It's easy to talk about a religious upsurge in America, bask in the fact that our country has one of the highest rates of church attendance in the world and complacently conclude that, however much may be going wrong in the early 21st Century, the state of Christianity is grounds for good cheer. An essay in today's Wall Street Journal offers a corrective to any such complacency (Dale Buss, "Christian Teens? Not Very").
To start with some positive-sounding survey numbers:
About one-third of American teenagers claim they're "born again" believers, according to data gathered over the past few years by Barna Research Group, the gold standard in data about the U.S. Protestant church, and 88% of teens say they are Christians. About 60% believe that "the Bible is totally accurate in all of its teachings." And 56% feel that their religious faith is very important in their life.
That doesn't sound bad. Perhaps the up-and-coming generation will sweep away this one's secularism, just as the Victorians reversed the Regency Era's moral decay. Unhappily, there is more to the story:
Only 6% of all teens believe that there are moral absolutes — and, most troubling to evangelical leaders, only 9% of self-described born-again teens believe that moral truth is absolute.
"When you ask even Christian kids, 'How can you say A is true as well as B, which is the antithesis of A?,' their typical response is, 'I'm not sure how it works, but it works for me,'" says George Barna, president of the Ventura, Calif.-based research company. "It's personal, pragmatic and fairly [sic!] superficial."
Some commentators produce even more startling statistics on the doctrinal drift of America's youth. Ninety-one percent of born-again teenagers surveyed a few years ago proclaimed that there is no such thing as absolute truth, says the Rev. Josh McDowell, a Dallas-based evangelist and author. More alarmingly, that number had risen quickly and steadily from just 52% of committed Christian kids in 1992 who denied the existence of absolute truth. A slight majority of professing Christian kids, Mr. McDowell says, also now say that the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ never occurred.
It is almost anticlimactic to learn that only 10 percent of Christian teenagers believe that pirating music is morally wrong and nearly 60 percent "say that all religious faiths teach equally valid truths".
One might despairingly infer that young people's version of "Christianity" is no more than another secular identity, notwithstanding its otherworldly trappings. At the very best, professing Christians cannot bring themselves to challenge openly the fundamental tenet of secularism: that all values are created by those who hold them, and no standard exists by which they can be judged.
Nonetheless, despair may not be warranted. Relativism is at the core of the secularist creed, and all secularists profess it with their lips. Yet none does — or can — live that dogma. No one refrains from moral judgement, and those who assert that truth is an unusable concept are generally the quickest to impugn others for lying. The only real role of relativism is the destructive one of attacking others' beliefs. Once it has served that purpose, it is cast aside, and a firm absolutism — nowadays codified enough to have a name, "political correctness" — takes over.
Since secularists don't practice relativism, why should we assume that Christians who mouth its platitudes are any more sincere?
That is, I'll not deny, a very thin sliver of hope, but let's not forget the Russian tale of the woman whose soul was saved by an onion.
I think that it's time that the parents of the youth of America wake up to the fact that something isn't right at home and at their local church if the Kids can't believe the doctrines of the faith. Is it because the parents only give lip service? Is it that they are allowing their kids be educated by the bombardment of MTV and the like which feeds it's own popular dogma to them? We are only accountable for ourselves and our own! How much truth can we impart if our Kids think that truth does not exist? It appears we need to address the question addressed to Christ "What is truth" not what is your truth but face towards the Christ that said I am the way the truth and the life.
Posted by: Des Sharpe | Thursday, October 28, 2004 at 08:38 PM