Another, but my first, blog on Millennials

Boomer and Millennial:

In Conflict or Partnership

Part One:

Review of an article by Rachel Held Evans

Written by Dan McDonald

            This article is meant to begin my interacting with three thoughtful provocative pieces written by ladies from the millennial generation (I think these are mostly the generation now in their twenties and very early thirties).  So I will begin by providing links to the three articles I have in mind as a backdrop.  I encourage readers to read these articles to understand a perspective shared by at least a segment of today’s newest adults.  I recognize, and believe all these writers, while speaking of generalities in their generation understand that generalities paint life with a wide brush and while hopefully insightful in catching the big picture tend to blur the reality of individual details.  So we can find endless reasons why what they say doesn’t address the reality of this individual or that, but still perhaps they capture a sense of what a good number of young people, especially young people connected to Evangelicalism, are going through as they become young adults.  Three blogs by millennial bloggers, or just a tad older than the formally described millennial generation are described here.  So here are the links to the articles I have in mind as I write this blog.  In this blog the focus will be on the article by Rachel Held Evans.

            Why Millenials are Leaving the Church by Rachel Held Evans 

            Millenials and Adam’s Missing Rib by Kate Schell

            Change Wisely Dude  by Andrea Palpant Dilley

            An additional article, one might wish to read, is David French’s critical reply to Rachel Held Evans’ blog, entitled “Why Millenials are Leaving the Church?  The Narcissism factor”  (http://www.patheos.com/blogs/frenchrevolution/2013/08/02/why-are-millennials-leaving-the-church-the-narcissism-factor)

David French may have some valid points, which is why I offer his perspective as well, but I will not be attempting to critique any possible shortfalls in the perspectives offered in these blogs.  I consider their viewpoints as helpful expressions of where they and many of the people they know find themselves in life.  I want you to be able to see from French’s perspective that a number of people in the millennial generation would seriously disagree to the perspectives set forth by some of these bloggers.  Millennial generation youth weren’t manufactured by fabricating machines dialed in with the same exact specifications for this generation’s model of humanity.  He makes some valid points to consider.  But I think we can do well to listen to these young writers and recognize that they are responding to real issues in life that have gained their attention and upon which they have concerns.

As someone who considers himself Evangelical, even as I have moved towards an Anglican perspective in my understanding of religion I think it rather important that all of these writers grew up connected to an Evangelical faith experience.  Each, of these ladies, expresses something I have seen to be fairly common among Evangelical young people as they became adults.  The transition from Evangelical youth to Evangelical adult has been difficult for many.    It should interest those of us who are older Evangelicals that quite a few of our Evangelical children have entered adulthood experiencing a lot of questioning, confusion, and sometimes having to deal with thoughts of having been betrayed by the tradition in which they grew up.  We Evangelical boomers have a hard time believing this to be so.  We built our lives around perspectives such as “God says it.  I believe it.  That settles it.”  We imagined that in raising our children we would teach them the Scriptures, would provide a safety net around their precious lives, and help them come into adulthood with a solid faith, intellectually prepared for a non-Christian world.  We thought that armed with the Gospel and believing churches, home-schooling, Christian education, that these children would start out their Christian adult lives with so much more clarity than we had when we began our Christian adult lives.  So when Evangelical boomers see their children questioning everything, we held as important, we wonder what went wrong.  It is painful to think that the questions asked by such young people might be indications that they are beginning to resist and reject the faith we hoped to see them grow into.  The babies born to the Baby Boomer generation are now out of the bathwater and they are having serious questions and both the Millennial and the Boomer is having difficulty accepting each other’s viewpoint and perspective.  Is the Millennial generation going through a youth phase, or is there more to it?  Or is it a youth phase and also more to it?  Are their questions just the questions of a youth phase or are they important questions for us older folk to consider in our latter years of life?  What are we to say to a generation questioning so many of our beliefs and ways of life?  What is to be our response to this millennial generation seemingly at times to be truly of a whole new millennium from how we understood life?

            Rachel Held Evans’ piece received the most publicity perhaps because her blog was on a CNN website with a lot of traffic.  It voices a common concern among many a millennial from an Evangelical background.  Evans without necessarily disbelieving the message of Evangelicalism clearly reacts to a seeming narrowness within Evangelicalism.  One statement that can surely be read negatively by believing Evangelicals is her concern about the hostility of Evangelicals towards homosexuals.  She writes “We want our LGBT friends to feel truly welcome in our faith communities.”    This can be interpreted in different ways.  If we read this as meaning the Evangelical community should no longer regard homosexual behavior as sinful then many of us would say that Rachel Hold Evans has crossed a line that Evangelicalism, with its desire to be faithful to the Scriptures cannot cross.  But perhaps that is not what she is really talking about.   How many of us have friends, let’s say male friends from a work place that are philandering womanizers?  Without changing our stance on sexual sins of that nature, what is our response to such a person who comes to a church service?  I suspect in many places the male womanizer would be just the sort of sinner we imagine God will save and turn into an Apostle Paul after his Damascus Road experience; whereas we will look at the practicing homosexual coming through the doors of our church as the one bringing a plague of death and destruction.  I don’t personally know Rachel Held Evans, nor have I read enough of her writings to know if she is the progressive discontented with Scriptural Christianity described by David French, or if she is simply an Evangelical with difficult questions for her faith community.  I value her one article I have read, for she ably presents a voice for the difficult questions her generation is posing to my generation within Evangelicalism.

            One of the things that strikes me as I see how my millennial friends speak of homosexuality and how I spoke of homosexuality when I was in my twenties, is that this is one of the ways in which my world is not like the millennial generation’s world.  Most of us, now old baby boomers, would not have known we knew a homosexual when we were young.  It was the sort of thing that was practiced secretly and in certain places where such folk hung out, and where we who were not did not hang out.  We may have known that there was a growing movement of people announcing themselves as gay, but as normal heterosexuals that wasn’t our concern.  That is the world in which most boomers grew up.  Today, a millennial will far more likely know someone openly gay.  To us baby boomers a gay person was someone we imagined in our minds wholly different from ourselves, whereas for many a millennial a gay person is someone living down the street or in a room across the hall in the dormitory.  They are mostly like you and I, except they have a different perspective on gender attraction than do you or I if we are heterosexual.  That is how many a Millennial knows about homosexuality and that creates a different perspective than most of us in our Boomer generation viewed such persons.

Perhaps we who are Evangelical boomers can learn to think of homosexuality like we saw drug use in our college days.  We recognized that drug and alcohol abuse were sins, but that did not make us believe that if someone who used and abused drugs or alcohol visited our church we were somehow right to be hostile towards them.  Sure, we didn’t change our message for them, but we treated them with respect because among other things they were taking the time to visit our church.  When I was in college I did something that was perhaps not the wisest thing for me to do.  On a few occasions there was a group of guys down the hall from me who played Risk.  I was a history major in those days and had a secret desire to rule the world, at least on a board game in a game with the guys down the hall on a Saturday night.  It was a state university, so there was no one around to enforce laws.  I was playing Risk with a bunch of guys, who as they played Risk passed the bong around the room.  Everyone there knew I was a Christian and never put any pressure on me to partake of the bong.  If one of them had expressed a desire to go with me to church I would have been very happy.  Moreover, even in the 1970’s where I went to the church would be happy to see someone visit their church even if they occasionally inhaled from a bong on Saturday night.  But is that how the LGBT person is treated coming into our churches?  I think, at least I would like to believe that is what Rachel Hold Evans is saying when she wants her church to be a place where she can invite her LGBT friends to visit.  In many instances what someone with an LGBT lifestyle wants is not so much to be told that we believe they are doing what is right, but simply to be treated with respect as a fellow human being.  Whether they will ever believe like an Evangelical believes that their behavior is a sin is not in one sense as important to us as churchmen and churchwomen as whether or not they know we care about their persons even if we don’t agree with their lifestyle.  As Evangelicals we need to stop and think.  Do we really think that when one becomes LGBT they give up the last vestiges of their souls and after entering that lifestyle have no more spiritual considerations?  If that were the case then maybe our churches wouldn’t be for them.  But if being LGBT didn’t mean that one forfeits having a soul then perhaps the millennial like Rachel Held Evans is right to want to be able to invite her LGBT friend to church.  Maybe she is right to imagine that her friends down the hall have spiritual needs and desires, even if we cannot Scripturally give our approval to that one particular behavior they are quite open about doing in life.  Maybe that is true of a lot of other sinners as well.  Maybe a young Christian should be able to believe that anyone they know would be welcome to come to their church, even if perhaps the message of the Gospel might cut across their grain, or conversely enable them to rethink their whole life.  Maybe we would like to hope that such a person could visit our church and be treated kindly and there would be no drama scene.  Is that really all that much to ask of church bought by the blood of the blessed redeemer?

One of the problems we boomers have in regard to homosexuality is that in our generation there was a tremendous amount of emphasis on the culture wars.  There was a tendency among Boomers to view moral issues through the filters of socio-political concerns.  A secularizing culture that was itself strongly political resulted in a conservative and Christian backlash that was highly motivated politically.  As divorce rates soared and as an increase in homosexuality took place, the boomer tendency was to react with laws to stem the tide of the decline in our nation’s morality.  The conservative movement viewed this as defensive, while much of the non-religious or not as religious portion of America viewed the same trend as a shove it down your throat Christianity.  Rachel Held Evans described one of the wishes of many of her millennial friends was that churches might “emphasize an allegiance to the kingdom of God over an allegiance to a single political party or nation.”

How many of us, as Evangelicals from within the Boomer generation heard Romans 1:18-32 preached upon as showing how cultures degenerated due to sin.  We were treated to St. Paul’s timely message of how the United States was in danger of apostasy even though we were this great Christian nation based on Christian principles, due to our Christian founding fathers.  We even were led to believe that America’s Deists were exuberant Christian men standing for our Christian faith.  So when we heard a sermon on Romans 1:18-32 taught as a portion of Scripture detailing how nations’ fall away from a knowledge of God, we saw the passage as requiring a proper political response so that our nation would not so fall away like nations of the past.  Within this message offering a message of how we could save America, the sin of homosexuality was presented perhaps not as Paul imagined himself presenting it, but as some sort of sin worse than any other, and proof if a nation had a gay pride movement that it was entering the end of the downward spiral from which there could be no recovery.  But is there any reason given according to St. Paul’s letter to the Romans to understand that passage in any way like that?  No!  He was beginning to show how failure to honor God as God and failure to give him thanks led to a distorted darkened mind that then led to a downgrading and darkening of all of man’s faculties and relationships.  This was not peculiar to a nation falling into its spiral of destruction, but common to the human experience caught up in sin.

So how was St. Paul using the sin of homosexuality?  There is no denying that he did treat it as a sin.  But I think he was using at as an illustration for all sinful behavior.  In his treatment of sin, he showed that sin had caused separation of man from God, from one another, from one’s self, and even from one’s own body.  Sin was destroying man, bringing him to eternal death and destruction, and the sort of destruction in which our mental, physical, and social faculties and ways all become blurred, out of focus, disrupted, and distorted.  Homosexuality is an illustration of that, but in a way that also speaks to gossiping, hatred, envy, jealousy, adultery, arrogance, murdering, anger, and every form of self-centered lust.  St. Paul was able to take the natural reason for sexual organs, so that our species can reproduce and then say but knowing what function and purpose our sexual organs exist for, there are those whose focus in disoriented so that they are moved to desire that which is unnatural, which serves no true purpose as to the known objective purpose of human sexuality.  This is mankind estranged from one’s own self and from one’s own body.  Then St. Paul can list a bunch of sins that impact us all in some way or another, and say, “And so are all these sins the expressions of a darkened mind leading to behavior that is not in keeping with the purpose for which God created us.  That is what he was saying.  But many handling that same passage in my generation were using that passage to encourage Christians to make a strong political stand lest America go the way of Romans one and become as such rabble rousers would put it “a nation of perverts.”  Ironically there may be some truth to the concern because Christians deprived of the pure Gospel and sent on the wild goose chase of saving America distorted how they viewed one particular sin among the many sins and created a sense of sympathy for people mistreated by the religious community.  You do not have to be a progressive politically to understand that Evangelicalism’s hostility towards homosexuality flows from its viewing of life politically rather than spiritually.  We have imposed a view of Romans 1:18-32 on to the passage that does not at all fit into St. Paul’s understanding of Roman 1 through Romans 8.  Instead of this being the universal sin problem for which reason Christ came to redeem his people, it becomes a national sin problem that we can forestall by good legislation.  From that came the religious right and an Evangelical movement that from some vantage point had ceased to proclaim the kingdom of God; and had put in its place one party and one nation rather than one Gospel for Jew, and Gentile, and for all the nations of the earth.  Perhaps Rachel Held Evans is a political progressive.  I don’t know and really I don’t care.  I believe that the list of things she mentioned in her blog to be issues unto which Evangelicalism needs to be sensitive.  Let’s say we are an Evangelical church and one of our children of millennial age comes home and has invited a friend from college and after a short time the friend is recognized to be homosexual.  It is probably understandable if there is a bit of a “what the” moment.  But once we have recovered have we been led to want to rejoice that this person has chosen to visit our church or are we going to wish that person would simply go away for our church isn’t really for this kind of people.  There are other churches interested in promoting this person’s way of lifestyle.  But maybe this person in addition to having LGBT inclinations still has spiritual concerns that have not yet been met.  This is something the millennial in our midst may appreciate more than most of us boomers.  The millennial may not be as interested in changing our perspective on homosexuality as much as changing our way of dealing with the homosexual.  The millennial is more inclined to say to us, “It isn’t about America or about politics. it is about this human being I know.”

I would like to conclude this blog with one more issue that I will address more in an upcoming or probably two upcoming blogs dealing with the blogs by Kate Schell and Andrea Palpant Dilley.  The issue I want us to think about is how the Boomer and the Millennial should be partners in Christ.  We should be listening to one another.  Sometimes we boomers know the world has changed around us, but do we know how much it has changed from how we speak of it as compared to how our millennial friends and brothers and sisters experience it?  Do we listen enough to see what they are experiencing so that if we have something to say to them it is because we have thought of what they are experiencing rather than about what we have experienced.

There is a transition from the life of a child in the way a child thinks to the life of an adult in the way an adult takes responsibility for the direction of their own life.  I think this is one of the difficulties for Boomers to face in seeing a Millennial thinking on their own.  We still think of this age group as our generation’s children.  But they are now God’s young adults.  They are adults transitioning from what they were as children to what they will be as adults, but they are on the adult side of the fence.  One of the difficulties of going from childhood to adulthood is everything becomes something which one has to rethink.  In childhood we trusted parents and guardians we needed to direct us in life.  In adulthood, we take everything we were taught and learned growing up and begin questioning it and perceiving it in a new way, so as to determine in what way, if any we are going to use this we have been taught to become one of our guiding principles in life.  This is part of becoming an adult.  Adults think so as to be responsible for their own actions and no longer to think or behave as children dependent on someone to constantly tell them to do this and do that, and to use a fork properly, and to be kind to the kid with too much acne to call him or her beautiful.  For a moment when your millennial is questioning every idea and principle you taught them, for a moment stop and think that there is a possibility that in a few more years we will be expressing our joy at seeing how these young people have grown into responsible men and women who have learned to be wise as well as independent.  This is all part of the process.

The goal for a Boomer in relating to a Millennial is perhaps first of all to be someone who respects the adulthood of a Millennial.  That will help us to listen and not just speak.  We need for them to tell us what is on their heart and mind before we blurt out our words of wisdom.  We need them to know if they want someone to talk to and if they want to hear our take on some things we are there for them.  We need to pray.  We need sometimes just to do some things together.  For the truth is we are one in Christ.  Simply because a young person asks difficult questions doesn’t mean they must have rejected the faith.  It may simply mean that they are in the wilderness, in that land between childhood and adulthood, between believing something because mommy and daddy believe that, to believing something because “I believe.”  There is a transition phase between a child’s faith so dependent on his parents’ beliefs and an adult’s faith which has come to the same conclusions or the same basic faith with important personal convictions because they have struggled responsibly with the questions of the faith.  I am grateful that Rachel Held Evans did not simply accept my generation’s faith.  I am grateful that she told me and others in my generation her concerns and questions.  Maybe because Rachel Held Evans talked about her questions I can begin to understand just a little better my need to realize that a young Christian, maybe somebody labeled as a Millennial is struggling with the sort of questions that need to be struggled through if someone is to come to age with a group of solid convictions that will guide them through the fiery trials and tribulations surely to come in the next few decades of life.  Soon they will have their own little ones and will dream great dreams for them and imagine they will give to them that best they have to offer so they won’t have to go through what their generation had to go through when they took on adulthood.  But then the world will have changed again, at least revolved a time or two until new ideas spawned by old ideas spawned by older ideas take their place in another generation of young people.  Maybe nothing ever changes, but maybe the one great need is that old and young adults may learn to talk with one another, to weep, laugh, call each other out on the carpet, to realize they don’t understand one another, and if in Christ to love one another because we know that we are one in Christ and because we know we are sharing a thing called life that is bigger than either one of our perspectives.