Perspective: How religious faith and a sense of agency corresponds with mental health

“Sisterhood is powerful.” That was an early slogan of feminism, but it’s hard to imagine it being used to describe young women today.

In fact, as a number of scholars have recently noticed, the mental health crisis being experienced by many teen and young adult women may have something to do with how little power they feel they have.

Writing for the Free Press recently, Jonathan Haidt cited a widely accepted theory in psychology about differences in how people perceive how much control they have:

“Some people have an internal locus of control — they feel as if they have the power to choose a course of action and make it happen, while other people have an external locus of control — they have little sense of agency and they believe that strong forces or agents outside of themselves will determine what happens to them.”

And, he noted, “Sixty years of research show that people with an internal locus of control are happier and achieve more. People with an external locus of control are more passive and more likely to become depressed.”

A number of factors have led young women — and liberal young women in particular — to have more of an external locus of control than previous generations or than their conservative peers. Social media certainly seems to have had an outsized effect on girls.

But it is also the messages that young progressives have embraced as a result of their political ideology — especially the idea that the world is made up of oppressors and victims (or good people and bad people) and the idea that another person’s words can cause a person deep and lasting harm.

What’s interesting is that these are ideas that liberals often associate with being a conservative or being strongly religious. It is not uncommon to see the secular media portray religious young people as powerless, simply following orders from their elders or from God.

Related

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• Finding the light: The science behind spirituality as an antidepressant

And it is also not uncommon to see religious folks portrayed as believing that the world is made up of good people and bad people, or as being so sensitive as to think that a few words can cause them real harm. They are the ones who want to “ban” books and who condemn swearing or taking the Lord’s name in vain.