God is Not Dead – Just Irrelevant: Addiction, Anxiety, & Agnosticism in America

I.  An Addicted Nation

I recently attended a Conference of the American Association of Safety Professionals in New Orleans, during which I sat in on a panel of distinguished lawyers, doctors, and policymakers on drug use in America.

During the discussion one of the doctors on the panel made an impassioned argument that America has become unlike any other country in the world in our use and abuse of alcohol and drugs—that as a people we turn to chemical substances as a way to change the way we feel more than any other country in the world—by 2-3 times in most cases.

In other words, look around you, to those who you work with, to who you associate with, to your family and friends. One out of seven of them are on a path towards substance abuse.

The societal costs of addiction and chemical abuse has become crippling to our country. The effects are broad and pervasive. Since the drug revolution in the early 1960’s, we have witnessed steady increases in; isolation, poverty, physical and sexual abuse, suicides, mood and mental disorders, incarcerations, & exploding health care costs.

In the Seattle area where I live, we are drowning in the problem of homelessness, as are many large cities in America. If we are waiting for a good economy to solve this problem, today would have been the day. And yet everywhere homelessness is growing.

Approximately 80% of the homeless population is due to individual alienation from any close relations—an alienation directly related to mental disorders and addiction. And yet, Seattle continues to spend millions of dollars each year trying to solve the problem by re-locating the homeless, cleaning up tent cities, and adding shelter beds the city cannot keep up with and many of the homeless do not want.

The question the panel left unanswered was “Why America, the most prosperous and advanced country in the world, leads the way in chemical use, abuse, and addiction?” I left this panel thinking about the implications of this, mulling it over in my mind for days.

I am not a sociologist or psychologist. What I am is both concerned and curious. What I bring to the question is my personal experience with addiction and recovery. It is through my story that I have formed the lens through which I come to my understanding of things.

As I pondered this topic, I could not help but reflect on three corresponding trends since the early 1960s; Addiction, Anxiety, and Agnosticism. Here I grapple with the question; Is there a connection between these three A’s in America? And if so, is there a way out?

This essay is my attempt to make sense of this national problem. I begin in assuming not all will agree with my thoughts or conclusions, but I hope at least you will think along with me for a few moments.

II. An Anxious Nation

As a nation, a large percentage of us just do not like the way we feel, and so we try to change that any way we can. The most efficient and readily available means to do this is through ingesting alcohol, opiates, amphetamines, or hallucinogens.

I am not advocating temperance. I am saying that I believe the fact that we are the largest users of chemicals in the world is a symptom of other underlying problems. By facing and addressing these underlying problems, we may in fact do more to eradicate the social ills I have alluded to.

My descent into alcoholism had its pre-cursors, ones I discovered only as I began to recover. Chief among them was a certain low-grade, chronic anxiety that ran like an underground stream in my soul.

I was born anxious.

While there were no saber tooth tigers crouching behind my neighborhood trees to devour me, I always believed there could be. It was an anxiety disassociated from reality.  It felt like if I walked gently over the thin ice of my life, I might make it. But who knows, any minute I could fall through!

The first time I felt relief from this was with my first drink. I knew then, on a subconscious level, that I had found a way to survive in this life.

Many years later when I entered recovery, I learned that I am not alone in this underlying anxiety. It is a defining characteristic for addicts in general.

Studies have shown that some form of anxiety disorder is becoming increasingly common in contemporary America, affecting 40 million adults in the United States age 18 and older, or 18.1% of the population every year.

The World Health Organization (WHO) reports that with respect to anxiety related cases, America is head and shoulders above all other regions, including Africa and Europe, suggesting that anxiety is more common in wealthier nations and perhaps the U.S.in particular. Hmm—sounds similar to the addiction statistic!

Some researchers have indicated that humans in Western societies are becoming more psychologically sensitive because there is less pressure on us to survive now that food and water are so abundant. They believe that our gaze has moved away from survival and shifted inward. They argue that we now focus on extrinsic desires, such as a new car and a big house, rather than intrinsic desires, including the joy of family and friends, and meeting with others in the community.

This type of general anxiety in America is in stark contrast to say, the very real and specific anxiety in cultures struggling to simply live. For example, in Africa, both a lion and abject poverty are very real dangers!

Social Anxiety Disorder and Addiction
The occurrence of substance abuse is common among people who have a general anxiety disorder(GAD). People with this disorder report that alcohol helps lessen their social anxiety, although it often makes it worse.  Alcohol abuse usually develops alongside or soon after the onset of this disorder, as it did in my case. The cure becomes the disease.

Again, I ask myself how as a nation did we get to this place of heightened anxiety leading to chemical abuse and its train of societal ills? For those of my age, our grandparents endured the great depression and WWI, while our parent’s generation served in WWII, suffered its rationing and hardships, and then helped rebuild our economy in its aftermath. Where did these generations find their strength and hope? And what has happened in our country since then that would make us so anxious that we readily self-medicate our moods and anxieties and, in the process, become the most chemically dependent nation in the world?

III. An Agnostic Nation -The Secularization of America

If indeed our national anxiety is feeding our national chemical dependency, then where did this anxiety come from and when did it begin?

I will suggest, again from my personal experience and curiosity, that it also began in the early 1960’s with the secularization (the general retreat from a personal belief and trust in a benevolent supreme being) of America in the name of government mandated plurality.

In the early 1960’s a court ruling Engel v. Vitale (1962) forbade schools from initiating or sponsoring religious activities, including prayer. Abington School District v. Schempp (1963)banned Bible reading; Lee v. Weisman (1992) extended the ban to prayers at graduation exercises; and Santa Fe Independent School District v. Doe (2000) extended it to student-initiated prayers at ball games.

The same has happened to our public space. Stone v. Graham (1980) prohibited the display of the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms and public religious symbols such as nativity scenes are uniformly banned.

Despite our national motto “IN GOD WE TRUST” practical evidence of this has been disappearing in the public arena over the past fifty years.

God has been pushed out to the fringe of our social life. And even many of our Churches are beginning to reflect the culture they try so hard to fit in with. Orthodoxy (right teaching) and Orthopraxy (right practice) have given way to “reformed” (culturally influenced) practice.

A survey released in 2009 by the Pew Research Center found that a quarter of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 surveyed said they were atheists (God does not exist), agnostics (God may or may not exist, but it does not matter to me), or had no religion. The decline in religion that began in the ’60s has accelerated in the past 15 years and is especially great among young people. A recent Pew report noted that over a third of its young respondents described themselves as “believers in nothing in particular.”

New research from the Public Religion Research Institute suggests that, at least in political terms, most Americans are secular in their orientation. The share that rejected any religious affiliation continues to grow rapidly, rising from 6 percent in 1992 to 29 percent in 2017. Among Millennial’s, the figure was 45 percent. Coincidentally (or not!) this reflects the same growth curve in anxiety disorders.

IV. Turning the Ship; In God We Trust-Once More

While the secular class has been shedding their religious beliefs, evidence of the positive effects of religious life have been repeatedly reported by many studies over the past decades.

Many of them show that strongly religious people are happier, healthier, and live longer than those with no religious belief and practice. Having faith in God and attributing a religious meaning to life anchors people, directs their efforts to things beyond the material world, protects them against setbacks, and provides supportive community. In the Handbook of Religion and Health, 299 quantitative studies were identified that had examined the relationship between religious beliefs and behaviors and anxiety.  Of those research reports, 147 (49%) found inverse relationships between religiosity and anxiety or a decrease in anxiety in response to religious/spiritual interventions.

In one of those studies, researchers examined whether including a religious/spiritual approach to meditating might reduce anxiety more effectively than secular meditation. In the first part of their study, 68 college students were taught either a spiritually focused meditation or a non-spiritual relaxation technique to practice for 20 minutes a day for two weeks. After that time, there was a marked reduction in anxiety reports from those who engaged in spiritual meditation and religious practices from those who simply practiced relaxation techniques. Do we require a spiritual connection to feel at ease?

And yet again, I have only my experience to draw from when I observe our national free -floating anxiety and how to break free from apart from medicating it away.

It all came down to who or what I can trust with my life— to guide me, to grant to me meaning, purpose, and joy?

When I learned how to treat my own anxiety through a simple reliance on a God who was loving and personal to me, my anxiety about life slowly slipped away, and with it my desire to change the way I felt. For no matter how I felt in a particular moment, sober days had taught me it would pass on its own as long as I kept my focus on God’s will.

As Bill Wilson wrote in the Book “Alcoholics Anonymous” in his wonderful chapter “We Agnostics”

“We have learned that whatever the human frailties of various faiths may be, those faiths have given purpose and direction to millions. People of faith have a logical idea of what life is all about. Actually, we used to have no reasonable conception whatever. We used to amuse ourselves by cynically dissecting spiritual beliefs and practices when we might have observed that many spiritually-minded persons of all races, colors, and creeds were demonstrating a degree of stability, happiness and usefulness which we should have sought ourselves… 

Here are thousands of men and women, worldly indeed. They flatly declare that since they have come to believe in a Power greater than themselves, to take a certain attitude toward that Power, and to do certain simple things, there has been a revolutionary change in their way of living and thinking. In the face of collapse and despair, in the face of the total failure of their human resources, they found that a new power, peace, happiness, and sense of direction flowed into them. This happened soon after they wholeheartedly met a few simple requirements. Once confused and baffled by the seeming futility of existence, they show the underlying reasons why they were making heavy going of life. Leaving aside the drink question, they tell why living was so unsatisfactory. They show how the change came over them. When many hundreds of people are able to say that the consciousness of the Presence of God is today the most important fact of their lives, they present a powerful reason why one should have faith…

When we saw others solve their problems by a simple reliance upon the Spirit of the Universe, we had to stop doubting the power of God. Our ideas did not work. But the God idea did.”

Is it time now to consider the degree of connection between our national addictions, anxieties, and agnosticism? Could Jesus, the ultimate symbol of religious thought—Jesus, who has been shoved to the corners of society and even the recesses of some of our churches, have been right when he said;

“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?

 “And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin.  Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these.  If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith?  So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’  For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them.  But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.  Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. MA 6:24-34

Human governmental systems and politics may create a portion of our anxiety, but it cannot solve our national anxiety problem, and the train of social ills that follow it, because our anxiety lies not outside of us, but within. It is an inside job, and that makes it spiritual in nature.

As Thomas Merton, Trappist monk, wrote (incidentally in the 1960’s):

“ Ours is a time of anxiety because we have willed it to be. Our anxiety is not imposed on us by some force outside. We impose it on our would and upon one another from within ourselves.” Conjectures of a guilty Bystander

“Anxiety is the mark of spiritual insecurity.”  No Man is an Island

I don’t presume to have an easy national response to the problems of anxiety and addiction. I don’t have an answer for anyone but myself. This is a pluralistic and free society, which means we each have to find our way.  But I can share where I have been and what has happened along the way—and maybe that will be enough to open the mind and heart of another person suffering from anxiety, the sense of alienation, and/or addiction.

Here is my prayer, that I share for your benefit:

“God, free me from anxiety, fear, and worries, and help me to put my trust in you. I believe that you care for me, you guide me, and you give me the strength to go through my day’s duties. Help me to live each moment with trust and gratitude for your providential care for me and those you have given me—so I may be free and willing to pass this care on to others. Amen”

Kind Regards,

Bob

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