Is youth ministry fundamentally broken?

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There’s something, at some awkward level, that we need to look in the eyes: youth work, to a large degree, just doesn’t work.

We’ve been engaging in the youth ministry experiment as we know it today since the mid-1940s, and I don’t think it’s ever fully found its groove. It’s true that youth work in the church did exist in some form before this time, but the models we favour today were largely born out of a post-war, church-wide missional landscape. That makes it still a baby.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m a youth worker. I share the same passion to see young people meet with Jesus and grow into fullness with Him as you likely do! I want them to have a community that’s designed to show them compassion and committed to give them opportunities. I believe in youth ministry. If I didn’t, then frankly I’d be unemployable. That said, I don’t always believe in what we call youth ministry.

There are lots of amazing youth ministries (plural), but I’ve often found myself troubled by the wider body language, spiritual tone, and practical longevity of youth ministry as a much larger tribe both within and independent of the church. Let’s have a look at a few of these.

Youth ministry is widely under resourced and undervalued

In the UK especially, youth work is often under-resourced financially at both the local and national levels. Strategic budgeting at denominational meetings, for instance, tends to favour new church planting innovations, and so youth work would need to swim in those particular waters to get a piece of the pie (hows that for a mixed metaphor!). Similarly, there’s often a lot more training incentives for ordinands and far less for lay leaders which includes youth and children’s’ workers. In face, youth workers are rarely even mentioned as a distinct group within lay ministry when money and training is spoken about.

Youth workers nationally, on average, still earn less than entry level teachers, even after significant time in their roles. Although jobs often advertise a salary scale ‘depending on experience and qualifications’, most youth workers don’t come with professional training, and even when they do, it’s rare for a church to pay at the higher advertised level. Usually, the higher rate of pay is what they might expect to ‘grow into’, making it a functional advancement cap.

It’s also not usual for youth worker contracts to come with additional budgeted perks either; so, no clear costs set aside in advance for training, professional development plans, coaching, conference expectations, or books. It’s also exceptionally rare for youth workers to get help with things like relocation costs.

There’s an unwritten expectation that youth workers won’t last very long—which is probably one reason that they don’t. As a whole, youth ministry isn’t understood well by the wider church, meaning people still see it as glorified babysitting with fun events and games thrown in. So longevity and long term value don’t tend to be serious parts of the hiring conversations.

All of this speaks to an attitude of low value placed on youth work.

It’s often too separate from the church and sits in too many separate boxes

Almost every model of youth work used since the 1940s has held its main projects separate from the church. If you’re interested in following the journey of how this came to be, you can read my short booklet ‘Does Youth Ministry Have a Future’.

More simply, we place ministry areas into homogenous boxes with their own contained eco-systems. There’s a youth ministry ‘box’, a children’s ministry ‘box’, maybe a student ‘box’ and then, of course, a ‘big’ or ‘main church box’. All of these, even if they interact, mostly exist as separate spaces.

Then within those boxes we have smaller boxes: 9-11s, 11-14s, 14s-18s, discipleship, evangelism, schools work, Sunday School, Alpha Courses etc.—all of these serve to continually separate our influence into smaller and smaller units – with the hope of them making it through to the end.

The average church with a functioning youth and children’s ministry can go through between six and fifteen transitions from creche to ‘main church’. That’s six to fifteen boxes they need to climb out of and climb into, and six to fifteen new cultures, friends, styles, contents, venues, and leaders they need to readapt to. And we wonder why we lose so many young people between groups?

These units then exist separately to the ‘main church’. This means, in effect, that there actually is no church because—theologically—church is made up of all these parts interacting intentionally together.

It’s often too confused by its own models

Youth ministry modelling has swung back and forth between the high-attractional and the high-relational approaches. A high-attractional approach tends to focus on larger, exciting events, with relevant games, music, languages, and branding. The idea is to fill a room, spread the net wide, and hope that some will connect more deeply. A high-relational approach would focus much more on small groups, detached work, and mentoring. This, in my opinion, has more going for it, but often leaves the youth worker in vulnerable situations if it’s not fully integrated into a much broader community—which they don’t tend to be.

Under these two approaches we have strategic models such as the funnel model which starts with easy to attend, low content projects, and moves young people into progressively deeper and smaller groups where—at some point—they’ll make a commitment to become a Christian and start being discipled. The issue, of course, is this over-commits resources and is a little bait-and-switch. Then there’s the incarnational model which has a lot of interesting (and mostly helpful) ideas on contextualisation and relationships, but often takes these too far with poorly defined boundaries. Then there’s the hub model, which is all projects meeting around, and flowing into, one large youth gathering or centre. This model, although it may have a relevant expression of youth community, has huge drop off rates, and is often at the cause of the ‘one-eared Mikey mouse’. There there are several versions of the intergenerational model—which are often more successful with mixing ages intentionally but haven’t quite cracked how to engage non-typical families, or the specific missional needs of young people.

There’s definitely some merit in all these models, and some issues too. I think, however, that youth ministry needs things from all of them, but always ends up championing just one of them to the exclusion of the benefits of others. The result is that it’s very rare to find a healthy youth ministry that doesn’t have significant strategic holes.

Put another way, it’s hard to find too many youth ministries that have sound enough strategic plans and don’t fall into the pitfalls of one or more of these models.

It can be too short-termed and small-minded

Hundreds of thousands of young people have ‘become a Christian’ at Christian festivals—but the measure of evangelistic effectiveness is not how many made a commitment on the night, but how many are pursuing hard after Jesus many years later.

When I worked in London, the local ‘churches together’ group ran a huge local festival with hundreds of young people in attendance. However, fifteen years later, I could only point to two or three young people that became a believer in those events who were still following Jesus—and in every case they had a Christian family to support them. In the short term the events looked great, but over time their effectiveness was almost non-existent.

Youth ministry doesn’t tend to identify growth pathway plans to help a child grow long-term right through into adulthood. This needs an unprecedented amount of cooperation between the ministries of a church to identify and guide the common ways in which young people enter faith, grow in community, and leave that specific church spiritually healthier at the other end. However, as youth work is often separate to other ministries and has shorter term success measures, this just doesn’t work.

This is seen more clearly in our resources. Last year I did an experiment; I bought a copy of two dozen of the most popular youth work group resources from the biggest publishers in both the UK and America, and from across a range of denominational and doctrinal persuasions. They all had two things in common:

  1. They were very short. The average time in a teaching series was six weeks. The longest lasted a year.
  2. They were very repetitive, to the point of having no maturity progression to speak of at all. When you complete one series and move onto another, the content depth remains the same—it’s recycling the same level of depth with a new topic. There isn’t even that much difference in the depth of content between ‘evangelistic’ resources and ‘discipleship’ ones.

So, you could spend seven years in youth clubs, go through (on average) twenty-eight teaching series, and never actually grow in depth or maturity because of those resources. You may grow in breadth of information, but the depth level is just recycled. The result is stunted growth, and young people who are not prepared to become members of the broader community of faith.

There’s just a whole lot less of it going on

On the surface there’s a lot of statistical decline. So, there are less youth clubs, less full-time youth workers, less entering training, and less training courses available. There’s less lunchtime clubs in schools, less detached workers, less conferences, less attending festivals, and – well – it just looks like there’s increasingly less youth work.

Let’s get into some actual figures and do some quick maths.

In 2018 the Church of England reported that its Sunday attendance at 703,000 people. Across roughly 16,043 churches and cathedrals, this makes the average attendance 44 people per church. Of this, 13% were children under the age of 16, or about 7 per church. However, as 75% of these churches reports no youth provision, it works out much like 22 young people across just a quarter of Church of England churches.

We know that that there is a significant attendance drop off for young people between the ages of 11-14, so only around 26% of those young people aged 0-16 would be older than 11.

It’s a similar story in the Methodist Church. In 2016, 7192 13-19-year-olds were attending on a Sunday morning, but 67,000 attending weekly activities. This (according to Piggot, 2017) would be across 4512 Methodist churches so up to 15 teenagers per church, but this would only be in about 6% of Methodist churches.

The Church of England and Methodist Church make up around a third of all church attendance but using similar available figures and methods for the Baptist, United Reformed, Catholic, Pentecostal, Orthodox, independent, and ‘other’ churches, we can put together a reasonable estimate of how many young people there are in churches today.

Splitting up the two common age categories into separate groups (11s-13s and 14s-18s), the average youth group size is probably 5-12 young people, and these are in only about 25% of all churches in the UK. This means 7 out of 10 churches don’t have any young people at all, and the three that do, most only have a small handful.

That ain’t a whole lot, and it’s getting smaller each year!

So, what’s your point?

Youth ministry is a beautiful thing, but we need to take it far more seriously as a Christian movement. We need to value it, resource it, integrate it, and deepen it. We need to shift our focus away from ‘room-filling’ models, and even away from purely relational models, and find a way to integrate young people and church together again much more intentionally.

If you cut a body up into smaller pieces and place each piece in a jar of formaldehyde, you don’t have a functional body. Even if you feed each separate limb and organ through tubes, and artificially flex the muscles so the separate parts all grow, it doesn’t matter. Sooner or later, that body is a dead body.

If there is something fundamentally wrong in how we approach youth ministry, then it comes from there being something fundamentally wrong in how we view church. The church is always more than simply the sum of its parts. The body is bleeding—the patient is on the table—and we’ve got to do all we can to make it whole again.

 

Photo by Sebastian Huxley on Unsplash

 

Has youth work forgotten how to innovate?

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Youth Ministry gets a lot of mileage out of the concept of “innovation”. We like to think that we do things differently; that we dodge, weave, and adapt. But do we?

When you think about it, how may truly and fundamentally different styles of Christian youth work have you seen? Clubs, events, detached, drop-ins, lock-ins… when does your list stop? And if you visit a whole lot of these across the country, how many of them feel significantly alike?

When I first left home, I discovered IKEA! A wonderland of affordable design. I decorated my crib with flat-pack Billy bookcases and Ektorp sofas. It took some real thought, and I believed that by using these tools I had come up with something truly unique. Then it transpired, however, that all my mates had done exactly the same thing. They picked different colours, and put things in different places, but when I was walking around their flats, I felt eerily like I was in my own. I thought I was being innovative, but really, I was just reconfiguring the norm.

Do youth work projects feel a little like this to you, too? To what extent do we truly innovate—by which I mean design a project ground-up and grow an expression of youth work that is deliberately and directly responsive to the specific needs of a local area. Or, to what extent do we just decorate a flat-pack and reconfigure the furniture?

I spent last week teaching youth work models at a theological college. We tracked the historic development of youth ministry styles and compared them to each other. When it comes down to it, there really are very few main approaches—and even those significantly overlap with each other. One of the fun questions I like to ask in these sessions is, ‘well, what else could we do?’ Or ‘What other model could we invent with a blank slate?’

As youth workers, we love this question—but in truth, it’s harder than we think.

We love to innovate… ish

Youth worker personality types can often be very creative and pioneering. This is why we go to conferences, read books, watch videos, and explore all new the latest ways of doing youth ministry. It’s probably one reason you read this blog. We love new project ideas, new resources, new forms of practice, strategies, and recruitment plans.

We love the new and we like to do things differently.

The problem, however, is that youth work sits in a very particular context and that context is inhabited by some strangely firm and surprisingly subliminal ideas. There are quite a fair few entrenched ideologies and practices that are almost always present in youth ministry projects, no matter how innovative it seems on the surface. This means that with these ideas and practices intact, there is, in reality, very little scope to truly be different.

If we want to challenge how youth ministry is done, therefore, and seek to be truly innovative—so a ministry that is properly adaptive to the specific cultural needs of the local area its serving—then we need to dig under these hidden layers and ask if they are as essential as we’ve allowed them to be.

So, what are they? Let’s do a thought experiment:

If I were to say to a group of youth workers, ‘okay, design a new youth work project. Be innovative, throw the book away, do everything from scratch, it’s all on the table…’ I wonder what they’d come up with. What would you?

Very quickly, however, I imagine they would start talking about where it would meet. What they would call it and what the logo would look like. Which elements it would use from the pool of ‘games, music, crafts, teaching, etc.’. How it would be advertised and to which types of youth culture would it target. What night of the week would it meet and which leaders would they need?

It’s hard to come up with a new project that doesn’t begin with these questions as de facto elements to re-order. However, names, branding, logos, teaching, attraction, coming-in, relevancy, youth culture, venues, games, leaders, etc. are all bricks that are pre-packaged and pre-understood. These are many of the baseline assumptions—the furniture that we’re just reordering.

You might be thinking, ‘no Tim, that’s just the bits and pieces that they’ve got to consider. Where it’s going to meet isn’t an assumption, it’s a practically.’ But that’s just not true. Maybe your youth ministry project isn’t actually a meeting. Maybe the ‘where’ is a red herring that’s shutting down a whole world of other ideas. Maybe your youth ministry project doesn’t need a name. Maybe without one, you would explore a whole range of other approaches to belonging and community. True innovation comes when even the tools and materials are suspended.

True innovation

To be truly innovative, you don’t begin with just re-ordering common building materials. You might evaluate these bricks, and you would probably make new ones, but you don’t just vary the place and size of what you already have available.

It’s not all that weird to challenge these basic assumptions either. Let’s go back to the idea of a youth group needing a name. Have you ever seen a youth project without a catchy (or at least cringy) name? But do they need one?

Think about it this way, almost everywhere else young people gather has a purely functional name. Football clubs, for instance, are named after the street or town they’re in. Classrooms are named after the subject they teach. Cadets and Scouts are named after areas too. Forms are usually some kind of code involving the age bracket and school year. Names are not necessarily normal for youth gatherings.

What is normal to have catchy names, however, are products—or places where there are customers like nightclubs and festivals. The assumption that every youth project needs a brand name comes from a marketing world where you’re trying to sell something and create clients. And we wonder why youth work is so consumeristic? So maybe your project doesn’t need to be named or branded after all? What other ideas could you explore without one.

I’m not saying don’t name your project something brandable—but I am saying don’t assume that you need one from the beginning. This is an example of the type of subliminal assumptions that we need to challenge if we’re going to be truly innovative.

Starting with a blank slate means a blank slate.

Where do these assumptions come from?

What I’m saying is that there is so much built into the fabric of what youth ministry is that if we always begin with those assumptions, then by the time we get to innovation, there’s not a whole lot that we can vary.

Even our age ranges invariably follow traditional transition patterns. Often all we end up truly varying is the surface level of the project itself, not the very heartbeat or foundations. In reality, this means that we inevitably end up serving some very particular needs of a certain stereotype of young person, rather than truly creating something for the specific needs of our area.

Variations on a theme, after all, is not truly innovation. We need to learn to innovate again!

I’ve been a youth worker for over 15 years, and I can generously think of maybe 12 or 15 styles of youth work or project models and—even with different names, different leaders, different orders of elements, different venues, mildly different age brackets, and a huge spectrum of difference in quality—I’ve seen very few truly innovative youth work approaches.

I think youth work as we know it today has learned these patterns from the late 1940s attractional parachurch models, and the mid-1990s incarnational and festival resurgence models. That’s not a lot of history, but it basically covers everything we’ve ever seen or read in youth work. That doesn’t mean, however, that it’s the only way.

We need to be courageous in our thinking, shake off these entrenched assumptions, and truly look at the very basics. Innovation begins with the roots, not the fruit—and certainly not with the packaging the fruit comes in.

Case study

Early last year my wife and I started an intentional online community class for young, introverted, and mostly home-schooled girls who were all trying to get fantasy novels published.

We connected them with creative writing coaching and discipled them through the medium of imaginative writing activities using the fantasy genre. We also borrowed from a postgraduate research community writing technique called ‘shut up and write.’ We helped them think about publication submissions, set up an online critique mechanism, and we connected them with a young author who has just been through publication. This project has several expressions including a gathered writing time, individual feedback, and coffee-shop days out. We’re also starting to connect with local bookshops about late-night writing sessions.

This writing project saw a local need. It identified and specified it clearly and then responded to it directly. It used locally available resources and developed a specific intentional community which then galvanised around a common need. It has since overspilled its original format and organically grown into something so much more. This is what I mean by innovation.

Although this project began with a name, we haven’t used it for almost a year now because it just doesn’t need it. We don’t advertise it either. It has no logo and no branding. It gains its identity (and an incredibly deep sense of community) from the project itself.

To be truly innovative, we need to go back to basics. This is why I harp on about youth work history, base-line theology, and supra-cultural traits. It’s why I poke us about what we really mean by relevancy, and why I think youth workers need to think more about the wider church and community.

I often hear pitches for large youth events that groups want to run in my area. They always claim to be innovative, but there’s very little to tell them apart and even less to demonstrate that they know anything about the particular young people in my area. In fact, other than some of the styles of music and technology, there’s little to tell them apart from the events I went to as a teenager in the 90s. Arguably, there’s very little fundamentally different to the youth rallies of the 1950s either.

We don’t want to be different for the sake of being different, but we do want to innovatively connect with the specific needs of local young people—and if we’re doing it right, then that’s always going to look different.

Let’s be truly innovative.

Starting with the youth worker

One of the key themes of my book Rebooted is we should stop referring to ourselves as ‘youth pastors.’ A ‘youth pastor’ is one of these subliminal assumptions that we bring to our youth ministry models in the same way that we want names and venues. It comes with the idea that we are somehow in a pastorate, and that these young people are under our spiritual care and guidance in the same way a church pastor is over church people. In my opinion, that’s very poor theology.

The pastor is the pastor of the church—and that means the people in it, including the young people, and us, are under their care. We’re not the pastor of a mini-separate church with a hyper-homogenous congregation. Some of you might recognise this as the ‘one-eared mickey mouse problem.’ We identified that back in the 1980s and yet we’re still living with it today.

What if our youth ministries, and particularly our full-time youth workers, orbited the idea of enabling a wider body of people to do the youth work, being facilitators rather than the direct deliverers of it? That, I think, would be massively innovative!

I think that there’s far too much pretend innovation that happens in the youth work world. Repackaged, flat-packed, and dragged and dropped into widely different locations with incredibly different needs without a second thought.

It’s about time we dug under the surface and found out how to truly develop the best and most useful expressions of what it means to bring God’s love to young people today.

If we’re going to be innovative—let’s actually be innovative.

So, how do you do it?

1. Start by knowing your area. Look, watch, read, talk, ask questions of everybody! Sit down with teachers, families, the police, politicians, local charities, health care groups – everyone. Do you know your local Mind workers? How about Social Services or foster groups? Know your area.

Discover what the local needs are and be able to articulate them specifically. I want every youth worker to talk in depth, intelligently, about the unique needs of young people in their location.

2. Know your resources. Find out the gifts, skills, and passions of those you connect with. Look at other local groups and what they’re doing well. Have an encyclopaedic knowledge of your town or city and what is offered there uniquely. I’m not kidding. A missionally-minded youth worker should know as much about the young people in their area as an MP should.

Discover the local flavours and cultures. Where are the bus stops, gather points, popular corner shops, most travelled after-school walks home? Know as much as you can about your area.

Start to overlap specific needs (1) with specific resources (2), and then ask how you can facilitate that relationship and propagate a community in that intersection as church. This is not the whole story—but it’s a great start!

Let’s be innovators.

 

Photo by Octavian Rosca on Unsplash

Do face mask requirements violate our personal freedoms?

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Hello, my name is Tim and I am mask exempt.

I have reasonably bad asthma, so—especially when my face gets warm—poor air circulation can trigger an attack. Now very rarely have I felt the need to take off my mask in public and I prefer wearing it for several reasons. I like the security it gives to those around me, for instance, as many of those that I work with are vulnerable people.

I know that there are many good reasons to not wear a mask. Medical reasons being at the top of that list. This, therefore, is not a wide-angle lens looking at all possible reasons that someone might have for not wearing a mask, and whether they should or shouldn’t. This instead will be a narrow lens looking at one particular version of an argument that’s often heard, especially on social media, for not wearing a mask.

That reason is “freedom.”

Or, more specifically, some version of “being required to wear a mask in a public place is an encroachment upon my personal civil freedoms”, or “wearing a mask somehow violates my rights as a citizen of a particular state or country, or generally as a human being.”

Now, as a person with a keen interest in ethics, I find this argument really fascinating. It’s made even more so when you look closely at the socio-ethnic makeup of the people asserting this view the loudest. However, this not that post either!

Sticking with the ethics, realistically I believe this “freedom” argument is in reality, quite a low maturity version of a well-known ethical debate surrounding the ideas of freedom, determinism, and autonomy.

The value of freedom

Now most of us, at least in the West, will respond positively to the question: Are you free? Freedom is a culturally significant high value that we have.

Freedom from slavery, for instance. Freedom from tyranny, freedom from poverty, freedom from financial dependence, freedom to pursue our best life, freedom of the press, freedom of diversity, and freedom of belief. There are many freedoms that we passionately pursue and aggressively defend.

Freedom is essential to the fabric of our civic and civil codes. This is especially true in Britain, some larger European countries, and in America, where a lot of these arguments against masks are being amplified. Because freedom is so emotively woven into the fabrics of who we are, it’s quite difficult to challenge arguments based upon it.

However, if you were to ask many of those same people, just how free are you, and what things can have a determinant influence on your freedoms, although we get a wide spectrum of answers, rarely will someone say “nothing.” Most people will agree that many things will have an influence on our personal freedoms, and that none of us have gained totally autonomous freedom.

Are we really free?

My personal freedom does not give me liberty to take off and fly because I’m determined by the law of gravity. My freedom to sleep with multiple partners is determined by the covenant of marriage. My freedom to not eat caviar for breakfast is determined by my bank balance. My freedom to not eat Shredded Wheat for breakfast is determined by my taste buds.

Now some of those restrictions on my freedom are more powerfully determined than others. I can choose to go into debt to buy caviar for breakfast, or to eat Shredded Wheat even though I might vomit it up. I could even choose to have extramarital affairs, even though it would devastate my life and family. But those influences are still a strong determining factor in whether I will make certain choices.

Something like the law of gravity, however, is a much harder thing to choose against. Even though I could choose to get on a plane, I wouldn’t truly be flying. Instead, I would be propelled into and through the air by a machine. I could jump off a cliff, but again I wouldn’t technically be flying I would be falling. I could use a hang glider, but I would be floating or drifting or gliding upon thermal currents. None of this would allow me to fly in the same way a bird—or Superman—would. Other laws such as entropy, thermodynamics, relativity, and time also have high (if not unavoidable) determinate affects on what I can and can’t do.

All this is by way of saying that no human is autonomously free. I am simply not free to do anything that I would like at any time, regardless of influences or consequences. That freedom simply does not exist.

Of course, within civil society, our freedoms are limited even further than natural laws by both legal codes and by common values. I’m “free” to murder someone, for instance, but I’m not really free to murder someone because if I did so, then freedoms would be forcefully taken away from me to ensure that I wouldn’t do it again. I’m free to drive 150 miles an hour on the motorway. But again, I’m not really free to do that because I’d be breaking a law put in place to save lives. Public endangerment is one of the main reasons we have laws that limit freedoms, as well as civil moral consensuses. All this determines the choices we make on how we live.

How does this apply to masks?

So, with a freedom argument for not wearing a mask, I wonder where the determinant lines are and how consistent an opinion like this can truly be.

I understand that mask wearing (at least outside of many large Asian cities) is a recent phenomenon. It’s also uncomfortable, and there is conflicting research on just how beneficial it is. Further, freedom to wear a mask or not is also wrapped up in a much larger set of questions about life during a pandemic and what other freedoms have been restricted. It’s part of a bigger thing.

But for the sake of my thought experiment here, if a person simply says ‘I refuse to wear a mask because being required to do so violates my civil rights or personal freedoms’, then there are questions we need to ask of that person:

We need to ask, to begin with, questions about public endangerment or civil responsibility, and at what point their feelings of freedom should overrule another’s feelings of security or even another’s health and safety.

We also need to ask questions about consistency. If, for instance, you were picking up your children from school, and another man was waiting by the school gates not wearing any clothes, would asking him to cover his bits up violate his personal freedoms? Would his rights have been violated when the police take him away in their car?

Is it a violation of your personal freedoms when the law requires you to wear a seatbelt? How about uniform codes in the army? What about on duty members of law enforcement being identifiable with ID? What about uniform codes in schools? At what level, therefore, does “wearing a mask is an encroachment on my personal freedoms” become different from any of these things?

Freedom plus…

Usually, the argument needs something else like, ‘it’s an encroachment on my freedom, and I don’t believe it serves any greater good.’ At that point, however, it’s not a freedom argument, but a medical effectiveness argument. Now I’m not a medical expert, so I’m going to follow the medical advice that I’m given.

You instead might add something else to it like, ‘it’s encroaching on my personal freedoms, and it makes criminals harder to identify.’ That’s not a freedom issue either, it’s a law enforcement issue.

Or it could be, ‘it’s an encroachment on my personal freedoms, and it makes it harder for me to breathe.’ Again, that’s a medical issue which needs to be discussed with a doctor.

So simply saying, ‘wearing the mask violates my personal freedoms or encroaches upon my human rights’ feels to me like an incomplete, inconsistent, and frankly ill-considered argument based on a real misunderstanding of how freedom, determinism, and autonomy work both in a human being and in modern society.

I think it’s an interesting question to explore and I believe that there certainly are legitimate reasons not to wear a mask, but I’m not yet convinced that ‘freedom’ on its own is a mature enough argument to be acceptable. At least not in the forms I’ve seen presented.

I’m open to have my mind changed, but right now I’m wearing a mask, and—without medical exemption—I’d prefer you did too.

All the best.

 

Photo by Volodymyr Hryshchenko on Unsplash