[Last month I had the opportunity to teach grandparents at our grandcamp. The first session I did was titled “Leaving a Legacy” and looked at Psalm 78. The other session I focused on the challenges of generational differences that exist today which did not really exist when we were growing up. This is from my teaching on that.]
When I present on this topic, I know I am likely to step on a few landmines. The reason is simple. Over the course of time, people made politics toxic, by which I mean we stopped having reasonable debates on ideas and moved into attacks, lies, disinformation, misinformation, etc. Then they made everything political. The result is that people have shut down good communication and the respectful exchange of ideas.
Last year I shared a lot of research on Generation Z. Generation Z is the term given to those born between 1999 and 2015 who are the largest American generation. They are today’s students and children – age 7-23.
They are the least reached generation.
They are twice as likely to say they are atheists than adults.
Only 4% hold to a biblical worldview.
They struggle with loneliness despite being the most connected generation to date.
Nearly 1/3 of GenZ say they have no trusted adults in their lives.
35% say they have no one to turn to when they feel stressed.
Nearly 40% have no one to talk to and feel left out.
45% feel as if no-one understands them.
George Barna, leading researcher in the religious life of Americans, tells pastors that the highest priority ministry in the church should be to children. We need to reach and teach scripture to the young in our congregations and communities. Why? According to Barna, a person’s worldview is largely formed by age 13. If we want each generation in the church to have a Biblical worldview the work needs to start young. If we want our grandkids to have such a worldview, this is our window of influence. After that point it becomes increasingly difficult to persuade people of the truth of the gospel. Never impossible… but definitely harder.
So, I want to focus in on what is distinct here between generations because I am suggesting that the generational gap has never been wider. I want adults to be equipped to navigate that divide. My conviction is that if we engage today’s children and youth in some ways that may have been appropriate in the past, we are likely to see kids shut down and close up. I am already hearing from experienced youth and college ministers who are finding that asking a question the wrong way or assuming shared values causes students to glaze over or look around at their peers like we are from another planet.
Carl Trueman in his newest book Strange New World
“For many people, the Western world in which we now live has a profoundly confusing, and often disturbing, quality to it. Things once regarded as obvious and unassailable virtues have in recent years been subject to vigorous criticism and even in some cases come to be seen by many as more akin to vices. Indeed, it can seem as if things that almost everybody believed as unquestioned orthodoxy the day before yesterday—that marriage is to be between one man and one woman, for example—are now regarded as heresies advocated only by the dangerous, lunatic fringe. Nor are the problems confined to the world “out there.” Often, they manifest themselves most acutely and most painfully within families. Parents teaching their family traditional views of sex find themselves met with incomprehension by their children who have absorbed far different views from the culture around them. What a parent considers to be a loving response to a child struggling with same-sex attraction or gender dysphoria might be regarded by the child as hateful and bigoted. And this is as true within the church as it is within wider society. The generation gap today is reflected not simply in fashion and music but in attitudes and beliefs about some of the most basic aspects of human existence. The result is often confusion and sometimes even heartbreak as many of the most brutal engagements in the culture war are played out around the dinner table and at family gatherings. Welcome to this strange new world. You may not like it. But it is where you live, and therefore it is important that you try to understand it.”
So here is what I want to get at…
The generation gap today is reflected not simply in fashion and music but in attitudes and beliefs about some of the most basic aspects of human existence. The result is often confusion and sometimes even heartbreak as many of the most brutal engagements in the culture war are played out around the dinner table and at family gatherings.
What Carl is getting at is that kids today are growing up immersed in a culture that is post Christian, postmodern, and redefining what it means to be human. What does that look like? Perhaps the best way is just dive into some of the cultural mess that kids today are being exposed to without any framework to understand it from a Christian point of view.
CRT – Critical Race Theory. In the summer of 2020, I did a deep dive to understand racism, social justice, equity, intersectionality, privilege, whiteness, fragility, and more. I came to realize that people obsessing over these issues had redefined terms. The words carried new meanings. A prime characteristic of postmodernism is giving new meanings to words. I also became aware that a lot of our high school and college students were being taught ideas like intersectionality and privilege in school. I followed down that trail long enough to see the divisive nature of critical theories.
Our current culture is using justice issues to drive a wedge between father and son, mother and daughter, grandparents and grandkids. Imagine being taught in school that because you are white, you are responsible for slavery and that you are part of the oppressive people. Imagine being taught that if you are black, you are oppressed, a victim, and the system is stacked against you. Now, imagine going home to parents who worked hard for the benefit of a better society and grandparents who marched in the civil rights movement and telling your family what you learned at school. Or imagine being taught these ideas and going home to a black mother and white father. I went on the website of a major organization seeking racial justice in America and read in their statement of beliefs that they “seek to dismantle the nuclear family”. No matter where you stand on issues of racial justice, know that the very nature of the conversation is dividing our families, communities, and churches.
While some in America want people to think that CRT is some boogeyman idea that is not found in our schools, the truth is the opposite. Critical theories are already underlying assumptions in much school curriculum across the country.
Now, what does that mean? Critical theories (CRT, QT, etc) all share a common idea. They teach that the world consists of two types of people. Oppressors and the oppressed. We are all one or the other – except that we can be both. Intersectionality is the idea that the lines between oppressor and oppressed vary according to things like gender, skin color, sexual orientation, etc. We live at the intersections of overlapping systems of privilege and oppression.
Females are oppressed by males, but a white female is also an oppressor to females of color. It’s really like having levels of minority and majority status and everything is pitted against something else. White straight male is the worst place to be in the intersectional web because they just view us as oppressor in every way.
Not only are kids taught that intersectionality is a reality today, but they are also taught that equity is the ultimate goal. We hear that word and think we are hearing the word equality. It is not. Equity means everyone has the same outcome. Equality means everyone gets the same opportunity. If you know anything of modern philosophy, you recognize this is Marxism.
SOGI – sexual orientation and gender identity
We have a huge generation gap around LGBTQ issues. About 6 years ago now I led a seminar at St. Christopher during the summer camp senior session on the subject of how the first few chapters of Genesis form our basic worldview. I talked about God as creator and us His creation and the implications of that. We explored what it means to be made in his image, etc. One thing did not sit with some of the students. I suggested that God made us male and female. God does not make mistakes, and would it not be an insult to our creator to change that? It ruffled a few campers so much that some questioned whether or not I should be invited back.
We have moved a long way in the past few years on these issues. The push to view gender as fluid and reject biological sex is not only irrational, it blows apart the notion of family and demands that we reject God. It’s hard to get our heads around how we went from a culture that embraced male and female, marriage and family, etc to an anything goes sexuality and gender fluidity. And we did this in less than a generation. Carl Trueman seems to get at the core of the issue. His book “The Rise & Triumph of the modern self” explores the idea of Expressive individualism that “particularly refers to the idea that in order to be fulfilled, in order to be an authentic person, in order to be genuinely me, I need to be able to express outwardly or perform publicly that which I feel I am inside. So expressive individualism in some ways overturns a lot of the notions of the self that previous generations may have held to.” “Expressive Individualism requires that society recognize the individual as supreme value.”
All of this ties into how we see the self, what is our identity, who am I, etc and youth today think very differently about these things than adults do. We don’t connect our identity to our sexuality. I don’t go around introducing myself as a cis gendered heterosexual male.
My wife is a middle school PE teacher. That means two things. One, she teaches all the kids in the school at some point. The other is she has to teach sex ed. She used to enjoy the challenge of correcting kids often funny misconceptions about sex and reproduction. Now she fields more questions about same sex interaction than boy girl interaction. She sees clearly that kids are being educated by porn more than by parents. And (this is the real tough one) she sees gender dysphoria every day in her classes. Over the past decade it went from boys and girls interests to same gender interests to what gender am I.
Climate change – you might not think of climate change as a cultural mess issue but I bring it up as one more significant area where kids think differently than generations before them. Many years ago, I listened to Al Gore talking to a group of children and telling them that global warming was going to cause catastrophic events in the next 20+ years and that their generation needed to be the ones to end the use of fossil fuels. He then told them that their parents would not understand this. They were ignorant and would refuse to listen, but they were wrong, and he was speaking the truth to them. I was shocked at the time. What is more shocking is knowing that teachers all over America have followed Al Gore’s lead on this for years …and taught kids that they know something their parents will never understand. Now, let me say I know climate change is real and needs to be addressed. My point in bringing this up is to show the wedge being driven between parent and child. This is a subject that is driving the anxiety crisis among kids because so many of them have been told that we have less than ten years now to end fossil fuels or we will see mass extinction events taking place. If that sounds too wild to be true, search Greta Thunberg on the internet.
I wrote a series of articles for a popular blog on climate anxiety among teens and how we can speak to the subject. In writing it I did a lot of research and was stunned to find out just how much climate panic is driving kids’ anxiety. What they don’t understand is that no scientist has suggested that the world is going to end or become inhabitable if we don’t end fossil fuels in the next decade. And we can’t just tell them because they have been convinced of not only that but that we are wrong on the subject.
Now, given that there is a more significant generational gap than has been before, what do we do? I believe that we ought to make the most of the opportunities that are arising because of the needs and hungers of this generation. The research is showing a few things that open doors for our stronger spiritual relationship with our grandkids.
1. Loneliness is a real issue for kids today especially coming out of the Covid. We can be there for them and with them, a presence that will be significant even when it is silent.
2. Research says there is a spiritual openness that is increasing among kids. The least Christian generation is not the least spiritual. Many unchurched are exploring spirituality outside of the church. That hunger is a good sign.
3. There is a desire among Gen Z to make a difference in the world. They have been described as an activist generation. They want a cause. We can direct that energy for the kingdom and draw our grandkids into gospel causes.
I was listening to a podcast recently which interviewed a youth ministry leader who described how his organization is teaching their folks to interact differently with kids today. I mentioned early on about kids eyes glazing over or other reactions if we raise the wrong question or say something that triggers them. I think this is a helpful way of thinking about our interaction with grandkids because they are immersed in such a different world. It is simply this…
Ask, listen, tell.
We need to be curious enough to ask lots of questions. When those we love have really misguided ideas, we do far better asking them questions to find out where those notions came from, why they think that way, etc. We can dismantle wrong ideas with questions that reveal the flaws in the ideas. This way we are less likely to make them defensive or feel like we are being critical.
We need to be good listeners. David W. Augsburger said “Being heard is so close to being loved that for the average person, they are almost indistinguishable.” Sometimes just being listened to is all we need. When we listen, it’s helpful to use reflective techniques to let people know we are listening. A simple way to do that is paraphrase what you just heard as you respond. If you get it wrong, kids will probably correct you – which is great because it creates far more clarity.
Tell might be our teaching moment but I honestly think it’s better to be our sharing moment when we say what we think or believe. Your grandkids look up to you and love you enough to value what you believe even when they don’t believe the same things. The fact that you hold to an idea is persuasive enough to make them pause.
Ask, listen, tell, and pray! Pray for this generation of children and youth that God would move powerfully among them before the culture takes them captive.
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