The new religious fundamentalists? Millennial Christians
But, what I haven’t heard many talk about is the fact that my generation can actually be quite prideful. Quite self-centered. Quite addicted to what’s newest, quickest, fastest and easiest. And because of those things, if we are not careful, we will turn into exactly what we are critiquing.
By Jefferson Bethke, The Washington Post
There’s been a lot of craze about Millennials leaving the church the past couple weeks.
All the articles going around centered around the church being the problem (or the fact that it isn’t). But, and I know I might get Internet stones thrown at me (boulders for that matter) for saying this, what if we Millennials were just as much to blame?
In this conversation about young people’s faith lives, I think that we put all the blame on the church. Sure, the church has, in the past, become servants of GOP, to ‘family values’, to sin gerrymandering, rather than being followers of Jesus.
But, what I haven’t heard many talk about is the fact that my generation can actually be quite prideful. Quite self-centered. Quite addicted to what’s newest, quickest, fastest and easiest. And because of those things, if we are not careful, we will turn into exactly what we are critiquing.
(We also have to notice, by the way, that we aren’t the first to critique our mom’s generation. Every generation of late thought their mom’s church was lame. That’s youth; that’s not Millennial.)
My peers and I have too quickly caricatured “fundamentalists,” without realizing we are eerily close to becoming what we say we hate. We can think fundamentalists only wear suits and play boring Christian music, or we can address fundamentalism for what it is—an issue of the heart. An easy way to define fundamentalism is adding rules to the Bible, or elevating things beyond how Scripture elevates them. It’s an attitude of pride. It gets in shouting matches (or tweeting matches) with anyone who disagrees. And in American Christian culture, I still see a lot of that.
There is a weird subsection of young Christians today who are almost reverse fundamentalists, but they are still fundamentalists. They look at the older generation who say in good conscience Christians shouldn’t drink beer, and they respond, “We are definitely drinking beer. Freedom in Christ!” Or they see those Christians who say you have to dress up for church service, and they say, “We are only going to wear skinny jeans and v-neck T-shirts in church.” They are better defined by what they are against than by what they are for. They are doing the exact same thing as what they are defining themselves against. They are elevating behavior, clothing, and other secondary issues as requirements to gain access to heaven. It’s a sickness in all of us to put our righteousness and dependence in absolutely anything except Jesus, and if we think we aren’t doing that, it usually means it’s even worse.
