The Government Wants You To Listen To Dancing Unicorns

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On Monday, Politico ran a long interview with Surgeon General Vivek Murthy. Murthy is apparently “worried about our sad social lives.” 

According to Politico, “Americans are burned out, disconnected, isolated and starved for time. Maybe it’s post-pandemic blues. Maybe it’s our smartphone addiction. Whatever the cause, it’s serious enough that Murthy has issued a formal advisory to the nation calling for action to address this ‘epidemic.’”

What are Murthy’s solutions? He is hosting events trying to put people in proximity with one another and speaking about the “power of friendship.” At these events, as Politico describes, “People dressed as dancing unicorns handed out prescriptions for five minutes of social connection. (Quantity: Endless. Refills: Daily.)” Murthy then encouraged people to spend 45 seconds writing a text to a loved one. He asks people to engage in what he calls “the connection exercise.” He says that such exercises can be “supplemented by investments in social infrastructure, which is where policymakers come in.”

Or, alternatively, it’s precisely where policymakers should butt out.

There is a reason for our loneliness epidemic. Sure, it has to do with smartphones and the internet and the increasing atomization of our lives as we hunker down with our screens. But screens are just a tool to be used for good or ill. The real problem is that our social institutions have been summarily destroyed over the course of decades by government.

Those social institutions used to begin with and center around church.

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Historically, churches fulfilled three interwoven functions. First, they provided common orientation around a higher goal, complete with rules and regulations that required skin in the game in order to be accepted into the group. Second, they provided economic benefits and social reinforcement, ranging from charity to the helping hands of neighbors. Finally, emerging from the first two functions, they created a feeling of community. 

That feeling of community, as sociologist Émile Durkheim wrote, could only be attained with reference to the sacred: a series of beliefs so worthwhile that they were not to be questioned. As Robert Nisbet writes, “It is community that gives to the sacred its most vital expressions everywhere: birth, marriage, death, and other moments in the human drama.”

The sacred, then, undergirded the community.

And the community provided the support structure necessary for the flourishing of the family.

And then government tried to replace church and destroyed community.

The first step was the substitution of government benefits for the earned membership of a church. People no longer had to have skin in the game of a community in order to be given charity — now they had “entitlements” by dint of breathing. According to a National Bureau of Economic Research study, New Deal policies crowded out 30% of all charitable spending by churches. Government benefits were made exponentially greater. Family structure itself was dramatically undermined by government spending since you were no longer responsible for your kids or your parents. Government was. Your call on your neighbor no longer required you to sacrifice for the community. Instead, you could point the government gun at him and steal his wallet.

Able to reap the rewards without the costs, many people stopped going to church. And over the course of decades, churches began to adjust to that reality not by reinforcing common orientation around a higher goal — sanctity — but by trying to get rid of “judgment” so as to include more people. Churches began to try to mirror government: no skin in the game, plenty of benefits. As Gertrude Himmelfarb wrote two decades ago, “This process of [religious] accommodation has since gone on apace, so that today many mainline churches offer little or no resistance to the prevailing culture. On the contrary, some are very much part of it, priding themselves on being cosmopolitan and sophisticated, undogmatic and uncensorious.”

Thus the sacred has been wiped away, leaving us all alone with our subjective senses of self, catered to by a broad welfare state. Are we happier? Will that problem be cured by government?

Of course not.

It can only be cured by a return to community. Historically, that community means religious community, which is why it continues to be so sad to see religious leaders playing around the edges of conciliation with value systems that undermine sacredness at every turn.

On Monday, according to the vast majority of the legacy media, Pope Francis apparently decided that it was fine for priests to bless same-sex couples. The New York Times said this move was “his most definitive step yet to make the Roman Catholic Church more welcoming to LGBTQ Catholics and more reflective of his vision of a more pastoral and less rigid church.”

If true, of course, that would mark a massive shift for the Catholic Church, which has held fast to the traditional teaching that marriage is between one man and one woman and that sexual union within marriage is the only morally permissible form of sexual union. The Church has held fast for thousands of years not only to the sanctity of marriage but also to the natural law philosophy inherent in that sanctity — a philosophy that says the world of God’s creation carries within it certain obvious rights and wrongs, teleological ends. Man and woman were created to become one flesh, this philosophy says, and creation is designed to end in the creation of new human life. 

Catholic philosopher Robert George has explained this point further: “What is unique about marriage is that it truly is a comprehensive sharing of life, a sharing founded on the bodily union made uniquely possible by the sexual complementarity of man and woman— a complementarity that makes it possible for two human beings to become, in the language of the Bible, one flesh, and thus possible for this one-flesh union to be the foundation of a relationship in which it is intelligible for two persons to bind themselves to each other in pledges of permanence, monogamy, and fidelity.”

It would certainly be a massive surrender for the Catholic Church to reject that teaching on behalf of a broader teaching that morality now encompasses sexual relationships of other sorts — particularly sexual relationships without any potential whatsoever for the creation of human life.

So, what did the Pope actually say?

His defenders say that he changed nothing. According to Catholic publication The Pillar, “Fiducia supplicans says clearly that that the Vatican does not intend to permit same-sex marriage, or anything that resembles it — and says that the Church does not actually have the power or authority to do that. While the text does create a framework for blessing gay couples, it says that those blessings should not be confused with marriage, or even with approval of same-sex unions, or homosexual activity.”

Fiducia suppplicans says blessings are a “pastoral resource to be valued rather than a risk or a problem” and they may be bestowed upon those persons who “although in a union that cannot be compared in any way to a marriage, desire to entrust themselves to the Lord and his mercy, to invoke his help, and to be guided to a greater understanding of his plan of love and truth.” Such blessings ought not be given in any circumstance resembling a sanctification of same-sex unions, says the Pope, and “there is no intention to legitimize anything.” Furthermore, says the document, the blessing ought to descend on those who “do not claim a legitimation of their own status, but who beg that all that is true, good, and humanly valid in their lives and their relationships be enriched, healed, and elevated by the presence of the Holy Spirit.”

But there is reason for the controversy. The document itself suggests that blessings should not be “subjected to too many moral prerequisites” and that priests ought not to “lose pastoral charity, which should permeate all our decisions and attitudes” and to avoid being “judges who only deny, reject, and exclude.” Furthermore, it is not clear whether the Church will crack down on liturgical blessings it does not approve in the document. 

The Pope, in other words, is being vague, and others are supposed to clean up for him. My friend Larry O’Connor has a good rundown of his interpretation of the latest missive. Here is what he writes: “I am not in full communion with the Church. As such, I am required to abstain from partaking in the Eucharist at Mass. I walk up to the altar with my arms crossed on my chest and the presiding priest offers me a blessing. He is not blessing the situation that I am in that keeps me from being in communion with the Church. He is offering me a priestly blessing so that I can continue my faith journey and move forward closer to Christ despite my situation. This is exactly what the Vatican has confirmed the pastors may do for individuals who have same sex attraction and are also not in full communion with the Church because of their situation.”

But is that all the Pope is doing? Because Larry isn’t approaching the altar as a member of a same-sex couple. He is approaching individually. Of course religions should bless the sinner but hate the sin. But when a same-sex couple approaches a priest for a blessing as a same-sex couple, the distinction falls away. The Pope here is not allowing blessing for individuals who participate in same-sex unions — every traditional religion allows sinners to receive blessings individually, so far as I’m aware. He is apparently, instead, greenlighting blessing same-sex couples as couples, then pretending it doesn’t mean anything so long as the blessing isn’t an outright sanctification of the same-sex relationship.

Clearly that’s how the Left is reading it. Rep. James Martin, a radical Left-wing Catholic, says, “The new declaration opens the door to nonliturgical blessings for same-sex couples, something that had been previously off-limits for bishops, priests and deacons. Along with many priests, I will now be delighted to bless my friends in same-sex unions.”

So, why ought we to care? We ought to care because when historical pillars of Western tradition including natural law begin to carve away at those pillars in the name of tolerance and diversity, the entire edifice begins to crumble. That is a problem for religious believers of all traditional stripes.

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It’s not unique to Catholicism. On the same day the Pope issued his statement, celebrated by the New York Times, the Times issued a piece about the collapse of the United Methodist Church, riven by controversy over LGBTQ issues. As the Times describes, “At issue for Methodists is the question of ordaining and marrying L.G.B.T.Q. people, a topic that has splintered many other Protestant denominations and which Methodists have been debating for years. … There were eight million Methodists in the United States in 2020, according to the U.S. Religion Census. Between large-scale departures and the broader trend of decline, Dr. Burge said, that number could drop by half in a decade. The exodus marks a calamitous decline for the broader tradition of mainline Protestantism, which once dominated the American religious, social and cultural landscape.”

And herein lies the problem: There is no substitute for traditional religion in the American landscape. And traditional religion requires skin in the game. The minute religion becomes merely a nonjudgmental “blessing” dumped on top of subjective self-glorification, religion loses its value.

And when religion loses its value, social society crumbles. We’re relegated to Vivek Murthy lecturing us with dancing unicorns who hand out prescriptions for social connection.

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