, but he's not wrong about the fact that much of the West is completely deluded. And living in that delusion and trying to reframe everybody else's thought around that, too. He's not wrong about the Church of England, and what he says about them. He's not wrong about Western perversions, socially experimenting on children. He's not wrong about that, even if he's wrong about so many other things, and we got to say that.

BROWN: John Stonestreet is President of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint Podcast. Thanks, John.

STONESTREET: Thank you both.

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