October 6, 2006 Evangelicals Fear the Loss of Their Teenagers By LAURIE GOODSTEIN 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 âBible-believing Christiansâ 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 âthe 4 percent panic attackâ), there is widespread consensus among evangelical leaders that they risk losing their teenagers. âIâm looking at the data,â said Ron Luce, who organized the meetings and founded Teen Mania, a 20-year-old youth ministry, âand weâve become post-Christian America, like post-Christian Europe. Weâve been working as hard as we know how to work â everyone in youth ministry is working hard â but weâre losing.â The board of the National Association of Evangelicals, an umbrella group representing 60 denominations and dozens of ministries, passed a resolution this year deploring âthe epidemic of young people leaving the evangelical church.â 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 âhooking upâ 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 âBiblical valuesâ 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. âWhen we brought food, we thought we could get a better turnout,â he said. They got 12. Chelsea Dunford, a 17-year old from Canton, Conn., said, âAt school I donât have a lot of friends who are Christians.â 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. âA lot of my friends are self-proclaimed agnostics or atheists,â said Ms. Dunford, who wears a bracelet with a heart-shaped charm engraved with âtlw,â for âtrue love waits,â 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: âItâs scary sometimes. You get made fun of.â To break the isolation and bolster the teenagersâ 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 âroadiesâ are 700 teenagers who have interned for a year at Teen Maniaâs âHonor Academyâ 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 masterâs degree from the Graduate School of Business Administration at Harvard and the star power of an aging rock guitarist. âThatâs more than Paul McCartney has pulled in,â 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, âWe wonât be silent.â 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 âcultural garbage.â Trash cans filled with folded pieces of paper on which the teenagers had scribbled things like Ryan Seacrest, Louis Vuitton, âGilmore Girls,â âDays of Our Lives,â Iron Maiden, Harry Potter, âneed for a boyfriendâ and âmy perfect teeth obsession.â One had written in tiny letters: âfornication.â
Continued: Some teenagers threw away cigarette lighters, brand-name sweatshirts, Mardi Gras beads and CDâs â one titled âIâm a Hustla.â âLord Jesus,â Mr. Luce prayed into the microphone as the teenagers dropped their notes into the trash, âI strip off the identity of the world, and this morning I clothe myself with Christ, with his lifestyle. Thatâs what I want to be known for.â 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. âThe uniqueness of the evangelical situation is the fact that during the 80âs and 90âs you had the Reagan revolution that was growing the evangelical churches,â 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 âRighteous: Dispatches from the Evangelical Youth Movementâ (Viking, 2006). Ms. Sandler, who calls herself a secular liberal, said she found the movement frighteningly robust. âThis generation is not about church,â said Ms. Sandler, an editor at Salon.com. âThey always say, âWe take our faith outside the four walls.â For a lot of young evangelicals, church is a rock festival, or a skate park or hanging out in someoneâs basement.â Contradicting the sense of isolation expressed by some evangelical teenagers, Ms. Sandler said, âI met plenty of kids who told me over and over that if youâre not Christian in your high school, youâre not cool â kids with Mohawks, with indie rock bands who feel peer pressure to be Christian.â 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 âSoul Searching: the Religious and Spiritual lives of American Teenagersâ (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. âA lot of the goals Iâm very supportive of,â Mr. Smith said of the new evangelical youth campaign, âbut it just kills me that itâs framed in such apocalyptic terms that couldnât possibly hold up under half a second of scrutiny. Itâs just self-defeating.â The 4 percent is cited in the book âThe Bridger Generationâ 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. âI would have to, with integrity, say there has been no significant follow-up to see if the numbers are still valid,â 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. Barnaâs methodology, however, for defining âBible-believingâ so narrowly that it excludes most people who consider themselves Christians. Mr. Luce responded: âIf the 4 percent is true, or even the 5 percent, itâs an indictment of youth ministry. So certainly theyâre going to want different data.â Outside the arena in Amherst, the teenagers at Mr. Luceâs Acquire the Fire extravaganza mobbed the tables hawking T-shirts and CDâs stamped: âBranded by God.â Mr. Luceâs strategy is to replace MTVâs 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 âAcquire the Fireâ T-shirts. âYou were there? Youâre a Christian?â he said the young people would say to one another. âThe fire doesnât die once you leave the stadium. But itâs a challenge to keep it burning.â http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/06/u...=1160107200&partner=homepage&pagewanted=print
I would hope that youth would steer clear of any religious extremist thinking... Front, back, right, and left...
You dumb Democrats. You canât even get your October surprises right. Conservatives will still go to the polls to secure your defeat like the rising sun on election day.
Hmmm... who knows what the masses will vote.. but it seems like you know it all. Care to tell where you got that insight from?
I'd confidently guess they're gaining more in recruits than what they're losing to secularism. What about liberals, though? Those suckers are breeding themselves out of existence. (Births below replacement rate.) Good. Couldn't happen to a more deserving group of people.
Hopefully yes, but it won't really matter all that much for the countries where the Muslims are immigrants. Those Muslims setting France ablaze a year ago weren't exactly religious nuts. Even when Muslims quit the face they maintain the Muslim identity. That is just as troublesome. (Would it really help Israel all that much if the Arabs there quit the religious side of Islam? They'd still be 'identity Muslims' and Arabs; ie still a massive headache.)
"Teenagers lose their fear of evangelicals" Bout time. Or did i read that wrong? Could have sworn, Z10 hadnt posted (much, for a few days) i was becoming concerned he had fallen ill or something. Perhaps, got sick, and went into toxic schlock..............................
i think its simpler than this. religion is driving youth away from the churches. i go to a large baptist type church to keep my wife happy. at my church you are not a "real" christian unless you believe these things: god made the earth 6000 years ago just as you see it today god made man from dust god made woman from a mans rib the bible is the inerrant word of god and every word of it is accurate right down to the punctuation. satan roams the earth trying to trick people evolution is a giant conspiricy by scientists to deny gods word. jesus will return any day now. once there was a great worldwide flood where god killed every living thing. noah collected 2 of every animal and put them in a giant boat to ride out the flood. unless you believe all these things god will burn you forever in a giant pit of fire somewhere in the center of the earth. god sent himself to earth to kill himself to save us from gods wrath. ect. ect. really i ask you. how can you sell this nonsense to educated youth today and expect them to take what you say seriously?