I have been holding on to the Steven Malanga piece from City Journal for a while now. Ostensibly it is about how hard it is to find employees these days, but I think it gives insight into much deeper issues. He points to several issues creating a worker shortage:

But the workforce woes run deeper. Ever more adults are unemployable because of worsening social dysfunction, changing youth attitudes toward work, and university and public school failures to prepare students for labor-market realities. Drug legalization has made it harder to find laborers who can pass drug tests…A crime spike, meantime, will likely create a new generation of convicts…Soaring mental-health problems add to the ranks of the unemployable….unrealistic expectations about pay and benefits.

Not a pretty picture, is it?

Eventually he looks at how we got here:

How did millennials develop such shortcomings and gloomy views of work? One explanation: young adults don’t assess risk well. Though we live in one of the safest times in history, Generation Z believes that “risk is everywhere they turn,” writes political scientist Gabriel Rubin about an ongoing study assessing the origins of young people’s mental-health crises.

In their bestseller The Coddling of the American Mind, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt argue that society has “unwittingly taught a generation of students the mental habits of anxious, depressed, polarized people.” Parents bear some blame, but schools at all levels are at fault, too, Lukianoff and Haidt maintain. Gen Z has grown up learning to “catastrophize.” Old wisdom—like the notion that what doesn’t kill you can make you stronger—gets turned on its head, so that any stress or conflict is seen as potentially devastating. Hence the demand for safe spaces and the agitated reactions to mundane workplace scenarios. Young workers wind up ill-suited to embracing economic opportunities because they can’t see work as fulfilling or even fun. “Yes, fun at work. Imagine that. Gen Z can’t,” business school professor Suzy Welch recently observed of her students. For them, she added, “Work is what you do when you can’t be doing what you want.”

I find this fascinating. For a long time, it was fashionable to accuse Christians of not trying to fix long term problems because of their eschatology – their view of how the world will end. The accusation was kind of like the current dismissal of “thoughts and prayers” after a mass shooting in that it revealed an utter ignorance of how Christians actually think. Christians hold most dearly that prayer is actually efficacious, and they hold their eschatology in a tension between with the immediate.

What he is describing the in the paragraph above is one, a massive level of self-absorption and two, an attitude of “why bother?” when the world is so close to ending anyway – hence everything is a catastrophe. And this perfectly describes how Christianity sets itself apart, particularly when it comes to eschatology. A Christian is taught to “regard one another as more important than yourselves.” This means that even if “the end is near” one’s focus is on making sure others are well cared for, not a self-serving bacchanalia prior to the end of existence.

We have worked so hard to push Christianity from our public discourse and consideration. Perhaps the thing I love the most about my retirement in East Tennessee is that Christian faith is still a part of civic life. The town square hosts the Stations of The Cross on Good Friday and everyone still says, “Merry Christmas.” From where I came from, California (Kamala Harris’ California) the first would result in massive litigation and the latter can get you chased out of public places. But what we are seeing is that these are symptoms of a much deeper ill. Removing Christianity from our lives, even nominally, has produced generations that are unemployable – threatening our economy. It is not just about the so-called “social issues.”

It’s Sunday morning – go to church and allow it to speak to you. There is much more at play than you might think.

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