Can people thrive in a secular society?

New York Times columnist David Brooks is once again attacking secular society, this time including not only secularism but individualism and self-expression, also. In the column, Brooks asks why more people in the world are hopeful, except citizens of Western democracies. His answer is that we are too secular, individualistic and self-expressive.

I wrote about Brooks’ search for God and meaning on OnlySky last January. That column was about the individual. This time, Brooks is addressing whole societies. 

Why Americans are so unhappy

Brooks is writing about recent world surveys that measure human flourishing. He concludes that these values—secularism, individualism and self-expression—when taken to excess, as in America and certain other countries, “are poisonous to our well-being.” Since we secularists are among the strongest proponents of these values—in fact, consider them to be our core commitments—we should consider what Brooks has to say even though we disagree with him.

There is also a political reason to take Brooks seriously. The 2024 presidential election seemed crazy. Forget about whether President Joe Biden was too old to run for reelection. Kamala Harris faced an uphill battle because a lot of Americans were angry and felt the country was headed in the wrong direction. Biden’s approval rating was in the low 30-percent range for most of 2023 and 2024. 

This was remarkable. I wasn’t alone in finding it difficult to understand why Americans were so angry and pessimistic. Yes, there had been some inflation, but, as the liberal economist Paul Krugman kept pointing out, inflation was lower than when Ronald Reagan declared “morning in America.” In fact, the economy was doing so well that American exceptionalism was a major topic of discussion worldwide. 

Nor was this economic success just at the top. Wages at the bottom were also rising.

In addition, America was at peace, for the first time in 25 years. 

In 2024, America was enjoying peace and prosperity. Yet, Donald Trump successfully sold the notion of national catastrophe. This was not some peculiar Trump talent. Democrats did not dare run on the Biden record even after the issue of his age was removed from consideration by his withdrawal. I have no doubt that future historians will judge the Biden presidency to have been quite successful, but when Democrats tried, gingerly, to take some credit for good news, they were absolutely hammered. Chris Murphy, Connecticut’s Democratic Senator, was correct when he warned the party that the country was in no mood for a positive sales pitch.

During the presidential campaign, Americans were obsessed with crime and immigration. This also made no sense. At the time, crime rates nationally were declining—and had only gone up a relatively small amount during the pandemic. Basically, crime was worse under the first Trump Administration. 

As for immigration, illegal entry to the United States did rise in the first two years of the Biden Administration, but deportations also rose. Anyway, by the spring of 2024, the increase had ended and a bill to deal with immigration had been on the verge of passing Congress when Trump insisted that Republicans kill it. 

Even aside from all that, what was the big deal about immigration? The vast majority of undocumented immigrants are working and contributing to American prosperity. In fact, they're contributing to my Social Security payments. The overall unemployment rate was around 4%, so they weren't taking jobs from native born Americans. They were making up for our low birth rate. 

There was no national immigration crisis. Yet, most Americans agreed with Trump that there was.

Of course, now Americans are waking up to the reality that Trump is making a lot of things worse, not better. 

But Trump did not create the negative national mood that he exploited. The question for us today is, why did Americans feel so bad about everything in 2024? That is the question David Brooks is addressing. We have to figure this out because, politically speaking, national anger is better for Republicans than Democrats.

Are secular values bad for well-being?

Brooks believes he knows the answer to why so many people are unhappy. And he tells a comprehensive story. 

First, most people in the world feel hopeful about the future. But, in what we can call the Protestant West—America, Canada, Western Europe, New Zealand and Australia—there has been a sharp decline in reported well-being, despite high standards of living. This is a trend—absolute measures of welfare are still relatively high.

Brooks is relying primarily on a recent world Gallup poll measuring human thriving, struggling or suffering. In America, the percentage of people reporting that they are thriving fell from 67% in 2007 to 49% in the most recent poll. That is a very significant decline and comports with the sour national mood. 

Second, Brooks asserts that the reason for this decline is that people only feel they are thriving when three factors coincide: economic well-being, social connection and meaning and purpose. All three must be taken into account.

Third, and most important, when these three factors are measured, as in another survey, the Global Flourishing Survey, nations doing well economically, but with deteriorating social and spiritual environments—like the U.S.—report lower rates of flourishing. 

Brooks concludes that the Protestant West has valued economic success to the absolute abandonment of any other consideration of a good life. This has led to social and spiritual deterioration and resulting negative national moods.

These trends have hurt two groups in particular: the young and the politically progressive. Conservatives are more resistant to these trends, but in one revealing statistic that Brooks cites, 35% of self-defined conservative college students report poor mental health. This is bad enough. But among self-defined liberal college students, that figure is 57%, which Brooks considers catastrophic.

What really makes people happy

What should people do to change things? Brooks’ answer is simple—conservatives in America fare better because they do things that correlate with happiness: “get married, go to church, give to charity, feel patriotic, have more sex and feel life has meaning.”

Before considering what secularists might learn from all this, I am aware that other surveys tell a somewhat different world story. The most recent World Happiness Report lists the following secular-leaning countries as the top five happiest countries: Finland, Denmark, Iceland, Sweden and Netherlands. But only in Finland, not as strongly secular as Scandinavia, is the trend of happiness strongly positive. So, this survey does not necessarily contradict Brooks.

In any event, assuming something is going on, what might we learn from Brooks? His list of things conservatives do to promote happiness is ambiguous. It consists mostly of things you do but is not necessarily causal. The list probably depends on one thing he lists that is a belief, not an action—feeling that life has meaning. People who feel that life has meaning are presumably more likely to get married, have sex, form positive social bonds and do a lot of other positive things. And people who feel that life has meaning are probably not going to obsess over material well-being alone. 

Some secular thinkers have responded to observers like Brooks by arguing that people make their own meaning. In other words, people decide what is meaningful for them.

But this is misleading. It is probably the case that a person must feel there is a point to human existence first, before embracing life and its many possibilities. Something about the human brain may just feel the need to be a part of something larger than one human life in order for a person to feel fulfilled.

Humanity’s religious traditions have historically supplied those larger narratives of the purpose of human life. The new secular contexts some countries are living today lack those explanations. Brooks’ argument raises the question whether such a narrative about human life is necessary to have a flourishing society. If Brooks is right, even to some extent, we secularists will have to decide how to respond.

There are basically only two possibilities. One is to get used to the bad news. There is no general point to existence. We’re here and we might as well live as well as we can, but that is all you can say. This was the message of one of the original New Atheists—Philip Kitcher—in his 2206 book, Living With Darwin.

The other possibility is to decide that life has meaning even without a deity behind it. But that would require a spiritually revived secular movement. At the moment, a secular movement like that does not exist. And there is no sign that it will arrive any time soon.