What Do You Worship? (Guest Post)

Alex McCauslin is a young seminarian and ministry intern at Central Woodward Christian Church.  One of Alex's assignments is to work with our young adults to create a YA community.  In a posting at her own blog, Alex writes about her encounter with a young woman who was cutting her hair.  This conversation about God, church, and worship raises some intriguing questions.  We know that an increasing number of young adults are listed as "Nones."  That is, they simply don't identify with any religious community or tradition.  That doesn't mean they don't believe in God or that they're not interested in spiritual things, they just don't have a "place" to put these beliefs.  I'd like to use Alex's reflections as a starting point for an important conversation about faith, worship, and a world that feels disconnected to what happens in religious communities.

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This experience has been rattling around in my head for the last week. I am puzzled by it, still.

I recently had my hair cut. The woman cutting my hair was in her early twenties (around my age.) She asked what I was doing with my life, and, of course, I eventually admitted I was studying at Seminary and working for a church.

“So, what religion are you?” She asked.

“I’m Disciples of Christ, it’s Protestant, like Methodists.”

She stared blankly at me and said, “I had a neighbor who was a Mormon and I went to church with her once.”

“We’re not quite like the Mormons,” I said.

“I don’t know. I mean, I’m a Christian.”

“Oh, yeah? What church did you go to?”

She shrugged. “I’ve never been to church, just youth group with my friends when I was in high school.”

“Cool, what kind of youth group?”

Again, a blank stare. “I don’t know, we just, like, hung out with our friends and talked about stuff. I didn’t really like it that much, so I stopped going.”

I nodded, and, deciding that the conversation was headed nowhere, stopped asking questions about church and started asking questions about her aspirations as a stylist.

Later, after a short lull in our conversation, she returned to the topic of religion. “So you work at a church? What do you do there?”

I told her that I was currently putting together an alternative worship service on Sunday evenings.

She frowned and stopped cutting my hair. “If you don’t mind me asking, what do you worship there?”

I didn’t even know what to say. I’d never been asked such a question before, and certainly never by someone who’d claimed to be a Christian.

I told her that we praised God and prayed to Jesus. That we contemplated our purpose, especially as it related to communities that suffered poverty and other oppression.

“That’s cool,” she said and pressed on asking questions about how we actually tried to help people. Eventually she admitted that she had given up trying to make a difference, as she had realized it wasn’t really possible.

As she was walking me to the front desk to pay for my haircut, she brought up the topic of religion a third time, out of the blue and with urgency. “I think I’m a really spiritual person! I just don’t know much about the church. It’s not really for me, I don’t think.”

I’ve heard this comment before. I don’t know what to do with it. Is the church not doing its job? Or is it becoming obsolete to upper-middle class Americans?

I don’t know what to do with the fact that Christians, perhaps myself included, aren’t prepared to answer the question, “What do you worship?” I’ve been thoroughly prepared to answer questions of why or how. But ‘what’ completely threw me off my game.

What do we worship?

ETA: Just went to lunch with a friend who started a new job as Youth Director at a suburban church. She has been observing their current Youth Group program and has concluded that it centers around gossip and chilling. She is appalled and eager to create change.

Reposted from Alex Discerns a Way.

Social/Moral Views of the "Nones"

In my series of reflections on the evolution of American religious identity from the 1950s to the present, which draw upon the Putnam/Campbell book American Grace I have noted that we've seen the nation's religiosity swing back and forth, from highly religious, to not so religious and then a return back to conservative religious values.  That last more conservative era of young adults began to end early in the 1990s.  Since then we've seen the pendulum swing the other way, and it is seen expressed most clearly in the movement away from "organized religion."  

The question that lies before us is why this is happening, or more specifically -- what markers are there that suggest a trend.  Robert Putnam and David Campbell point to attitudes among the rising generation toward homosexuality and marijuana.  And, not surprising those who take a more liberal view of these two issues tend to predominate among "Nones."  That is, as the authors note:  "liberal views on sexual morality contributed to their disaffection from religion" (p. 130).  This likely isn't news to many.  In fact, while I don't care for the Kinnaman/Lyon's book UnChristian, they also demonstrate that those most disaffected by organized forms of religion find the church's views on homosexuality distasteful.    

Consider what Putnam and Campbell write:

We make no strong claims about causation here, and we do not believe that it was simply differences over public policy that weakened the ties of this generation to organized religion.  Rather, we suggest, the dramatic contrast between a young generation increasingly liberal on certain moral and lifestyle issues (though still potentially open to religious feelings and ideals) and an older generation of religious leaders who seemed consumed by the political fight against gay marriage was one important source of the second aftershock. (p. 130).

This change of attitude has led to increased unease about mixing religion and politics -- and thus engaging in culture wars.  By continuing to fight these battles the church seems likely to continue pushing younger folks away.

Do give a little context from the news to bolster this change of attitude, I'd point to the debate over abolishing "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" in the military.  According to the Pentagon Report, about 70% of rank and file military have no problem or are neutral regarding the presence of gays serving openly in the military.  Where the problem seems to lie, is among older officers and the large contingent of evangelical chaplains (and certain members of Congress). 

Whether older generations or culture warriors like it or not the times, they are a changin'."  The question is -- how will the church respond?  And if it seeks to keep gays and lesbians at bay, push the upcoming generations further away from the church?

America's Religious Identity -- Boom, Shocks, and After-shocks (Part 4 -- Second Aftershock)

If you can remember back that far, the 1950s and early 1960s were the hey day of institutional religion.  I was, as I've noted, born at the end of the 1950s, grew up in the 60s and 70s and came of age in the early 70s.  I was born into a mainline church, but left it for a more "charismatic" and conservative religious orientation in the mid to late 70s.  Over time I grew disenchanted with my charismatic context, in large part due to the anti-intellectualism that I found there.  I will add, that I also found a lot of hypocrisy in that group as well.  We were very competent in covering our ways in spiritual language.  But, I didn't go "liberal" overnight.  I went to a premier evangelical seminary, though in evangelical circles Fuller is considered liberal, and while I continue to value my education at Fuller, I continued to chaff under the evangelical sub-culture that seemed unable to wrestle in meaningful ways with the intellectual challenges of the age.  That's my story, but there is another story of a more dramatic aftershock to the conservative aftershock of the 1970s and 1980s.

Robert Putnam and David Campbell, writing in their book American Grace, suggest that when we look at demographics, we need to keep in mind that the overall numbers change slowly as one generation gives way to another.  Consider that yesterday we observed Pearl Harbor Day.  World War II began for Americans on December 7, 1941.  That was 69 years ago.  Even the youngest survivors of that day are in their late 80s.   The Greatest Generation, the generation that birthed the Baby Boom and that fueled the religious surge in the 1950s and 1960s is dying off and soon their presence will no longer be felt.  This generation, along with the one that came of age right after WW II, the folks that fought in Korea and have not made as much of a dent in the public mind as either the Greatest Generation or the Baby Boomers, they're aging as well.  Both of these generations are relatively conservative.  As they pass away, the younger generations will begin to make themselves felt. 

Well, if the later Baby Boomers (sometimes called the Jones Generation) and the GenXers were more conservative, leading to the first aftershock, there is a new generation coming of age, and they are both more liberal and increasingly disaffected from institutional forms of religion.  I know one of these people quite well --he's my son!  

One of the key changes in this new generation is the growing presence of what have come to be known as the "None's."  They're a bit like the growing numbers of Americans who choose as their political party affiliation -- Decline to State.  Putnam and Campbell note that in the pre-boomer years maybe 5-7% of the population would have claimed no religious affiliation ("nones").  That doubled among boomers (10-15%), and that has doubled again to 20-30% among those who have come of age in the past two decades.   The authors note that there is no evidence to show that as these younger generations age they're becoming more attached to institutional religion.  Here is the kicker:

Since 2000 generational succession has meant that cohorts of whom barely 5 percent say they have no religious affiliation are being replaced by cohorts of whom roughly 25 percent say they have no religion, massively increasing the nationwide incidence of nones.  (American Grace, p. 123).

It's not that they don't believe in God or seek some kind of spiritual sustenance, as the authors note there are few atheists or agnostics in this bunch.  The New Atheists are making a big splash, but they're really not making many converts!  Many of this new cohorts of "Nones" emerge from homes that were not religious to begin with -- that is children of Boomers who never got introduced to the church or synagogue, but they are also increasingly present among children of the devout, even among the evangelicals.  

And, note this:

The new nones are heavily drawn from the center and left of the political spectrum.  Hout and Fischer have shown that the rise of the new nones closely corresponds (with a lag of about half a decade) to the visibility of the Religious Right in the public media, suggesting that the rise of the nones might be some sort of backlash against religious conservativism.  Our Faith Matters surveys confirm that few of the new nones come from the right half of the political spectrum. (American Grace, p. 127).

Although there are more progressive alternatives to conservative forms of religion, it would appear that the younger cohort isn't paying much attention to these alternatives.  Institutional forms of religion seem to them to be inherently politicized, and they'll get their politics elsewhere.

So, what does this bode for the church?   Although evangelicalism continues to have some presence, the trends don't look good for them either.  Evangelicals could be in much the same place that Mainliners were four decades ago.  And the movements that are tapping into all of this change are what have been called Emergent or Emerging churches.  

I think that the past two election cycles are good examples of this.  In 2008, President Obama and the Democrats had an amazing year, sweeping the Republicans out of the White House and creating huge majorities in Congress.  They did this with a lot of help from young voters.  In 2010, the situation reversed itself.  But all of the polling suggests that the electorate of 2010 was much older than the general population.  Will this reverse itself in 2012?  It's too early to say, but I think it's interesting to note that the Fox viewership mirrors the 2010 electorate, it's getting older.  Younger adults, who didn't show up at the polls in 2010, are turning to Stewart and Colbert!   Oh, and I thought interesting that the median age of viewers for Sarah Palin's Alaska was 57 years old, 15 years older than the typical TLC audience.  

The second aftershock is only now making itself felt -- the question that political parties and religious institutions need to consider, is how this shift will affect their longevity!   

Split Ticket -- A Review

SPLIT TICKET: Independent Faith in a Time of Partisan Politics. Edited by Amy Gopp, Christian Piatt, and Brandon Gilvin. St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2010. viii + 184 pp.

If the reports are to be believed, young adults are leaving the church, either because it has become too politicized or because institutional religion has become corrupt and moribund. They are, for instance, turned off by their perception that churches tend to be anti-homosexual. And if truth be told, they’re probably correct in this perception, for at most, a majority of churches have followed the lead of the military and have instituted a policy of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” In other words, stay in the closet.

Of course, not all young adults are leaving the church. Neither are all young adults rejecting what some would call political agendas (definitions are important here, because many consider social justice advocacy/action to be political, while others see it as a proper extension of the gospel). As is true of people of every generation, today’s young adults are not of one mind when it comes to the question of politics and religion. Things are complex!

Split Ticket, the book that is under review here, is the second book in Chalice Press’s WTF (Where’s the Faith?) Series, a series that is edited by, authored by, and intended for young adults. The first book in the series, provocatively titled O God! O God! O God!, (reviewed here) looked at the issue of sex, and this book will be just as provocative as the first. Focusing here on the relationship between faith and politics, we are presented with a series of nineteen essays that range from anarchist to prophetic to politically engaged. The theology evidenced by the writers runs from evangelical to liberationist. Authors are gay and straight, male and female, clergy and laity, and from most every ethnic community. As is true in the first volume in this series, the essays are extremely personal. These volumes are designed to start a conversation, which is why each chapter ends with three discussion questions.

This volume is divided into three sections – “From Awakenings to Activism”; “God in the Voting Booth”; and “We’ve Got Issues.” To give a flavor of the essays comprising each section, consider that the first section includes essays about connecting faith to activism, including an essay by David Ball entitled “Thy Revolution Come: An Invitation to Radical Discipleship.” Ball frames his essay with the Lord’s Prayer, and suggests that radical discipleship is best expressed through “Christian Anarchism.” Christian anarchism, as the phrase suggests, calls for radical, even revolutionary action, even against one’s own government. Amy Gopp, one of the three co-editors, on the other hand reflects back to her time spent in Bosnia, and speaks of building bridges between groups and peoples in the pursuit of peace.

In the second section the essays range from the provocative essay by John Edgerton and Vince Amlin that charges that voting itself is an act of violence and coercion, and thus as Christians they have decided not to vote. They suggest that a better way of making decisions is one of consensus-building. As one who has long believed that voting is a national responsibility, this essay was disturbing to say the least, and yet it is a view that many are considering in our day. On the other hand, others see the value of one’s faith in influencing not just voting, but political action. If there is a consensus here is that, as Gabriel Saguero writes, “the Gospel challenges all political ideologies and denounces any obedience to any Lord but Christ” (p. 113).

In the final section, the essayists reflect on the leading issues of our time, from abortion to health care reform, and the way that we deal with them from a perspective of faith. What is clear from the essays is that this isn’t a clear-cut process. There is gray area to be considered, and the role of the church needs to be weighed carefully. Christian Piatt writes an intriguing and extremely personal essay about his own struggle with the pro-life/pro-choice debate in the context of the births of his own two children. Being strongly pro-choice, he found himself equally pro-life, as he fell in love with the “it” that was the fetus being carried by his wife. Christian reminds us that personal experience is a powerful contributor to the way we look at issues. Things become much less cut and dry, once one is personally engaged. As Christian puts it:

I’m not ready to jump the pro-choice ship, but the experiences of parenthood have had a permanent change on my understanding of life, the human soul, and our responsibility as joint stewards of those lives. . . . I may wrestle with this subject until the end of my days, but one thing is for sure: I love my kids, both of them. Even if one of them had never been able to join us in the world, and had never had the opportunity of loving and being loved, I would still love “It” all the same (p. 134).

So, are young adults calling for the church to be apolitical? No, however, they want the church to deal honestly with issues such as homosexuality, abortion, justice, the environment. They decry hypocrisy and want issues to be dealt with in light of faith and not just politics as usual being baptized into the church. They are passionate, but they also seem to want to keep the bridges standing (unless you’re an anarchist and the bridges lead to injustice). Perhaps Earle Fisher states it best:

Political truths may be something we’re willing to fight for, campaign for, or give money to. But a personal, spiritual truth, truly embraced as a foundational tenet of our identity as God-created beings, is something to which we’re willing to give our entire lives to, and perhaps die for (p. 148).

In other words, for these young adults, faith is the foundation, the guide, for their political engagement, even if that means deciding not to participate in the political process, because to do so would be to participate in a coercive, and therefore violent, system.

I heartily recommend this book to anyone wishing to understand the relationship of faith and politics. These essays may be written by and for young adults, but the issues they raise, and the solutions they suggest, are as pertinent to those who are well into their retirement years as those who are just entering the adult world.

While my recommendation of this book would not be any different, I should note that the editors, all members of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) are people whom I know and have worked with in the past (and in the present). I have high regards for all of them as individuals and for the work that they do in the church and outside it. Two of them, Amy Gopp and Brandon Gilvin, are Disciples clergy, while the third, Christian Piatt, is married to one. They are all committed to the church and to social justice (Gopp and Gilvin are in leadership at Week of Compassion, the relief and development arm of the Disciples).

As for the authors, many of the contributors are unknown to me, and while I agree with some and not with others, each of them offered insightful and challenging words that demand my attention, and the attention of any reader. If we’re to accept the premise that young adults are tired of politicized churches, then we must first understand what they mean by their critique, and this is a good place to start!