Monday Miscellany, 3/24/25

We really are getting stupider. American doctors are finally waking up to gender dysphoria. And the unchurched prefer churches that look like churches.

We Really Are Getting Stupider

The evidence suggests that our ability to think rationally is declining worldwide.

John Burn-Murdoch writes about this in his Financial Times article Have humans passed peak brain power? The answer to the question is given in the deck: “Data across countries and ages reveal a growing struggle to concentrate, and declining verbal and numerical reasoning.”

He cites a consistent trend in international aptitude tests, both for young people and for adults. Scores for reading, math, and science peaked, he says, in 2012. There was an especially big falloff between 2012 and 2018, so we can’t blame this on the COVID shutdowns, which certainly didn’t help.

Other measures point to the same conclusion. In 2022, fewer than half of Americans (48.5%) had read even a single book. Another study found that 35% of American adults are unable to “use mathematical reasoning when reviewing and evaluating the validity of statements.” This is higher than the already-bad world average in developed countries, which is 25%.

Why is this? Burn-Murdoch says that this is happening in too short a time for it to be connected to some biological change in the human brain. “Part of what we’re looking at here,” he says, “is likely a result of the ongoing transition away from text and towards visual media — the shift towards a “post-literate” society spent obsessively on our screens.”

He also cites “a shift in our relationship with information”:

We have moved from finite web pages to infinite, constantly refreshed feeds and a constant barrage of notifications. We no longer spend as much time actively browsing the web and interacting with people we know but instead are presented with a torrent of content. This represents a move from self-directed behaviour to passive consumption and constant context-switching.

Research finds that active, intentional use of digital technologies is often benign or even beneficial. Whereas the behaviours that have taken off in recent years have been shown to affect everything from our ability to process verbal information, to attention, working memory and self-regulation.

Probably so. But I would also suggest the effects of contemporary educational approaches, which seem to be rampant throughout the Western world, which teaches relativism, cultivates subjectivity, and undermines objective thought. In contrast, the classical education tradition, which gave us the Western world including science, taught logic, mathematics, and the objectivity of truth. So of course people’s knowledge of such things will decline when they are not taught anymore.

American Doctors Are Finally Waking Up to Gender Dysphoria

The medical profession in Europe has been challenging the notion that minors should be getting sex-change hormones and surgeries. The American medical establishment, though, is an outlier, with the major professional associations insisting that sterilizing and mutilating children who want to be the other sex is simply “gender affirming care.”

Finally, though, that may be starting to change. So says Wesley J. Smith in his article for National Review entitled At Last, the Medical Establishment’s Support for ‘Gender Affirming Care’ Begins to Crack.

The Journal of the American Medical Association has published a paper entitled Toward Evidence-Based and Ethical Pediatric Gender Medicine. After recounting the current American treatment recommendations, which make the desire of the child paramount, and surveying the European research and contrary recommendations, the researchers come to their conclusion (Smith’s emphases):

Given this state of knowledge, it is ethically problematic to view the routine use of hormonal or surgical interventions in youth with gender dysphoria as evidence-based. We need high-quality studies to better understand the risks and benefits of various interventions. In the meantime, pediatricians should inform parents of disagreements within the field. Parents need to know how current practices in the US diverge from those in Europe. They need to know that systematic reviews of the clinical research find many flaws. Clinicians should also be aware that the Endocrine Society and WPATH guidelines as well as the AAP’s policy statement differ substantially from the approach adopted in the UK and a growing number of European countries.

The Unchurched Prefer Churches That Look Like Churches

It has been said that to attract young people and the unchurched, congregations should worship in buildings that are not traditionally “churchy.” Instead, worship spaces should be more like concert halls, sports arenas, or shopping malls.

But Daniel Silliman of Christianity Today reports on a Barna study that found, on the contrary, that Americans Think Church Should Look Churchy:

Nearly 90 percent of Americans say a church should be “easily identifiable,” and 8 of 10 say they want the building to “reflect the beauty of God.” There are some, to be sure, who prefer that churches feel modern (38%) and trendy (28%), but most Americans want religious spaces that feel more timeless and transcendent.

In digging into this a little more, I came across a 2008 study from the Baptist’s LifeWay Research that showed 1,684 unchurched adults pictures of church buildings in various styles. The findings, in the words of the report title, were that The Unchurched Prefer the Most Traditional Church Exterior More Than 2 to 1.

The effect was even greater with younger adults. Old people, though, the unchurched over 70, liked the more modern church designs better: “Young unchurched people were particularly drawn to the Gothic look. Those between the ages of 25 to 34 used an average of 58.9 of their preference points on the more ornate church exterior. Those over the age of 70 only used an average of 32.9 of their 100 preference points on that particular church exterior.”

A more recent Barna study from 2020 found a similar response from Millennials:

In Making Space for Millennials, based on a study conducted in partnership with Cornerstone Knowledge Network, we learned that young adults—a group whose relationship to institutional Church is already tenuous—preferred what could be seen as a historic standard for churches: communal rather than private (78% vs. 22%), sanctuaries rather than auditoriums (77% vs. 23%), classic rather than trendy (67% vs. 33%).

Said the Baptists,

“We may have been designing buildings based on what we think the unchurched would prefer,” [Jim] Couchenour concluded. “While multi-use space is the most efficient, we need to ask, ‘Are there ways to dress up that big rectangular box in ways that would be more appealing to the unchurched?’”

“Quite honestly, this research surprised us,” said Ed Stetzer, director of LifeWay Research and LifeWay Christian Resource’s missiologist in residence. “We expected they’d choose the more contemporary options, but they were clearly more drawn to the aesthetics of the Gothic building than the run-of-the-mill, modern church building.”