All is NOT hunky-dory in the world of evangelical Protestant-dom, as I said in my previous post. We have very serious problems which need to be dragged out into the light and discussed openly and honestly. Sweeping these problems under the rug and pretending that they don’t exist is NOT going to make them not exist. Our movement is rapidly losing relevance in society, and if we continue to pretend that all is well, that will only serve to hasten our decline and journey to the ash heap of societal irrelevance.
One of these problems is college students. We are losing an awful lot of them. The vast majority (I am unsure of the exact percentages on this) of evangelical college students now graduate from college no longer believing in the existence of God.
The stock reaction to this is to blame the colleges. Of course it is all the fault of the queers, the feminazis, the Louis Farrakhan/Jesse Jackson/Al Sharpton wannabes, the atheistic evolutionist college professors, etc who are taking over our college campuses and brainwashing the younger generation. We bitch and moan about what a debaucherous environment the college campus is, about all the temptations to sin that are prevalent in the party scene. We joke about making it through college, that it’s a wonder any of us survived it at all and that if we could just bypass that whole period of life altogether then we would all be much better off. We run commercials on Christian radio about that godless liberal philosophy professor who eats Christian freshmen for lunch–is your little Johnny ready for him? Here, our ministry has all sorts of resources to ensure that your little Johnny has all the answers he could possibly need to shut that godless liberal college professor down.
But is it really the fault of those godless radicals who are taking over the college campuses and brainwashing our kids? Well, maybe. But I submit to you that a much greater problem is our abject failure in offering our college students any semblance of a faith that is worth holding on to in the face of all the temptations of college.
I have allowed too much of Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Victor Hugo to soak into me over the last few years to go on believing that all our problems are the fault of others. Thanks to the influence of The Brothers Karamazov, in which we are challenged to consider our own responsibility for the most hideous crimes in society, and Les Miserables, in which we are challenged to consider our responsibility for the creation of social structures which exploit the least among us, I simply cannot look at the problem of our vanishing college students without asking how much of this problem is our own doing.
Part of the problem is that we cast the whole thing as an us-versus-them, where we are doing constant battle to preserve the dignity and integrity of the Christian faith and message from the tireless assaults of the forces of darkness. It is a scorched-earth, take-no-prisoners campaign in which we paint grotesquely distorted caricatures of the opposition–those monstrously immoral, bloodsucking queers, feminazis, and other radicals who want nothing more than to impose their corrupt will on all the rest of us.
I will give you an example of how this works. This example concerns college football, which has nothing whatsoever to do with religion. But then, college football is a religion in this part of the country, so I guess it will do just fine.
Arkansas joined the SEC in 1992, and over the course of the years since then, LSU-Arkansas has evolved into something of a strong border rivalry. Most of my family are big-time LSU fans, and over the years I have heard horror stories from the LSU fans that we would hang with about what a snarky, classless bunch those Arkansas fans are and how badly the LSU fans who travel to Arkansas for the LSU-Arkansas games there are treated. Why, there are many restaurants in Arkansas that will not even serve fans of opposing teams. “I’m sorry, but you’re LSU fans and you’ll have to leave.”
A couple of years back I had the opportunity to attend a Georgia-Arkansas game in Fayetteville. The distance from Athens to Fayetteville was too great for the Redcoat Band to travel there, so they got a group of Redcoat alumni together to form a small pep band for this game. Due to all the LSU horror stories that I had heard, I went into this thing expecting the worst. I was completely blown away by the fact that the Arkansas fans we came into contact with during the course of our trip were nothing at all like the way the LSU fans described them. Instead, they were very classy and hospitable. They were friendly to us and wished us good luck and a safe trip. I came away from that experience with the feeling that someone had given me bad information about Arkansas fans.
The same thing happens with a lot of evangelical college students. They hear all the bad things we say about those godless liberals who want to corrupt our nation. And then they get to college and actually meet one of those “godless liberals” in the flesh, and realize that what they are looking at is a normal person who is nothing like what they were led to believe. All their stereotypes come crashing down as they realize that the folks at the church back home were giving them bad information, and their level of distrust for the church back home goes way up. If they are in a place where most of the churches and college ministries in town are saying the exact thing as the church back home, then their level of distrust for Christianity in general goes way up.
Another part of the problem is the environments which we rely on for the spiritual formation of our young people. We need to take a long, hard look at these enviromnents and ask ourselves if they really give young people any semblance of a faith that can carry them through the storms and temptations of life.
I have just finished reading Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, the story of the wife of a small-town doctor, her adulterous affairs, and the spiritual, mental, and physical corruption and degradation which ultimately result. One of the issues in her decline is the religious education that she received; it was little more than stimulation toward sentimental imaginings and it was of no worth to her whatsoever in sustaining her through the storms and temptations of life to come.
The typical youth group setting which our young people experience is nothing more than a place to hang out with all their Christian friends and talk about all the latest Christian gossip (How do you like the latest Chris Tomlin CD or the latest Margaret Feinberg book? What do you think about those godless fools in the government/administration who will not show us favor by allowing us to do whatever we want to do? What do you think about so-and-so who likes secular music and is obviously quite superficial in his faith and you’d better not get anywhere near him or he will drag you down with him too? etc). It is a place where they can have all the latest CCM worship songs that they all know and love performed for them by a totally rocking band and call the rush that they get from this God. It is a place where they get to hear (what we would consider) relevant, challenging teaching from some guy who is trying to dress and look cool but is old enough to have lost all credentials for possible coolness.
Do we honestly think that such environments are of any worth to our youth in sustaining them through the storms and temptations of life in general, and college life in particular?
The commonly voiced solution to this problem is that we need to be the church. We need to provide environments where evangelical college students can go to be affirmed and challenged in their faith, and shine forth the light of Christ to a dark world. But what do we mean when we say this? Do we intend to provide environments which are basically just more of the same? Do we intend to just keep on doing what we’re doing and blaming those godless liberal college professors? If so, then the bleeding of college students will only continue unabated. We will end up on the ash heap of cultural and societal irrelevance, and we will have no one to blame for it but ourselves.
I agree that we need to be the church. But we need to start by taking a long, hard look at ourselves. What are we doing that is driving college students away from the faith? How are we responsible? I have allowed enough Dostoyevsky and Hugo to soak into me that I am not going to give up asking the question.
We need to look at the experience of God that we are promising our young people and modeling for them. Is it the robust experience of a God who is working quietly over the long haul of our lives, through all of our choices and circumstances, to weave a coherent narrative of His goodness and grace? Or is it the promise of an over-the-top miraculous experience of God’s presence, leading, healing, and provision along with all sorts of ready-made explanations for those who fail to experience it?
We need to look at the kind of worldview that we are communicating and modeling for our young people. Is it a worldview where we believe that Jesus is precisely who he said he is and because of that we who were once dead in our sins are brought to life forever, and have margin for disagreement on things which are not crucial to this core message? Or is it a system where everything on the face of the earth, from the six days of creation to the flood of Noah to the sun standing still to the prohibition on alcohol or women doing anything outside the home to the compulsory support of anti-abortion Republican political candidates to the pre-tribulation Rapture is considered an essential to the Christian faith and message, where compromise or equivocation on any of these seemingly trivial matters marks the progression toward complete and utter unbelief and is therefore not to be tolerated?
And what kind of community are we creating and modeling for our young people? Is it a place where Jesus exists as an abstraction that has given us rules to live our own lives by but has left us free to create it in our own image–a place where they can go and hang with their own kind, hear all the latest Christian gossip, enjoy all the latest cool CCM worship and hear “relevant” teaching? Is it a place that is built upon division and exclusion, whether on the basis of racism, doctrinal correctness, or consumeristic niche marketing? Is it a community predicated upon our arrogance in broadcasting to the world the message that “we’re saved, you’re not, and you need to get saved”? Or is it a place where we recognize that we are all dead in our sins and in desperate need of a savior, where we go out to serve the world in the same way that Christ served, and where all are welcome to come and join us as we wait for the ultimate fulfillment of all that Christ has promised us?
Finally, what is the nature of the Christian commitment that we are calling our young people to? Are we calling our young people to a Christian profession that wallows in the arrogance of how much we can believe and how much we can do for God? Are we calling our young people to broadcast in every possible way, as boldly, loudly, tactlessly, and arrogantly as possible the message that “I’m saved, you’re not, and you need to get saved”, or “I’m a Christian. Look at me to know what Christ is all about”? Are we sending the message that anything other than a “good Christian” and a “strong witness” is just not good enough? Or are we inviting our young people into a commitment that is humbler in how much it is willing to claim and boast of? Are we modeling a kind of commitment that does not boast of how much one believes or how much one is willing to do for Christ but rather rests in all that Christ has done for us?
We need to talk about these things. All is NOT hunky-dory in the world of evangelical Protestant-dom; instead we have very serious problems which need to be addressed and which will not go away if we simply pretend that they do not exist. We are on the verge of losing an entire generation of college students because of our insistence that all is well in our world despite the glaring evidence to the contrary, and I am not willing to just sit back and let it happen. So I am going to keep on asking the questions, bringing the issues to light and pushing for us to talk about them, even at the risk of making a complete and total ass of myself.
