Something has gone badly wrong in the formation of young men. Across the English-speaking world and well beyond it, a generation of males has retreated into online communities defined not by aspiration or brotherhood, but by resentment, grievance, and a profound sense of relational exile. Scholars call this ecosystem the manosphere. Sociologists catalog its subcultures — incels, Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW), pick-up artists, men’s rights activists — and document their alarming overlaps with radicalization and violence. What receives far less attention is the question: What kind of wound produces this kind of infection?

The answer, I want to argue, is an attachment wound — and understanding it clearly requires us to take seriously both the legitimate relational disorientation many young men experience and the cultural conditions, including certain strands of feminist discourse, that helped produce it. Neither side of that sentence can be abandoned without losing the truth.

The manosphere is more than a gender backlash

The standard account of the manosphere frames it as reactionary: men who cannot tolerate women’s equality striking back at gains they did not want to concede. There is something to this. Misogyny is real, entitlement is real, and the violence that has erupted from incel communities — from the 2014 Isla Vista killings to subsequent attacks claimed in the name of incel ideology — cannot be minimized or explained away.

But the backlash framing, taken alone, is insufficient. It cannot explain why the manosphere has grown most rapidly precisely among younger men — men who did not grow up under the old patriarchal order, who did not personally lose power or status, and who in many cases are the most economically and socially marginal members of their generation. These are not men defending privilege. It appears that these men never felt they had any.

What they share is not entitlement but isolation. And isolation, in the language of attachment science, is the start of a relational crisis.

Protest, Despair, Detachment: Reading the Manosphere Through Attachment Theory

Attachment theory, developed across decades of careful empirical work, tells us that human beings are wired for connection. When the relational environment fails to provide secure belonging — when attachment figures are unavailable, rejecting, or hostile — the attachment system mounts a predictable response. John Bowlby described this sequence as protest, despair, and detachment.

Framework

Protest. Loud and rageful rejection of the relational environment perceived as hostile. Manifests as incel forums, misogynist content, grievance communities. The attachment system is still activated — still reaching, even if violently.

Despair. The collapse of hope that belonging is possible. “Blackpill” ideology — the belief that one is genetically and permanently unlovable — is protest giving way to despair. The system begins to shut down.

Detachment. Withdrawal from the relational field entirely. MGTOW — Men Going Their Own Way — represents detachment: the decision to abandon the quest for connection altogether and build an identity around self-sufficiency and contempt for intimacy.

The manosphere, read through this lens, is not a coherent ideology. It is a spectrum of attachment distress responses, each corresponding to a different stage of relational breakdown. Incels are in protest. “Blackpilled” incels are in despair. MGTOW adherents have reached detachment. The rage, the nihilism, and the withdrawal are not signs of strength. They are signs of a wounded attachment system doing exactly what wounded attachment systems do.

What triggered the protest?

Attachment protest is triggered by the perception of rejection — specifically, rejection from the relational environment one depends upon. For young men navigating identity formation, that relational environment can also be within a context of culture. Is not merely personal. It can include but not limited to the ambient messages that a society sends about who belongs, who is valued, and whose longing for connection is legitimate.

I am careful in my analysis here because what follows is easily misread. I am not claiming that feminism or the #MeToo movement are responsible for the manosphere. The claim is that a specific drift in cultural messaging — a drift that occurred within a particular strand of feminist discourse during the 2010s — contributed, to a large extent, to a relational environment that many young men experienced as hostile to their very existence.

Feminist critique of patriarchal structures — of dominance-based masculinity, of systems that subordinate women and constrain men alike — is a legitimate and necessary intellectual project. The problem arose when the critique of structures migrated into a critique of persons: when “toxic masculinity” ceased to name a set of distorted social scripts and became, in popular usage, something closer to a description of maleness itself. When young men absorbed, from cultural media, from educational environments, and from online discourse, the message that their desire for connection was suspect, that their masculinity was a pathology to be managed, and that their relational needs were a form of entitlement they had not earned.

The attachment system reads this as rejection and not as a call to grow or reform. As rejection. And rejected attachment systems protest.

We got what we deserved

There is a third element in this story that is rarely named in secular analyses but is essential to a full account: the collapse of alternative belonging structures that might have intercepted young men before they reached the manosphere.

For centuries, the church provided men with a framework for masculine identity that was neither domineering nor dissolute — an account of strength as self-giving, of dignity as derivative of image-bearing rather than performance, of belonging as a gift received rather than a status earned. It offered what the manosphere now desperately mimics: brotherhood, initiation, meaning, and a narrative that made suffering intelligible.

As that formation infrastructure eroded — as churches became less effective at discipling men, as the secular state cancelled the church, as the theological resources for a constructive account of masculine identity were either abandoned or never developed — the vacuum did not remain empty. The manosphere filled it. Online communities of resentment offered what the church had stopped providing: identity, in-group belonging, a story about why one’s suffering is not random, and a sense of mission, however dark.

For reflection

The priests they deserve

There is a detail in this story that deserves its own reckoning, one that carries an uncomfortable irony for those who spent the last two decades dismissing pastoral authority as irrelevant, patriarchal, or dangerous. The same cultural moment that delegitimized the pastor, the priest, the rabbi, and the imam did not produce autonomous, self-determining men liberated from the need for guidance. It produced men who were starving for exactly the kind of formation that religious leaders had always offered — and who found it, eventually, in the worst possible places.

Consider what Andrew Tate, the most visible figure of contemporary manosphere culture, actually provides to his followers. He offers moral framing: a story about why their suffering is not random, why they are struggling, and who is to blame. He offers behavioral prescription: a code of conduct, a regimen, a set of rules for how to live. He offers community identity: a sense of in-group belonging, a shared language, a brotherhood of the initiated. He offers an account of the enemy: the forces arrayed against them, the ideology they must resist. These are, in structure, liturgical functions. Tate is not a social media personality who stumbled into influence. He is, functionally, a ‘leader’ — performing, in corrupted form, every office that religious formation has always performed.

“The manosphere is not a new phenomenon thankfully. It is a dark liturgy that is performing, in corrupted form, every office that religious formation has always performed, for men who were told they no longer needed priests.”

The irony is pointed. A culture that scorned religious authority as unnecessary, that caricatured pastors as power-hungry and faith communities as instruments of control, has watched its young men develop something indistinguishable from religious devotion — directed at figures whose actual contempt for those men’s flourishing is barely concealed. They traded the shepherd for the wolf and called it liberation.

This is not karma in the punitive sense but in the structural sense. Human beings require formation. They require figures or role models who embody ideals and narratives that make suffering meaningful. When institutions capable of providing these things are dismantled or discredited without replacement, the need does not disappear but finds another outlet. The question was never whether young men would have ideological leaders, but always what kind.

The Irony

A constructive response

None of this is an apology for misogyny. The violence, the dehumanization, the rage directed at women that saturates incel communities is genuinely dangerous, and naming its psychological roots does not diminish its moral seriousness. Protest behavior that harms others remains harmful, whatever the wound that produced it.

But understanding the wound is a prerequisite for treating it. Condemning the manosphere without attending to the attachment conditions that generate it is like treating a fever without asking what infection drives it. The fever is still there and the infection matters a lot more.

Three responses follow from this analysis. First, the church needs a constructive theology of masculine identity — one grounded not in dominance or passivity but in the image-bearing dignity of persons called to self-giving strength. Second, therapeutic and pastoral communities need to become skilled at meeting men in protest rather than waiting for them to arrive composed. Attachment protest is loud and often ugly; effective helpers must not be frightened away from it. Third, the broader culture needs to distinguish, far more carefully than it has, between the critique of harmful masculine scripts and the ambient message that men themselves are the problem. That distinction is very important and not merely an academic exercise. For many young men, it is the difference between receiving an invitation to grow and receiving a verdict of condemnation.

Rage as distress signal

What looks, from the outside, like hatred is often, at its root, a distress signal from an attachment system that has given up hope. The manosphere did not emerge from nowhere. It grew out of real relational dislocation —- dislocation shaped partly by economic marginalization, partly by the collapse of male belonging institutions, and partly by cultural messaging that, at its least careful, communicated to young men that their longing for connection was a form of harm.

Recognizing this does not require us to be naive about the dangers the manosphere poses. It requires us to be serious about the conditions that produce it, and serious, in turn, about building the relational environments, the ecclesial communities, and the therapeutic cultures capable of intercepting that distress before it becomes rage.

Flourishing, for men as for all people, begins not with the suppression of the need for belonging but with the provision of conditions in which that need can be met. The task before the clinic, church or the culture is not to explain away young men’s pain. It is to become communities capable of receiving it and offering, in return, the one thing that actually heals an attachment wound: secure and unconditional belonging.

We were working through the experimental psychology literature on parochial altruism — the well-replicated finding that humans, and especially people of faith, cooperate generously with their in-group while showing markedly less concern, and sometimes outright hostility, toward outsiders. The data are uncomfortable. They suggest that much of what we call moral behavior is calibrated to the boundary of the group rather than to the dignity of the person in front of us. We were sitting with that, as one does, when our class discussion slipped toward my concern about short-term mission trips. Some of my students pressed me to explain what I meant.

I hedged in the moment. I said something about how the picture is complicated, that intentions matter, that there is real good done. All of that is true. But I walked out of the classroom knowing I had not answered the question I was actually asked. So let me try again here, in print, because I think the honest answer is one that the American church needs to hear before another summer of departures begins.

A practice that did not always exist

It helps to remember that this is a new thing. For most of Christian history, missions meant going and not coming back. Patrick stayed in Ireland. Boniface stayed among the Germanic peoples and died there. The Jesuits who reached Japan in the sixteenth century learned the language, wore the clothes, and were buried in the soil. William Carey, often called the father of modern Protestant missions, sailed for India in 1793 and never returned to England. Hudson Taylor spent fifty-one years in China. Adoniram Judson buried two wives and most of his children in Burma. Whatever else one thinks of the colonial entanglements of that era, the missionary vocation was a vocation. It cost a life.

The short-term mission trip as we know it did not exist before the Second World War. It is a product of three converging developments in the second half of the twentieth century: cheap commercial air travel, the rise of parachurch youth organizations like Operation Mobilization (founded in 1957) and Youth With A Mission (founded in 1960), and the emergence of American evangelicalism as an affluent suburban movement with disposable income, paid vacation, and a felt need to do something with both. Within a generation, the practice had become institutionalized in nearly every evangelical youth group and Christian college in the country. Current estimates put the number of Americans going on short-term mission trips at well over a million and a half each year, with annual spending in the billions of dollars. This is not a minor adjunct to the missionary enterprise. It has, in budget and in cultural weight, largely become the enterprise.

And it is almost entirely a North American phenomenon. Nigerian and Korean and Brazilian Christians are sending long-term missionaries in extraordinary numbers, often to harder places than American missionaries are willing to go. Americans, increasingly, send teenagers for ten days.

What the evidence actually shows

Researchers have been looking at this for two decades now, and the findings are remarkably consistent. Kurt Ver Beek’s study of post-Hurricane Mitch housing reconstruction in Honduras compared communities served by short-term American teams against communities where local labor was hired with the equivalent funds. He found no meaningful long-term difference in housing outcomes, spiritual outcomes, or community development. The American teams cost roughly thirty thousand dollars per house. Local labor would have built four houses for the same money, employed Hondurans, and left behind skills rather than memories.

Robert Priest, who has done more ethnographic work on this than anyone, has concluded that the short-term mission trip functions primarily as a rite of passage for the American participant. It is formation for the sender, not evangelization of the receiver. Brian Howell, in his book on the subject, shows how participants come home rehearsing a narrative they were given before they ever left — the script of being changed, of seeing the real face of poverty, of returning grateful. The script is so consistent across trips, denominations, and destinations that it cannot plausibly be coming from the trips themselves. It is a cultural performance.

Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert’s When Helping Hurts documented, painfully, the ways in which well-meaning short-term teams routinely undermine local economies, displace local leadership, create dependency, and damage the long-term work of indigenous churches and missionaries who must clean up afterward. The orphanage tourism industry in places like Cambodia and Haiti — which exists because of American demand for emotional encounters with children — has been linked to the active separation of children from living parents. This is not a fringe critique. It is now mainstream missiology.

Where the psychology gets uncomfortable

This is the point at which the parochial altruism literature stops feeling academic. The behavioral signature of parochial altruism is high-cost, high-visibility cooperation that strengthens the in-group bond while delivering modest or negligible benefit to the out-group it claims to serve. The short-term mission trip fits this signature almost perfectly.

Consider the structure. The cost is high and conspicuous, often paid through public fundraising in the home church, which produces social recognition before the trip has even begun. The duration is short, which limits real entanglement with the recipient community and protects the participant from the kind of disruption that long-term presence would produce. The destination is photogenic, which produces images that circulate back through the sending community as evidence of seriousness and faith. The recipients are usually members of a racial, economic, and cultural out-group, which makes the in-group’s generosity legible as generosity. And the return is celebrated with testimonies, slideshows, and renewed status within the home congregation.

Every one of these features serves the bond inside the group. Almost none of them serves the person who was visited. The mathematics of it should trouble anyone who reads the Sermon on the Mount carefully. Jesus reserved his sharpest warnings for exactly the kind of piety that is performed in a way that signals to the in-group. He did not warn against generosity. He warned against generosity that is visible.

The structural mismatch

The theological problem with calling it missions

The deepest issue is not strategic but theological. The word missions belongs to the missio Dei — the sending of God into the world for the sake of the world. It is a word that names God’s outward movement toward the stranger, the enemy, the one who has no claim on him. To borrow that word for a practice that is structurally calibrated to strengthen the in-group is to commit a small but corrosive theft. It empties the term of its scandal. It makes it harder, over time, to recognize the real thing when we see it.

There is also the matter of what we are teaching the next generation. A young person who goes on three short-term trips between sixteen and twenty-two has been formed, whether anyone intended it or not, into a particular understanding of what Christian love looks like. Christian love, in this catechesis, is episodic. It is photogenic. It is performed in front of the in-group. It costs about what a used car costs, and then it is over. The person returns to their normal life, which is structured in such a way that no actual neighbor — no immigrant family in their own city, no struggling congregant down the pew, no addicted cousin — has any sustained claim on them. The trip has, in fact, made it easier to ignore the neighbor by giving the conscience something to point at.

This is the catechesis we should worry about. Not the bad theology in the sermon series, but the embodied theology of a practice repeated every summer for a generation.

What missions could mean again

I am not arguing that Americans should stop crossing borders, or stop giving, or stop caring about people in places they do not live. I am arguing that we should stop calling what we are mostly doing missions, and that we should ask harder questions about what we are forming in ourselves and in our young people when we do it.

A few honest reframings would help.

Call it what it is. If a church wants to send a youth group to do construction in another country for a week, call it a service-learning trip, or a cross-cultural exposure trip, or a pilgrimage. These are real categories with real value. None of them are missions, and naming them honestly would do less violence to the word.

Send people who are going to stay. The recovery of long-term missionary vocation — five years, ten years, a life — is the single most important thing the American church could do for the world it claims to want to reach. This is harder, more expensive, more disruptive, and infinitely more faithful than what we have substituted for it.

Partner before you go. If a trip happens, let it be at the invitation of, and under the authority of, an indigenous church or organization that has named what it actually needs. If they need money, send money. If they need silence, send silence. The reflex to show up in person is itself a parochial reflex. It assumes that our presence is the gift.

Stay home and love your neighbor. The hardest missionary call in twenty-first century America is to the suburb, the cul-de-sac, the apartment complex two blocks over. It does not photograph well. It does not produce a slideshow. It will not give a teenager a story to tell at retreat. It will, however, do the thing that missions was always supposed to do, which is to embody the strange, slow, unphotogenic love of God for the actual person in front of you.

It is summer again. The flights are booked, the t-shirts are printed, the fundraising letters are out. I am not going to tell anyone to cancel a trip. I am going to ask, instead, that the American church find the courage to look honestly at what this practice has become and to consider whether the word we have used for it still fits.

The parochial altruism literature will keep producing its findings whether we read them or not. The honest question is whether we are willing to let the gospel of a God who crossed every boundary, including the boundary of death, judge a practice that has quietly become a way of staying inside our own.

I think we are. I think the American church is more ready for this conversation than its institutions are. And I think the students in my classroom — the ones who asked the question I could not answer in the moment — are the ones who will lead us out.

On May 25, 2026, a pope and the co-founder of one of the world’s leading artificial intelligence laboratories shared a stage at the Vatican to release a document about what AI is doing to the human person. The image is worth pausing over. Christopher Olah of Anthropic, alongside two cardinals and two theologians, presented an encyclical written by a pope who, ten days earlier, had signed the document on the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum, the 1891 letter that defended factory workers against the machinery of the first industrial revolution. The symmetry was deliberate. Two industrial revolutions. Two Leos. The same question: who is being ground up inside the new machine, and who will name them on the world stage?

Most of the press coverage will focus on the optics. A pope sharing a stage with an AI executive is a story by itself. But the optics are not the news. The news is buried in paragraph 110 of the encyclical, and it is the most radical thing a major world leader has said about artificial intelligence in this decade.

Pope Leo XIV calls for the world to disarm AI.

What “disarm AI” actually means

The phrase appears in a paragraph that almost no news outlet will quote in full, because it does something the standard policy vocabulary has no category for. Leo XIV writes that the AI industry is operating inside a mentality of “armed” competition. He clarifies immediately that he does not mean military competition alone. He means economic and cognitive competition. He means the race for ever more powerful algorithms, larger datasets, and geopolitical or commercial dominance. He means the assumption that whoever builds the most capable system fastest will get to set the terms for everyone else.

To disarm AI, in Leo XIV’s framing, is to discredit that assumption itself. It is to refuse the premise that technical power confers the right to govern. It is to break the logic of the race.

This is an important move than the AI safety community has been willing to make. Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, and the long line of researchers who have warned about catastrophic risk have framed the problem primarily as a technical alignment question or a future-tense scenario in which sufficiently powerful systems escape human control. Their warnings are serious and deserve a hearing. But they leave the structure of the race itself intact. They ask whether the cars in the race can be made safer. Leo XIV asks why we are racing at all, and who is being run over while we do.

The casualties are already counted

This is the harder move, and the encyclical takes it seriously. In §173, Leo XIV gives a description of the present that any reader paying attention to the AI industry knows is accurate, even if it is rarely said this plainly from a public pulpit. He names the people whose bodies are already part of the supply chain.

Casualty One

The hidden workers

Casualty Two

The children in the mines

Casualty Three

The data-colonized

Casualty Four

The deskilled and surveilled

Casualty Five

The trafficked

Casualty Six

The young and the lonely

These are not predictions. These are people who exist now. Leo XIV’s argument is that any framework which treats AI risk as a future-tense catastrophe to be averted while ignoring this present-tense list of casualties is participating in a moral evasion.

Why the language of war is not metaphor

The reflex response to the encyclical’s framing will be that “disarm AI” is rhetorical overreach, that the AI industry is not literally a war and that calling it one cheapens the word. This response is worth taking seriously, because the integrity of language matters, and inflated comparisons damage moral discourse. But Leo XIV anticipates the objection and answers it carefully.

His point is about the structure of the tool. A war is not defined by uniforms or borders. It is defined by a competitive logic in which actors believe their survival depends on out-producing or out-positioning an enemy, and in which that logic produces casualties as a normal byproduct of the competition. By that definition, the AI industry now operates in conditions remarkably close to a wartime economy. Firms openly speak of an existential race against each other and against geopolitical rivals. Investment is justified by the language of national security. Talent is treated as a strategic resource to be denied to competitors. Capabilities are kept opaque to prevent enemies from learning from them. And the casualties are externalized to populations that have no voice in the contest.

If that is not a war in the conventional sense, it is something close enough that the conventional categories no longer protect us from its consequences. Leo XIV’s contribution is to refuse the polite vocabulary that would let us pretend otherwise.

The Central Move

What he is asking for is not a treaty. Pope Leo seeks a transformation in how the industry understands itself.

The third position

The public debate about AI tends to collapse into two camps. The optimists argue that the technology will be net positive and that excessive caution will only hand advantage to less scrupulous developers. The catastrophists argue that the technology may end the human story and that everything else is secondary to preventing that outcome. Both camps share an assumption: that the central question is what AI will do once built.

Leo XIV is articulating a third position, and it is the position the AI safety conversation has needed for some time. The central question, he argues, is not what AI will do. It is what the race to build AI is doing already, and what kind of human person is being shaped, sold, and discarded in the process of its construction.

This is why the encyclical does not read like a typical Vatican intervention in a technology debate. It does not call for prohibitions. It does not romanticize the pre-digital past. It accepts that AI will be part of human life going forward. What it refuses is the framing that the race itself is morally neutral, and that the casualties of the race are an acceptable cost of progress. On both points, the document is uncompromising.

What disarmament would look like

Leo XIV does not leave the phrase abstract. The encyclical names specific moves that would constitute disarmament in practice.

The first is transparency in supply chains. No competitive advantage should be built on hidden exploitation, and the labor and material chains that produce AI systems should be subject to the same scrutiny as any other industry. The second is independent oversight of algorithms that make consequential decisions about employment, credit, services, and reputation. The third is the treatment of data as a common good rather than as private property to be extracted from populations who have no leverage to refuse. The fourth, and the sharpest, is the absolute prohibition of autonomous weapons systems that delegate lethal decisions to machines. On this last point Leo XIV is direct:

no algorithm can make war morally acceptable.

The Vatican’s position, formally restated, is that AI-enabled warfare in which machines select and engage targets without effective human control cannot be morally licit, full stop.

These are not utopian demands. They are versions of the same accountability frameworks humanity has built, slowly and incompletely, around nuclear technology, pharmaceutical research, and medical experimentation. The argument is that AI now warrants the same seriousness, and that the industry’s resistance to providing it is itself one of the clearest signs that the disarmament is needed.

The flourishing question

There is a deeper reason this encyclical matters for anyone working on human flourishing, and it is not the one most readers will reach for. The standard frame would say that AI poses risks to wellbeing and that policy should mitigate those risks. That frame is true but shallow. Leo XIV is making a more demanding claim. He is saying that the question of whether human flourishing remains possible at all depends on whether we can build technologies without sacrificing the people who are not in the room when the technologies are designed.

The contemporary science of human flourishing has been mapping the conditions under which persons across cultures actually thrive. Meaning, relationships, character, health, material sufficiency, and the structures that hold these together. My own work on the Relational Theory of Hope sits inside that project, and what the data keep showing is that flourishing is irreducibly relational. It depends on bonds, on place, on being seen, on the moral imagination of communities that refuse to write any person out of the picture.

The Closing Thought

The most provocative line in Magnifica Humanitas is not about machines. It is about us. Leo XIV writes that

the construction of Babel or the rebuilding of Jerusalem begins within each one of us.

The disarmament he calls for is not, in the end, a policy program. It is a conversion of the imagination that refuses to accept that the race we are running is the only race available.

Whether the AI industry can hear that is the question this encyclical leaves on the table.

On May 15, 2026, the Vatican released what many believe to be the most consequential document of the 21st century: Magnifica Humanitas. While the global press initially focused on the Pope’s general acceptance of AI as a “valuable tool,” a closer reading reveals a targeted, surgical dismantling of the “predictive logic” that defines the modern data-industrial complex—specifically the models utilized by transnational surveillance and analytics giants like Palantir.

The Shift of Sovereignty

The Pope begins by noting that the “drivers of development” have shifted from the public interest to “private, often transnational, parties that are endowed with resources and the capacity to intervene that surpass those of many Governments” (Para 5). He is not just making a comment on corporate wealth; it is a warning about the privatization of sovereignty. Pope Leo observes that this “technological power thus takes on an unprecedented, predominantly ‘private’ aspect, which makes it even more challenging to discern, govern and direct such power toward the common good” (Para 5).

For companies whose business models rely on providing governments with the “invisible infrastructure” (Para 107) to manage populations, the Pope’s critique is devastating. He argues that when we entrust an algorithm with the power to “select who is worthy or not, without anyone bearing responsibility for that judgment,” we are handing over “the task of redefining the boundaries of human possibilities” (Para 103).

The Architecture of Visibility

At the heart of the “Palantir logic” is the ability to profile, predict, and influence behavior. Pope Leo XIV describes this as a “further risk, less visible but no less serious,” facilitated by the “massive collection of data and use of algorithmic systems” (Para 171).

He writes:

“When every action—movements, purchases, relationships and preferences—leaves a trace, a new form of power emerges, namely the power to profile, predict and influence behavior, often without individuals being fully aware of it” (Para 171).

The Encyclical warns that this creates an “architecture of visibility,” where what is amplified or rendered invisible “ultimately shapes opinions and choices, fostering conformity and self-censorship” (Para 171). For a magazine publication dedicated to human flourishing, this is the ultimate alarm: a society that is constantly being “predicted” is a society that has lost its capacity for the “slow and arduous effort” of genuine freedom (Para 62).

Data as the New Colonialism

Perhaps the most blistering section of the document—and the one that most directly challenges the global data-harvesting trade—is the Pope’s identification of a “new mindset of extraction” (Para 178). He argues that “colonialism assumes new forms” today, no longer dominating only bodies, but appropriating data.

The Pope identifies the specific assets that companies like Palantir thrive on—health data, epidemiological profiles, and genetic maps—as the “new ‘rare earths’ of power” (Para 178). He notes that this data is “once aggregated and analyzed... used to train predictive models... [to] determine who and what is deemed to matter” (Para 178). He continues:

“Those who control the health data of entire peoples... possess a structural leverage over the future, for they can shape needs and markets” (Para 178).

In the eyes of Leo XIV, this is a violation of the “universal destination of goods” (Para 65). He argues that “ownership of data cannot be left solely in private hands” (Para 108) and that the current distribution of power allows “a handful of actors to dictate these processes on their own” (Para 72).

The Call to Flourish

The Pope’s conclusion is quiet clear:

If we are to flourish, we must follow the “Way of Nehemiah,” a model introduced in the document as a way of “shared responsibility” (Para 8) that rebuilds relationships “piece by piece” (Para 184) rather than the “Babel Syndrome” of “automated control” (Para 132). Magnifica Humanitas is more than a letter for our time. One could say that it is a prophetic declaration of independence from the algorithmic gods of the 21st century.

On May 25, 2026, Pope Leo XIV will release his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, on the protection of the human person in the age of artificial intelligence. He signed it ten days earlier, on May 15, exactly 135 years to the day after his namesake, Pope Leo XIII, signed Rerum Novarum, the 1891 letter on the rights of workers in the age of industrial machines. The symmetry is not accidental. Two Leos, two industrial revolutions, the same underlying question: when the machinery of an age threatens to forget what a person is, who will remember on their behalf?

This is the question that has quietly organized one of the most consequential moral traditions of the modern era. Most readers know the encyclicals only by name, if at all. A handful of Latin titles drift through history syllabi and Catholic seminars. But read together, in sequence, they form something more than a religious archive. They form a slowly expanding cartography of the human person, written across 135 years of upheaval, and they have shaped global policy, law, economics, and moral imagination in ways the secular world rarely credits.

Before going further, an honest preface is needed. The Catholic tradition was not always on the right side of this question, and pretending otherwise would falsify the whole argument.

The shadow before the widening

Long before the modern social encyclicals, popes wrote documents that helped underwrite some of history’s gravest violations of human dignity. The bulls Dum Diversas (1452) and Romanus Pontifex (1455) granted Portuguese sovereigns authority to “reduce to perpetual slavery” non-Christian peoples in West Africa, and Inter Caetera (1493) divided the so-called New World between Iberian crowns, helping to seed the legal architecture later called the Doctrine of Discovery. These texts did not invent colonialism or the Atlantic slave trade, but they baptized them. Centuries later, when the Holocaust unfolded in Christian Europe, the Vatican’s diplomatic caution, however it is finally judged, made clear that papal voice and papal silence each carry historical weight. Modern Catholic social teaching is, in part, a long act of moral self-correction by a tradition that learned, painfully and incompletely, that its understanding of the human person had been too narrow. The widening that begins in 1891 is not a triumphal arc but a tradition working out, in public and in writing, who it had been failing to see.

That context is what makes the modern encyclicals readable as an argument rather than a settlement. They are not pronouncements from a tradition that always knew. They are revisions from a tradition that was learning, and that kept widening the circle of the person each time history forced a new question.

Five widenings, but one tradition

The pattern is easier to see when the documents are placed in chronological order and read for the figure each one defends. What follows is not a complete summary of the encyclicals. It is a portrait of the human person, drawn in five movements.

1891 · Leo XIII

Rerum Novarum

The worker becomes a person.

1963 · John XXIII

Pacem in Terris

The citizen becomes a global person.

1967 · Paul VI

Populorum Progressio

The developing person becomes the measure of peace.

1995 · John Paul II

Evangelium Vitae

The vulnerable life becomes the test of dignity

2015 · Francis

Laudato Si’

The person becomes ecological.

The Pattern

The sixth widening

This is where Pope Leo XIV comes into the picture. The announced focus of his Magnifica Humanitas is the protection of the human person in the age of artificial intelligence. The Vatican has emphasized that the document was deliberately signed on the anniversary of Rerum Novarum, and the parallel is exact in its structure. In 1891, industrial machinery had begun to absorb human labor, making the worker invisible inside the system that consumed them. In 2026, algorithmic systems are beginning to absorb human judgment, attention, relationship, and even creative voice, in ways that make the person inside the data flow harder to see.

If the pattern holds, Magnifica Humanitas will not simply moralize about technology. It will name a new figure in the long widening: the person under algorithmic gaze, whose dignity is being quietly redefined by systems they did not consent to and cannot fully see. Whether the encyclical succeeds in this is a question for next week and the years that follow. But the timing makes clear that Leo XIV understands himself to be standing at a hinge moment of the same kind Leo XIII faced in 1891.

When the machinery of an age threatens to forget what a person is, the question becomes who will remember on their behalf.

What the encyclicals were building

Read sequentially, the social encyclicals form something the modern world has rarely had: a publicly written argument that the human person is irreducible to any single dimension or world order. Not labor alone. Not citizenship alone. Not economic development alone. Not autonomy alone. Not even relationship to the earth alone. The person is all of these at once, and any age that loses sight of one of them is failing the whole.

Dimension One

Dimension Two

Dimension Three

Dimension Four

Dimension Five

Dimension Six

These are not abstract principles. They are the deposit of 135 years of writing in response to specific historical pressures, and they have shaped global policy in ways that are easy to overlook precisely because they have become ordinary. The architecture of postwar human rights, the language of integral development used by UN agencies, the moral grammar of the climate movement, the categories used in global poverty frameworks, the bioethics consensus around vulnerable populations: each of these owes more to Catholic social teaching than most secular accounts acknowledge.

The flourishing lineage

This is where the contemporary science of human flourishing meets a tradition older than itself. In the last fifteen years, flourishing has become a measurable construct. The Global Flourishing Study, the longitudinal collaboration between Harvard’s Human Flourishing Program and Baylor’s Institute for Studies of Religion, is now generating data on more than 200,000 participants across 23 countries, examining how dimensions of life, including meaning, relationships, character, health, and material conditions, hold together across cultures. My own work on the Relational Theory of Hope and on relationships, place, and integral flourishing sits inside that broader empirical project.

What the encyclicals offer, read in this light, is the moral cartography that the empirical science is now beginning to investigate. Long before flourishing became a construct one could measure, this tradition had been articulating, in public and in revision, a multidimensional vision of the human person grounded in dignity, solidarity, work, peace, vulnerability, place, and transcendence. The science is catching up to a vision the tradition had already widened, encyclical by encyclical, into something our current world badly needs and rarely names.

A Closing Thought

Every generation of young adults has arrived in cities with expectations. That is not new. What is new is the scale and the degree to which contemporary culture has constructed the city as the singular destination of young adult aspiration, the place where real life begins, where identity is formed, where the future is made. Social media has accelerated this narrative to the point where the city is not merely a place young people move to. It is a promise they have been handed since adolescence. And the Global Flourishing Study data, drawn from 22 countries and tens of thousands of respondents, now allow us to assess, with some clarity, how that promise is being kept.

The answer is not encouraging. Adults aged 18 to 24 report city satisfaction at 75% — the lowest of any age group in the study, and 18 percentage points below adults aged 80 and above, who are the most city-satisfied demographic on earth. This is the generation that cities are most visibly designed for — the rooftop bars, the co-working spaces, the curated neighbourhoods, the cultural programming aimed squarely at the young professional demographic. And they are the generation least satisfied with what those cities are delivering. That gap between design intention and lived appraisal is what this article is about.

Satisfaction is a ratio and the ratio is broken

Place satisfaction is not a raw assessment of environmental quality. It is a relationship between experience and expectation — between what a place delivers and what a person anticipated it would deliver. A city that performs adequately against calibrated expectations produces satisfaction. A city that performs adequately against inflated expectations produces dissatisfaction. And one of the most consequential things that has happened to young adults in the past two decades is an extraordinary inflation of urban expectation, driven by a media environment that curates cities relentlessly and omits almost everything that makes them hard

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The 18-to-24-year-old arrives in a city having consumed years of carefully edited representations of it — the highlight reel of urban life, with the housing search, the loneliness, the cost, and the grinding transience largely absent. The expectation is formed against an image. The experience lands against a reality. The appraisal reflects the distance between them

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This is not a counsel of pessimism about cities. I am simply trying to lay out an observation about the asymmetry between how cities are narrated to young people and how young people actually experience them. The 75% satisfaction score is not evidence that cities are failing in absolute terms but points to an evidence that the promise substantially exceeds the delivery and that young adults are the demographic most exposed to that gap. This is, partly, because they are the ones who arrived with the largest expectation and the least accumulated experience to calibrate it against.

Transience as a place satisfaction killer

Young adults aged 18 to 24 are the most mobile demographic in most societies. They move for university, then for entry-level employment, then for better opportunities, then for relationships, then for housing affordability in whatever city has become unaffordable in the one they started in. This relocation frequency is not incidental to their low place satisfaction scores. It might be structurally causal–and I will tell you why I say that

Place satisfaction, the research consistently shows, deepens with residential duration. The familiarity with local rhythms, the accumulated knowledge of neighbourhood geography, the gradual formation of local social ties, the sense of having history in a place — all of these are products of time spent in a specific location. They cannot be downloaded. They cannot be rushed because they require presence, repetition, and the kind of unhurried accumulation that frequent relocation structurally prevents.

The 80-year-old who scores 93% on city satisfaction has almost certainly lived in their neighbourhood for decades. They know it in the way that only time teaches. The 22-year-old who scores 75% arrived recently, plans to leave when the opportunity presents itself, and is inhabiting a city they have not yet had time to learn. The difference in satisfaction is not only a difference in what the city is providing. It is a difference in how much of the city has been allowed to accumulate into the person’s experience of it

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Digital displacement and the fractured experience of place

There is a dimension of the young adult’s relationship to place that has no historical precedent and that the existing literature on place satisfaction has only begun to grapple with. Adults aged 18 to 24 are the most digitally present generation in history. They conduct significant portions of their social lives, their professional lives, their leisure, and their self-presentation through screens — and those screens are, spatially, nowhere in particular.

This matters for place appraisal because satisfaction with a place requires actually inhabiting it — attending to it with sufficient presence to form a meaningful evaluation. A person whose attention is distributed across a dozen digital environments simultaneously is not fully inhabiting any physical one. The neighbourhood is experienced through a phone as much as through the street. The local park is a backdrop for a photograph rather than an environment to be known. The city is something scrolled past as much as something walked through.

This is not a moral argument about screen time. It is an observation about the conditions under which place satisfaction forms. Appraisal requires presence. And sometimes, this presence requires attention. And the attentional economy of contemporary young adult life is structured in ways that systematically pull attention away from the immediate physical environment toward the mediated, the curated, and the elsewhere. The 75% satisfaction score may in part be measuring what the young adult is no longer fully present enough to receive and not necessarily what the city is failing to deliver.

The country-level picture adds a further layer

The demographic data do not exist in isolation. The country-level findings from the Global Flourishing Study add an important comparative layer. The countries with the highest city satisfaction scores — the Philippines, Indonesia, India — are not the countries most associated with the youth-oriented and digitally saturated urban culture that characterises cities in the global north. They are countries–in the global south—where local community structures, religious institutions, and intergenerational neighbourhood ties remain stronger, and where the narrative promise of the city has not been as comprehensively inflated by social media and aspirational marketing.

Countries in the global north — the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Australia — cluster in the middle and lower portions of the country ranking. These are precisely the countries where the promise of the city has been most aggressively narrated, most comprehensively marketed, and most thoroughly embedded in the aspirational culture that shapes young adult expectations. They are also, not coincidentally, the countries with the most severe housing affordability crises for young adults. The country-level data do not simply reflect objective urban quality. They reflect the size of the gap between what was promised and what was found.

What cities owe the young and are not providing

The policy reflex when confronted with young adult urban dissatisfaction is typically to propose more — more amenities, more nightlife, more cultural programming, more co-working infrastructure. More of the things that cities are already providing in abundance, under the assumption that the problem is quantity rather than kind.

The Global Flourishing Study data suggest the problem is more fundamental. The features that produce the highest city satisfaction across the entire demographic spectrum — as demonstrated most clearly the 80+ finding — are not amenity-driven. They are stability-driven: walkable scale, residential affordability, long-term community anchors, local institutions that outlast a lease cycle, and the conditions under which place familiarity can form and grow over time. These are precisely the features that contemporary cities systematically under-provide for young adults, who are instead offered transience dressed as freedom and density dressed as community.

What cities invest in for young adults: cultural programming, entertainment districts, co-working spaces, short-term rental supply, transit optimised for commuting patterns.

What produces high place satisfaction: residential stability, walkable neighbourhood scale, long-term community activities, local institutions that persist across years, the conditions under which place familiarity accumulates.

The gap between those two lists is a significant part of what the 75% satisfaction score is measuring.

The city that works for the over-80s — legible, local, stable, relationally situated — is the city that young adults need in order for place satisfaction to form. It is not the city being built for them. And until the gap between the city that is promised and the city that is built begins to close, the data are unlikely to move.

Young adults are not asking too much of their cities. They are asking what they were told to ask. The problem is that cities, for all their investment in youth-oriented design, have not yet reckoned seriously with what it would actually take to make young people feel at home in them. The Global Flourishing Study data make that reckoning harder to avoid. 75% percent is not a crisis, but a signal to something happening unnoticed. And signals, if attended to early enough, are more useful than crises.

In the first episode of the Bonding with God series, I explore proximity seeking: the instinct that drives us toward safety when life feels uncertain. When that safe haven is God, something profound happens in our faith.

🎥 Free chapter + more: http://vcounted.com/bondingwithGod

📖 Get the book: https://www.amazon.com/Bonding-God-Attachment-Theory-Psychology/dp/1540968413/

Walk into almost any evangelical church on any given Sunday, and you will see it at the end of the service — the altar call. The music softens. The lights dim slightly. A voice says something like, “If you want to give your life to Jesus tonight, repeat this prayer after me.” Heads bow, hands raise, and those who respond walk forward to confirm what has just happened in their hearts. The ritual is so deeply embedded in Protestant Christianity that most people assume it has been there forever — as ancient and unquestionable as the cross itself.

It has not. The altar call is an American invention, less than two hundred years old. And understanding where it came from — and what it quietly assumed about the nature of faith — may help explain one of the most urgent puzzles of our religious moment: why so many people who once raised their hands have since walked away.

A 19th-Century Innovation Dressed as Ancient Practice

The altar call was pioneered by Charles Finney in the 1830s. Finney was a lawyer turned revivalist, and he approached conversion with the precision of a courtroom argument. He believed that if you laid out the evidence compellingly enough, the rational individual would make a decision. He introduced the “anxious bench” — a front row reserved for those under conviction — as a deliberate technique to move people from deliberation to decision. Dwight L. Moody refined it further, and by the 20th century, Billy Graham had made it the defining symbol of evangelical Christianity worldwide.

There is something admirable in this — a genuine desire to see people encounter God and respond. But embedded in the ritual is a set of assumptions that have quietly shaped how entire generations understand what faith is and how it works. The altar call treats faith as fundamentally a cognitive-volitional event: you hear a proposition, you judge it to be true, you decide to accept it, and you act on that decision. In short: you believe the right things, and then you belong.

“The early church practiced the reverse. You belonged first — you were welcomed into a community — and from within that belonging, belief had space to grow.”

What the Early Church Actually Did

The early church had no altar call. What it had was the catechumenate — a formation process that, in many traditions, lasted two to three years before baptism. During that time, you lived alongside the community. You ate with them, served with them, suffered with them. You were formed into patterns of prayer and practice long before you were asked to formally confess a creed. The Nicene Creed, when it came, was not an entry point. It was a testimony — a description of a God you had already begun to know.

The church fathers understood faith as primarily relational and participatory. For Augustine, the longing for God was not a conclusion arrived at by reason but a restlessness built into the human soul — a restlessness that only quiets when it finds rest in the One it was made for. For Irenaeus, to know God was to be known by God, caught up in the divine life not through intellectual assent but through lived participation. This is not mysticism in a vague sense. It is a profoundly developed theological anthropology: human beings are relational creatures who come to know by belonging, not the other way around.

Research finding

Studies on religious disaffiliation consistently find that those who leave faith communities most often cite not intellectual doubt but relational disconnection — from God, from community, and from a sense of being truly known. The problem is not that they stopped believing. It is that they never experienced the belonging that makes belief livable.

Descartes, the Enlightenment, and the Anxious Bench

To understand why Christianity moved from the catechumenate to the altar call, you have to understand what happened in Western thought between the 5th and 18th centuries. René Descartes, writing in the 1640s, made a move that would reshape everything. He located the ground of certainty in the thinking self — cogito ergo sum — making the individual reasoning mind the seat of all knowledge. The Enlightenment extended this impulse across every domain of human inquiry. If something could not be verified, measured, or rationally demonstrated, its claim to truth became suspect.

Protestant Christianity, already oriented toward doctrinal precision after the Reformation, was particularly susceptible to this pressure. Every protestant theologian that came afterward wrote and talked about faith as religious cognition. In other words, faith became belief–it was a way knowing God and intellectualizing God’s existence. This fits quite well with British empiricism priciples, since most of the leading protestant theologians at this time were writing from England. The question was no longer “Do you trust God?” —- which is a relational question —- but “Do you believe these propositions about God?” or simply put “Do you belief?” —- which is a cognitive one. Faith quietly shifted from trust to assent. And the altar call became the ritual that sealed the transaction.

This is not a conspiracy. Nobody sat down and decided to replace relationship with religion. It was the slow, largely unconscious drift of a tradition trying to make itself legible in a world that increasingly valued what could be verified and decided. But the consequences of that drift have been profound.

What Happens When We Begin With Belief Instead of Sacred Belonging?

When you hand a child correct doctrine before you have given them a relational experience of God, you are asking them to build a house starting with the roof. The information is not wrong. But it has no foundation beneath it —- no felt sense that God is present, safe, and responsive; no internal experience of the divine as a secure base from which to explore the world and face its difficulties.

Developmental psychology has understood for decades that formation follows a relational logic. Children do not trust their parents because they have evaluated parental behavior and concluded it meets their criteria for trustworthiness. They trust —- or fail to trust -— based on thousands of small, embodied, pre-reflective experiences of being held, responded to, seen, and kept safe. Belief about the parent grows from and within that prior relational reality. Reverse the order, and you will not get formation —- what you get is performance.

What the research shows

Research in the psychology of religion consistently finds that secure attachment to God —- not the content of belief, but the quality of the felt relationship security —- is among the strongest predictors of psychological well-being, resilience in suffering, and sustained faith over a lifetime. We have spent generations getting people to believe the right things. We have invested far less in helping them experience the right relationship.

This is precisely what attachment science reveals about God-representation as well. When people have a secure internal working model of God —- when God is experienced, not just believed in, as reliably present and genuinely responsive —- they navigate suffering and life’s uncertainty from a position of security. When God is primarily a set of propositions to which they have given assent, life stressors and cloudy seasons dismantle the framework because there is no living, secure relationship underneath to hold them.

Why I Wrote Bonding with God, and What Comes Next

This question has shaped my scholarship for years, and it is the heartbeat of my book Bonding with God. The book brings attachment theory into direct conversation with faith and psychology to ask a deceptively simple question: what does it mean to form a secure bond with God, and what conditions make that possible or difficult? I draw on both empirical research and the lived experience of over 100 young people during my fieldwork in South Africa. In the book, I argued that psychological security and spiritual vitality are not separate concerns, but are richly connected.

The attachment system that drives an infant toward a caregiver in moments of threat is the same system that, across development, shapes how we orient toward God in prayer, in suffering, in worship, and in the quiet of an ordinary day. If that system is formed in an environment that offers warmth, consistency, and genuine responsiveness —- in a family, in a faith community, in a church that understands what it is doing —- the result is a faith that can hold the weight of a real life and the ups and downs that come with it. If it is not, no amount of correct theology fills the gap.

Bonding with God is not a critique of doctrine. The book presents an argument for restoring doctrine to its proper place: as the language we develop to describe a God we have already encountered, rather than the door we must walk through before the encounter is permitted.

An Invitation: Building a Secure Faith Future

But scholarship alone is not enough. The problem is not only that we need better research —- though we do. It is that the people who shape faith formation on the ground: pastors, children’s ministry directors, parents, youth workers, seminary educators, need a different framework to work from. They need the tools to move from transmission of information to cultivation of relationship. They need to understand what secure faith looks like in a child’s body, in an adolescent’s questions, in a young adult’s late-night doubts.

This is why I am launching the Building a Secure Faith Future initiative —- an effort to translate what we know from attachment science, developmental psychology, and the psychology of religion into practical formation resources for communities of faith. This project has not received any funding as of yet. But because of the urgency of this initiative, I am lead to launch Building A Secure Faith Future by faith and the right partners–with a shared burden–will come. The initiative will bring together researchers, practitioners, and educators to develop tools, training, and frameworks that help churches and families build the kind of relational environment in which secure faith can actually grow.

If you are a parent who wants your child to know God —- not just know about God. If you are a pastor who has watched your most committed young adults drift away and suspects it is about something more than intellectual doubt. If you are an educator or therapist who sees the intersection of attachment and spiritual formation as one of the most urgent areas of our time. If you are a funding organization called to invest in building a secure faith in the next generation. This is an initiative for you.

The Long Way Home

There is a reason Augustine’s Confessions remains one of the most read books in Western history fifteen centuries after it was written. It is not a theological treatise, though theology fills its pages. Confessions is a love story of a man searching, running, intellectualizing, resisting, and finally being caught by the God who had been pursuing him the entire time. The God at the end of the Confessions is not a proposition Augustine finally accepted. He is a person Augustine finally stopped running from.

That is the kind of faith that endures. Not the kind measured in altar calls, but the kind forged in the slow fire of genuine relationship —- in prayer that sometimes feels like silence and sometimes feels like presence; in communities that hold people through their doubts rather than managing them; in a theological anthropology that takes seriously what developmental science confirms: that we are made for relationships, that security in the context of a relationship is the soil in which everything good grows, and that a living God, fully known and fully knowing, is exactly the kind of attachment figure the human soul was built to need.

Getting the order right matters. I think it has always mattered. We are only now measuring the cost of getting it wrong, and unfortunately, beginning, at last, to find our way back.

Be sure to get Bonding with God today.

Anxious attachment

If this is you, your faith feels intense but unstable. You worry God is disappointed in you, you pray desperately seeking reassurance, and doubt hits hard and fast.

Avoidant attachment

You believe in God, but from a distance. Faith feels more intellectual than personal. Vulnerability in prayer doesn’t come naturally, and you tend to rely on yourself more than you’d like to admit.

Secure attachment

This is where transformation happens. You trust God’s presence even in silence. You bring your full self to prayer — your doubts, fears, and all — and you rest in the relationship.

Key Insight

Attachment styles are not fixed. You can move toward secure faith — and that journey begins with understanding how you bond with God in the first place.

I wrote Bonding with God to show you exactly how, drawing on my work on attachment theory and the psychology of faith. Whether you find yourself in the anxious, avoidant, or secure pattern, there is a path forward.

What if the problem isn’t effort at all?

Attachment theory, one of the most robust frameworks in developmental psychology, tells us that the way we bond with God mirrors the relational patterns formed earliest in life. An anxious attachment produces anxious prayer: restless, urgent, never quite sure God is really there. An avoidant attachment produces distant prayer: transactional, infrequent, emotionally flat. And secure attachment? That’s where genuine intimacy with God begins.

In my new video, I unpack exactly how these patterns show up in your prayer life, and what it looks like to move toward something more secure, more alive, more honest.

What if the way you relate to God is not a fixed fate, but a living story — one that can grow, heal, and flourish?

Today is a day I have been quietly working toward for a long time. Bonding with God: Attachment Theory and the Psychology of Faith is now officially published and available through Baker Academic.

This book began as a question — one that I kept returning to in my research, my clinical work, and my own spiritual life: Why do so many people believe in God intellectually yet feel emotionally distant from him? Why does faith sometimes feel like obligation rather than intimacy? And what does science actually say about how human beings form — and reform — deep bonds of trust?

Attachment theory gave me a language for what I was seeing. Developed by John Bowlby and expanded by decades of psychological research, attachment science tells us that we are wired for secure connection from the moment we are born. Those early bonds shape everything — how we see ourselves, how we see others, and, as this book argues, how we relate to God.

What the Book Is Really About

Bonding with God challenges a common — and quietly discouraging — assumption: that our early attachment patterns are our destiny. The psychological literature has long documented how insecure attachment formed in childhood can ripple outward into adulthood, affecting our relationships, our mental health, and our faith. But this book does not stop there.

The deeper claim of this work is that relationship with God can itself be a source of earned security — a corrective emotional and spiritual experience that rewires how we bond. Faith is not just a belief system. It is an attachment system. And when that bond is cultivated with intention, the results are nothing short of transformative.

Drawing on the Global Flourishing Study — one of the largest cross-cultural studies of human wellbeing ever conducted — alongside decades of research in the psychology of religion and attachment, this book brings science and Scripture into genuine conversation. Not to reduce faith to psychology. But to let each illuminate the other.

Who This Book Is For

If you are a pastor, therapist, spiritual director, or counselor working with people whose faith feels dry, fragmented, or distant — this book was written with you in mind. If you are a scholar or student of psychology, theology, or spiritual formation — it offers a rigorous framework for understanding faith as attachment. And if you are simply a person trying to make sense of your own relationship with God — you will find both honesty and hope in these pages.

Bonding with God is not a self-help book. It is an invitation — to see yourself as someone whose deepest longings for connection were placed there by design, and whose spiritual flourishing is not beyond reach.

A Grateful Moment

Publishing a book is never a solo endeavor, and I am grateful beyond words to Baker Academic for the care they have brought to this project, to the scholars and clinicians who offered early endorsements, and to the many students, research participants, and congregation members whose stories quietly shaped this work.

Most of all, I am grateful that this conversation is now in your hands. A book only becomes fully alive when it meets a reader. My hope is that what you find here opens something — a question, a memory, a longing — that draws you closer to the God who has been bonded to you all along.

I am excited to share that Bonding with God is now available through Baker Academic, Amazon, and any local bookstore near you. And I wanted to take a moment to tell you who this book is really for.

Bonding with God is for the everyday believer who has wondered why God sometimes feels close and other times impossibly distant. It is for the therapist or counselor sitting with clients whose wounds run as deep as the spiritual. It is for the pastor who senses something beneath the surface of a congregation’s faith struggles but hasn’t had the language to name it. And it is for anyone who has ever felt that their relationship with God is more complicated than they’re supposed to admit.

This short video is my introduction to the book and the people I had in mind while writing it. If any of that resonates, I think you should pick up a copy of Bonding with God.

If you've started the book, could you leave a 1-minute review on Amazon? It helps the algorithm show the book to people who are searching for healing!

Thank you!

Happy Easter!!!

Aquiet shift has taken place in the architecture of modern healing. When a person faces the weight of trauma, anxiety, or deep-seated grief, they are now significantly more likely to call their therapist than their pastor. The consulting room has become the new confessional; the 50-minute hour, the new sacred liturgy. Therapy, once whispered about in the shadows of the narthex, is now mainstream—and for many, it is the only space they feel safe enough to be fully known.

As a psychologist, I believe in the clinical power of therapy. It provides tools for clarity that are life-saving. But as a Christian, I have watched with growing concern as therapy has quietly replaced the Church as the primary theater of healing for believers. We must ask ourselves why the Church has lost its voice in the conversation of the soul, and more importantly, how we can reclaim it.

The New Sacred Space

Modern therapy echoes the very themes the Church once pioneered: wholeness, forgiveness, trauma, and restoration. Yet, many are fleeing to the sofa because they have found the pew to be ill-equipped for their pain. Too often, churches have been quick to fix rather than listen, dismissive of mental illness as a “lack of faith,” or focused on external behavior while ignoring the inner wounds of the heart.

In contrast, the clinical space offers a dependable, non-judgmental presence. But while therapy is an excellent mirror for self-understanding, it was never meant to be a substitute for the Body of Christ. Therapy can explore the self, but it cannot always restore the soul. It can name our trauma, but it cannot name our Grace.

Therapy helps us become more self-aware. But the Church calls us beyond self-awareness to self-giving—sending us out to live for something greater than our own pain.

The Church’s Unique Offering

If we are to reclaim the Church as a place of “soul care” in the age of “self-care,” we must recognize the four distinct gifts that clinical science cannot provide:

01

Identity in Christ

In therapy, we explore who we are. In the Church, we are reminded whose we are. Our worth is rooted in being God’s beloved, not in our performance or psychological progress.

02

Healing in Community

While therapy is an individual endeavor, the Church offers healing in a “we.” We bear each other’s burdens and find our story within a larger, redemptive history.

03

Grace Over Shame

Therapy helps us understand the roots of shame. Only the Gospel, however, can speak a final word over it: that we are fully known and yet fully loved.

04

Transcendent Purpose

The Church calls us beyond self-actualization toward worship and mission. It invites us to find healing by pouring ourselves out for the sake of others.

Reclaiming the Path to Wholeness

To be clear: this is not an argument against therapy. God often uses counselors as instruments of His healing. But healing is not just about “feeling better”—it is about being made new. For the Church to grow in its role as a healer, we must become trauma-informed, create space for honest lament, and learn the patient art of listening without rushing to a theological “fix.”

We live in a time of profound hunger for restoration. The Church must not shrink back. We are called to be a people who point others not just to better coping mechanisms, but to Christ—the only one who does not just treat symptoms, but transforms lives.

My hope is that we can reclaim the Church as a sanctuary for the weary. We can be a people who listen well, love deeply, and offer the world a healing that lasts beyond the therapy hour. This is what my colleague Jim Sells and his team are doing with The Church Cares project. You should check them out; they also have a new book out “When Hurting People Come To Church”.

We are, by any objective measure, the most informed population ever to walk the earth. Before a single cup of coffee has cooled, a citizen of the twenty-first century can absorb more data about global suffering, political upheaval, and cultural fracture than a nineteenth-century scholar might have encountered in an entire lifetime.

We have mistaken the velocity of information for the depth of understanding. Our digital town squares are flooded with “truths” that are technically accurate but socially corrosive — narratives tailored to the comfort of the dominant or the fury of the partisan. In this blizzard of data, we have lost the thread of what it means to live well together. We have built a world where everyone knows everything, yet no one can agree on what is good. If we are to survive this fragmentation, we must stop treating journalism as a commodity to be consumed and start recovering it as a public vocation — a sacred obligation to nourish the common soil in which a society actually flourishes.

The Failure of “Value-Neutral” News

For much of the late twentieth century, the gold standard of the press was “objectivity” — a clinical, value-neutral reporting of “just the facts.” While noble in its intent to prevent bias, this model has been dismantled by the realities of a hyper-polarized digital age. In a society, as it is today, where truth is increasingly treated as relative and subjective, “facts” are no longer neutral; they are selected, framed, and weaponized to serve the narrative of the dominant group.

When journalism defines itself merely by the circulation of information, it becomes an unwitting tool for those with the loudest megaphones. It retreats into a “view from nowhere” (e.g., using slang like ‘Fake News’) that creates a false equivalence between truth and falsehood in the name of balance. This is the crisis of the modern age: a lack of moral weight. Real hope for human flourishing lies in a vision of journalism that serves the common good by interpreting facts through the lens of what a healthy society requires to survive; not merely by ignoring it.

A society that hopes to flourish must cultivate a form of journalism that seeks the common good rather than merely the circulation of information, especially when truth itself has become divisive and relative.

The Architecture of Flourishing

In the classical tradition, Aristotle used the word eudaimonia — flourishing — to describe an activity of the soul, beyond one’s emotions, in accordance with virtue. For a modern society to flourish, it needs an information ecosystem that does more than just warn us of danger or validate our grievances. It needs a press that helps us navigate our obligations to one another.

Currently, our media environment is designed for “thin” flourishing — the dopamine hit of a viral headline or the satisfaction of seeing an ideological opponent “owned.” This is the logic of the market, not the logic of the community. “Thick” flourishing, on the other hand, is the kind that allows a neighbor to look at a neighbor and see a partner in a shared future. This kind of shared hope requires a journalism that investigates what an event means for our collective life rather than just focusing on what happened.

The distinction matters greatly because thin flourishing would always feel like engagement; it produces anxiety, tribalism, and the sensation of being well-informed while understanding nothing. Thick flourishing would feel like ‘wisdom’ that is for the greater good. This kind of wisdom produces the durable civic trust that allows a society to be united under pressure and recognize shared obligation even across deep disagreement.

Four Practices of Vocational Journalism

The Pursuit of Meaning

The journalist shifts from provider of data to curator of meaning. Not just “what happened?” but “why does this matter for our shared future?”

Moral Clarity over Neutrality

Objectivity cannot mean an absence of values. Vocational journalism must be unashamedly pro-human, pro-truth, and pro-justice — even when the powerful contest it.

Radical Inclusion

Flourishing is impossible when truth is a luxury of the dominant. Recovering the vocation means seeking dimensions of reality that power prefers to keep hidden.

Civic Health

Success is not clicks generated, but civic health produced. Does this report build trust? Does it clarify our obligations? Does it help us flourish together?

The Public Vocation

To call journalism a “vocation” is to reach back to an older and more soulful understanding of work. A vocation is a calling — a profession that carries a set of ethical responsibilities that transcend the profit motive. Like medicine or the law, journalism exists to provide a service that is essential to the human condition. The physician’s vocation is health; the lawyer’s is justice. The journalist’s vocation must be the common good.

Recovering this sense of vocation means prioritizing the health of the social fabric over the growth of the audience. This paradigm shift in media-empire building would require media CEOs and onwers that have a heart for the common good. This must come above profit. It means having the courage to report truths that challenge the dominant group’s narrative and the wisdom to elevate voices that have been rendered inaudible. It moves the conversation from protecting a “free press” — an institutional focus — to protecting a “flourishing society” — a human focus. That shift won’t be cosmetic but requires a fundamental reorientation of what journalism is for.

Toward a New Social Contract

The path forward requires a new “social contract” for the press. This is not a task for journalists alone; it requires a transformation in how we, as citizens, consume our world. We must be willing to support journalism that challenges our own narratives, and we must demand a media that values our flourishing over our attention.

Some of this recovery is already underway — in community-based reporting projects rebuilding trust between newsrooms and local residents, in long-form investigations that expose what power prefers to keep hidden, in the quiet proliferation of outlets that treat their readers as citizens rather than consumers. These are not departures from serious journalism. They are its most serious expression.

We stand at a crossroads. We can continue to be the most informed, most divided, and most anxious society in history — armed with enough “facts” and “fake news” to sustain our grievances but not enough truth to transcend them. Or we can choose something harder and more necessary: a journalism that does not merely tell us what is happening, but shows us who we might yet become. The hope of human flourishing rests on recovering journalism as a public vocation directed toward the common good. Our shared future depends on it.

Over the past half century, the science of well-being slowly moved away from a purely individual model toward a relational one. Security, care, connection, and belonging became central to understanding how people live well. This shift did not happen by accident. It was driven by a vanguard of women scholars who asked different questions about human life.

The Relational Foundation: Mary Ainsworth

One of the earliest transformations came through the work of Mary Ainsworth. Her fieldwork in Uganda and later studies in Baltimore produced one of the most influential discoveries in modern developmental science: the patterns of attachment. Ainsworth demonstrated that emotional bonds serve as the foundation of psychological stability across the lifespan. Trust and resilience grow from early relational experiences, a finding that reshaped how psychologists understand human security.

A Different Voice: Carol Gilligan

Another transformation arrived through Carol Gilligan. In the late twentieth century, moral psychology focused on abstract rules and universal justice. Gilligan noticed a missing dimension: the ethic of care. In her work In a Different Voice, she showed that human moral life often grows through attentiveness to relationships. Decisions about right and wrong frequently emerge within webs of responsibility rather than abstract logic alone.

The Power of Shared Joy: Barbara Fredrickson

Finally, Barbara Fredrickson challenged the assumption that positive emotions were merely “decorative.” Her Broaden and Build theory proposes that joy, gratitude, and love widen our attention and help us build enduring social resources. Positive emotions do not merely feel good; they construct the relational infrastructure that supports long-term psychological health.

The Legacy of the Quiet Revolution

The story of these intellectual developments rarely receives the attention it deserves. Public conversations about women in science often focus on representation, yet the deeper legacy lies in the transformation of ideas. Women scholars did not simply join existing fields; they broadened the questions those fields asked.

As we celebrate Women’s Month, let us look to the

scholars who insisted that relationships matter. Their work reminds us that to understand human well-being, science must attend to the bonds that sustain human life. In that sense, the quiet revolution they began continues to shape how we think about what it means to live well.

Celebrating Women’s Month 2026

Not long ago, I joined a Zoom call with an interest group meeting at a virtual colloquium, listening to a scholar attempt to explain the complexity of well-being. He spoke in the clean sterile language of modern psychology: non-dualistic sense of happiness, relational harmony, the interconnectedness of the cosmos. To the untrained ear, it sounded like a breakthrough. But as I listened, I realized he was describing something ancient and raw using the bloodless vocabulary of a lab report. He was trying to translate the deep resonant longings of a thousand different cultures into a single, standardized dialect of “well-being.”

This is the central tension in the modern science of flourishing. We have treated “the good life” like a standardized blood type—something universal, biological, and easily measured. But after months of analyzing data from the Global Flourishing Study (GFS) and working within the Harvard Human Flourishing Program, I have come to a startling realization: In our rush to build a universal metric for happiness, we are inadvertently colonizing the human experience.

The Skeleton: The Universal Baseline

In the social sciences, we rely on what is called an etic perspective—an outsider’s yardstick. Drawing from longitudinal data across forty countries, Harvard’s Tyler VanderWeele framework identifies six domains that consistently correlate with a life going well. These are ideals of a good life and the structural pillars that seem to support human life regardless of culture; they are ends in themselves. I provide a summary below of how I understand each of the domains:

1. Happiness & Life Satisfaction

2. Mental & Physical Health

3. Meaning & Purpose

4. Character & Virtue

5. Close Social Relationships

6. Financial & Material Stability

These six domains are the “skeleton” of flourishing. They are measurable, comparable, and empirically rigorous. But a skeleton is not a person. It has no warmth; it has no history; it has no name. In our obsession with the skeleton, we have forgotten that culture is the flesh. We can confirm that “meaning” matters, but the survey data cannot tell us what that meaning is actually made of. That is where culture—and the “emic” perspective—steps in.

We are currently trying to solve a global loneliness epidemic using a Western definition of “connection” that doesn’t work for half the world’s population.

The Flesh: Divergent Ideals

When you move from the universal framework to the lived reality of a particular community, the domains are inverted. The “Standardized Happiness” we measure in a Manhattan high-rise is an entirely different species of emotion than the well-being found in a Senegalese village or an Andean mountain community.

Ubuntu: “I am Because We Are”

In the West, we often view social relationships as a “resource” we tap into to boost our personal well-being. But in the African tradition of Ubuntu, this logic is reversed. Personhood is not something you possess; it is something you achieve through others. Flourishing does not happen inside the individual; it exists in the relational space between us. To measure an African’s well-being by their individual “life satisfaction” is like trying to measure the volume of a radio by looking at a single wire.

Ikigai: Purpose as Harmony

While Western purpose is often tied to individual achievement and “making a mark,” East Asian traditions influenced by Confucianism frame purpose through relational harmony and moral cultivation. The Japanese concept of Ikigai—the reason for waking up—locates meaning at the intersection of passion, social usefulness, and practiced craft. In a place like Japan, happiness is not a goal pursued directly but the byproduct of living well within a social order. Perhaps the real issue with the lower scores in the Global Flourishing Study is not simply that people in Japan flourish less. The issue may lie in how flourishing gets measured. Many flourishing indicators assume that well-being appears as strong self-reported happiness, personal satisfaction, or explicit expressions of meaning. Japanese cultural norms often encourage restraint in such expressions. Modesty, emotional moderation, and sensitivity to group harmony shape how people respond to questions about their own happiness. A person who reports moderate satisfaction may still experience a deep sense of belonging and moral purpose.

Shalom: Wholeness through communion

In the Christian tradition, the six etic domains discussed earlier map onto a different ultimate logic. “Meaning” is not defined by whether activities feel worthwhile. A sense of meaning in Christian thology is defined by alignment with God’s purposes. “Relationships” are not valued primarily because they produce satisfaction; they are a moral obligation rooted in the command to love one’s neighbor. However, this outward expression of God’s love in the world, as one “sent” by a missionary God, is not possible outside right relationship with God. Flourishing, in this frame, is not the self’s highest achievement but a life oriented toward God — one in which even suffering can coexist with a form of thriving social science surveys may not detect.

Falāḥ: Success Beyond the Secular

The Islamic concept of Falāḥ spans both this world and the hereafter. Within this framework, “financial stability” and “health” are not ends; they are instruments of Tazkiyah—the purification of the soul. A person living in material comfort but without moral integrity is failing. Conversely, a person enduring hardship with faith and justice may be “thriving” in a way that our current psychological surveys are literally incapable of detecting. A similar logic appears within the Christian tradition. Classical Christian thought rarely treats happiness as a direct goal. The aim is fidelity to God and participation in a life ordered toward love and holiness. Happiness, however, emerges as a secondary consequence of living rightly before God and neighbor.

Sukha: Freedom from “Craving”

Western psychology is obsessed with “high-arousal joy”— positive emotions like excitement and enthusiasm. Buddhism offers a radical alternative: Sukha. This is a stable equanimity that arises from releasing craving altogether. The goal is not to “feel better” but rather to become freer. A keyword used to describe this phenomenon in Eastern religion is “detachment” — the idea of freeing one’s self from the entanglements that hold us down. It reminds me of Hebrews 12:1, where the writes urges his audience to “throw off every weight”. When we apply Western scales to these populations, we find they score lower on “excitement” but higher on “freedom.” By our metrics, they are missing out; by theirs, we are the ones who are enslaved.

Why Both Lenses Are Necessary

Placing these perspectives side by side, a significant insight emerges. The six etic domains cited earlier do not dissolve under cultural scrutiny. What changes is the moral architecture that surrounds them — the “why” that gives each domain its significance, the “how” that shapes how it is pursued, and the vision of the person and community that lies beneath it.

This is why well-being science needs to be genuinely bilingual. Researchers who rely only on etic frameworks risk producing measures that capture outcomes without understanding the moral ideals that make those outcomes meaningful to the people being measured. Researchers who work only within emic traditions risk building knowledge that cannot travel — that cannot be tested, compared, or applied across the cultural diversity of human experience.

Why does this matter? Because the science of well-being is not just an academic exercise. It informs how billions of dollars in international aid are spent, how public policy is written, and how we treat the “burnout” of a generation. If we rely only on universal frameworks, we risk producing a “homogenized” human experience—a science that knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

The scholar at that colloquium mentioned at the beginning of this article was not replacing our understanding of well-being; in fact, I think he was trying to broaden it. He was reminding us that “meaning,” “health,” and “happiness” are not fixed containers but living concepts, shaped by the cultural soil in which they grow. To truly promote human flourishing, we must become bilingual. The most honest and useful science of flourishing holds both perspectives in sustained dialogue. We must use universal structures to guide our measurement, but we must also allow cultural traditions to shed light on how we understand human nature. Neither the skeleton (etic) nor the flesh (emic) is enough on its own.

As a professor in a Doctor of Clinical Psychology (PsyD) program, I spend a significant portion of my time in the Fall semester reviewing student internship essays and conducting mock internship interviews. It is in these high-stakes moments that I encounter a recurring problem.

We are graduating “Psychological Technicians”—a generation of clinicians who are experts in the what and the how, but functionally blind to the why.

Year after year, I read “Theoretical Orientation” essays where students claim their orientation is “CBT,” “Attachment Theory,” or “Family Systems.” It is a category error that has become an epidemic in clinical training. These students are confusing the tool with the foundation. They can flawlessly execute a DBT chain analysis or map a genogram, yet they falter when asked the most fundamental question of their profession: What is your theoretical orientation?

To the student—and often the supervisor—this might sound like academic hair-splitting. But really it is not. A theory is a set of techniques; an orientation is a metaphysical stance. A theoretical orientation is the answer to the question: What is the nature of a human being?

Without a clear orientation, a therapist or psychologist is like a captain who has mastered the mechanics of the engine but has no compass to guide the ship. As these students prepare for internship interviews, they risk presenting themselves as mere “manual-readers.” They can fix a symptom, but they cannot articulate why they view a person as a biological machine, a narrative to be rewritten, or a soul seeking meaning.

To restore depth to our field, we must move beyond the “Technician” model and return to the “Healer” model; one rooted in an intellectual fluency that understands the difference between a protocol and a worldview.

The Rise of the Blind Eclectic

In an effort to be “well-rounded,” the field of psychology has defaulted to a “Blind Eclecticism.” While using “what works” sounds pragmatic, it often results in a clinical identity crisis. When a therapist lacks a foundational root, they treat theories like items on a menu, picking and choosing without realizing that some worldviews are fundamentally incompatible.

One hour, the clinician may treat the patient like a biological machine (Biologism); the next, as a collection of data points (Empiricism); and the next, as a soul searching for meaning (Humanism). Without an integrated framework, the therapeutic process becomes a series of disjointed techniques rather than a cohesive journey toward healing.

The Five Roots of Clinical Fluency

To move beyond blind eclecticism, we must return to the philosophical foundations of our work as psychologists. True clinical fluency requires a precise understanding of the distinct worldviews beneath our interventions. Tools are only as effective as the worldview that guides them.

1. The Material Root: Biologism

Prioritizes the material substrate, viewing mental health as a manifestation of neuroanatomy, genetics, and physiological homeostasis.

Primary Goal: Physiological Homeostasis.

Key Modalities: Somatic Experiencing (SE), Neurofeedback, and Psychopharmacology integration.

2. The Positivist Root: Empiricism

Anchors reality in the observable, prizing quantitative data, measurable outcomes, and standardized protocols over subjective narrative.

Primary Goal: Symptom Reduction & Precision.

Key Modalities: Manualized CBT, Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP), and Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA).

3. The Pragmatic Root: Functionalism

Treats behavior as an evolutionary tool, focusing on the ‘utility’ of a symptom and the client’s capacity for systemic and social adaptation.

• Primary Goal: Systemic Adaptation.

• Key Modalities: Solution-Focused Brief Therapy, Family Systems Therapy, and Behavioral Activation.

4. The Existential Root: Humanism

Centers the phenomenological whole, prioritizing personal agency, subjective meaning, and the inherent drive toward self-actualization.

Primary Goal: Self-Actualization.

Key Modalities: Person-Centered Counseling, Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT), and Gestalt Interventions.

5. The Phenomenological Root: Idealism

Posits the mind as the architect of reality, elevating consciousness and spiritual narratives as the primary sites of healing.

Primary Goal: Integration of Consciousness.

Key Modalities: Narrative Therapy, Jungian Depth Psychology, and Dreamwork.

Why This Is a Public Health Crisis

Why should the public care about the philosophical depth of their therapist? Because the orientation of the clinician dictates the scope of the recovery.

If a clinician is unaware of their own Empiricist bias, they may accidentally dismiss a patient’s spiritual or cultural experience as “unscientific” or “irrelevant” simply because it cannot be measured by a standardized test. If they are unaware of their Functionalist bias, they may work to return a patient to a “productive” state in society without ever questioning if the society itself is what made the patient ill.

We are seeing a national rise in mental health struggles, yet we are producing clinicians who are increasingly “de-skilled” in the depth required to treat them. We are teaching them to fix “symptoms” while they remain oblivious to the “person.”

A Call for a Return to Philosophy

We must stop treating psychology like a branch of data entry. I challenge my students—and my colleagues—to look past the manuals. We need to stop talking exclusively about “interventions” and start talking about “worldviews.”

If we do not know our own roots, we cannot help our clients grow theirs. A psychologist without an orientation is not a healer; they are a technician in a pharmacy of ideas. It is time we stop looking at the manual and start looking at the worldview that shaped the ideas behind our manual. Only then can we offer our clients a path toward a meaningful and flourishing life.

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As the first salvos of “Operation Epic Fury” illuminated the skies over Tehran, Kermanshah, and Isfahan this morning, the world watched the flickering screens of its smartphones with a familiar sickening dread. We are counting the sorties. We are tracking the ballistic trajectories toward Al Udeid and the U.S. Fifth Fleet in Bahrain. We are measuring the spike in Brent Crude as the Strait of Hormuz transforms into a theater of kinetic ruin.

But while the Pentagon and the Kremlin calculate the “hard power” costs of this escalation, they are missing the more permanent, more dangerous catastrophe unfolding beneath the surface. We are witnessing The Great Unmooring.

In my work on the psychology of radicalization, I have tracked a phenomenon I call the “Unmooring Effect” in my book The Roots of Radicalization. It is the process by which individuals and entire societies lose the “anchors”—spatial, relational, and spiritual—that tether them to a stable reality. When these anchors are severed, people drift. And in that drift, they become vulnerable to the most radical forces of our age.

Today’s escalation is not merely a war of borders; it is a global factory for mass unmooring.

The three anchors that are at risk

To understand the stakes of this war, we must understand what keeps a human being stable. We are moored by three primary tethers:

1. The Spatial Anchor. This is our connection to place, home, and geography.

2. The Relational Anchor. Our trust in the communities and international orders that protect us.

3. The Narrative Anchor. The story we tell ourselves about our future and our purpose.

By noon today, Operation Epic Fury had systematically severed all three. When a missile strikes a residential block in Tehran or a logistics hub in Kuwait, it doesn’t just destroy infrastructure; it destroys “spatial hope.” The physical world is no longer a site of safety. When the Geneva talks collapsed last week, the “relational anchor” of global diplomacy snapped.

We are now entering what I term “The Drift.”

The Unmooring Effect

When a population is unmoored, they move through three predictable, devastating stages.

First comes the Grief, or the “Protest” phase. We are seeing this now in the streets of world capitals—a primal desperate scream against the loss of the world as we knew it. But as the war drags into its second and third weeks, this will give way to Existential Disorientation, or “Despair.” This is the silence that follows the scream. It is the spiritual and psychological numbness that occurs when a person realizes their “anchors” are gone and they are floating in an unpredictable void.

The final stage is Detachment, where the unmoored individual becomes a “free radical,” no longer invested in the survival of a society that failed to keep them tethered.

The Danger Ahead

The great irony of the U.S.-Iran escalation is that while it seeks to “stabilize” the region through force, it is creating the very conditions for ultimate instability.

My research shows that a human being cannot stay unmoored for long. The vacuum of the “Drift” is too painful to endure. Driven by the need for certainty, unmoored people will reach for the nearest “Emergency Anchor.”

History teaches us that these anchors are rarely moderate. When you strip a young person in the Middle East—or a displaced worker in the West feeling the economic ripples of this war—of their home, their safety, and their future, they will “re-moor” themselves to the first thing that offers a sense of belonging: extremist ideologies, radical nationalism, or the rigid certainty of a cult.

When millions of people around the world are unmoored, then we are not winning a war (actually there is nothing to win here); we are recruiting an army for the next one.

Beyond the Fog of War

The headlines tomorrow will focus on “regime change” and “deterrence.” But the true metric of success in the 21st century cannot be measured in craters. It must be measured in anchors.

If we want to prevent a global descent into chaos, our objective must shift from kinetic dominance to Relational Restoration. We must ask: How do we re-moor a population that has lost its sense of place? How do we provide “Spatial Hope” to those whose neighborhoods have become battlefields?

We are at a crossroads. We can continue the military logic of Operation Epic Fury and watch as the world drifts into a fragmented, radicalized future. Or, we can recognize that the most powerful weapon in any arsenal is not a missile, but a stable connection to a peaceful reality.

The bombs have already fallen. The unmooring has begun. The only question that remains is “what will we offer the world to hold onto before it drifts away entirely?”