Barry's Blog

In spite of the increasing political clout on the national stage, along with packed megachurches across America, evangelical Christian leaders are giving warnings that our teenagers are abandoning the Christian faith in droves. As reported in a recent  article in The New York Times, in a series of unusual leadership meetings in forty-four cities this fall, more than 6,000 pastors are hearing some dire forecasts from some of the more luminary representatives of the conservative, evangelical movement in America.

One of the more alarming trends noted by some of these leaders is that if current trends continue, only 4 percent of teenagers will be "Bible-believing Christians" as adults. That would be a sharp decline compared with the 35 percent of the current generation of baby boomers, and the 65 percent of the World War II generation. While some youth leaders believe the statistics are greatly exaggerated (one evangelical magazine for youth pastors has dubbed the findings as "the 4 percent panic attack"), there is little doubt among most evangelical leaders that teens of today do not share "their father's world." They look at life, including their faith, through a different set of glasses.

Ron Luce, who founded the youth ministry outreach called Teen Mania, observes that: "I'm looking at the data, and we've become post-Christian America, like post-Christian Europe. We've been working as hard as we know how to work - everyone in youth ministry is working hard - but we're losing." And many Christian teenagers and youth pastors are sounding a similar genuine alarm, admitting that they find it difficult to compete against a pervasive culture of cynicism about their Christian faith, as well as the casual "hooking up" approach to sex, and a culture that glamorizes alcohol and drugs. Oftentimes, evangelical teens feel like a tiny, beleaguered minority in a sea of relativism.

Yet, the phenomenon may not be that young evangelicals are abandoning their faith, but that they are abandoning the institutional church. So says Lauren Sandler, author of Righteous: Dispatches from the Evangelical Youth Movement, who writes that she has found the movement "frighteningly robust," in spite of the fact that she sees herself as a secular liberal. Ms. Sandler, an editor at Salon.com, suggests that "this generation is not about church. They always say, 'We take our faith outside the four walls.' For a lot of young evangelicals, church is a rock festival, or a skate park or hanging out in someone's basement."

According to Christian Smith, evangelicals are the envy of Roman Catholics, mainline Protestants, and Jews, when it comes to organizing youth. Smith, a professor of sociology at the University of Notre Dame, specializes in the study of American evangelicals, and conducted extensive surveys of teens for his book, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (Oxford Press, 2005).

Smith says he was skeptical about the 4 percent statistic cited earlier, and observed that the figure was from a footnote in a book which was inconsistent with research he had conducted and reviewed, which found that evangelical teens are more likely to remain involved with their faith than are mainline Protestants, Catholics, Jews and teens from almost every other religion. "A lot of the goals I'm very supportive of," Smith said of the new evangelical youth campaign, "but it just kills me that it's framed in such apocalyptic terms that couldn't possibly hold up under half a second of scutiny. It's just self-defeating."

While the statistics can be debated ad infinitum, there is little doubt that our secularized culture has a profound impact upon all of us, and especially our teenagers. We would do well to see that they have the opportunity, whether in a church or parachurch setting, to have quality biblical instruction, authentic community, and youth leaders who serve as significant role models.

For FinishingWell,

Barry Morrow