Losing their Religions

According to this recent and encouraging article in the Times, evangelical leaders are consumed with worry that young Christians will soon fall away from their faith. We can only hope!

According to the article, "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." In finding causes for this disaster, evangelical leaders point in the usual directions:

Genuine alarm can be heard from Christian teenagers and youth pastors, who say they cannot compete against a pervasive culture of cynicism about religion, and the casual “hooking up” approach to sex so pervasive on MTV, on Web sites for teenagers and in hip-hop, rap and rock music. Divorced parents and dysfunctional families also lead some teenagers to avoid church entirely or to drift away.

Over and over in interviews, evangelical teenagers said they felt like a tiny, beleaguered minority in their schools and neighborhoods. They said they often felt alone in their struggles to live by their “Biblical values” by avoiding casual sex, risqué music and videos, Internet pornography, alcohol and drugs.

Being a former Catholic, not a former evangelical, I can't say that these factors are immaterial to the possible falling-away of millions of Christian kids from their faiths. Being someone endowed with six more-or-less functioning senses and halfway decent reasoning abilities, though, I'd posit a few other causes - beyond the obvious one that sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll are fun.

For one, I'll bet that some kids are turned off when they become increasingly aware of the fact that many evangelical leaders - like Ron Luce, "who founded Teen Mania, a 20-year-old youth ministry" that has sponsored big "stadium extravanzas" for 15 years - are apparently as concerned with taking their money as saving their souls. It's bound to be disillusioning for the kids to realize that business concerns (and not some sort of ahistorical adherence to the Bible) steer conservative Christianity - as they have for decades.

Similarly disillusioning, I'd expect, is the near-parodic hypocrisy of Christian leaders from Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell (blaming 9/11 on lib'ruhls) to the current set of hooligans in Congress. Sure, a lot of conservative Christians, whether 18 or 88, will be able to ignore the Foley email scandal - or to ascribe it to the lib'ruhls - but some will probably also see it as troubling evidence of the towering perfidy of those who claim to rule in the name of faith and vritue. And given that Americans love nothing so much as they easy way out, I'd expect that many - or at least some - who come to that conclusion will just abandon the megachurches.