Always Lent, never Easter
Timothy P. Carney
“Be not conformed to this age,” St. Paul warned the Romans, implying that Christians ought to fit a bit uncomfortably in this world. This discord shines forth brilliantly in office breakrooms across America on Ash Wednesday every year as someone inevitably brings in a king cake and invites colleagues to join in consuming it.
The reason for the season of Mardi Gras is obliterated in a world without Lent. It’s enough to make a self-satisfied self-mortifier curse that our secular society does not believe in penitence, solemnity, or sin.
That critique (that we want Mardi Gras without Ash Wednesday) was far more apt a generation ago. In this age, our culture is guilty of the opposite heresy. Our secular religion, with its dogmata of inevitable climate doom, indelible racial guilt, and irredeemable deplorability, is much more like the one beyond C.S. Lewis’s wardrobe: “always winter, never Christmas.” Or in this case, always Lent, never Easter.
Teenage depression and anxiety have skyrocketed in recent years. The obvious suspects are social media and the COVID-era lockdowns. But these explanations grate on the sensibilities of many modern commentators, who reject the notion that our sadness might have been avoided or might possibly be overcome.
“People are like ‘Why are kids so depressed? It must be their PHONES!’” leading Washington Post millennial reporter Taylor Lorenz wrote on Twitter just before Ash Wednesday. To Lorenz, this explanation fails on multiple scores. For one thing, her job includes promoting and defending TikTok, a China-based social media app that is clearly causing teenage depression and anxiety. Also, Lorenz, like many in the media class, believes that cause is more deeply planted in America’s roots.
“We’re living in a late-stage capitalist hellscape during an ongoing deadly pandemic with record wealth inequality, 0 social safety net/job security, as climate change cooks the world.”
These points range from meaningless to outright false, but it’s the deeper truth that matters to millennial doomers: We are bad, our society is built upon evil foundations, and we should be depressed.
“You have to be delusional to look at life in our country right now and have any amount of hope or optimism,” Lorenz said.
Well, except that everyone really should be optimistic. The pandemic is over. America has a massive safety net that is bigger than ever before. And not a single climate scientist will claim that any wealthy American millennial is going to suffer significant harm due to the climate.
The expressed fear is a mask to cover guilt. Note how it’s the highly paid scribblers that most loudly declare their hatred of capitalism. That guilt is a symptom of sadness.
Sadness and guilt aren’t merely the product of sensationalist media. They are, in fact, natural. All the great religions have an account for our natural guilt. But the 21st-century secular religion is different because it has all the guilt and none of the redemption.
There is no season of atonement or penance anymore, only permanent sadness. But at least there’s also cake.