Readers of my new book, The Universe Is on Our Side: Restoring Faith in American Public Life, know that I see America’s ills as grounded in the Death of God, the traditional God, on which America had been built. It’s more a tone than an analysis, I admit, but I see evidence all around.

This really struck me this weekend when I came across two pieces of such evidence: a column by New York Times writer Ross Douthat and an episode of the New Yorker Radio Hour I heard on NPR.

Douthat’s column was entitled What the New Right Sees and he makes the point that whatever you think about the policy prescriptions of a younger generation of conservatives, their concerns mirror very well the concerns of Americans generally.

This is Douthat’s description of those concerns: “it’s more reactionary and radical all at once, more pessimistic and possibly more dangerous. …its psychology defined more by alienation…Abroad, the double failure of our post-9/11 nation-building efforts and our open door to China, which requires either a recalibration to contain the Chinese regime or else a general pullback from an overextended empire.

At home, the threat to liberty from Silicon Valley monopolies enforcing progressive orthodoxy and the threat to human happiness from the addictive nature of social media, online pornography and online life in general. The collapse of birthrates, the dissolution of institutional religion and the decline of bourgeois normalcy, manifest in the younger generation’s failure to mate, to marry, raise families. The post-1960s “great stagnation” in both living standards and technological innovation. The costs of cultural libertarianism, the increase in unhappiness and high rates of depression and addiction in a more individualistic society.

Then finally, the way in which the technocratic response to the pandemic, the retreat to a virtual life suited only to a “laptop class” (and maybe not even to them), may make these problems worse.”

Sounds like an absence of meaning to me.

Then there is the lack of hope.

I won’t go into detail about the millennial piece, but it’s called Millennial Writers Reflect on a Generation’s Despair. In it, Ngofeen Mputubwele interviews five millennial writers to explore why millennials feel hopeless and how they can live with that feeling.

You might say that this is partly a rational response to the way things are, considering climate change and Trump and everything.

Except that that would such an exaggeration as to be laughable. Exactly what better time has there actually been in human history? Certainly this is nowhere near one of the worst times. And never has there been better opportunity to improve things.

It’s the lens, not the landscape. That lens is formed by fallout from the Death of God.

The real question is, what do we do about it? (spoiler alert—the book is about that too).