Over the weekend I got the latest edition of Christianity Today in the mail. The cover story of this issue is a doozie: “When Are We Going to Grow Up? The Juvenilization of American Christianity.” The article is based on a new similar titled book by Thomas Bergler, called The Juvenilization of American Christianity
Beginning in the 1930s and ’40s, Christian teenagers and youth leaders staged a quiet revolution in American church life that led to what can properly be called the juvenilization of American Christianity. Juvenilization is the process by which the religious beliefs, practices, and developmental characteristics of adolescents become accepted as appropriate for adults. It began with the praiseworthy goal of adapting the faith to appeal to the young, which in fact revitalized American Christianity. But it has sometimes ended with both youth and adults embracing immature versions of the faith.
The article was a fascinating read of mostly Evangelical history stretching back to the pre-WWII era. I hadn’t realized the malaise we’re in within Evangelicalism stretches back that far! And the malaise of which refer and of which Bergler himself speaks is that the broader adult population of the Evangelical church has adopted wholesale the practices of church youth culture. In other words, what was “contained” within the youth group has now been adopted, packaged, and sold to the broader general adult gathering and programing.
In many ways this makes sense as the broader culture is now overly youth obsessed to the point that youth culture drives mainstream pop-culture. My wife commented how a showing of Twilight yielded as many 40 year olds and 14 year olds. Middle-age soccer moms don’t want to get older as much as their teenagers don’t want to grow-up. The broader culture is drenched in the values and impulses of youth culture, and now so to is mainstream Evangelical church culture.
One of the biggest areas Bergler sees as a problematic contributor is music and the alternative offered by the Christian culture. And growing up a CCM kid who went to his fare share of DC Talk and Newsboys concerts, I get this. Interestingly, Bergler traces part of this genesis of alternative music to Evangelicalism providing a replacement to Elvis Presley:
It also helped that adults provided white evangelical teenagers with replacements for most of the youth-culture pleasures they renounced. In those rare cases where no equivalent could be found, they simply redefined life with Jesus to be just like whatever teenagers had to give up, only better.
One anonymous YFC teenager wrote of her disillusionment with Elvis Presley: “The fact of the matter is, I’ve found something else that has given me more of a thrill than a hundred Presleys ever could! It’s a new friendship with the most wonderful Person I’ve ever met, a Man who has given me happiness and thrills and something worth living for.”
Evangelical teenagers were coming to describe the Christian life as falling in love with Jesus and experiencing the “thrills” and “happiness” of a romantic relationship with him. Perhaps because they believed so strongly in a personal relationship with Jesus as the center of Christianity, they didn’t question what might be lost when that relationship was equated with an erotic, emotional attraction to a teen idol.
Earlier Bergler wrote how Christian leaders had “a dream of beating ‘the world’ at its own game” by starting they started weekly Saturday night youth rallies they held in auditoriums that featured, among other things, “live radio broadcasts” and “upbeat music that mimicked the crooner and big-band styles of the day.” But instead of simply mimicking the style, the music and CCM scene morphed into an alternative teen idol and, I believe, a warped, counter-NT picture of Jesus Christ himself who is now contributing to the religious state of teenagers and even adults described below.
The author isn’t so much criticizing the adaptation of cultural methods in the church as he is exposing what such uncritical adoption has done and is doing in the church. I don’t think he would be opposed to conceptualization, but is exposing what happens when such contextualization isn’t accompanied by critical judgment. And that uncritical eye within youth adaptation to youth culture has led to “unintended consequences” within broader Evangelicalism:
Still, churches new to juvenilization would do well to consider its unintended consequences. Juvenilization tends to create a self-centered, emotionally driven, and intellectually empty faith. In their landmark National Study of Youth and Religion, Christian Smith and his team of researchers found that the majority of American teenagers, even those who are highly involved in church activities, are inarticulate about religious matters. They seldom used words like faith, salvation, sin, or evenJesus to describe their beliefs. Instead, they return again and again to the language of personal fulfillment to describe why God and Christianity are important to them.
Smith and his researchers coined the fast-becoming popular description of such a religious state: Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. This state has replaced the demands and beliefs of the historic Christian faith with a version of the faith that centers on the inner good feelings: Teenagers are “moralistic” in that they believe that God wants us to be good and religion is supposed to help us be good, but religion (especially any one particular religion) isn’t needed to make us good; their faith is “therapeutic” in that God wants us to feel good, so both God and religion are valuable because they help us feel better about our life problems; and it is “deistic” in that “God” is part of the equation, yet stands far removed from their everyday lives and certainly doesn’t make any particular demands on that life.
But how did this happen? Certainly well-meaning Evangelical youth leaders would not consciously promote such a faith. And certainly well-meaning youth leaders would instead want to cultivate vibrant followers of Jesus who had strong faith commitment so Christian orthodoxy. According to Bergler here’s the problem, “As they listen to years of simplified messages that emphasize an emotional relationship with Jesus over intellectual content, teenagers learn that a well-articulated belief system is unimportant and might even become an obstacle to authentic faith. This feel-good faith works because it appeals to teenage desires for fun and belonging. It casts a wide net by dumbing down Christianity to the lowest common denominator of adolescent cognitive development and religious motivation.”
And here’s the doozie:
Today many Americans of all ages not only accept a Christianized version of adolescent narcissism, they often celebrate it as authentic spirituality. God, faith, and the church all exist to help me with my problems. Religious institutions are bad; only my personal relationship with Jesus matters. If we believe that a mature faith involves more than good feelings, vague beliefs, and living however we want, we must conclude that juvenilization has revitalized American Christianity at the cost of leaving many individuals mired in spiritual immaturity.
What’s concerning to me isn’t that Moralistic Therapeutic Deism has become the standard, default faith position of adolescents, though that’s certainly concerning. What’s as scary and perhaps more scary is that Moralistic Therapeutic Deism seems to becoming faith position of mainstream Evangelical adults. Feeling good and being good and believing in a God who simply want’s both for us seems to be standard Christian fare. The Christian faith isn’t so much about our lives revolving around God through daily self-denial/dying and obedience. It’s about a God and faith and church that all exist to help me with my problems. As Bergler says, it’s narcissism celebrated as authentic spirituality.
And now we have an emerging Evangelicalism that is miles wide and paper-thin, filled with people who cannot articulate the Christian faith and have no compelling reason to do so. If it’s simply about my personal relationship with Jesus and God’s good solution to my life problems, should we expect anything less than infant, milk-sippers?
Why do you think we’ve gotten into this mess, this juvenilization of the Church? What do you see as the solution to moving beyond such immature practices and beliefs and maturing?
Good response.
I think this phenomenon is inextricably linked to music and culture. It's the result of a Christianity that has been doing its best to get and retain people as a commercial business would. What the Church offers in most cases is so insubstantial and entertaining that people stay, but they're not really led anywhere. We pull out all the stops (except we don't, since we don't use organs anymore) and give people what's familiar and what their generation has grown up with, forsaking anything that might make them have to work too hard to understand. It's basically like a high school English department having students read "Twilight" and suggesting is has any intrinsic value.
The things that are most beneficial for us will usually seem foreign in the beginning. They may even be tedious or take effort. That isn't good for business.
Couple that with a general avoidance of growing up in our culture, and you've got a mix for a Church that may be able to show some excitement, but has little clue of what it's excited about, beyond the promise of a God who exists to meet my needs.
I think, to change this, the Church must once again be a teaching organization. Somewhere we realized that people wouldn't come if we tried to teach them too much actual theology, so we kept it light on the transcendence and heavy on the imminence. That is a fundamentally flawed perspective.
Blessings.
http://togodpraiseandglory.wordpress.com/
"I think, to change this, the Church must once again be a teaching organization." I agree, Jonathan. Discipleship is almost non-existent. Teaching the fundamentals of the Christian faith is mostly unheard-of.
In a follow-up post I'm posting tomorrow or Wed I'll argue that much of the reason we're in this juvenile boat is because Evangelicalism is largely un-creedal and disconnected from the practices of the historic Church. Not that Evangelicalism doesn't line up with the historic creeds or engage in some historic church practice (e.g. sacraments and major church holidays). By in large she is completely disconnected from the rhythms of the catholic, historic Church (lower 'c'), including the ancient creeds and historic practices.
In my view not only do we need to believe with the Church by once again become a teaching organism, we need to *practice* with the Church.
Jeremy, I wonder if simplicity is being mistaken for "juvenile" in some of this discussion. Now, I do believe a wide stripe surely is youth-culture obsessed and that this is nothing new. However, the option is to return to an emotionally ascetic system of guilt and formality that is not necessarily biblical, even if it is historical. I believe, for right or wrong, sacramental substitutes have been applied such as worship singing being the altar and the "altar call" our confession. Our revivalist forms come from the European reaction to relics and abuse and our personal view of God is biblical and historical. There is a modernist attraction to being machine-like, disregarding the mystical. The mystical side of our faith does not need to only come from old, familiar modes. The Bible gives us freedom. Feeling good about grace is a start, simple, and child-like. But, I refuse to sell it out as opposed to enriching it further with depth. To engage God with the mind need not exclude the enjoyment of grace and the simplicity of the proposition of the Gospel and experience of the power of the life of the Holy Spirit–a doctrine too shallow in the toolbox of many.
Great post that produces much thought. I also find it interesting that the article you reference goes back so far in time. I would have simply blamed the boomers and called it good. 😉 I also wonder what articles would have been written about the 1st century Church. The Church has always had issues to contend with. Thanks again for the post.
I'm reading the book Culture Making by Andy Crouch. In it he suggests that Christians have typically taken one of four postures toward our culture: Condemning (fundamentalists), Critiquing (Evangelicals), Copying (CCM), and Consuming (today's post modern person).
It's always difficult to detect where and how exactly, one has been shaped by the broader culture – we tend to be like the fish that aren't aware of the water around them. It's good to get other perspectives. Crouch suggest two other "C" postures – Creating and Cultivating (the artist and gardener) as more positive ways than the more reactive postures of the first four Cs.
Maybe in focusing on making a positive impact on the culture instead of just reacting to it, the church could grow in the maturity necessary to manage the paradoxical tensions of transcendence and imminence, childlike experience of the Spirit and robust theology.