Rod Dreher posted an interesting essay on March 23, 2016: Millennial Landslide.
I’ll start with a snippet of a quote he provided from another source:
The percentage of Americans who prayed or believed in God reached an all-time low in 2014, according to new research led by San Diego State University psychology professor Jean M. Twenge. [From Fewer Americans Now Pray.]
A few paragraphs down in that same article from the San Diego State University newsletter, we read:
This decline in religious practice has not been accompanied by a rise in spirituality, which, according to Twenge, suggests that, rather than spirituality replacing religion, Americans are becoming more secular. The one exception to the decline in religious beliefs was a slight increase in belief in the afterlife.
“It was interesting that fewer people participated in religion or prayed but more believed in an afterlife,” Twenge said. “It might be part of a growing entitlement mentality — thinking you can get something for nothing.”
Dreher discusses this study and some other studies as well as a book he’d read recently and begins to come to a conclusion by claiming:
The point of the book [Lost in Transition: The Dark Side of Emerging Adulthood written by Christian Smith, et al. and published by Oxford University Press] is not that Millennials are bad people, but rather that they have not been given any clear way to determine what is right and what is wrong, and how to use their reason. So they fall back on what feels right in a given moment. We have thrown our kids into the deep end of a pool, but failed to teach them how to swim.
Dreher’s essay ends with these paragraphs:
This is who we are. This is who we have raised our kids to be, whether we intended to or not. Smith et al. warn against “doom-and-gloomers,” though I’m not quite sure why, and they also warn against older adults who say, “Aww, that’s how kids are, they’ll grow out of it.” That’s a dangerous complacency, they say. And they also warn against drawing firm conclusions based on anecdotal data. They say there’s a lot of bad journalism out there that sees, for example, young people volunteering for political campaigns, and concludes, “See, the kids really are all right. They’re engaged!” The sociological data do not remotely justify that conclusion.
It is not going to get any better in the foreseeable future, only worse, and more difficult. This is why we orthodox Christians who want to resist the spirit of the age, and who want to raise kids able to be resilient, need the Benedict Option. Church youth group, parochial or religious school, and church on Sunday is not enough. Not remotely enough.
I’d suggest that all of us who call ourselves `Christian’ should look into the mirror if we wish to see the real malefactors in this problem of confusion of the very concept of truth. There is a clear case of a particular issue where we Christians have fudged the concept of truth to avoid facing up to a difficult and necessary re-understanding of God’s Creation. And all of this distortion of truth by Christians began when the West was truly Christian; any related distortions of truth by post-Christian secularists is only a continuation of errors and crimes began by Christians.
In The City of God, Augustine of Hippo discusses the origins of the human race and makes a point which seems obvious. I’ll state that point in my terms: Either man arose as a creature by natural processes within this concrete world which is part of God’s Creation or else he was a special creation inserted into this concrete world.
Augustine, who had also noted that the earth was immensely old—far beyond the number of years in a literalistic Biblical chronology, chose to go with the idea of a special creation. Stanley Jaki, Benedictine priest who was a physicist as well as theologian and Bible scholar and historian of human thought, said that Augustine’s choice was the most important and most damaging act of intellectual cowardice in history. I would add, though I don’t know if Jaki would agree, that Augustine made a choice for multiple truths, one truth for the moral and religious dimensions of human life and one truth for the concrete and practical dimensions of human life.
We speak of decisions about sexuality in ideological (not truly `idealistic’) terms while scientists, not villainous in any way, are nibbling away and connecting sexuality and other aspects of human being to their biological foundations. For example, as I discuss in The Demonology of Sexual Behaviors and Preferences, infectious agents can alter our intelligence levels, change some of our personality characteristics, and—likely—change our sexual habits and behaviors.
In general terms: Are we a race trying to recover from a great fall from a state of angelic grace? Are we a race trying to balance ourselves as we rise from our knuckles?
Our ancestors had chosen the first option but masses of empirical facts have pointed to the second option as the truth. But our understandings of our own selves, individual and communal, as well as our hopes rested upon that first option. We have tried to resolve the resulting tensions not by facing up to the factual nature of God’s Creation but rather by claiming to have access to a realm of truth which somehow is disconnected from the world in which we live. In this realm of the spirit or something of the sort, we see purposes and futures which are impossible to reconcile to human history and to the factual reality of our bodies.
After generations of self-delusion and hypocrisy, we have reached such a bad state that the young people of the West are paying the price. They know not truth; they are vacant in their moral selves to a far greater extent than even Pontius Pilate. And all we Christians can do is lament their unwillingness to accept our irrational and hypocritical resolution of the conflict between our claimed beliefs and the facts of this world we claim to be the work of God. Clearly, an awfully botched work because God’s choice of evolutionary and developmental processes is in conflict with our claims to the real truths of God’s Creation.
The young people of this age are left with no understanding of truth because they’ve seen through our lies, our hypocrisies, our acts of cowardice, but they have no resources to rely upon to develop a better understanding of truth and, as a result, they have no chance to develop a better understanding of Creation including that small but important work of God which is human being.