American kids’ mental health is in crisis; the solution isn’t just therapy, it’s revolution

“In America, kids aren’t so much people as they are products or proof-texts or grades for the kinds of parents we are. Intrinsically, we know this as we recoil in quiet judgment from parents whose kids didn’t “turn out,” or whose attitudes and efforts don’t meet the unyielding expectations of American awesomeness and productivity.

Even in our national conversations about how to combat the youth mental health “crisis” in America, there is this expectation that if we focus on the problem — such as the relative and growing not-OKness of our young people — then we can neutralize the impacts of all this (gestures wildly) on the thing that matters most to us as a society and as parents: that our kids turn out well no matter the circumstances.”

Read more at Baptist News

I’m aiming for a kind of fresh resolve to no longer continue producing solutions for the future based on problems from the past

“This new year, most of all, I am desperate for us to resolve to tell the truth of what we all went through and are currently attempting to survive; to listen to what it has and is doing to us, and what solutions it is demanding from us, right now and not in some imagined version of our past projected out into the future with probably better phones.

We are never going back, and no amount of earnest resolution can change that. We can only go forward, armed with the knowledge that whatever awaits us next will meet someone, or an entire group of someones, who have grown up, who are no longer alone and who are able to be honest about what they went through without pretending or performing.”

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Advice for church after the pandemic: Stop believing capitalism will save you

For far too long, most white Christian institutions in America have found a particularly lucrative market niche by offering what is mostly — as Marx claimed — an anesthetizing opiate, or in words more familiar to us, an overprescribed anti-depressant for the pain of existing under capitalism and bloodthirsty self-interest. What is heaven if not one more T. Rowe Price commercial featuring boomers captaining schooners in the middle of the workday? And what is #blessed if not one more Waco dream kitchen prayerfully wrapped in shiplap?

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Raising kids at the end of the world.

Parenting a child in America right now, especially if you live in a state or region ruled by a Republican supermajority, isn’t too terribly different an experience than being a middle schooler who feels guilty for their parents’ divorce. Every day is chaotic, stressful and leaves you with the aching sense that the adults in the room are untrustworthy at best and selfish at worst. In this world, the messaging is always: work harder, read more, do more, learn more, and take more responsibility because you’re on your own, and if you want to make it out of this thing alive, you better grow up and get your shit together, or don’t.

Either way:

It’s up to you.

It’s up to you.

It’s up to you.

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'I don't think I care about anything anymore': How to be anxious and depressed during the end of the world

You don’t have to be a psychotherapist (like me!) to realize that I’m probably depressed. Not just because our country’s been trying to kill itself (at least actively) for the last five to six years, but because when you are anxious, almost uninterruptedly, for concerted periods of time, your body can’t physically maintain its normal level of engagement. So, like a car engine stuck in first gear, you overheat. Eventually, if you ignore the warning signs for long enough, your engine turns off and forces you onto the shoulder where, I guess to keep the metaphor going, you watch Netflix in your sweatpants and scroll other peoples’ vacation footage on Instagram until you cry and (hypothetically) shame-eat a dozen original glazed Krispy Kreme donuts.

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The revolution will be hashtagged.

During this, our on-again-off-again pandemic, even more of human life became “content,” like church and book clubs and insurrection. We buy pants and plants online, we digitally rummage through our friend’s new house on Zillow, we unexpectedly perish attempting to take cool selfies in dangerous places, we listen to podcasts and donate to Patreon accounts where famous people on the internet pretend to be our friends, and the man who sells us all these pants and plants just went to space for 11 minutes dressed as a cowboy.

Life is incredibly bizarre right now, and yet us humans? Totally, predictably, depressingly uncomplicated.

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Learning to see my hometown from a different perspective with a little help from my friends.

Owning my complicity for what happens in East Knoxville, in Minneapolis, in Cleveland, in Charleston, and in the White House as a privileged white person from “the couch,” isn’t some sort of political saber-rattle or virtue signal, it’s what my inherited evangelical tradition called an act of rededication. It’s a confession, an admittance of a sinfulness that both predates and inhabits me whenever I say things like “urban,” “impoverished,” or, you know “that” part of town.

For, as James Baldwin argues, it is only when white Americans are brought face to face with the fictions underwriting “our” history, “our” worth, “our” value, “our” neighborhoods, and “our” heritage that we might finally begin questioning the crippling capitalism that has so thoroughly blinded us to the realities of the world and has left us the “slightly mad victims of (our) own brainwashing.”

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Why 'moderate' churches fear telling it like it is

The morality that runs moderate church spaces and moderate politics is the same: survival at all costs. Which is why naming the realities of what is actually happening in our world, directly, without equivocation or hedging, betrays the one unassailable myth of moderate churches — that at some point they will, in fact, do something other than exist.

This, friends, as we saw on Jan. 6, is a lie.

Read more at Baptist News.

In an unending pandemic, grief isn't doubt, it's true faith

What I’m saying is that it isn’t just that we feel angry or cynically withdrawn from one another in the midst of our unending pandemic hellscape because of some inherent, individual brokenness or lack of intestinal fortitude. It’s that our anger and withdrawal are symptomatic of far deeper (and pre-existing) feelings of hopelessness and worthlessness installed by a broken family system and maintained by a socio-economic system that has monetized our discontent as a form of frenetic fuel (spoilers: you’re reading this on Facebook).

And, thanks to the ways in which we have thoroughly internalized the values of capitalism, many of us have become quite practiced at quickly transforming the collective and individual pain of being alive into productivity, consumption and compelling Christian testimonies. God, in America at least, is always rebranding our pain for us.

Which is why, maybe now more than ever, it is so terribly important to give a full hearing to the deep complexity of our grief as a devotional act before immediately getting stitched up, freshly medicated and right back to work.

Read more at Baptist News.