Jonathan Haidt on the Coddling of the American Mind

If their intent is to foster anger and conflict, college administrators are doing an excellent job. But the rise of safe spaces hasn’t proven so safe for students, speakers, and professors who question the progressive orthodoxy of today’s academy. In many university settings today, students are encouraged to assume the worst of others, to assume they and their friends are fighting evil on behalf of good, and to assume they cannot withstand criticism or challenge from ideas they don’t like. That’s a recipe for endless quarrels.

But it’s not just anger and conflict we see in these settings. It’s also rising rates of anxiety and depression among students. And no wonder. In a new book, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure, Jonathan Haidt and co-author Greg Lukianoff of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Higher Education argue that campus leaders have promoted three great untruths:

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The Untruth of Fragility: What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker.
The Untruth of Emotional Reasoning: Always trust your feelings.
The Untruth of Us Versus Them: Life is a battle between good people and evil people.

Haidt, a previous guest on The Gospel Coalition Podcast for his superb book The Righteous Mind, argues that we’re facing some longstanding problems with a new twist. He and Lukianoff write, “What is new today is the premise that students are fragile. Even those who are not fragile themselves often believe that others are in danger and therefore need protection.”

Haidt is the Thomas Cooley professor of ethical leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business. He’s also the author of The Happiness Hypothesis, which I recommend. To learn more about Haidt’s work, check out ‘An Unlikely Ally’: What a Secular Atheist Is Teaching Christian Leaders, a profile by TGC senior writer Sarah Eekhoff Zylstra.

Is there enough evidence for us to believe the Gospels?

In an age of faith deconstruction and skepticism about the Bible’s authority, it’s common to hear claims that the Gospels are unreliable propaganda. And if the Gospels are shown to be historically unreliable, the whole foundation of Christianity begins to crumble.

But the Gospels are historically reliable. And the evidence for this is vast.

To learn about the evidence for the historical reliability of the four Gospels, click below to access a FREE eBook of Can We Trust the Gospels? written by New Testament scholar Peter J. Williams.

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Collin Hansen serves as vice president for content and editor in chief of The Gospel Coalition, as well as executive director of The Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics. He hosts the Gospelbound podcast and has written and contributed to many books, most recently Timothy Keller: His Spiritual and Intellectual Formation and Rediscover Church: Why the Body of Christ Is Essential. He has published with the New York Times and the Washington Post and offered commentary for CNN, Fox News, NPR, BBC, ABC News, and PBS NewsHour. He edited Our Secular Age: Ten Years of Reading and Applying Charles Taylor and The New City Catechism Devotional, among other books. He is an adjunct professor at Beeson Divinity School, where he also co-chairs the advisory board.