Frank lived a few blocks west of me. He was outside our neighborhood gang but inside our elementary school sphere. Frank was the younger of two brothers. His father worked at one of the tire factories ubiquitous to the Akron, Ohio landscape. Frank was loud and obnoxious.

When Leave It to Beaver first came on television (yes, I’m that old) I  thought they might have modeled Eddie Haskell on Frank. Frank was sweet to everyone’s parents, the picture of deferential respect. My dad saw right through him. Mom did not. Taken by his flattery she would ask, “Why don’t you have Frank come over more often?”

I did not invite Frank over more often because Frank was a bully. I saw his father give him a dressing down in his front yard once, in front of a bunch of us. It was utterly humiliating for poor Frank. Being an Enneagram Two and all, I went to Frank and said, “I’m sorry that happened.” Unfortunately I did not understand it at the time, but I had witnessed his true powerlessness, a truth he could not bear to have anyone witness. While he had always been a bully, from that moment on he reserved a special enmity for me.

No one from my old neighborhood knows what happened to Frank. I’ve searched his surname, a very unusual and supremely unfortunate name that relates to things that occur in a private restroom. I’ve not found him anywhere, but then again, he might have changed his name. I mean, it would have been a good  idea to have done so.

Bullies almost always have sad backstories. Profoundly wounded by life, their ego strength is so weak they spend the rest of their lives knowing no other pathway to power than the denigration and diminishment of others. Narcissistic Personality Disorder is very difficult to treat. When I was in training I was told I would probably never treat someone with NPD because they never go to therapy. Their wounding was so early in life and so profound it is unbearable for them to revisit that original wound.

Our president is a bully. In my opinion, he has narcissistic personality disorder, though I cannot diagnose that with certainty because he is not my client. I lived in New York for 35 years. There was virtually no one in New York City who had any use for him. He was known as a terrible businessman and a wannabe fixated with Page Six of the New York Post, the page with all of the celebrity gossip. When he was chosen for the Apprentice, we all couldn’t believe it.

One of my friends lived near him in Florida. My friend’s daughter and Trump’s daughter Tiffany were friendly acquaintances. My friend’s wife was friends with Trump’s wife at the time, Marla. They had kind things to say about Marla and Tiffany, but not Donald.

But that was then, and here we are now. A grown-up Eddie Haskell as president, with half of the nation following news and social media that hide the truth. My safety is decidedly worse than it was before he was elected. My medical care remains, but my options for providers gets smaller and smaller. I really worry about the six members of my family who are people of color, two of whom were not born in the US, though they have been citizens for over forty years. Based on what we’ve seen in Minneapolis this past week, that doesn’t matter anymore.

When people said Trump was a fascist, I thought they were throwing around a term that was sensational, not true. Now, I believe it is true. With the demolition of norms, the glorification of violence, the creation of “alternate facts” from the highest positions in the land, I’ve lost hope for our nation. With our current Supreme Court and Congress, I see no pathway forward. We are failing the stress test of democracy and I fear it will be too late before most of the country recognizes it.

I’ve never been a pessimist. I have always seen the glass half full, even after I transitioned and lost all of my jobs, my pension, and my friends. Hope has been my stock in trade, but in today’s America, my hope is rapidly diminishing. I keep desperately repeating the words of Emily Dickinson:

Hope is the thing with feathers, that perches in the soul

And sings the tune without the words, and never stops at all.

Why are the evangelicals so much better at evangelism than the rest of us? I have some thoughts.

The two most influential books on religion in the twentieth century were Varieties of Religious Experience by William James, published in 1902, and Stages of Faith by James Fowler, which came out in 1982. Fowler identified six stages of faith we can experience during our time on earth. Fowler’s book can be helpful on this subject. Well, so can James’s book, but I have a secret word count I always remain below in my blogs.

Stage one is magical faith. When my kids were little and my 18 month-old daughter locked herself in the bathroom, my 4-year-old son said with all seriousness, “Get the Incredible Hulk.” That’s stage one. Stage two is a law and order faith, with the boundaries, guardrails, and guides necessary for children and young adolescents. Next comes conventional faith, which is exactly what the name implies. Many people remain in stage three throughout their lives. Conventional religion is easier. Other people make the decisions about what is right and wrong and who the enemies and good guys are. If you keep their rules, you remain in good standing.

Many people eventually find stage three confining and move to stage four, the stage of disenchantment. When I was in college I realized that my denomination, which said we were the only ones certain of going to heaven, was one of about two-hundred denominations that taught the same thing. Something was wrong with that picture.

Stage four usually occurs during our time of psychological  differentiation or individuation, when we start going out on our own in the world. But eventually life catches up with us. We have children, a loved one dies, we lose our job, and the spiritual vacuum of stage four no longer suffices, so we move into stage five, the stage of re-enchantment. Most of us return to the religion in which we were raised, but we return with a broader and deeper faith, less focused on rules and regulations and more focused on loving God, neighbor, and self.

Sixth is universalizing faith, in which we realize the commonalities of all major world religions, and the dangers of the fundamentalist forms of those religions.

For a variety of reasons we won’t go into in this post, a lot of Americans are stuck in stage four, and in today’s polarized world they are looking for spiritual meaning. I mean, if you haven’t noticed, this place is a mess and we have a spoiled child as president. We need somethin’.

For some of those folks, the evangelicals in stage three have crafted a message that feels very inviting. For young men who grew up on video games, evangelicals couch their language in battlefield terms saying, “Come join us in spiritual warfare against the evil forces of the dark state.” That appeals to those looking for direction, a cause to fight for, and a way to increase their standing in the “army” they have joined, just like they do in their video games.

Seventy-two percent of people who attend a church for the first time are there because a friend invited them. The truth is that evangelicals invite a lot more friends to church than the rest of us. It’s pretty simple, and quite true. If you don’t invite folks to your church, they won’t attend.

Those of us in stage five almost stumble over ourselves when we talk with friends about our church. “You can come to my church, I mean, if you’re looking for a church, which you’re probably not. Our church is a mess, like they all are, but it has a lot of good stuff too, though it might not be for you. Come to think of it, I’m not even sure why I attend.” Not exactly a compelling invitation.

The problem is not the people in stage three churches. The problem is their religious leaders who take a Turning Point attitude toward spirituality, making their focus not the love of God, but the “Satanic empire” that must be defeated. The problem is that their Satanic empire includes me! If you’re reading this blog, it probably includes you too.

People need spirituality, a spirituality expressed in embodied community, focused on that which is sacred. We need to do good deeds in which the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. We need spiritual community to learn to be human together. But the majority of Americans are not going to church.

Between 1999 and 2021 our nation went from 70 percent of Americans being affiliated with a local religious body to just 47 percent, a 23 percentage point drop in 22 years. The drop has stabilized since then, but still, fewer than half of Americans count themselves as members of a local religious community. But we are beginning to recognize our need for community. Adults are realizing that not only are their kids damaged by spending too much time staring at screens; adults are too. The third place, after work and home, should not be a screen, it should be a community.

Here’s a challenge. Invite your friends to church. If you don’t go to church, gather a few friends and commit to finding a church together.  We need what stage five and six faith provide – a community focused not on deciding who goes to heaven and hell, but focused on loving the God who loves us just as we are, loving our neighbors, particularly those who do not look like us, and loving ourselves. As a therapist, I do know that if you cannot do the last one, you cannot do the other two. But that’s a different post for a different day.

And so it goes.

About three years ago all five granddaughters were in their downstairs bedroom at our house. It was about 6:00 in the evening and they were not making a sound. The girls were between thirteen and sixteen at the time, so that kind of quiet just didn’t seem right. I went downstairs and peeked in the door. There were all five, lying on two beds, quiet as a church mouse. Why? Because they were all on their smartphones.

Suddenly I knew why all five of them have phone-free hours set by their parents. Here were five girls who love nothing more than being together, but while they were bodily in the same room they were not looking at each other, speaking to each other, touching each other, or otherwise interacting.

I will say I do remember similar times with my cousins, when we’d all be in the same room reading Nancy Drew mystery novels. But that was after a creative day of play, and reading sessions like that were rare. But my children are aware enough of teen culture to know that if hours were not regulated, their girls would be tempted to look at their phones all day.

I’ve been reading a lot over the past year about the differences between the left and right hemispheres of the brain, and how our current culture, for about five centuries now, has rewarded left brain thinking and minimized the importance of right brain functioning. This is a shame, because the right hemisphere is the primary hemisphere of the human brain. The left is its emissary. We function best when the left hemisphere works at the direction of the right. The right hemisphere knows it needs the left. The left, unfortunately, believes it can get along just fine without the right.

The left hemisphere says I have a body. The right hemisphere says I am a body. The left is interested in what it knows, the right is interested in what it experiences. The left brain is interested in things, and the right in the relationships between people and things. The left brain is more mechanistic, the right more organic. The left brain focuses on analysis and categorization, the right on placing information in context. The left is more rational, the right more intuitive.

With that brief explanation you can see we have become a left brain dominant species. This left brain fixation plays out in a myriad of ways, some of them quite frightening. As I have been reading Jonathan Haidt’s latest book, The Anxious Generation, I have been fascinated by how much of the negative fallout of current teen culture is related to this left brain fixation.

Between 2010 and 2015 America went from a play-based childhood to a phone-based childhood. The shift is damaging our children. For centuries, children’s relational and social learning was embodied. It was synchronous, taking place in real time, where you learn to take turns and read the emotions of others. You were bodily in the same place with others, so it was in your best interest to learn how to get along. All of that is right hemisphere learning. It is necessary to learn empathy, to place information in context, and to develop a high emotional quotient.

Since 2015 and the mass adoption of smart phones, children’s relational and social learning is disembodied. It is asynchronous, not taking place in real time. There is no longer one to one communication or one to several, but one to many, even multitudes.

For girls, it takes place on social media. Girls are more relational and image conscious than boys. Unfortunately, when girls become aggressive on social media, they tend to destroy relationships and reputations. In an embodied community, they learn there is a price to pay for that kind of behavior. They become known as one of the mean girls. Online, there are no real consequences to destroying relationships and reputations.

For boys, their online activity is primarily video games, not played with a friend on a console, but online with others scattered all over the globe. If they are not playing video games, they are watching porn, which does not help them develop meaningful romantic relationships.

Cathy and I have both had teens in our counseling practice who have had suicidal ideation based on online attacks. We both can see that the problem is increasing.

All of us need embodied community. It is how we learn to be human together, how to do work together in which the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, and where we maintain the social skills necessary to a healthy life.  What smartphones have wrought is a disengagement from embodied community. The price we are paying for that disengagement is just now being made manifest.

Our granddaughters were seldom on their phones while we were in Florida. We all interacted together with laughter, thoughtful conversations, play, and shared activities. It was a great week. We are all wired for deep human connections. We are an incarnate species. We cannot get those deep connections electronically. We must get them bodily.