1. You might have encountered Freya India as one of the young Gen-Z writers over on Jonathan Haidt’s After Babel substack, which just this week dropped a data-driven reflection on the ways conservative religious families have largely avoided the hazards of screen-filled, play-free childhoods. In their summary of the data: “The secret is likely not any particular belief system itself but the way organized religion and shared beliefs bind communities together.” India, on her own substack that focuses on young women, wrote on the same subject, declaring “Our New Religion Isn’t Enough.” By “new religion”, India specifically means the therapy culture that so many rely upon for meaning and purpose. She points out how the proliferation of therapy culture seems to not only not help people achieve mental health or spiritual wellness, but make things worse:

My worry with this new faith is that it wrenches aspects of religion from the inconvenient parts; the parts we need most.

Because where is God, in all this? Who is God? Some say therapy culture has no God. I think, more accurately, it’s us. God is who all this revolves around. All these apps and platforms serve us. AI chatbots are “all about you and your mental health journey”! Our online therapist is here to serve our every need, whenever we have one, any time of day. We are the divine; we are the deity. We have become the omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent beings in our lives. There’s a reason, I think, that one of the most popular therapeutic phrases at the moment is is this serving me? […]

It’s hard to put this into words but I think, in some ways, what we actually want is to be humbled. People say Gen Z follow these new faiths because we crave belonging and connection, but what if we also crave commandments? What if we are desperate to be delivered from something? To be at the mercy of something? I think we underestimate how hard it is for young people today to feel their way through life without moral guardrails and guidance, to follow the whims and wishes of our ego and be affirmed by adults every step of the way. I’m not sure that’s actual freedom. And if it is, I’m not sure freedom is what any of us actually wants. […]

So maybe we can replace some aspects of religion. We can find community without church. We can be absolved from guilt and shame in therapy. We can find peace and calm by putting our faith in the universe. But what seems very difficult to replicate are the demands on the self. Not just a sense of continuity with the past, but a sense of obligation to the past — to honour our ancestors, to do right by our future offspring. Religion is not just reckoning with God and with the world, but reckoning with yourself. Not your needs and feelings but all the ways you fall short and fail to put others first. It’s a life devoted not to feeling better but being better; not to better thoughts but better actions. Instead we fear nobody. We need ask no forgiveness. But what if that’s what we need most? Less of a reckoning with childhood trauma, less with social injustice, and more with ourselves?

India, and the greater After Babel community, have seen the data and acknowledged that organized religion has something that the world is missing. They aren’t the only ones either: I’ve noticed a growing crowd of secular voices flirting with religion as of late, whether it’s Jordan Peterson’s “Wrestling with God” tour or Nick Cave’s spirit-filled newsletters or Richard Dawkins’s plea to leave pretty cathedrals alone and keep singing Christmas carols. My fear, of course, is that the secular impulse to gain the benefits of organized religion without the organized religion is a fool’s errand. This week’s After Babel data dump ended with the following recommendation: “No, I’m not calling for everyone to fully abandon the digital world or decide to become religious and conservative. But I am saying that secular families and liberal parents may need to work harder and be more intentional about providing their children with tight-knit, real-world communities that can combat the ill effects of the immersive and addictive virtual world.” Maybe it’s just my organized religious ears, but any time the solution is “try harder,” I have my doubts.

 

2. Despite my multiple trips to NYC for Mockingbird conferences, I never went to see the avant garde play Sleep No More, which is now (probably) closing after 13 years of production. The play is famous for its immersive experience — the audience wanders through a five story gilded age hotel, where they are free to roam and observe as the cast performs a version of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. The audience are all given spooky white plague masks and asked to remain silent, as if they are ghosts or spirits present in the midst of the actors. Styled in Roaring Twenties fashion, with fanciful cocktails to boot, the play was a kind of cutting-edge theatrical experience — or at least it was 13 years ago when it debuted. Now, as Tara Isabella Burton writes over at Slate, the idea of an immersive experience has become commonplace, tapping into those inward curved parts of our lives that marketers love to exploit.

At their best, immersive productions offer “a magical, intricate, wonderful experience you just get lost in for a few hours,” says Nick Atkinson, a former Sleep No More performer who originated the role of Maximilian Martel, one of the Manderley’s in-show cabaret hosts. But, increasingly, “immersive” has become a catchall branding term, bearing the same relationship to genuine experience as content does to art. At worst, the popularity of productions that bill themselves as “immersive” play to the audience’s potential narcissism: our collective desire, affirmed by a culture driven by social media, to be the main character — not only of our own lives, but also of someone else’s show. In this context, immersive theater can be less an escape from smartphone culture so much as its natural extension: another place for us to narrate, whether through social media or simply our own consciousness, the story of our own lives — less a place to lose ourselves than to reify our selfhood. By becoming part of the show, often in highly aestheticized ways, we pass up the opportunity to experience the sheer otherness of theater: encounters with characters whose stories, for a few hours, become far more important than our own. Contrary to what so many of us once found in Sleep No More, many of today’s shows that bill themselves as “immersive” merely foster the idea that the audience is the star — or, as Atkinson puts it, “gotta get those selfies … to put out there.” […]

It would be possible to read Sleep No More’s popularity, and its wider legacy of immersive content, as a harbinger of a wider cultural shift: one in which we have begun to expect artistic experiences to revolve around us — or indeed, to think of encountering art as a specific kind of personal experience. The more we become accustomed to living our lives as a source of content, the more we want our relationship to artistic production to be one that centers our own subjectivity. More and more of us hunger for experiences where we are not asked to pay attention to others, but where others — performers included — interact with, and pay attention, to us. The idea that we should be part of the show, once a transgressive invitation to challenge the boundaries of us and them, has now become an all-too-common excuse for treating theatrical outings as a backdrop boost to our ego.

But to blame immersive theater itself for this shift, Booth warns, would be to ignore the very factors that made Sleep No More such a potent production in the first place. Immersive theater, he points out, has its roots in the kind of all-encompassing religious rituals that were once an ordinary part of human social life. “The churches were the art centers of their day,” Booth notes; they provided a “very rich sensory experience,” from the art to the music to the physicality of being there. The idea that you could experience a transcendent shared reality outside the ordinary has long been not just an aesthetic phenomenon but a spiritual one: one that seems all the more necessary in an era where, as Booth puts it, many of us live in “artificial urban environments, disconnected from nature, from our bodies, from spirit.”

Burton’s religious take here is worth consideration. From my perch in Pittsburgh, hardly the hot spot for cutting-edge theatrical productions, when I hear about immersive experiences, it’s usually those Instagram-styled pop-ups that first come to mind: museums of ice cream, dinosaur exhibits for kids, or that failed Willy Wonka experience in Scotland that made the rounds last month. When done right, says Burton, immersive theater (and religious experience) can’t possibly function as social projection. Transcendence requires a separation from the self, which is not only unpopular, but increasingly, in the smartphone age, harder to pull off.

 

3. The New Yorker takes a swipe at a certain class of left-leaning progressives regarding their views on children, which I only feel comfortable mentioning because I will offer a right-leaning equivalent swipe in a moment. Jay Caspian Kang reviews the new book by Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman, What Are Children For?, which gives the occasion for some soul-searching, regardless of political background. The book points out how modern parents, without a larger spiritual or social inspiration for having kids, default to culture war language and ideas instead of parenthood’s inherent joys or depths of meaning.

Within this larger discourse, Berg and Wiseman see a landscape of beleaguered people who have leaned a bit too far into their political and cultural beliefs, trading in the joys of life for an overly determinative belief that children will suffer inescapable misery. The thought of having children, in these mostly progressive circles, is often weighed against rising existential risk, whether stemming from climate change, the emergence of the far right, or even artificial intelligence. This, the authors point out, is a weird way to talk about kids. And they envision a near future in which that conversation becomes further polarized, with the anti-abortion right on one side and an increasingly anti-natalist left on the other. This outcome, they think, would be disastrous. “Simply put,” Wiseman writes, in the book’s introduction, “the question of whether or not to have a family is too important to allow it to be a casualty of the culture war.”[…]

This is why “What Are Children For?” ultimately feels provocative, even if its scope does not extend much beyond the panicking class. We might know what children are for, and most of us, I imagine, understand why they are good. But do we know how to talk about our kids without apology, or feigned ambivalence, or as the causes and victims of one coming apocalypse or another? When our children do good, we bring up endless caveats about privilege; we are always aware of how lucky we are. And yet we also talk about children as impositions to whatever it is we imagined ourselves doing otherwise. Most parents, in my experience, do not actually think about their children in these ways — most are loving and appreciative. But our discourse about children suffers from a culture of perpetual alarm, theatrical stress, and doomerism. If the point of our politics is to promote a prosperity that can be shared by the children of every type of family, we should stop talking about children as the key to competition with the economic enemies of the United States, or as sites for endless optimization, or as impositions who need to be continually placed into a polite, deferential context. We should talk about them as a universal and immutable good.

If the left has trouble talking about kids without the lens of “alarm, theatrical stress, and doomerism,” the right has the same troubles talking about children beyond extending family and cultural tradition. Rather than being “universal and immutable goods,” children become the vehicles for values to be passed along to future generations. If those values are athletic excellence, you get shouting matches at little league games. If those values are religious traditions, you get fundamentalist homes. There’s a whole genre of stories where children chafe at the expectations their parents have to inherit the business, politics, or manners of their family history, a genre that wouldn’t exist if it didn’t have some basis in reality. This is why conservative parents are often characterized as less charitable to their children’s divergent life choices: It marks a failure of that task to pass along a legacy or tradition.

If the left struggles to talk about kids without engaging with how far the world is from a progressive ideal, the right struggles to talk about kids without engaging in tradition and legacy. Which is to say, the challenge of letting children be a universal and immutable good remains for the left and right alike, and the act of having and raising kids for both sides remains too important to be a casualty of the culture wars.

Also: The book by Berg and Wiseman was reviewed in Christianity Today by Bonnie Kristian, who rightly points out that, for all their wisdom and insight, the secular answer to why one should have kids is still about whether it’s ‘right for you,’ an expression of authenticity, and not because it’s an inherent social and cultural (and spiritual) good.

4. In humor this week, Reductress gets the laughs with “Guests Crying During Vows Are All Thinking About Their Own Shit.” How selfish of them. McSweeney’s offers “Excerpts from an Epic Fantasy Novel Where the Protagonist Is Over Thirty” as well as “You’ve Read Your Last Free Article, Such is the Nature of Mortality.” I also appreciated the unexpected depth and richness of Colbert talking Father’s Day with his wife. The comedy bit was OK, but when the duo testify to the power and love and transformative leadership of a good father in their lives, the tenor is transcendent. Come for the Catholic/Protestant jokes, stay for the touching reveal that Colbert’s father in law died five weeks prior.

5. From one hot potato to another, the feminist writer Lux Alptraum asks a tough question in the New York Times this week. “We’re Good at Punishing #MeToo Men. Can We Ever Forgive Them?” she asks, recounting her unexpected friendship with canceled documentary filmmaker Morgan Spurlock. When the #MeToo moment hit back in 2018, Spurlock, the director (and star of) the famous film Supersize Me, published a confession of his own track record of misogyny, and as a result, tanked his career. In the fallout, Alpatraum was vetted as a potential feminist advisor to help him resuscitate his career, but the two became friends instead, dialoguing for years about the definition and practice of what it means to be a good person. Alpatraum writes:

When the news broke last month that Mr. Spurlock had died from complications of cancer, the arc of his life seemed permanently settled: a one-hit wonder who’d squandered his success by trying to get out ahead of a potential P.R. scandal. On social media, more than a few people derided him as a rapist who didn’t deserve to be mourned, a privileged white guy who’d hurt people on the way up and expected the slate to be wiped clean just because he’d admitted that he’d done something wrong.

I find myself chafing at this summary judgment. After that initial coffee, I’d stayed in touch with Mr. Spurlock and eventually we formed a friendship, one full of conversations about what it might mean to be a better person. Despite that relationship, I don’t consider him worthy of blanket forgiveness; I don’t even believe that he deserved a second chance at the spotlight. But I can’t shake the feeling that, nearly seven years after #MeToo, we still haven’t found a way for men who want to make amends to do so meaningfully. There were prominent figures brought down by #MeToo who’ve never asked for, nor deserved, our sympathy. But if we as a society want to truly break the cycle of harm, we need to offer an opportunity for forgiveness to those who are truly willing and eager to change.

It’s sobering to me to realize in hindsight that, if Mr. Spurlock had simply said nothing, his reputation likely would have survived intact. Many celebrities touched by #MeToo scandals have since re-emerged relatively unscathed, either due to a shifting political climate, a steadfast refusal to be held to account or the inevitable cooling of the white-hot emotions that prevailed in that moment. But it seems wrong to me that Mr. Spurlock — whom I believe genuinely hoped to learn from his actions — would have fared better if he’d stayed silent. And it seems cruel that a man who attempted to take ownership of his actions accomplished so little beyond sabotaging his own career and public standing.

Spurlock’s confession revealed a lot, and it’s easy to see how it made him more enemies than sympathizers. Still, I think this unlikely friendship outlines the power of repentance, the genuine connection and mutual affection that can form when someone is genuinely sorry for their situation. It may not restore careers or fill bank accounts, but the fact that someone is standing up with a story of affection at a guilty man’s funeral speaks volumes. Spurlock had said that he acknowledged that he was part of the problem and hoped to be the part of the solution, a reality that might just happen posthumously. It also reminded me of a quote from Ruby Sales, the civil rights activist, who spoke in Charlottesville on the other side of the 2017 Unite the Right violence: “Justice without forgiveness is not justice, but vengeance.”

6. The last word this week goes to pop diva Raye, whose latest release “Genesis” is its own sort of devotional. For every essay written about the crushing dangers of social media, addiction, body shame, mental illness, etc., and how faith is the antidote, the seven minute music video “shows” it better than all the think pieces can “tell”. Be sure to stay for the video’s third act, where everything changes — the mood, the music, the audience, the style, etc.

“Let there be light,” indeed:

Strays:

• Following up on the piece from Freya India and the After Babel team, Christine Emba, Washington Post editor and writer, thinks we may be hitting “peak loneliness.”
• A full history of Eagles Court, the famous courtroom established by the city of Philadelphia in the Eagle’s football stadium to curb fan violence with quick prosecution.
• Why Dining Rooms Are Disappearing From American Homes
• For Father’s Day weekend, you’ll forgive a smidge of self-promotion if I praise the uncool, goofy fathers of the world. For a more touching experience of what it’s like to be a father, Garth Risk Hallberg writes about the conversation he had with his son about his own teenage addiction to painkillers. See also the Luke Combs video above.

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