Do you know where your keys are? When you forget the reason that you went from one room to another or the purpose for which you picked up your phone, do you chalk that forgetfulness up to simple inattentiveness and distraction, or does it represent some kind of cognitive decline?
It can be helpful to consider how our brains, and our ways of remembering, are sometimes faulty, even before we face the diminishment of aging.
One of the most damaging tendencies in any culture, society, or religious community is the tendency to equate vocation, service, mission and faith itself with moving back towards some perceived golden age.
As a pastor, I saw this tendency consistently. Some churches built their entire programme and ethos upon it. I saw it, and still do, as detrimental to faith, to community, and to spiritual growth. It is a counterfeit morality and spirituality that hurts not only other people and groups, but also the very people who feel it and perpetuate it.
As it turns out, evangelical Christians are not the only ones who consistently think that the past is better than the present , A recent study, outlined in a New York Times article this week showed that across faiths, across cultures, and in every country where research was conducted (235 surveys, 574,000 respondents, 59 countries thus far), there is an almost automatic assumption that things used to be better, that society is in decline.
If you can’t find your keys you might think that someone has moved them or that they have been left in an unusual place. Or you might also admit that the problem is your ability to remember. In other words, maybe the sense that things are obviously worse than they used to be has more to do with our brains and their function (or dysfunction) than with reality.
The study cited in the article mentioned two key reasons that we consistently assume societal decline. The first is called biased-exposure, “People predominantly encounter and pay attention to negative information about others - mischief and misdeeds make the news and dominate our conversations.”
The second is called biased-memory, “The negativity of negative information fades faster than the positivity of positive information. Getting dumped, for instance, hurts in the moment, but as you rationalize, reframe and distance yourself from the memory, the sting fades. The memory of meeting your current spouse, on the other hand, probably still makes you smile.”
Taken together, these two cognitive tendencies contribute to a misguided sense that things are getting worse. This is not new. People for centuries and more have been promised by tyrants and authoritarians that they would usher in a golden age hearkening back to the past. As the article says, “What these political myths have in common is an understanding that the golden age is definitely not right now. Maybe we’ve been changing from angels into demons for centuries.”
I think that more people who claim Christian faith could help to counter some of the damaging results of this cognitive bias. A healthier view of faith accepts the truth that there was no golden age. Healthy faith also understands that idealistic thinking about progress does not help either. Rather, we can admit that the tendency to idealize the past or to sanctify progress as inevitable, has done damage to society, to the church, to faith and to people’s lives.
James K. A. Smith’s book, How to Inhabit Time, is a beautiful consideration of some of these ideas from the perspective of Christian faith (I spoke to him on an episode of Rector’s Cupboard, the podcast which I co-host, about this book). Among the many insights in the book is that nostalgia is actually a form of forgetting more than it is a form of remembering. We forget more than half. This is a literary expression of the biased-memory cognitive bug mentioned in the article.
For those who claim Christian faith, can you consider the possibility that your tendency to think that the past is better than the present is not a mark of faithful discipleship, but perhaps something that you should aim to counter rather than feed? Can you aim to be free from leaders who use our cognitive bias to idealization of the past to build ministries around? We might consider refusing to follow people whose chief contention politically or religiously is that things used to be better. We know that we are susceptible to such counterfeit spirituality, but we can grow in an understanding that nostalgia and condemnation of the present is not faith and should not be thought of as such.
The article points out that the sense that things are worse is shared across cultures, but, when further pressed, it turns out that people would rather live now than at any time during the past. What is shown is that, on a day-to-day basis, people think generally that things are as good or even better than they were in the past.
Healthy faith does not demand turning the past into an idol. Leaders who gain your allegiance, your energy or your money by presenting an idealized view of the past are often setting up idols more than they are encouraging spiritual growth. They tend not to be called out on it because they often loudly declare that faith itself means looking back, not ahead. Faithfulness is not fear and castigation of the present. Faithful work of helping one another to see better can have positive impact not only in the church, but in a world where longing for a past that never existed is doing a lot of damage.