Welcome to 10 minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life in the time it takes to get to work.

I'm Patrick Miller.

When I was in second or third grade, an incredibly popular movie starring Alicia Silverstone came out. It was called Clueless. Now, don't go watch it because it's not a good movie, but the movie told the story of wealthy teenagers living in Southern California and it managed to accurately capture the speech patterns and speech inflections of affluent people in that area at that time.

For example, they included the word like as a meaningless interjection in almost every sentence.

I like can't believe she wore that. It also caught the way that people in that region lifted up their voice at the end of sentences. It's what we now call up speak. But the truest testimony to Clueless's success was that at the time those verbal ticks, the like, the up speak, all of that stuff, they were seen as weird. They were even seen as unintelligent. But fast forward three decades and using up speak and like is totally ordinary now.

Somehow their speech infected the entire English speaking world, at least in America.

Now, the technical term for this is social contagion.

Humans are social animals.

We are all social animals, which means that we have an innate ability to catch the speech, lifestyle and norms of the people around us.

For example, if you hang out with overweight people, you are statistically much more likely to become overweight yourself.

It sounds weird to say, but being overweight can be caught socially.

Something similar is happening with what doctors call rapid onset trans identity. This is happening amongst teenage girls.

Having a trans friend makes a teenage girl 70 times more likely to become trans

herself. Again, this is a social contagion.

Now, I'm not trying to make a political point.

I'm simply pointing out that our social habitats shape us far more than we like to admit.

Whether it's your life path, your values, your speech, your worldview, or your career,

all of those things are shaped by the people around you.

But we didn't need modern social sciences to teach us this point. It's right there in your Bibles.

In Numbers 11, which we looked at yesterday, the social contagion of complaint, cynicism, and mistrust.

It spreads throughout the entire people of Israel.

Everyone's complaining.

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