Safety “is the freedom from emotional or physical discomfort, loss, or harm. Security is being loved and cared for whether bad things happen or not.” Risk is particularly necessary in Christian life. Love for God and man means that risk will be involved. Living all our lives at home or in church, where people will be nice “is not the life that Christians are called to.” 

Richard Bradford, director of the Swiss branch of the L’Abri Fellowship, spoke at the annual L’Abri Conference on February 14 concerning the obsession with safety in the contemporary world, and especially among young people. Generation Z (born after 1995) is “the safest generation in history.” He said that research shows that “car accidents, crime, drinking related accidents, and most other things that are a source of physical danger” are less for this generation than for previous generations. Yet the current generation “experiences higher levels of anxiety and depression than any generation that we know of.”

A growing issue for this generation “is the issue of safety.” Indeed, he believes it to be an “idol.” Safetyism makes safety the supreme value in life. This is contrasted with the “Christian vision of security.” Safetyism has a “detrimental effect” on Generation Z, he believes. People feel they are oppressed by ideas they disagree with, ideas found in books, blog posts, conversation, etc. As an example, people who came in recent years to the Swiss L’Abri branch objected to books shelved there which made them feel unsafe.  

“Christianity doesn’t promise safety, but it does promise security,” i.e., that God will be with us, Bradford said, and Scripture clearly states he will cause our good to prevail in the end. But we are warned in the Bible of “hardships and trials” if we are faithful to God. He proposed that risk is “something valuable” in our lives. We should not, as many do today, regard safety as essentially a human right.

Three Untruths of Safetyism

“Anxiety and depression are on the rise” among young people, but also among adults. Experience at L’Abri has shown that this has become normalized. One reason is that young people have access to social media from an early age. They want safety, but this includes “emotional safety.” Kids today are not more “spoiled” or “lazy,” rather they are “overprotected.” In The Coddling of the American Mind, the authors Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff identify “three great untruths” that people (with especial emphasis on young people) hold today:

1. “What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker” (“the untruth of fragility”)
2. “Always trust your feelings” (“the untruth of emotional reasoning”)
3. “Life is a battle between good people and evil people” (“the untruth of us versus them”)

The shift on college campuses occurred about 2013, when demands to remove “triggering” material from course syllabi began to be heard. “People began to talk about feeling unsafe and their ability to function being interfered with” by disturbing ideas.

What’s new in the first point is that “students are fragile.” This, it might be added, is the opposite of the historic association of youth and strength. But today there is no recognition that “hardship might make somebody stronger.” There is indeed more diversity that has to be faced on college campuses. People will be confronted with ideas that do not agree with the cultures they have come from. Students ought “to come face to face with ideas that might be offensive, or even hostile.” The concept of “fragility” results in students “unable to live in world of difference.” Referring to New York University Risk Engineering Professor Nassim Taleb, Haidt and Lukianoff distinguished between fragility (easily broken), resilient (able to withstand shocks), and antifragility (made stronger or sustained by adversity, as with an immune system). Children are antifragile, Teleb maintained. They must be challenged to become strong. Haidt and Lukianoff say that parents should “prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child.”

Bradford observed that great strides have been made over the last century in making people safer, but now the idea of safety, as noted above, “has expanded beyond just physical safety to include this idea of emotional safety.” Faculty guidelines began to change around 2014 to direct professors not to say anything that might “make students feel unsafe … [the] meaning of words like ‘trauma,’ ‘bullying,’ ‘abuse,’ and ‘prejudice’ have changed, have evolved.” These words “have gradually come to apply to less severe instances, and to new but conceptually related phenomena.” This is a matter of what is called “concept creep.” “Trauma” used to refer to some type of physical trauma (such as torture) as well as what results from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Such things as divorce were not considered trauma. Emotional distress was considered a normal experience, and normal experiences were not considered trauma.

But in the early 2000s, trauma came to mean “anything experienced by an individual as physically or emotionally harmful, with lasting diverse effects on a person’s functioning and mental, physical, emotional, social, or spiritual well-being.” This, however, moves trauma “from an objective standard to a subjective one.” Anything which “feels like trauma, or bullying, or abuse,” in fact is trauma (or bullying or abuse).

Regarding the second untruth (emotional reasoning), Bradford said that “wise men throughout history” have understood that although our feelings “are always compelling, they are not always reliable.” They can, in fact, “distort reality.” He noted that one of the authors of the book, Lukianoff, experienced a very deep depression, but recovered. He spent three years in cognitive behavioral therapy, “in which people learn to question their automatic thoughts and feelings about what’s going on.” People must learn to challenge “cognitive distortions.” Personal claims must be connected to “reliable evidence.”

In this regard, an important problem has been the acceptance of a subjective criterion called “microaggression.”

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