Until fairly recently I was very distressed about young Evangelicals, especially at Christian colleges. But especially after visiting several Evangelical campuses last week I now think they maybe one of our greatest causes of hope for Christian witness in America.
My organization, the Institute on Religion and Democracy, was founded 35 years ago mainly to combat the public witness during the Cold War by many Mainline Protestant elites equating Marxist revolution with God’s Kingdom. Our founders insisted the church is not primarily a political instrument. But they stipulated that the church’s social witness should affirm human rights and religious liberty, best protected by lawful democracy, over authoritarian and totalitarian alternatives that disregard human dignity. IRD asserted that fidelity to historic Christian orthodoxy was the church’s best contribution to healthy and free societies.
The Mainline Protestant world is no longer mainline in American culture, and Evangelicalism replaced it demographically and socially. Yet some of the same trends that began to undo the Mainline earlier in the 20th century over the last two decades have disturbingly appeared within Evangelical elite culture: apathy about Christian theological orthodoxy combined with a political witness increasingly indifferent or even hostile to constitutional, lawful democracy as embodied in the American experience. These trends partly owed to many Evangelical elites who reacted, or overreacted, against stereotypes and some realities regarding the old Religious Right. And they partly owed to Evangelicalism’s lack of roots in historic denominational traditions and too frequent low regard for the institutional church. The untethered nature of American Evangelicalism made it vulnerable to wider American cultural trends, especially in academia and the social sciences.
These trends remain of concern, certainly. But there are increasing indications that many young Evangelicals are resisting these currents, are reconnecting with the teachings of historic Christianity, and are far more confident and hopeful about the future than older Evangelicals overall. My colleague Marc LiVecche and I spoke at Biola University, Pepperdine University and Westmont College about Christianity and American foreign policy, which is the focus of our new Providence magazine. Students we encountered were attentive, smart, engaged, curious, and good spirited. There was little evidence of the grim, anxious despair that is gripping much of the traditional Evangelical world. Often they were not familiar with historic Christian teachings about war, peace and the pursuit of justice. But they seemed receptive and even delighted to learn.
I was fascinated to learn from students in one class at Biola how they glean their news about the world. They mostly described that they don’t rely on particular publications or websites but instead lean heavily on their Facebook feeds. So they might read many articles from the Wall Street Journal or New York Times, but which ones depends on what their friends have chosen to share. A professor remarked that his students often seem well informed but often learn of significant events only days later, after news appears on Facebook, instead of learning immediately from a news website. As a lifelong reader of a daily newspaper, this phenomenon is intriguing, not negative, but simply different. Podcasts are also very popular among young Evangelicals and offer thoughtful conversation and analysis often at great length, without the combative rhetoric of older media.
My impression is that young Evangelicals are not relying on the highly toxic and unreliable polemical websites influential among many older Evangelicals. They aren’t watching cable news or listening to incendiary radio talk show hosts, whose high octane, polarizing style doesn’t appeal. They seem impatient with ideological diatribes and want more cerebral presentations from a wider variety of sources. Forty years ago everyone read a newspaper and watched network news. Over the last 20 years Americans increasingly have siloed into ideological cubbyholes on cable television and websites, feeding off echo chambers of the likeminded, distrustful of alternative voices. Young Evangelicals are oblivious to these old paradigms and look to few centralized sources. Reaching them has become more complicated. But in their decentralized diversity they seem far less prone to the apocalyptic, panicked tones too often common in old Evangelicalism.
Last week’s experiences on Christian college campuses confirm impressions gained from our IRD interns, from young Evangelicals I encounter in Washington public policy circles, and from my visits to Evangelical churches popular with young people. Overall they seem more comfortable than their parents or grandparents with living in the tension between secular culture and the spiritual space of Christianity. Maybe less brittle than older generations, including my own, they might be better adjusted to affirm traditional faith while not overly stressing about external challenges to orthodox belief and practice. They seem to intuit if not always able to articulate that the church need not fear the world, and today’s challenges will be survived no less than yesterday’s. They of course have much to learn, but they also have much to teach.
No comments yet
