If you have followed GetReligion for a decade or so, you know that our religion-beat patriarch Richard Ostling writes a “Memo” post every week in which he focuses on religion trends and future events to which journalists should be paying attention.
This week’s Memo focused on why religious and secular debates about Death with Dignity laws will not be fading away anytime soon. As always, Ostling’s Memo posts are packed with links to relevant interest groups, experts and online resources to aid reporters.
This brings me to this week’s “Crossroads,” which — for a change — does not focus on a religion-news story in the mainstream press (click here to listen to the podcast). Instead, you can think of this feature as a kind of Mattingly Memo, in which host Todd Wilken and I discussed the news (and religious) implications of a new Atlantic Monthly essay by Jonathan Haidt that ran with this dramatic double-decker headline:
The Dangerous Experiment on Teen Girls
The preponderance of the evidence suggests that social media is causing real damage to adolescents
On its face, this essay was not a “religion news” piece at all. From my point of view, that was kind of the point.
One of the themes Haidt stressed was that teen-aged girls are pretty much alone, when it comes to wrestling with the moral, emotional and even medical side effects of addiction to social media — the invasive visual-image wonderland of Instagram, in particular. The article includes a depressing file of research slides on this mental-health issue from the Wall Street Journal (click here for that .pdf). Note, in particular, that teens believe their parents have next to zero understanding of what is going on.
If parents are tuned out, where does that put clergy? Should religious leaders be playing some kind of role in public-square (and personal) discussions of this issue?
These questions made me think of an “On Religion” column that I wrote in 2017 about the efforts of some Colorado teens — reacting to several suicides linked to cyber-bullying — to help their friends examine the impact of social-media programs on their lives.