The West has replaced religion with social media. We are all worse for it

They are probably right.

But the challenge facing governments is far greater than regulating content or limiting screen time. The real issue is not technological. It is cultural and psychological. Social media is no longer merely something we use. It is increasingly how we experience the world.

The platforms insist they exist to build communities. In some cases they do. But the idea that social media creates genuine social cohesion may prove to be one of the most successful marketing exercises of modern times. Its power cannot be denied. The more important question is not what social media does to us, but what it has replaced.

For centuries, churches, civic institutions, and local communities shaped how people behaved, what they believed, and how they understood their obligations to others. Even those who rarely attended church lived within a broadly Christian culture that emphasised duty, responsibility, and belonging. That influence has weakened dramatically over the past half century.

Today, regular church attendance in Britain has fallen to a small minority, while almost 90 per cent of internet users now use social media. The average person spends more than two hours a day on social platforms, with younger users spending considerably longer.

The comparison with religion is therefore no longer entirely metaphorical. Social media increasingly performs many of the functions once carried out by churches and civic institutions. It creates tribes, defines acceptable behaviour, rewards conformity, and punishes heresy. It shapes language, values, and emotional reactions in real time. It offers belonging, status, and identity.

Yet unlike those institutions, it offers no shared moral framework beyond engagement itself. Its purpose is not to make us better citizens, neighbours, or family members. Its purpose is to keep us watching.

And its influence is deeply psychological. Most of us reach for our phones within minutes of waking and check them compulsively throughout the day. Many experience genuine anxiety when separated from their devices. For younger generations who have never known life without smartphones, digital immersion is not a pastime. It is a permanent condition.

Moments previous generations spent reflecting, reading, talking, or simply being alone with their thoughts are now filled by the reflex of reaching for a screen. Notifications, likes, and endless scrolling create constant cycles of anticipation, validation, and emotional reaction.

The result is a society that is simultaneously more connected and more psychologically dependent. Never before has so much of the population spent so many hours each day interacting with systems designed primarily to capture and retain attention.

The consequences are increasingly visible. Despite unprecedented digital connectivity, loneliness, anxiety, and distrust continue to rise. Public debate has become more polarised and emotional because there is diminishing agreement not simply about politics, but about truth itself. Trust in governments, media, churches, and democratic institutions has steadily declined. The result is a society that often feels fragmented, anxious, and uncertain of itself.

This matters far beyond culture. For most of the post-war period, the West believed liberal democracy represented not only the strongest political system but the future itself. Beneath that success sat something deeper: strong institutions and a shared sense of identity, obligation, and purpose. Those foundations are weakening.

At the same time, many of the West’s competitors increasingly understand the importance of collective identity better than we do. Russia has rebuilt its relationship with the Orthodox Church as part of a wider narrative of national continuity. Political Islam continues to provide religious collectivism and social cohesion. China promotes national purpose above individual autonomy.

The modern West, by contrast, increasingly offers consumerism, personal branding, and digital distraction. The greatest threat to the West may therefore not come from China, Russia, or Iran. It may come from within.

Because societies survive not simply because they are wealthy or militarily strong, but because enough people trust one another, believe in something larger than themselves, and feel bound together by a common story.

Future historians may conclude that the defining crisis of the early twenty-first century was not geopolitical at all. It was the moment Western society stopped believing in institutions that asked something of us and started believing in algorithms that merely reflected us back to ourselves.

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Guy Hands is the Founder of private equity firm Terra Firma.

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