Goodbye Boomers, hello Moralistic Therapeutic Deism

Seems like I read a lot of stuff like point 1 when I was a young adult Christian--25 years ago. And that was sort of being accepted by churches as the normal cycle; when those 20-somethings had kids, they'd return to at least semi-religious practice. When you want to be able to explain death to your children, it helps to have an afterlife.

My three kids (ages 18, 21 and 23) still attend church willingly when at home. But they find that its much more of a challenge when off on their own. Often the challenge is a matter of atmosphere. Our oldest son (who has lived in small Colorado ski towns for the past three years) finds that most congregations there are so small and ingrown that they freak out when a long-haired snowboarder kid like him walks in the door. Almost always another challenge is that its hard to find a congregation where there are other young adults. Almost none of my kids' friends (even the ones who grew up in Sunday School with them) attend church. But more than anything, my kids say its really hard to find a congregation that treats them like adults. My kids (God bless 'em) loathe the rave-like hipster services that some congregations aim at young adults. My kids (yes, even the long-haired snowboarder dude) prefer a fairly traditional, liturgical service with preaching that doesn't talk down to them. Although I agree with McLaren that churches need to reach out to young adults, I'd caution that "reach out" does not necessarily mean chatty sermons or guitars 'n' drums in the sanctuary.

Grumpy, confirmed old bachelors and spinsters don't really have an understood place, let alone unmarried thirty-somethings who live for their careers.

Great point. Makes sense; why would a church get on the bandwagon of family decline? Not much future there.

These casualties of feminism and meritocracy are often truly among the lost.

Interesting. By "meritocracy" hurting marriage do you mean

a) people now work too hard for married life?
b) that women won't marry untalented men in a merit-driven culture?
c) talented women are too valuable for marriage in a merit-driven culture?
d) something else?

I recently read someone who pointed out that part of the problem that churches face today is the fact that people can access almost everything the church is offering on their own. Whereas people used to have to go to church to sing and hear music, listen to teaching and generally be entertained. Today music, teaching and entertainment are everywhere. Many churches are trying to compete, but at the end of the day, that's not what people really want and need. I think that where the church has a real opportunity to change and to become an integral part of the lives of people across a broad spectrum is through the creation of real community. That's something which is almost completely absent from our world and that the church should already be offering, but generally isn't.
At the church I attend most people are under the age of 35 and there is a huge frustration among people looking for community and the sad fact is that the church leadership doesn't really know how to help create community. We live in an age where many (most?) people have never even seen a functioning family, much less any larger community of people. It's hard to envision what community looks like when you don't even have functioning families. And those who can remember living in community usually don't know how it was constructed and have a hard time figuring out how to rebuild it.
So, if the church can figure out how to provide a sense of community for its people, I think it will be in a position to serve the needs of the people and even begin to revolutionize the world around it.
One of the biggest problems with the church today, I think, is the obsession with liturgy and services. I think a good church is like a house. The Sunday service is like the foyer and the front room where people are recieved. However, we need kitchens and bathrooms and studies and bedrooms and laundry rooms and all the rest beyond that entry point. Most churches pour all their energies into the Sunday services and have a wreck out back that they don't even want people to see.
There are things like small groups that do a good job in helping to create some sense of community, but I think most people want more. I don't have the answers, but it's certainly something I've been thinking about and I think the church would do well to turn its attention there as well.

Rod:

I would love to believe in the simplicity of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, except that even for someone politically and religiously liberal like me, there's too much evidence against it. So there you go.

BTW, what in the h*ll do you (and Al Mohler) have against legitimate psychological therapy? Even when your fellow conservative commentator Michael Barone says that Republicans are "discipline-oriented" and Democrats are "therapy-oriented," he is making a statement of fact, not a value judgment.

And as your own criticisms of Gitmo and waterboarding make clear, "discipline-oriented" can go too far, too.

Aaand... this article is going right along to my parish council and OCF board members. Thanks - I've been looking for words to say this for a good long while. We have lots of under-eighteens, a handful of baby boomers, and hordes of retirees. But in a town with 50,000 college students, it's a good Sunday when more than three twenty-somethings show up for Liturgy. Then once they come, they get ignored.

By meritocracy I guess I mean competitive careerism, open to all based on test-taking and similar skills. Get good grades, good SAT, go to college, Get good GMAT, LSAT, etc. score, go to graduate school. Get a "good" job in some office. ("Twenty years of schooling and they put you on the day shift.") Make partner, vice-president, etc. Suddenly, life has passed so many of these people by.

A whole generation of women were told that they should go for careers. It was a right choice for some, but many I think were unfulfilled. Meanwhile, men were offered sexual gratification without responsibility. "He who dies with the most toys, wins."

"Not by usura came Piero della Francesca."

Lord, have mercy.

"A whole generation of women were told that they should go for careers. It was a right choice for some, but many I think were unfulfilled."

Correcto-mundo, GOM. My galpals and I have been saying for several years that someone dropped us all on our collective heads to convince us that there is something innately fulfilling about working for a paycheck.

Rick Warren was on Speaking of Faith yesterday on NPR. His is a visionary call to end global poverty through local churches. Christianity has more adherents than the populations of China and India combined (he said) and it has something no government or business has: universal distribution. Perhaps the churches in this country need more sense of an urgent mission than all this whining (excuse me, but it sounds like whining, oh Gen-Xers) about how "I don't like the liturgy" and "I don't feel community."

elizabeth, please point out the gen xers whining about the style of liturgy (and it's very convenient for the boomers who are in charge and form things to their liking to write off discontent from disenfranchised younger folks as whining anyhow). And community is what the church is supposed to be about! How does pointing out that the church is not doing a good job at one of its main functions qualify as whining?
But I'm sure there's just nothing to the common gen x gripe that we've been fed nothing but very negative messages about anything and everything we do/think/say for our entire existence. We're just imagining it, I'm sure. Thanks for demonstrating that, elizabeth!

Anyhow. What I do agree with is that one of the best ways for the church to regenerate itself is to come to understand that as Christians we are bound not just to our individual congregations or even to our own neighborhoods, but to all Christians everywhere. When you look at the NT, you see a fundraising effort going on to help Christians in Jeruselem which people responded to out of a sense of solidarity with other Christians. Many of the contributing congregations were far removed from Jeruselem. Yet today most suburban congregations have trouble mustering a sense of solidarity with those in need just a couple of towns over.
Of course, along with a sense of solidarity with eachother as Christians, we are called to serve people in general. One of the ways that Christianity spread in the early days was that when a plague would hit, Christians were the ones to stay behind to care for the sick and the children left behind because they were not afraid of death. Both those served and those who saw what they did were inspired and many converted.
If we were able to get Christians to buy into the idea that we should be more afraid of failing to care for each other and the world than we are of not having enough money for retirement, we really could change the world. This feeds back into the idea of community which so many people are longing for. A sense of common purpose and of living a meaningful life for something bigger than oneself can be a powerful means of meeting the needs of the individual while affecting real change in the world.

Rick Warren was on Speaking of Faith yesterday on NPR. His is a visionary call to end global poverty through local churches.

Snort. Way to go Rick! Finding and uniting those hard-core religious folk on NPR...why didn't I think of that? No doubt global poverty will be over in no time. Go Rick.

Yet today most suburban congregations have trouble mustering a sense of solidarity with those in need just a couple of towns over.

Again, 100% true.

I don't even give much money to my parish because I have no unity with the boomers who spend it - let alone give money to the next town over! To avoid our parish, we only give money to the poor directly, and just put the parish on survival wages. Starving the monster, we call it. The only way to deal with boomers is to ignore them. They will die out soon enough, and there is plenty of Christian works to do outside the parish.

In otherwords, leaving out the sociospeak, they're ditching something that they know that they don't need. The kids really are all right.

"What's weird - and new - is the either/or proposition which holds that you must either live your faith on Sunday morning, or on Saturday night, but never both."

I think this is a misunderstanding of the Emergent Church. McLaren would argue he wants people both at the pub or living room AND at Sunday services. But the idea of what that Sunday service looks like and sounds like is probably not what most people look for. These are churches which don't look at "liturgy" the same way Catholics or Orthodox or Lutherans or Episcopalians look at "liturgy" and so the centrality of the Sunday liturgy is less important than the everyday connection with your faith and the Lord.

Let's not forget that McLaren has just published a book entitled, "Everything Must Change".

As the founding guru of the Emergent Church movement, McLaren caught the fire and urgency of "missions" (paraphrased above in amazonia's and elizabeth's posts), left his senior pastor position several years ago and set out on a journey of discovery.

He found countless young people put off by "therapeutic" churches, yet searching for the transcendent via traditional orthodoxy, PLUS, they have a deep desire to effect social change through (mostly) urban (missional) outreach. {Google: "The Simple Way" in Phila for an example.]

It's an extremely healthy trend, if you ask me. Churches too inwardly focused can quickly become dens of strife or lose themselves completely in a sea of banality - exactly the opposite of how Paul said we are to behave as believers.

That all aside, the point is/was that community comes out of shared vision and mission

Exactly. This is why community generally fails. Boomers and Xers really are different, and rarely share a vision. As the article said, "It's clear young adults are being left out." It's interesting to note that:

mainline protestant average age 52
"evangelical" average age 48

mainline protestant / "evangelical" ratio:
1970: 5/4
2000: 2/3

Favorite quote: "We should not ignore the possiblility that congregations will survive from sheer inertia...but survival and vitality are two different things."

Actions by Baby Boomer moralists and Evangelicals are really creating cynicism for Post Baby Boomer Christians. That might be a lot easier to pass on to children than one would think. After all 'The Golden Compass' was the number 1 movie at the box office this weekend.
I consider myself to be a PBC.
Here's a great quote by a guy named Ben Franklin:
"The most dangerous hypocrite in the Commonwealth is one who leaves the gospel for the sake of the law. A man compounded of law and gospel is able to cheat a whole country with his religion and then destroy them under the color of law."
It's almost as if Evangelical Republicans have amnesia about the golden boy they christened named George W. Bush. He's probably done more to turn away fair minded people from Evangelical Christianity than any Hollywood movie producer or any secular educator.
No doubt Giuliani will do the same thing for Catholicism.
If radical Christian groups keep supporting preemptive war, tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy, and tearing apart the social safety net to push through there ultra moralistic agenda... they're only gonna bread cynicism.
I really feel that even if the Republicans win the Presidency or get a majority in Congress they're just gonna do more to turn the average person away from the religious groups that rally behind them.
I did my undergraduate degree 10 years ago in Nebraska and got sick of hearing Rush Limbaugh quotes in congregations.
In the last ten years he's been charged with drug abuse. At one point on a trip to the Caribbean he was found with a suitcase containing Viagra. Any rational person would wonder how an individual going down to party in the Caribbean with Viagra could hold the moral mantle for so many Evangelicals and Catholics; but he still does.
Bill O'Reilly is another great example. He talks about God and right and wrong after having settled out of court for phone sex with the O'Reilly Factor's former female producer. There's a straight shooter for you.
Most people don't talk about the fact that more than 1/2 the electorate doesn't feel it's even worth their time to show up at polls in a presidential race. They think that some guy claiming to be Christ-like while beating the drums for war and ignoring real issues that affect them day to day is just BS. And seeing them hang out with religious types and give there personal testimony only adds to the burn.

rebeccat - Point conceded about boomers perceiving whining. But the statement about 'and then we'll be in charge - deal with it' sounded a tad like taking over church as Payback Time, no?

M_David - If the faith cannot transform people beyond their conditioning, what good is it? How can anyone get beyond their little self? Can't a generational or other divide be overcome by practicing the faith? This is a real question, not a goad.

Maybe the kids leaving church is one more way of saying a pox on both our (Boomer/X-er) houses. This kind of tension can't be all that appealing. But the Sojouners folks are appealing to a new generation of evangelicals - again, a mission and vision to do the work that Jesus commanded with the poor.

That, and the fact that the real Church of America is the mall. If kids heard about and observed love, duty and responsibility a tenth as much as they hear about the next product they absolutely couldn't live without...

If the faith cannot transform people beyond their conditioning, what good is it?

Elizabeth, that's the best question I'm likely to hear all day!

sigilaris and Bill - right you are. Business thrives on making hay from demographic information. The fact that there are differences in points of view from generation to generation, especially when times are changing so rapidly, should be no surprise. But why must it generate antipathy? Can you say "marketing opportunity?"

(A topic for another thread would be the issue of retirement. When did we decide, as a society, that we are entitled to several decades of non-productivity at the end of our lives - much less several decades of self-indulgence? The ads for "Our Generation"-style retirement with Dennis Hopper make me ill. Talk about marketing engendering intergenerational resentment!)

I am delighted by the younger people I work with. For the most part they are eager to contribute, to help the world with their talents.
Very few of them attend any kind of spiritual community, however. They are more likely to find a sense of community in artistic circles.

I think that there are marked differences between generations right now precisely because as elizabeth points out, the world is changing so quickly. I think there is added antipathy between gen xers and boomers precisely because they are on opposite sides of the greatest and fastest shift in human thinking and behavior a society has probably ever experienced. The result is two generations, close together raised in completely different cultures with utterly different formative experiences. The older generation doesn't fully understand how profound the change has been and the younger is a bit pissy for the fall-out of some of these changes and projects blame onto the previous generation. And then we wonder why there's friction.
I think that the next generation now just coming of age, for all of its potential problems, can do us all a favor by help us learn to work more cooperatively together. All reports are that this is something gen yers are particularly adept at and which their older brethren could use some help with.
Finally, these generational divides and ghettos are one of the reasons we homeschool our kids. I can't help but think that it's unhealthy for us as a society when the only time that many generations, including children and teens, come into contact with each other is for a couple of hours a week at church on Sunday. Aside from homeschooling, I'm not sure how to get around our current set-up. However, I think we really need to consider the effect of raising kids in virtually adult-free environments where the only people you have real contact with are not only of your generation, but were born within 24 months of you. This cannot be good.

"A whole generation of women were told that they should go for careers. It was a right choice for some, but many I think were unfulfilled."

Told by whom? The sinister feminist conspiracy? I doubt it. See Barbara Ehrenreich's "The Hearts of Men." Women were sent into the workplace by (a) employers who no longer wanted to pay their employees (male or female) a "family wage", and (b) husbands who no longer wanted to bear the burden of financially supporting the family single-handedly. And, I guess, (c) parents, especially mothers, who educated their daughters in the reality that, even if a man promises to support you, there is no way to enforce that promise, and he certainly can't promise not to predecease you.

I've been practicing divorce law for 30+ years, and it has been 29 years since the last time I encountered an American-born husband* who refused to "let" his wife "work." But I have long since lost track of the number of husbands who complain bitterly that their wives are refusing to stay in the paid work force, or return to it immediately after childbirth, or work full-time rather than part-time. Note that there have been several fairly notorious murders of pregnant wives or girlfriends by husbands/boyfriends who did not want to assume responsibility for supporting the potential children or, even briefly, the temporarily incapacitated mothers of those children. The leading cause of death among pregnant women in the US is homicide.

*Some immigrants still operate by older rules.

The very phrase "Moralistic Therapeutic Deism" is a lie, typical of the dishonesty of the "Christian right" -- "Moralistic" sounds like it's not really moral, as though fairness and being good to others were immoral (maybe they are to the fundies); and the key elements of "Deism" are belief in God based on reason, and rejection of revelational claims and other signs of interference from that God. This claimed "Moralistic Therapeutic Deism" is nothing but an unfair and dishonest smear campaign against true deism and intellectual objections to fantasy religions.