Boy: I’ve had no contact with religion anywhere in my upbringing. Both my grandparents were very secular, my parents were very secular, so it’s almost religion to me, and growing up in sort of North Canberra, all my friends have been secular, so it’s almost like an abstract thing for me, I’ve had almost no contact with it throughout my entire life so far. I’ve never been to Church, like to a mass, or anything like that. So I suppose it’s all a bit of an intellectual thing, I don’t think religion is a particularly good force, I think it does a lot of bad in the world, sort of increases I suppose intolerance and bigotry in sort of within the community. But on the other hand people can believe what they want, I just don’t think it has a particularly positive force on lots of parts of society anyway.
I think don’t that the sort of moral high ground that religion proposes is valid at all in our society, I think most of the things have come despite religion through free thinkers and those things, and I don’t think the individualistic thing, I think that it’s equally there especially in Judaeo Christian religions, there’s that real focus on individual morality and individual sinning, it doesn’t see the wider picture, so I mean while everyone here at this table might be living in sin in terms of religious ideas, I think most of us want to try and make the world a better place.
*long drippy sigh*
I encounter this sort of thinking all the time in my philosophy and religion classes, especially among the younger students. They understand religion vaguely (as in, some people ‘out there’ are religious), and they get their news from the secular media. I mean, who can blame this kid? If he wasn’t raised in church or synagogue, doesn’t have any obviously religious friends, and hears only about Muslims and Jews killing each other and Christians blocking the entrance to abortion clinics, then *of course* he’s going to think that religion “does a lot of bad in the world.”
It’s enough to make a person despair.
[blockquote] I don’t think religion encourages this idea of critical thinking, or individual thinking, I think it’s very like You must do this, the Bible teaches you this. [/blockquote]
But how do we cross the cultural divide to reach secular young people like this? Rather than deplore the sophomoric attitudes of secular sophomores, how can we in a very gray church learn to do cross cultural evangelism with them?
Brian,
All we have to do is preach the Gospel. The Good News crossed all sorts of cultural barriers in the past:
Jews, Romans, Greeks, Syrians, Turks, Armenians, Macedonians, Goths, Gauls, Celts, Slavs, etc..etc..Throughout the world, the Gospel has crossed cultural barriers. Even in China, where believers truly suffer for the faith, the Gospel is a motivator.
But the Gospel will only be believable by the witness of those who testify to it. How convincing is our witness? If we bring the Gospel halfway down to the lost, if we water it down in order to “be relevant”, it is not effective.
It isn’t preaching, anymore. This generation has had it with the hypocritical pronouncements of religious folk. They know well that our lives do not line up with what we preach!
I have not come across anyone within this age group who does not look at Mother Teresa or Desmond Tutu, for example, with anything but respect. It isn’t the words these two preached, necessarily, but that their lives demonstrated their convictions and lived up to their words. People saw and see in them the Gospel, but they don’t see the Gospel in an organizational Church that is too busy trying to impose sectarian dogma on each other and all others in the world.
It isn’t just the secular media, either. It is what is being said by us. I’ve written this before, but the way the conflicts within Anglicanism are being handled right now is only proving the point of this kind of perception by non-Christian young folks, regardless of how altruistic we image ourselves to be or how much we think we are standing up for the Gospel.
What a tremendous opportunity we have! This is a unique time when we can DEMONSTRATE that we actually get it and that what we promise is actually true – that we truly can love God with our entire being and love our neighbor as ourselves (like Mother Teresa’s example). That we truly can even love our enemies – and that love is demonstrated in ways that are recognizable to sinners (like Tutu’s). That the Fruit of Spirit is actually the way we live. It is too bad so many of us who claim Christ have no clue how to truly live in the Way of Christ.
We can blame anyone and everyone for the decline in Christian adherents, but the truth is people are not attracted to the Church (not the Gospel, but the Church) because of our failure to live the life God calls us to live – whether we are conservatives or liberals. I don’t think we get it, yet. I hope we will, and soon.
My general train of thought when I encounter this line of thinking follows two potential discussions. One is that any institution that man makes can “do a lot of bad in the world.” That ranges from political ideologies (Communism, capitalism in the extreme) to science (atomic bomb, ethnic cleansing premised on social darwinism) to, yes, religion. Anything that has any power can be corrupted. Just because it can be corrupted does not mean you have to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
My second line of thought is, as was stated above, to look at all the actions that religion has done that has made a positive impact in the world. This is especially evident in the history of the West. Everything from public schools to hospitals to social service organizations were created out of religious sentiment, and for years funded only by the church or religious organizations. Even science and education in the West grew up from monasticism because theology was the “mother of all sciences.” By studying God and his universe, the modern disciplines descended.
All one has to do is sign them up for a trip to the Katrina-damaged gulf coast. There they will hear from the residents that the secular world let them down, and they don’t know how they would have made it if the churches hadn’t stepped in [i]en masse[/i] to help out, and are still coming.
The need is still great. And the church-folk are still coming. I have been [url=http://resurrectiongulfcoast.blogspot.com/]working alongside[/url] these folk for over a year.
“This generation has had it with the hypocritical pronouncements of religious folk. They know well that our lives do not line up with what we preach!”
You could have written the same thing in 1997, 1987, 1977, or 1967.
That’s true, Irenaeus, but I think the cultural situation and perception has changed significantly enough since the mid-1990’s (in the Anglo-West – perhaps sooner in the rest of the West) to warrant consideration. There was still enough cultural linkage to Christianity in years past so that the preponderance of young people didn’t react the way as this younger generation is acting. The significant increase in un-churched people also contributes to the different response and reaction.
Similar findings in a large survey of American teens by (now) Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith (et al). The findings of this National Study on Youth and Religion are published as [i]Soul Searching: The Religious And Spiritual Lives Of American Teenagers[/i]. Oxford University Press, 2005. Smith is soon releasing a video documentary (also called [i]Soul Searching[/i]). I saw an advance copy and highly recommend it to youth workers and others. Smith summarizes the worldview of most (even “evangelical”) teens as Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. Read more about it at http://www.christianpost.com/article/20050418/6266.htm.
Bob G+, what you say is true in its own context and the charges you bring against the churches is some part just, but I think youare being too harsh. You forget how vicious contemporary America is, how relentless it is in its pursuit of non-secular, how its advertising harasses every citizen who has to hear and see, how driven we have been forced to become because accumulating wealth is so essential to simple survival. You cannot tend the spirit in a country that demands that you hurry in the marketplace, that you throng with the throngs, that you buy and buy and buy. Where can you go now to be quiet? Where are you permitted to be poor in cash but rich in culture – for after all, one used to be able to be thus. It does no good to say, “We brought this on ourselves and it serves us right,” even if it is true. How can you say to those who are suffering from contemporaryness and do not know it, ‘Turn off the cells, the Blue Tooths, the vid games, the TV, the rap.”
But it is also true that there appears to be no time since Homo Sapiens appeared when he did not need religion. Even the Neanderthals buried their dead. There is a new generation coming, and it may well be that the decadence that is the inheritance of the fin de siecle will have run its course, and the young, sick of jittery electronics, may hear new words. Larry
Larry: I agree.