teenage spirituality leads to mental

Teenage spirituality leads to mental health problems

Worried about teenage crime, pregnancy and mental health problems?

If so, you can now point the finger in an unusual direction: religion.

According to a study in Australia, church-going and conventional

religion is linked towards happiness and good mental health.

Unconventional religion - "trendy spiritualism", if you're a

journalist - can cause problems. These include mental health issues,

anxiety and depression - alongside more serious signs of demonic

possession including projectile vomiting and your head spinning all

the way around on your neck.

Apparently, atheists and agnostics don't come out of it terribly well,

either.

What's even more surprising is that if you change only some of the

letters in the name of the report's author, Dr Rosemary Aird, you can

find yourself spelling out "Evil Roasting Devil."

Being serious for a moment (and setting aside the potential for

nitpicking), this highlights some interesting points about religion

and society.

Traditional religious faith tends to offer the chance of redemption in

the afterlife if you live well today. I get the impression there is a

tendency in part of the 'new age' movement to focus on developing a

personal spirituality based on a concotion of different belief

systems; that your life will be better if only you can find the right

mix of crystals, meditation practices and spells to cast.

However, this is part of a trend towards 'retail spirituality' which

has been going on for some time. In C.S. Lewis's The Screwtape

Letters, a senior devil advises that when tempting a human it's a good

idea to encourage them to shop around for the church that best suits

them, so as to distract from their developing any actual faith. Since

that advice was given in 1942, the smorgasbord of spirituality on

offer has increased markedly; Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism have all

spread in the West, while countless forms of spirituality have tacked

themselves onto the declining ship of religious practice.

This, in turn, has happened because people aren't happy to accept

given answers any more. Tony Giddens argues that the basic

characteristic of the modern age is 'reflexive self-identity'; people

thinking about who they want to be and choosing their lives for

themselves. In most of the Western world, accepting the authority of

the Church isn't part of that picture.

I'm not convinced that this has adverse social consequences. Equally I

can clearly see why it might. I'm an atheistic sort of agnostic (I

don't believe in God, but don't think there is any proof he doesn't

exist). I think it's possible to live morally regardless of your

spiritual views or religious values. But I'm willing to accept that

organised religion was part of the glue which held society together,

and that its demise presents problems for society.

That doesn't mean trying to go back to the old days of widespread

church attendance, near-compulsory religion and banning homosexuality

and abortion. The genie is out of the bottle and no conservative can

put it back in. It does mean that society hasn't yet worked through

the changes of the last five or ten decades and the questions of how