Why reducing the voting age is a mistake

Adolescence should be a safe space to be a bit daft

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

A band and audience are back lit against a stage.

Let it out.

Kylie Paz on Unsplash

The haunting book of Ecclesiastes carries these memorable words:

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:

a time to be born and a time to die,

a time to weep, and a time to laugh

a time to keep silence, and a time to speak

They came to mind recently when reading of the UK government’s plan to reduce the minimum voting age to 16. Now I understand why this government might want to do this. Lowering the voting age has proved popular in other places such as Scotland. Some well brought up 16-year-olds are mature beyond their years, show an interest in politics, and are smart, articulate people. And, of course, younger people tend to be more inclined to vote for left-leaning parties like Labour. It makes electoral sense.

But does it make generational sense?

Adolescence is a time when we try out being grown-up for a while. Mid-teenagers are no longer children, but they are not yet fully adult. They are in the process of spreading their wings, most of them still at school, living at home under their parents’ roofs, not yet fully responsible for their own time, income, life choices and so on. They can’t legally buy alcohol, fireworks or drive a car. Yet they can buy a pet or a lottery ticket. It’s a kind of middling time, not one thing nor the other.

And rightly so. Adolescence is a time for a certain controlled irresponsibility. We all look back with embarrassment on things we did in our teenage years. A few years ago, I watched a cricketer called Ollie Robinson make his debut for England at Lords. The best day of his life turned into the worst when some journalist desperate for a story dug up some semi-racist tweets he had posted several years before as a teenager. Some say he has never recovered, as he struggled with the media attention into his life, and has not played international cricket for over two years. We all said stupid things when we were 16 and that should be expected and forgiven as what they were – immature posturing, attempts to work out who we are in the big world, testing the water of the adult world before we dive in. Adolescence should be a safe space to be a bit daft, to get some things wrong and some things right. Hopefully we learn from our mistakes and our successes and grow up a bit through them.

The attempt to make 16-years olds politically responsible seems to encroach upon that safe space. It risks skewing an important stage of growing up. And this seems to be a modern trend.

Teenage years are a vital period enabling us to grow into mature adults, learning to become responsible over time.

In the past, 21 was the age when people legally became adults, being given the ‘key to the door’, trusted to come in and out of the house independently of parents. Yet that has shifted within living memory. The legal age of adulthood was reduced to 18 in 1969.

Jonathan Haidt recently complained that we are seeing “the complete rewiring of childhood.” The childhood of mammals, he claimed, involves rough and tumble play, chasing games, activities that develop adult skills. In recent times, he says, we have put into the pockets of children and young teenagers, a video arcade, a porn theatre, a gambling casino, and access to every TV station. The result of indiscriminate access to smartphones has been the loss of what we recognise as childhood and its replacement by gazing at screens all day long.

This shift to the voting age is also part of the drift to politicise everything. Everything becomes political, from your artistic tastes, to gender differences, to the food you eat, to family relationships. If politics is everything then surely everyone affected by it must vote? Yet politics has its limits. Politicians can only do so much. They can try to fix the economy, close loopholes that let harmful behaviour flourish, organise life a little better for most of us. They cannot fix the human heart, get us to love our neighbours or teach us gratitude, humility, faith, or what to worship – the most important choice of our lives.

Not everything is political, but everything is spiritual. Everything moulds us in some way, shaping us into the people we become over time, like plasticene in the hands of a child. Teenage years are a vital period enabling us to grow into mature adults, learning to become responsible over time, being given leeway to develop our moral senses and to work out our opinions as we encounter the wider world.

There is indeed a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to choose, and a time to play; a time to be an adult and a time to be child. Perhaps we should respect the times and seasons of life a little better, letting teenagers be teenagers and not expecting them to become adult too quickly. Most will hopefully have many years to vote if they live long healthy lives. The distinctions of time and the delicate, slow process of maturity need to be respected. We erode them at our peril.

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Community

Mental Health

Romance

12 February 2025

4 min read

Forget rapturous romance, the relationally malnourished need something else

Look beyond the commercialised celebration of Valentine’s Day.

John Wyatt

John Wyatt is the author of Transforming Friendship. He also writes on ethical, philosophical and theological challenges caused by advances in medical science and technology.

A hand held out is gentle grasped by a turning person.

This article was first published in February 2024

It’s Valentine’s Day yet again – the annual commercialised binge of flowers, chocolates, tacky pink cards and heart-shaped balloons. This year US consumers alone will spend an estimated $26bn expressing their yearnings for someone or something. A special person that will make their dreams come true, a magic chemistry that will bring meaning and fulfillment, or maybe just plain old-fashioned lust. Valentine’s Day provides an annual and unavoidable restatement of the message that the royal route to personal fulfillment and relational intimacy is mind-blowing sex and romantic endorphins.

A time traveller from a previous era would look at these excesses with astonishment. How was it that sexual ecstasy and came to be seen as the route to human fulfilment, meaning and intimacy? For most of our history, sexual attraction and coupling has been regarded as a relatively minor part of life. Important for reproduction and continuation of the species, no doubt, but hardly the meaning of existence.

There is a pervasive sense of relational deficit, a longing for genuine intimacy that remains unsatisfied.

Dr Freud, obsessed with the hydraulic metaphors of the age, invents the idea of libido, a powerful but unruly fluid which provides the ultimate motive force for the personality. Sexual repression is essential to civilization but also the source of neurosis and other discontents. For decades Freudian psychology remains a minority interest for psychotherapists and creative artists but with the rise of the sexual liberation movement in the 1960s, the invention of the contraceptive pill and the commercial exploitation of sex for marketing, it has become the unquestionable orthodoxy of the age. The conviction formed that sex in all its forms is good for psychological health, that control and frustration of sexual drives leads inexorably to mental illness. That celibacy is a deeply unrealistic and potentially dangerous state, that the impulse for sexual pleasure lies behind much if not all human motivation, that our very identity is defined by our sexual drives and interests – these seem to be such obvious and scientifically authoritative ideas as to be self-evident and unchallengeable. They are part of the agreed presuppositions of twenty-first century culture, and they are all traceable to Freud. Valentine’s day is the ultimate celebration of libido in all its multifarious forms.

But for many of us, February 14th is a painful reminder of what we don’t have. Whether unattached but aching to be romantically involved, or trapped in a dysfunctional relationship, the glossy merchandise packing out the supermarket aisles only seems to twist the knife. Surveys have indicated that half of UK adults report feeling lonely, and seven percent of the population experience ‘chronic loneliness’. The popularity of transactional dating apps, and the surprising rise of simulated AI partners, reflect a desperate longing for something, a relationship that will satisfy our deepest yearnings, bring purpose and fulfillment. There is a pervasive sense of relational deficit, a longing for genuine intimacy that remains unsatisfied.

It is friendship with its genuine concern and caring for the other that must absorb our pain and meet our needs, just as we, in turn, meet the needs of others.

How can we recover and celebrate an older, deeper and more lasting form of intimacy between human beings? To the writers, sages and philosophers of the past, friendship - covenantal, committed, intimate, self-disclosing - was the highest form of human love. To Cicero, friendship was the most joyful gift of life and those who deprive life of friendship ‘seem to take the sun out of the universe’. To JC Ryle ‘Friendship halves our troubles and doubles our joys.’

Our culture’s tendency to read a sexual dimension into all close adult relationships, implies that we have forgotten that non-sexual and yet powerfully intimate, joyful and committed unions can exist between two people. Healthy covenantal friendship, in which our deepest fears, vulnerabilities and longings can be accepted, seen, known, and loved by the other, is inexpressibly beautiful and life-affirming, a form of intimacy which is open to all, unlike marriage or romance. Friendship is the love that our relationally malnourished, lonely society cries out for. Where so many in our society lack biological family or marital ties, it is friendship with its genuine concern and caring for the other that must absorb our pain and meet our needs, just as we, in turn, meet the needs of others.

Romantic love and sexual attraction have their place in our lives, but they have become twisted out of proportion and made into ultimate goals. Sex was never designed to bear the weight of every human need and desire. In a strange and poignant quirk of the calendar, this year Valentine’s Day coincides with Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent, a reminder of mortality and death -ashes to ashes - but also the first day of the great Lenten journey which leads to Easter sacrifice and resurrection. It’s a reminder that ultimate meaning for human beings made out of dust may be found not in libidinous excess but in love and hope that affirm and transcend our mortality.