Church Attendance Slump Caused Mental Health Crisis, Harvard Professor Suggests

Anyway, plenty of mental-health clinicians I know see in religious-service attendance some of the habits and attitudes that can help to combat depression and anxiety. There’s the supportive community, the face-to-face interaction, the getting out of bed and out of the house, the sense of purpose and meaning, the expressions of gratitude and humility. Or, as Shai Held nicely puts it in his new book “Judaism Is About Love,” the balance between humility and “a robust sense of self-worth.” (“Woe to a person who is unaware of their shortcomings, because they will not know what to work on. But even greater woe to a person who is unaware of their virtues, because they don’t even know what they have to work with,” is a quote from Rabbi Yeruham Levovitz that Held marshals for this point.) Held, like VanderWeele, has had some funding from the John Templeton Foundation, which is interested in religion.

VanderWeele, like any good scientist, is careful to note the difference between causation and correlation, and cautious enough to use language like “suggest” rather than more definitive language such as “demonstrate” or “prove.”

None of this is to say that anyone should avoid seeking professional mental health treatment and instead go to church or synagogue as a substitute.

And there’s a danger, too, of instrumentalizing organized religion, taking a utilitarian view of it so that it’s useful only for its public health benefits rather than out of any more inherent truth. It could be that if people participate in organized religion only because they are seeking the health benefits, those benefits do not materialize in the way that they would if the participation came from some other motivation. Or perhaps they would anyway, because the attendance matters more than the original motivation, and the motivation may change over time.

From a public policy perspective, there are plenty of steps one could take to encourage religious service attendance. My personal favorite would be to make the government financially neutral as to whether a child attends a religious private school or a government-run public school. That could have other benefits as well. Another would be to ease regulations to make it easier for congregations to build or for congregations to rent spaces or use homes for services.

Kahn Backs Bennet Theory of Times Trouble: When former New York Times editorial page editor James Bennet wrote his long piece in the Economist back in December 2023 about how the New York Times lost its way, I headlined my summary of it “James Bennet on how Academia Ruined Journalism.” Bennet wrote, “The new newsroom ideology seems idealistic, yet it has grown from cynical roots in academia: from the idea that there is no such thing as objective truth; that there is only narrative, and that therefore whoever controls the narrative – whoever gets to tell the version of the story that the public hears – has the whip hand.”

Back then, the Times pushed back hard against Bennet. “I could not disagree more strongly with the false narrative he has constructed about The Times,” Times publisher AG Sulzberger said in a statement.

Now Sulzberger’s hand-picked executive editor, Joe Kahn, has given the Wall Street Journal an interview in which he basically backs the Bennet theory that higher education is to blame for the ideological conformity that afflicts the Times. From the Journal’s account of its interview with Kahn:

He also suggested that colleges aren’t preparing new hires to be tolerant of dissenting views.

“Young adults who are coming up through the education system are less accustomed to this sort of open debate, this sort of robust exchange of views around issues they feel strongly about than may have been the case in the past,” he said, adding that the onus is on the Times to instill values like independence in its employees.

It’s all somewhat comical circular blame-shifting. The employers blame the colleges, the colleges blame the primary and secondary education system, and so forth. What newspaper does Kahn think the professors and teachers and graduate students are reading? Credit to him, though, for at least publicly acknowledging the problem.

Recent Work: Speaking of the problems at the New York Times, my latest column over at the Algemeiner is headlined “New York Times Bares Anti-Israel Bias in Dispatch From Berlin.” It’s about some of the tricks the Times uses to villainize Israel. Please check it out if you are interested in that sort of thing.

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