you can fool some of the people some of the time.....
the youngsters see the hypocricy of many evangelicals using religion
for control ..... not in advancing the precepts of ....love and peace.
Just the opposite...they see clearly ....advancement in their
congregations of : hatred, bigotry, intolerance, retribution, greed,
and hypocritical promotion of the GOP as the party of family values,
when in fact ...the GOP is steeped in:
misinformation
unbridled greed
censorship
militarism
deficits
bribery
extortion
retribution
theocracy
racism
corporatism
imperialism
cronyism
incompetence
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/06/us/06evangelical.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slog...
Despite their packed megachurches, their political clout and their
increasing visibility on the national stage, evangelical Christian
leaders are warning one another that their teenagers are abandoning
the faith in droves.
At an unusual series of leadership meetings in 44 cities this fall,
more than 6,000 pastors are hearing dire forecasts from some of the
biggest names in the conservative evangelical movement.
Their alarm has been stoked by a highly suspect claim 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 35
percent of the current generation of baby boomers, and before that, 65
percent of the World War II generation.
While some critics say the statistics are greatly exaggerated (one
evangelical magazine for youth ministers dubbed it the 4 percent
panic attack), there is widespread consensus among evangelical
leaders that they risk losing their teenagers.
Im looking at the data, said Ron Luce, who organized the meetings
and founded Teen Mania, a 20-year-old youth ministry, and weve
become post-Christian America, like post-Christian Europe. Weve been
working as hard as we know how to work everyone in youth ministry is
working hard but were losing.
The board of the National Association of Evangelicals, an umbrella
group representing 60 denominations and dozens of ministries, passed a
resolution this year deploring the epidemic of young people leaving
the evangelical church.
Among the leaders speaking at the meetings are Ted Haggard, president
of the evangelical association; the Rev. Jerry Falwell; and nationally
known preachers like Jack Hayford and Tommy Barnett.
Genuine alarm can be heard from Christian teenagers and youth pastors,
who say they cannot compete against a pervasive culture of cynicism
about religion, and the casual hooking up approach to sex so
pervasive on MTV, on Web sites for teenagers and in hip-hop, rap and
rock music. Divorced parents and dysfunctional families also lead some
teenagers to avoid church entirely or to drift away.
Over and over in interviews, evangelical teenagers said they felt like
a tiny, beleaguered minority in their schools and neighborhoods. They
said they often felt alone in their struggles to live by their
Biblical values by avoiding casual sex, risqué music and videos,
Internet pornography, alcohol and drugs.
When Eric Soto, 18, transferred from a small charter school to a large
public high school in Chicago, he said he was disappointed to find
that an extracurricular Bible study attracted only five to eight
students. When we brought food, we thought we could get a better
turnout, he said. They got 12.
Chelsea Dunford, a 17-year old from Canton, Conn., said, At school I
dont have a lot of friends who are Christians.
Ms. Dunford spoke late last month as she and her small church youth
group were about to join more than 3,400 teenagers in a sports arena
at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst for a Christian youth
extravaganza and rock concert called Acquire the Fire.
A lot of my friends are self-proclaimed agnostics or atheists, said
Ms. Dunford, who wears a bracelet with a heart-shaped charm engraved
with tlw, for true love waits, to remind herself of her pledge not
to have premarital sex.
She said her friends were more prone to use profanity and party than
she was, and added: Its scary sometimes. You get made fun of.
To break the isolation and bolster the teenagers commitment to a
conservative lifestyle, Mr. Luce has been organizing these stadium
extravaganzas for 15 years. The event in Amherst was the first of 40
that Teen Mania is putting on between now and May, on a breakneck
schedule that resembles a road trip for a major touring band. The
roadies are 700 teenagers who have interned for a year at Teen
Manias Honor Academy in Garden Valley, Tex.
More than two million teenagers have attended in the last 15 years,
said Mr. Luce, a 45-year-old, mop-headed father of three with a
masters degree from the Graduate School of Business Administration at
Harvard and the star power of an aging rock guitarist.
Thats more than Paul McCartney has pulled in, Mr. Luce asserted,
before bounding onstage for the opening pyrotechnics and a prayer.
For the next two days, the teenagers in the arena pogoed to Christian
bands, pledged to lead their friends to Christ and sang an anthem with
the chorus, We wont be silent. Hundreds streamed down the aisles
for the altar call and knelt in front of the stage, some weeping
openly as they prayed to give their lives to God.
The next morning, Mr. Luce led the crowd in an exercise in which they
wrote on scraps of paper all the negative cultural influences, brand
names, products and television shows that they planned to excise from
their lives. Again they streamed down the aisles, this time to throw
away the cultural garbage.
Skip to next paragraph
Multimedia
Slide Show
Courting Evangelical Youth Trash cans filled with folded pieces of
paper on which the teenagers had scribbled things like Ryan Seacrest,
Louis Vuitton, Gilmore Girls, Days of Our Lives, Iron Maiden,
Harry Potter, need for a boyfriend and my perfect teeth obsession.
One had written in tiny letters: fornication.
Some teenagers threw away cigarette lighters, brand-name sweatshirts,
Mardi Gras beads and CDs one titled Im a Hustla.
Lord Jesus, Mr. Luce prayed into the microphone as the teenagers
dropped their notes into the trash, I strip off the identity of the
world, and this morning I clothe myself with Christ, with his
lifestyle. Thats what I want to be known for.
Evangelical adults, like believers of every faith, fret about losing
the next generation, said the Rev. David W. Key, director of Baptist
Studies at the Candler School of Theology of Emory University, in
Atlanta.
The uniqueness of the evangelical situation is the fact that during
the 80s and 90s you had the Reagan revolution that was growing the
evangelical churches, Mr. Key said.
Today, he said, the culture trivializes religion and normalizes
secularism and liberal sexual mores.
The phenomenon may not be that young evangelicals are abandoning their
faith, but that they are abandoning the institutional church, said
Lauren Sandler, author of Righteous: Dispatches from the Evangelical
Youth Movement (Viking, 2006). Ms. Sandler, who calls herself a
secular liberal, said she found the movement frighteningly robust.
This generation is not about church, said Ms. Sandler, an editor at
Salon.com. 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 someones basement.
Contradicting the sense of isolation expressed by some evangelical
teenagers, Ms. Sandler said, I met plenty of kids who told me over
and over that if youre not Christian in your high school, youre not
cool kids with Mohawks, with indie rock bands who feel peer pressure
to be Christian.
The reality is, when it comes to organizing youth, evangelical
Christians are the envy of Roman Catholics, mainline Protestants and
Jews, said Christian Smith, a professor of sociology at the University
of Notre Dame, who specializes in the study of American evangelicals
and surveyed teens for his book Soul Searching: the Religious and
Spiritual lives of American Teenagers (Oxford, 2005).
Mr. Smith said he was skeptical about the 4 percent statistic. He said
the figure was from a footnote in a book and was inconsistent with
research he had conducted and reviewed, which has found that
evangelical teenagers are more likely to remain involved with their
faith than are mainline Protestants, Catholics, Jews and teenagers of
almost every other religion.
A lot of the goals Im very supportive of, Mr. Smith said of the new
evangelical youth campaign, but it just kills me that its framed in
such apocalyptic terms that couldnt possibly hold up under half a
second of scrutiny. Its just self-defeating.
The 4 percent is cited in the book The Bridger Generation by Thom S.
Rainer, a Southern Baptist and a former professor of ministry. Mr.
Rainer said in an interview that it came from a poll he had
commissioned, and that while he thought the methodology was reliable,
the poll was 10 years old.
I would have to, with integrity, say there has been no significant
follow-up to see if the numbers are still valid, Mr. Rainer said.
Mr. Luce seems weary of criticism that his message is overly alarmist.
He said that a current poll by the well-known evangelical pollster
George Barna found that 5 percent of teenagers were Bible-believing
Christians. Some criticize Mr. Barnas methodology, however, for
defining Bible-believing so narrowly that it excludes most people
who consider themselves Christians.
Mr. Luce responded: If the 4 percent is true, or even the 5 percent,
its an indictment of youth ministry. So certainly theyre going to
want different data.
Outside the arena in Amherst, the teenagers at Mr. Luces Acquire the
Fire extravaganza mobbed the tables hawking T-shirts and CDs stamped:
Branded by God. Mr. Luces strategy is to replace MTVs wares with
those of an alternative Christian culture, so teenagers will link
their identity to Christ and not to the latest flesh-baring pop star.
Apparently, the strategy can show results. In Chicago, Eric Soto said
he returned from a stadium event in Detroit in the spring to find that
other teenagers in the hallways were also wearing Acquire the Fire
T-shirts.
You were there? Youre a Christian? he said the young people would
say to one another. The fire doesnt die once you leave the stadium.
But its a challenge to keep it burning.
