SUICIDE AND SECULARISM

 More than any other indicator, suicide says, “Life isn’t worth living.” What is causing the explosion of suicides among those who have everything to live for – our 10-24 year olds:

·       Suicide rates among youth ages 10 to 24 increased by 57% between 2007 and 2018, data released Thursday from the National Center for Health Statistics shows, rising from almost 7 per 100,000 population to nearly 11. Comparing three-year averages from 2007 to 2009 to the time period between 2016 and 2018 brought the increase down to 47%...The U.S. suicide rate among all age groups was 14 per 100,000 in 2018. https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/suicides-among-us-kids-young-adults-jumped-57percent-in-past-decade/ar-BB18ViMs?ocid=se

How can we explain this phenomenon? Many explanations are offered:

·       “There are many reasons to suspect that suicide rates will increase this year too, not just because of Covid-19 but because stress and anxiety seem to be permeating every aspect of our lives,” said Shannon Monnat, co-director of the Policy, Place, and Population Health Lab at Syracuse University. (Ibid.)

It does not seem that environmental factors are significant. This phenomenon is no respecter of the US States. Similar increases are found throughout the States. Instead, it seems to be associated with the growth of secularism, today’s reigning Western religion:

·       Diana Graines, in Rolling Stone, noted that prior to the 1960s, teenage suicide was virtually nonexistent among American youth. By 1980 almost four hundred thousand adolescents were attempting suicide every year. By 1987 suicide had become the second largest killer of teens, after automotive accidents. By the 1990s, suicide had slipped down to number three because young people were killing each other as often as they killed themselves. (Vishal Mangalwadi, The Book that Made your World: How the Bible Created the Soul of Western Civilization, 4)

Why point the accusing finger at secularism? Secularism destroys meaning and value. It claims that these do not have any independent existence. Instead, they are merely socially constructed to give life some coherence. However, our welfare depends upon believing that they are real and represent worthwhile pursuits. They impart fullness to our lives.

Secularism provides no basis for hope or faith beyond the physical world of chemical-electrical reactions. Consequently, in a valueless world, there can be no basis for meaning or morality beyond our own arbitrary decisions to create meaning out of non-meaning. Arthur Deikman, a Buddhist-like psychotherapist, writes about the poverty of secular psychotherapy:

·       Human beings need meaning. Without it they suffer boredom, depression, and despair…Western psychotherapy is hard put to meet human beings need for meaning, for it attempts to understand clinical phenomena in a framework based on scientific materialism in which meaning is arbitrary and purpose nonexistent. Consequently, Western psychotherapy interprets the search for meaning as a function of childlike dependency wishes and fears of helplessness. (The Observing Self, 4)

Secularism is incapable of affirming anything beyond the material. Many psychotherapists have noted the relationship between the absence of meaning, purpose, and moral absolutes and depression. In Speaking of Sadness, David Karp writes:

·       Cosmopolitan medicine banishes that [extra-material] knowledge by insisting that suffering is without meaning and unnecessary because pain can be technically eliminated. Symptoms are divorced from the person who has them and the situations that surround them, secularized as mechanical mishaps, and so stripped of their stories, the spiritual ramifications and missing pieces of history that make meaning. (191)

I too had experienced the barrenness of secularism. I had been referred to five highly recommended psychologists in my youth. Each had left me worse off than I had been before. I came to understand that everything that I felt, longed for, and dreamed about was merely a product of my childhood depravations. None of it had any meaning or purpose. It was one big mistake and its victim, a mere result of how I had been treated.

Secular therapy had stripped me of any sense of dignity; it laughed at my quest for honor. It reduced my life to a matter of self-fulfillment but made it almost impossible for me to find fulfillment.

Secularism is suicide, the death of the individual and even of his debauched society.