Dancing Bear

I was a junior in high school, backing my dad’s old truck into my assigned parking spot when… bump. I’d hit the car behind me. Out stepped Andy, toe-headed and probably shouldering a bag full of dusty baseball gear, who looked from me to the ding in his bumper and then back to me. “Don’t sweat it, dude.” One of those small acts of kindness that sticks with me to this day. A few hours later, Andy got back in that car, drove home, and took his own life.

Like so many high schools in America, ours was plagued by annual tragedy, almost always involving drugs or guns. A terrible drunk-driving incident my freshman year, followed by an opioid overdose. A friend in advanced math, truly one of the funniest people in my sophomore class, skipped school to rob a gas station and murdered the teller in the process. About a year after Andy’s funeral, I was sitting in an IHOP, face full of waffles and in the middle of a heated debate with fellow philosophy-club members about whether people are inherently evil, when our phones started buzzing; an ROTC student had fatally shot his girlfriend before turning the gun on himself. It was technically (but barely) off campus, so it only got local air-time.

My old high school sits on what used to be the northern edge of Phoenix, though the suburbs have continued their slow but steady march into the desert since then. Sprawling tract homes, many if not most with their own private swimming pools replacing miles of desert washes, fanning out through rocky flesh and mountain bone, more stingray than serpent. I read that Phoenix used to be totally underwater, and when I’d wander into the nearest patch of desert and squint my eyes, I could see it. In middle school we’d have airsoft wars in chiasmic terrain that felt like the bottom of the ocean, more worried about stepping on dirty needles than sea urchins or rattlesnakes. Which is all to say, the desert in its unblemished state is not a hospitable environment. The life that really thrives is pointed and poisonous. I wonder if that’s why so many spiritual pilgrims, from John the Baptist to Luke Skywalker, seem to have come of age in the desert: it strips us of niceties and forces us to look at our claws, to learn how to use them as tools. Sometimes we hurt ourselves in the process.

On their own, these adolescent fatalities, though tragic, aren’t particularly surprising. (Excuse me while I put on my psychiatrist hat.) There’s a well established bimodal distribution of suicide across the lifespan in America, with peak incidence during adolescence and then again in late age. So high schoolers everywhere, whether they live in the suburbs or the inner city, remain at a higher risk. What I’ve found more disturbing since finishing high school is the slow but steady trickle of suicides I’ve heard about every year since then. Of those that come to mind, virtually all involve a young man, usually an acquaintance or distant friend, ending his life or else losing it to addiction.

Epidemiologically, many of these later tragedies would qualify as “deaths of despair”: mortality resulting from suicide, drug overdose, and alcohol-related liver disease, especially among working-class adults with less education. My own story is in part a testament to the incredible opportunities that success in school can afford. But what about the students whose skills don’t lend themselves to the secular launching pad that is school, school, and more school?

At the risk of oversimplifying, one of the most promising solutions outside of the secular is, of course, the religious. I’m told by some older friends in ministry that Phoenix in the 1980s was viewed as fertile ground for church-planting. Protestant pastors, especially Baptists, poured in from the south and midwest, eager to cultivate the next oasis in the desert. My mom’s faith was planted around the time I was born and had been watered by the “Jesus movement” splashing in from California. We wore flip-flops to church and heard surfer-infused rock as part of worship services. I loved it.

In high school, I became more involved with a much larger church whose impressive model of ministry centered on reaching a fictional but prototypical young man, “Mike.” Like so many suburban men, Mike had a young family, a decent job, and a penchant for Cardinals football—but something deeper was missing. The church positioned itself to be that something. Mike’s quiet despair informed virtually every aspect of the church’s ministry, from the colors of the bulletin to the architecture of the campus to the sound of the music. This church charged itself with reaching lost young men like Mike. By the time I left for college, more than 20,000 people were attending Sunday services.

While a masculine aesthetic probably made the church more palatable for suburban Mike, it was the church’s emphasis on responsibility for the community he was stepping into that probably kept him coming back. The matte black bulletin promised Mike a free meal at the church’s excellent restaurant, where he’d be encouraged to sign up for a newcomer class. That class, which was offered multiple times a week to better accommodate Mike’s work schedule, provided a brief theological introduction to the church as well as an invitation to get more involved, right from the start. Within a few years, Mike might be coaching one of the church’s tackle-football teams for boys, leading small groups for young men getting ready for college, or even serving a free meal to the latest newcomer.

This church has undeniably made an enormous positive impact on thousands of Arizonans, so I hope I’m not portraying it as some dystopian spiritual factory. What I mean to convey is that this church, and others like it, were able to reach and arguably save those who fell through the cracks of our more secular systems of meaning-making. The church helped buttress Mike against despair by emphasizing personal responsibility for one’s family and community, thereby imbuing his life with a more palpable purpose in the process. The church is still growing to this day, bringing in roughly 50,000 people weekly by the estimates I’m seeing online.

But does this model of suburban religion work for everyone?

Over 10,000 Arizonans, predominantly male, overdosed between 2019 and 2023, with the vast majority involving opioids. Despite shared efforts from our medical, educational, and religious institutions alike, deaths of despair nationally have continued to rise year after year for over two decades, again with men leading the charge. And while the prototype of “Mike” might resonate with a large number of young men in Arizona, it’s a mold that arguably still excludes more than it includes. What about all the guys who don’t like the Cardinals?

What I can say from my own testimony—as one nurtured and perhaps even saved by my local church, and then buoyed to the surreal opportunities afforded through higher education—is that, at their best, the combined efforts of both secular and religious solutions to our suburban despair are still missing too many young men. Taken together, their ideal of “the good life” isn’t much further along than Mike’s story anyway: an active member of his community with a healthy marriage and good kids and, more importantly, an existential grit to carry him through the difficult times. Mike’s life can be hard, but it’s sufficiently meaningful to keep him from ending it.

I don’t think you need to be a Christian, or religious for that matter, to attain “the good life” that lies at the heart of our country’s suburban ideal. I’m also not sure that the American dream, or at least the version of it I’ve encountered in the suburbs, has much of anything to do with the teachings of Jesus. Plenty of cultures have figured out how to make strong families without Jesus, even if they didn’t have Teslas and air-conditioning to boot.

Which leads me to my closing thought: are deaths of despair even a good metric for the tractability of our despair? I hope we flatten the curve soon, but I don’t think doing so will indicate that we’ve conquered some timeless existential contender. Despair will still be with us, whether we feel it or not. Sure, achieving the suburban ideal might keep Mike from staring too keenly into the abyss—but what if that’s the real work he’s here to do? Put another way, what would it profit a man if he gained the whole world but lost his soul? Maybe despair has more to teach us, in which case “the good life”, and the whole pursuit of happiness, could actually get in the way. As one of my small group leaders at that church once put it: a good thing can be a bad thing when it keeps you from the best thing. Or as I like to put it: keep on dancing.