Dechurching and the ‘Illusion of Moral Decline’

If you find yourself plagued by the general feeling that people are not as nice or as moral as they once were, you are not alone. As psychologist Adam Mastroianni demonstrates in an article entitled “The Illusion of Moral Decline” in the June 7 issue of Nature magazine, that notion is common across all ages and demographics and in every society. It is so pervasive and powerful that we as individuals are primed to believe it whether facts support our feelings or not. And when social or cultural changes reinforce our fears, as they have in recent years, the tendency to assume the worst is magnified even more. Yet Mastroianni also finds that our feelings are illusory. As a rule, it seems, we are as moral and as nice as we ever were. We just do not know enough people to feel that way.

Mastroianni’s methodology included thousands of surveys with people from every demographic, occupation, and lifestyle. He found that most of us mythologize the past as a period when things were better, and we do it regardless of our age. The point in time we usually fixate upon is the year of our birth. So, someone my age might think things were fine until the 1960s; my parents would have argued things were better until the 1930s; the students I will teach this Fall think things were better until 2005; and so on.

Feelings are not rational, so even though it is entirely inconsistent from a logical point of view for all of us to feel this way, we do it just the same. And it makes sense in a way because we can only have memories from the time after we were born. As we mature and our lives become more complicated, it is natural to think life is harder and then to leap to the idea that people are not as nice.

There are also psychological phenomena at work. We all suffer from biased exposure, which means we are more likely to focus on negative behavior, especially in strangers. This is likely a trait that evolved in humans to aid in self-preservation. And we also struggle with biased memory, which means that bad memories fade faster than good ones. When combined, those traits mean that most of us forget the bad stuff that happened when we were young and therefore have an overly positive view of the good old days, while at the same time we are paying attention to all the bad news in the world currently and concluding that things are worse now than they used to be. Throw in genuine social change over the last 20 years, from the decline in trust in social institutions to growing loneliness and mental health declines, or from the erosion of community life and organizations to the disconnection and fear often associated with social media, and you have a real problem.

All these feelings/changes have implications for our culture and society, but they have special significance for our politics. They explain why the desire to return America back to what our distorted memories and feelings tell us it used to be is so powerful. It is why “Make America Great Again” resonates with so many people. And it does not matter that thousands of leaders throughout history have used a version of the same message. Nor does it matter that they never delivered. The feeling, or perhaps the longing, is often more powerful than any fact, and it goes a long way towards explaining much of our current polarization.

The good news is that Mastroianni found that while everyone believed people in general were less kind and moral (even though they were not) than in years past, they ALL believed their friends and family had gotten better over time. That belief, of course, is biased too, but it is a positive feeling we can build on because it implies that when we get to know people, we think they are nicer and that gives us more faith in humanity in general and in our social institutions in particular. And that means that one of the keys to combating our social ills is just to get out and meet folks.

Seriously, that is all we have to do.

I do not pretend this will be easy. We spent the last three decades chipping away at social institutions and becoming increasingly lost in our smartphones. To give one example, 40 million Americans stopped going to church over the last 25 years. That is about 12 percent of the population. It represents the greatest change in church attendance in American history. And as Jim Davis and Michael Graham point out in their book “The Great Dechurching”, the biggest problem is the nature of American life. Modern America does not emphasize nor typically celebrate the common good or the virtue of living a moral life. Instead, we are taught to maximize individual accomplishment as defined by professional and financial success. We are workaholics, and with precious little free time for family or recreation we just do not have time for church. And that is a shame because churches could be part of the solution for what ails us as a nation. People who regularly participate in a religious community on average are healthier, live longer, give more to others, and form more stable families. But membership in a vibrant religious group requires time and energy and emphasizes the well-being of the group rather than the individual, and that is a hard-sell in a society in love with individual gratification despite being unhappy and unfulfilled.

Church attendance is just one symptom of the larger challenge posed by our pervasive disconnection. We are increasingly lonely, anxious, and uncertain how to live in a community with other people. That is a dire problem for us as individuals, and for democracy in general.

The hope in what Mastroianni, Davis, and Graham have demonstrated, however, is that these problems can be fixed. We are just as good as individuals as you remember we were when you were young. But we must keep meeting new people and joining communities to remember that.

The only hope we have is each other.

Lance Janda holds a PhD in History from the University of Oklahoma and has more than 30 years of experience in higher education. He is the author of “Stronger Than Custom: West Point and the Admission of Women”, among other works.