Talking
to Generation X
Sarah
E. Hinlicky
Copyright
(c) 1999 First Things 90 (February1999): 10–11.
We've
never been proud to be Americans–our political memory stretches back
only as far as Vietnam, Watergate, and Reaganomics. Our
parents left religion and, perhaps not coincidentally,
each other in unprecedented numbers. Failed ideologies
were mother's milk to us: love didn't save the world, the
Age of Aquarius brought no peace, sexual liberation brought
us AIDS and legions of fatherless children, Marxism collapsed.
We can't even imagine a world of cultural or national unity;
our world is more like a tattered patchwork quilt. We have
every little inconsequential thing, Nintendo 64s and homepages
and cell phones, but not one important thing to believe
in. We are the much–maligned Generation X: your mission
is to get us back to church.
There's a problem
in this project. Even though we share the same cultural
background, not all members of my generation are alike.
After all, it's not so easy to sum up the character of
a group whose only certain common feature is age. Yet there's
something to be said for such generalizations. So drawing
on our commonality (in spite of our diversity) and the
extraordinary presumption of youth, I present here a vision
of what the Xers might say if they all banded together
to tell you what might persuade them to reenter the fold.
My
authority on this subject can be challenged because in
one critical
respect I am not part of the "we" in what follows. I do
go to church and am utterly taken with "the Christian thing." But
I know a lot of people of my generation who don't and aren't.
So while I don't claim to be an expert (and am not sure
what it would mean to be an expert on this subject), I'll
presume to talk about "we" and "us" and ask the reader
to accept it for what it's worth.
We
know you've tried to get us to church. That's part of
the problem.
Many of your appeals have been carefully calculated for
success, and that turns our collective stomach. Take worship,
for instance. You may think that fashionably cutting–edge
liturgies relate to us on our level, but the fact is, we
can find better entertainment elsewhere. The same goes
for anything else you term "contemporary." We see right
through it: it's up–to–date for the sake of being up–to–date,
and we're not impressed by the results. In any event, you're
not doing us any favors by telling us we're so important
that age–old prayers and devotions can be rewritten to
suit our personal whims. We know intuitively that, in the
cosmic scheme of things, the stakes are too high for that.
On
the other hand, you shouldn't be excessively medieval
and mysterious, either.
Mystery works up to a point, but it's addictive, and once
we get hooked on it, the Church won't be able to provide
enough to support our habit. We'll turn instead (many of
us already have) to Eastern gurus and ancient pagan pantheons
to satisfy all the esoteric delights our souls might desire.
The human lust for secret knowledge should not be underestimated
and certainly not encouraged. The Church has fought against
that gnostic impulse from the start: Christianity is explosively
non–secretive, God enfleshed for everyone to see, the light
shining in the darkness. We're much too comfortable alone
in the dark; we need the light to shake us up.
Then, of course,
there is the matter of telling us that the Church possesses
the Absolute Truth. Gen Xers doubt the very existence of
such Truth with a capital T. We're much more comfortable
with the idea of a multiplicity of little truths than one
single unifying truth. But even if universal truth does exist,
we are extremely skeptical that you–or anyone else–can
possess it. Admittedly, this skepticism is a bit puerile.
All the more reason not to use "the Truth" as the basis
for evangelizing us, because it will backfire. And when
your evangelizing attempts do fail, don't let the word "Hell" cross
your lips. That's another thing we don't believe in.
As
you can see, Generation Xers are a strangely complicated
and self–contradictory
bunch. Torn between rigid scientific doubt on the one hand
and irrational credulity toward the supernatural on the
other, we tend to have a generalized belief in God but
are doubtful of his personal concern for us. It often sounds
to us like the Church preaches two Gods, one of law and
another of love. The first punishes sins (though we see
evildoers get away with murder) while the second babysits
his flock (but there's too much suffering for us to buy
that, either). We refuse God's judgments, yet judge our
parents harshly by canons in which hypocrisy is the only
capital crime. And anything that smacks of the Establishment
(a hangup inherited from our Boomer parents) elicits nothing
but our contempt. The Establishment purports to be for
the greater good, but what has the greater good ever done
for us? Each of us is the center of his or her own universe,
and so we abhor any kind of coercion, no matter how gentle,
socially beneficial, or genuinely correct. In our eyes,
the Church's standards of orthodoxy and behavior are as
coercive as the government's laws. Both seem to be convenient
vehicles for affirming preconceived notions, whether the
narrow–minded judgments of parochial middle America or
the social agendas of trendy leftists. We see complicity
in the Church where you want us to see stability, moralism
where you want us to see righteousness. The ultimate difference
is that where you see the City of God we see only the City
of Man.
Our stumbling
block is Christianity presented as panacea. You're right
that we are looking for healing, and usually in all the
wrong places. When we're at our worst, we turn to drugs
to numb the pain, cure the boredom, and escape the nothingness
that haunts our lives. At our best we try alternative medicine,
psychology, meditation, yoga, diets and exercise, successful
careers, or falling in love. We invest ourselves in these
things, and they inevitably fail. Which is what we expected
anyway. We have learned that nothing can be trusted, so
we've given up on trust altogether. Don't tell us that
the Church can be trusted because, frankly, we doubt it.
Don't tell us Christianity is the answer to our problems,
because nothing but death will take them away. (Ever wonder
why our suicide rate is so high?)
So
you're in quite a pickle: you can't tell us that the
Church has "the Truth," and
we know that the Church won't miraculously cure us of our
misery. What do you have left to persuade us? One thing:
the story. We are story people. We know narratives, not
ideas. Our surrogate parents were the TV and the VCR, and
we can spew out entertainment trivia at the drop of a hat.
We treat our ennui with stories, more and more stories,
because they're the only things that make sense; when the
external stories fail, we make a story of our own lives.
You wonder why we're so self–destructive, but we're looking
for the one story with staying power, the destruction and
redemption of our own lives. That's to your advantage:
you have the best redemption story on the market.
Perhaps
the only thing you can do, then, is to point us towards
Golgotha,
a story that we can make sense of. Show us the women who
wept and loved the Lord but couldn't change his fate. Remind
us that Peter, the rock of the Church, denied the Messiah
three times. Tell us that Pilate washed his hands of the
truth, something we are often tempted to do. Mostly, though,
turn us towards God hanging on the cross. That is what
the world does to the holy. Where the cities of God and
Man intersect, there is a crucifixion. The best–laid plans
are swept aside; the blueprints for the perfect society
are divided among the spoilers. We recognize this world:
ripped from the start by our parents' divorces, spoiled
by our own bad choices, threatened by war and poverty,
pain and meaninglessness. Ours is a world where inconvenient
lives are aborted and inconvenient loves are abandoned.
We know all too well that we, too, would betray the only
one who could save us.
One more thing.
In our world where the stakes are high, remind us that
all hope is not lost. As Christians you worship not at
the time of the crucifixion, but Sunday morning at the
resurrection. Tell us that the lives we lead now are redeemed,
and that the Church, for all her flaws, is the bearer of
this redemption. A story needs a storyteller, and it is
the Church alone that tells the story of salvation. Here
in the Church is where the cities of Man and God meet,
and that is why all the real spiritual battles, the most
exciting adventure stories, begin here. We know that death
will continue to break our hearts and our bodies, but it's
not the end of the story. Because of all the stories competing
for our attention, the story of the City of God is the
only one worth living, and dying, for.
Sarah E. Hinlicky
is an Editorial Assistant at First Things.
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