Originally posted at Liberal Street Fighter
Poor fundies … the NY Times reports that they fear that they are swimming against the tide of our nasty, terrible secular culture:
At an unusual series of leadership meetings in 44 cities this fall, more than 6,000 pastors are hearing dire forecasts from some of the biggest names in the conservative evangelical movement.
Their alarm has been stoked by a highly suspect claim that if current trends continue, only 4 percent of teenagers will be “Bible-believing Christians” as adults. That would be a sharp decline compared with 35 percent of the current generation of baby boomers, and before that, 65 percent of the World War II generation.
While some critics say the statistics are greatly exaggerated (one evangelical magazine for youth ministers dubbed it “the 4 percent panic attack”), there is widespread consensus among evangelical leaders that they risk losing their teenagers.
“I’m looking at the data,” said Ron Luce, who organized the meetings and founded Teen Mania, a 20-year-old youth ministry, “and we’ve become post-Christian America, like post-Christian Europe. We’ve been working as hard as we know how to work — everyone in youth ministry is working hard — but we’re losing.”
The board of the National Association of Evangelicals, an umbrella group representing 60 denominations and dozens of ministries, passed a resolution this year deploring “the epidemic of young people leaving the evangelical church.”
As is their wont, these folks blame liberals and gays and feminists and “activist judges”, but those excuses are mere marketing slogans. They have no philosophic or theological weight, and serve only reinforce the frightened thinking of their like-minded followers. Being a shallow movement spiritually, they don’t ask the important questions that determine whether people join, or leave, a religion.
Why do people feel they NEED religions, and why do they pick, or stay with, the faiths they belong to?
It is a big and scary universe. Contemplating life and death and the hard choices presented by life, throughout history people have found comfort in religion. Some, like Professor Bruce Hood, think that human beings are “hardwired” to look for supernatural explanations for life’s mysteries.
“They have basically said there are two types of people in the world,” he said – “those who believe in the supernatural and those who do not. But almost everyone entertains some form of irrational beliefs even if they are not religious.
“For example, many people would be reluctant to part with a wedding ring for an identical ring because of the personal significance it holds. Conversely, many people are disgusted by an object if it has associations with ‘evil’.”
I think the Professor puts too much weight on this tendency. Life is eased when certain rituals and practices can serve to smooth out the need to confront every issue every time you come across it. The wedding ring, to use his example, isn’t just an “object” easily replaced. It is a manifestation of a commitment, and thus performs a mental shortcut to remembering this commitment. It is no mistake that people take the ring off when they break that commitment. They don’t remove it because it has magical power, they remove it because it represents a covenant, and they don’t want others, or they themselves, to have to confront the boundaries demanded by that promise.
Being social animals, people have codified these explanations into the various faiths. These beliefs, and the institutions that grow up around them, prosper if they fulfill their function: to give people comfort and meaning. As they grow they become more and more intertwined into people’s lives. Children grow into the faith of the parents, and so too their children, and so on through time. Once institutionalized, many faiths rely more and more on dogma, creeds and ritual. When you look at the state of institutional religion in America today, faith communities often seem to become little more than their trappings.
This is, after all, a very shallow culture. Reflection is actively discouraged. The right’s version of evangelical thought is especially shallow and resistant to contemplation. One strengthens one’s commitment to the faith NOT by doing the hard spiritual work of examining the puzzles and solutions presented by their scriptures and the way they interact with the world, but rather the hard, and very SECULAR work, of rejecting outside influences. This isn’t a new theological gambit, of course, but it is a very lightweight one. Contrast this movement, for example, with the Amish so much in the news now. That community, too, rejects much of our “base” culture, especially unneeded technological “advancements” that encourage people to become caught up in vanity, in commodification and competition. However, they have a very different way of forcing young adherants to confront what it means to become adult members of that faith community by going out at age sixteen to experience the broader culture. Compare this to the usual evangelical demands that their children avoid temptation at all cost, and one sees how immature this brand of faith is. In fact, so insecure are these “believers” in the power of their message that they demand OTHERS help them remove temptation from their children’s path.
Paltry shadows of Christians past, these people. All too reminiscent of some of the more dangerous varities of that religion that have popped up throughout history. A faith built without trial, without confrontation is a weak thing, like a sword forged in a flame just not hot enough. Brittle, easily broken, and if this exodus is real and not just hype to get butts in the pews, then it is this weakness that is causing their young to flee. Religion’s purpose is to support and buttress the believer when confronted by trials and tribulations, not to function as a mere security blanket and rah-rah group cheer.
Perhaps their children have come to see the “blankie” that is their church as merely a tattered and threadbare cloth, one that has served it’s purpose. Perhaps their children, ill-served by a theology based on fear, hate, rejection and self-loathing, are moving on in their journey as human beings, in search of worldviews that enable them to be happier people.