The Faith of the Rising Generation
Unsolicited advice to churches and youth pastors
This weekend, as I was reflecting on Friday’s newsletter about John Fea’s Atlantic article about his dad and the prior Friday’s newsletter about Sarah McCammon’s new book reflecting on her evangelical upbringing, my online friend Joey Cochran (someday IRL) posted on Facebook about the middle school youth group retreat at his church.1
Joey had a longer comment on a the Facebook reel.
I have a hot-take on the future of Christianity in the States, and it’s that the church is gonna flourish. There is a resilient generation that is rising up to live for the Master. I give you exhibit A as evidence. A couple hundred middle schoolers from my church at a retreat.
I fervently pray that Joey is correct. Not just about his children, but about the fervency of those 200 children working through the process of individuation so key to the teen years. There is reason to be hopeful: the data on Gen Z suggests that they are more connected to the broader world that earlier generations and yet remain fairly optimistic. They also have much stronger BS detectors than their parents’ and grandparents’ generations.
Still, I remain concerned given all I have learned over the past decade of my research. In the evangelical memoirs I’ve studied, I also found middle school and high school youth group exuberance and a willingness to give it all to Jesus. Whether it was Addie Zierman in the rain at “See You At The Pole” and anointing cafeteria tables or DL Mayfield doing teen outreach to neighborhood kids, too much of this energy was sapped by reality. The youth group of Linda Kay Klein showed long-term negative impacts of purity culture on the females. The impact of complementarian thinking in general has been deleterious to both men and women. Add to that the insular nature of much the evangelicalism of the past thirty years and a suspicion of the broader world (including science, politics, and education) and a thin plausibility structure is the result that shatters once teens become young adults.
Reporting on the first wave of the National Survey on Youth and Religion (NSYR), Christian Smith and colleagues focused on the problem of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism (MTD): a belief in vague morality that wants you to be a good person, that God wants you to be happy, and that he will swoop in when needed in difficult situations. Using the same data, Kendra Creasy Dean argued that students didn’t make up MTD but that it was the version of religion on offer from pastors, youth pastors, and families. Following the third wave of the NYSR, Melinda Denton and Richard Flory found MTD alive and well.
We also have solid data on the ways in which churches are sorting politically. Other data suggests that this has the result of softening youth commitment to religion and may feed the rise of the “nones”. Recent books by Tim Alberta and Andrew Whitehead suggest that this segmentation is getting worse.
But I don’t want to stay with the concerns that pour cold water on Joey’s children and their fervency. Like him, I want to be hopeful about their faith commitments. Even more, I desperately want them to have a positive impact on their parents and congregations. For that to happen, there are some things that churches — and especially youth pastors — need to attend to.2
I’ll start with one of themes that runs through my book on Christian Universities: center the students’ experiences, questions, struggles, and doubts. If the experiences at their youth retreats and weekly gatherings are places where they can be their true selves as they express their faith, they will be less likely to engage in the pretense of having it all together. They need to know that their acceptance among their peers — and by extension, God — is not dependent upon their perfect behaviors and thoughts.
They need some depth in scriptural interpretation and theological understanding. No sword drills to prove you know where the books of the Bible are but an awareness of the grand narrative of God coming to his people. They need to know that God loves them in spite of what they see as imperfections — and maybe because of them.
Their group experiences need to address the nature of diversity (which may be a challenge if the group is too homogeneous). How do they engage “the other” whether in the group, at school, or on social media? Can they practice a faithful humility that holds loosely to “what they’ve always believed” while engaging the other in their midst?
One of the patterns I’ve seen in memoirs of evangelicals deconstructing is that spending a lot of time focusing on Jesus in the Gospels is part of their reconstruction. Because I argue in my book for “anticipatory deconstruction”, I believe it is never too early to get students focused on Jesus. This is to examine his earthly ministry as a model as well as affirming his mysterious divinity.3
All of these ideas I’ve offered need to be embodied in the youth ministry team, the youth pastor, and the pastoral staff. There is another huge segment of those who grew up in evangelical spaces who were then crushed when they find the impropriety, sexism, racism, or abuse (spiritual and sexual) by those in leadership. Trust in institutions, including churches, is on the wane among this generation. It doesn’t take much of a breach to encourage them to chuck the whole thing.
One of the basic sociological elements of institutional life is that existing patterns tend to persist unless something exerts force to make them change. If congregations lean in to these enthusiastic young people, they will find the levers that can exert that force. If they continue in supporting the institution and expecting the young people to conform to old patterns, we’ll continue to see them struggle and drift away.
I want to affirm Joey’s hope. I just need the churches to do the same.
I assume he was a chaperone or a speaker as nobody in their right mind would volunteer to hang out with 200 middle schoolers for fun!
I admit it’s been two decades since I had kids in youth group but what I got from students in recent years lets me know that not a lot has changed.
This is a great antidote to the over-emotionalism that has been too much of evangelical youth culture.