Faith, generational thinking, and an increasingly unfamiliar future

Reflections of a Boomer who definitely wasn't raised evangelical and in fact was unserious about spiritual matters until relatively recently

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Once again, an Aaron Renn piece has spurred today’s thought processes.

I know his target audience is young men committed to a Christian faith walk, and that he sees his mission as helping to guide them through a culture that no longer esteems Christian faith. He’s addressed concerns that arise for them on many levels, from how to choose a place to live and work, to avoiding vices, to “how America’s shift from Protestant work ethic to post-Christian consumer culture unraveled the values that once defined its middle class.”

He tends to approach things like a sociologist, which entails a lot of categorizing. Boomers vis-a-vis Millennials, big cities vis-a-vis small towns, coastal America vis-a-vis the heartland, and so forth. In doing so, he has us face some blunt realities about life, such as the relationship between time and opportunity and the inevitability of hierarchies.

His latest Substack post, titled “Beyond Boomerism,” has a bit narrower focus than the title promises. It’s about how younger generations of evangelicals need to cull what is of lasting value from the work of older theologians, apologists and preachers and let the rest go:

Doug Ponder wrote an interesting piece about the state of evangelical gender theology. He called an essay I wrote on this topic a few years ago “a shot heard round the world of evangelical gender debates.” I hadn’t realized it caused such a stir.

My original piece argued that the evangelical approach to gender known as “complementarianism” was a Baby Boomer theology that would die with the Boomers.

In my piece I noted the profound influence the early cohort of Baby Boomers - ones I define culturally as being born 1942-1954 - has had on our society. Complementarianism was mostly created by this group in the 1980s and 90s, with John Piper (b. 1946) and Wayne Grudem (b. 1948) being particularly influential.

I have found that if you critique any of the major evangelical Boomer figures, you can expect to get a lot of blowback. Some of them are revered to the point that younger pastors and leader have explicitly said to me that they would never publicly disagree with those older figures because they have too much respect for them to do so.

Not only are we living in the shadow of the Boomers because they still hold many of the formal and informal levers of power in our society. We are living in a Boomer world because younger generations have implicitly internalized the superiority of the Boomers and their points of view.

But the Boomers themselves were not like this at an early age. In fact, they were the first to rebel against their parents and elders. The original “generation gap” was between Boomers and their parents. The very young Boomers had such a high regard for themselves that they embraced lines like, “Never trust anyone over 30.”

The last paragraph in the above excerpt might indicate that Renn is about to open the window to a wider look at the impact of Boomers, but he uses it to make points within the confines of Evangelical developments concerning gender.

They are useful points. Within those parameters, it’s right and proper to give weight to the impact of Tim Keller:

Consider the way Tim Keller - as a college student - forthrightly judged older generations of Christians and found them wanting. This quote is from Collin Hansen’s book Timothy Keller: His Spiritual and Intellectual Formation.

It marked the first time I [Keller] realized that most older white adults in my life were telling me things that were dead wrong. The problem was not just a “few troublemakers.” Black people did have a right to demand the redress and rectifying of many wrongs. Although I had grown up going to church, Christianity began to lose its appeal to me when I was in college. One reason for my difficulty was the disconnect between my secular friends who supported the Civil Rights Movement, and the orthodox Christian believers who thought that Martin Luther King, Jr. was a threat to society. [emphasis added]

Keller also assembled his own approach from an eclectic array of influences. He had the discernment to separate what was useful to him from what was not useful to him (or even wrong) in older people’s approaches.

You know what I call his approach? Smart. We should be imitating him in this.

Similarly, complementarian gender theology was an explicit rejection of the existing conservative Christian approaches to gender. John Piper once said as much himself with regards to the previous “traditional” approach. Piper and Grudem titled their book Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood. The very name suggests that the previous generation had lost it such that it needed to be recovered. Sociologist James Davison Hunter, in his academic book Evangelicalism: The Coming Generation, also noted that the strand of evangelical gender thinking that became complementarianism was different from the one which continued to hold to the gender roles in place prior to second wave feminism.

Again, think about the incredible Boomer self-confidence involved in believing that they had rediscovered a Biblical truth that previous generations had lost.

I need to remember who Renn’s target audience is. It’s not as if he writes an essay with whether it’s going to appeal to me in mind.

On the other hand, the parameters within which he - and a lot of Christian intellectuals - discuss the future of institutionalized faith in America - leave a lot about the Boomer experience out.

I hope you’ll forgive yet another mention of my June 2022 Precipice post “On Entering Adolescence During the Tectonic Shift,” about turning 13 in the year 1968. It just comes into play whenever a discussion about whether foundational aspects of American life can be retrieved arises.

Arguments that developments of the last fifty-seven to sixty years are on a continuum with what came before, and that that continuum allows for such radical inflection points as the Civil War and the Depression, have some validity. After all, those born since what I call the tectonic shift are entitled to make sense of their maturation experience within their own contexts.

But come on. No previous period has seen anything like the mainstreaming of consciousness-expanding drugs, the diminishment of the nuclear family, women outnumbering men in college enrollment, widespread cynicism about American leadership on the world stage, a shift in economic activity away from making things out of material resources, and the whole transgenderism phenomenon.

That last one is the most significant of all, in my view. After all, Renn’s focus is on gender theology, and the whole business about preferred pronouns and puberty blockers has upended what the society beyond the Evangelical sphere had known about telling boys from girls had assumed for the length of time our species has been around. Transgender military personnel are, as you read this, fretting about how to deal with Trump/Hegseth-era dismissals.

I repeat, come on.

No culture anywhere, at any time in history, was dealing with a defensive force that included guys who were convinced they were gals. And, no, it’s not the same thing as military segregation. All the Tuskegee Airmen had penises.

And I also find myself returning to a look at the role of the arts in all of this. Especially music. Whether it’s loud and harsh or breathily soft, music since the tectonic shift has cast a jaundiced eye on previously held notions of what makes us human. The post-shift perspective on gender roles is part of this, and is a main feature of popular music, but music in general has lost an interest in standards and rigor. Also in a transcendent purpose in making music.

Let me come at this another way, and use music as my means of illustration.

You actually can sometimes evangelize to the tattoo-covered addict who listens to thrash metal, if he or she has hit bottom and is ready to reclaim his or her life.

But even that statement mustn’t be carried too far. I’ve done some jail ministry weekends, and conversions don’t always stick.

But how about the person who has stayed out of jail, who has some kind of career or occupation that keeps him responsible as well as secure, who stays relatively well-informed and even reads books when time allows, who likes beers and cocktails and maybe the occasional hit of THC, who doesn’t listen to bonehead forms of music, but rather the more sophisticated breed of singer-songwriter, or jazz, or even symphonic music? And who hasn’t been to church since the age of 8?

You’re not going to reach that person with contemporary praise music or Max Lucado videos. And internecine skirmishes between complimentarians and egalitarians seem utterly irrelevant to such a person.

And isn’t winning souls for Christ what this all comes down to?

I recently passed a church marquee that said “Christ died for sinners, and you qualify.” I know that. You know that. Tim Keller knew that. Keller forthrightly said that the Gospel itself is offensive. I found it so before I really took in who Jesus is.

But that’s the hurdle that must be overcome.

I maintain, as I did in my August 2021 post “I Never Feel Like Waving My Arms,” that apologetics is perhaps the most effective tool a Christian has for reaching the typical secular agnostic a quarter of the way through the twenty-first century:

Origen’s Contra Celsum, written circa 248 A.D., provides us with a fine model for responding to not just objections but attacks on Christianity. Celsus, a secular philosopher who not only thought the faith was a lot of hooey but harmful to society, had written The True Word, a book-length explanation of his views. Origen took the time to address Celsus’s points one by one with rigor but also courtesy.

Augustine of Hippo’s Confessions is an account of how he came to see the folly of being driven by lust and an attempt to convince himself that his intellect was a sufficient guide. He contributed greatly to Christianity’s understanding that, while human beings are imbued with free will, there is a right use of free will to which they become compelled to turn once they heed God’s beckoning.

Pascal’s Wager takes an interesting approach, namely, asserting that the stakes are too high to not believe in God. Pascal was one of those guys who has to be heeded, given that he was no slouch in a number of fields besides theology, such as mathematics, physics and philosophy.

In more modern times, C.S. Lewis’s Meditation in a Toolshed is a classic in the field of apologetics. I return often to his notion of looking along the beam:

I was standing today in the dark toolshed. The sun was shining outside and through the crack at the top of the door there came a sunbeam. From where I stood that beam of light, with the specks of dust floating in it, was the most striking thing in the place. Everything else was almost pitch-black. I was seeing the beam, not seeing things by it.

Then I moved, so that the beam fell on my eyes. Instantly the whole previous picture vanished. I saw no toolshed, and (above all) no beam. Instead I saw, framed in the irregular cranny at the top of the door, green leaves moving on the branches of a tree outside and beyond that, 90 odd million miles away, the sun. Looking along the beam, and looking at the beam are very different experiences.

But this is only a very simple example of the difference between looking at and looking along. A young man meets a girl. The whole world looks different when he sees her. Her voice reminds him of something he has been trying to remember all his life, and ten minutes casual chat with her is more precious than all the favours that all other women in the world could grant. lie is, as they say, “in love”. Now comes a scientist and describes this young man's experience from the outside. For him it is all an affair of the young man's genes and a recognised biological stimulus. That is the dif- ference between looking along the sexual impulse and looking at it.

When you have got into the habit of making this distinction you will find examples of it all day long. The mathematician sits thinking, and to him it seems that he is contemplating timeless and spaceless truths about quantity. But the cerebral physiologist, if he could look inside the mathematician's head, would find nothing timeless and spaceless there - only tiny movements in the grey matter. The savage dances in ecstasy at midnight before Nyonga and feels with every muscle that his dance is helping to bring the new green crops and the spring rain and the babies. The anthropologist, observing that savage, records that he is performing a fertility ritual of the type so- and-so. The girl cries over her broken doll and feels that she has lost a real friend; the psychologist says that her nascent maternal instinct has been temporarily lavished on a bit of shaped and coloured wax.

As soon as you have grasped this simple distinction, it raises a question. You get one experience of a thing when you look along it and another when you look at it. Which is the “true” or “valid” experience? Which tells you most about the thing? And you can hardly ask that question without noticing that for the last fifty years or so everyone has been taking the answer for granted. It has been assumed without discussion that if you want the true account of religion you must go, not to religious people, but to anthropologists; that if you want the true account of sexual love you must go, not to lovers, but to psychologists; that if you want to understand some “ideology” (such as medieval chivalry or the nineteenth-century idea of a “gentleman”), you must listen not to those who lived inside it, but to sociologists.

The people who look at things have had it all their own way; the people who look along things have simply been brow-beaten. It has even come to be taken for granted that the external account of a thing somehow refutes or “debunks” the account given from inside. “All these moral ideals which look so transcendental and beautiful from inside”, says the wiseacre, “are really only a mass of biological instincts and inherited taboos.” And no one plays the game the other way round by replying, “If you will only step inside, the things that look to you like instincts and taboos will suddenly reveal their real and transcendental nature.”

That, in fact, is the whole basis of the specifically “modern” type of thought. And is it not, you will ask, a very sensible basis? For, after all, we are often deceived by things from the inside. For example, the girl who looks so wonderful while we're in love, may really be a very plain, stupid, and disagreeable person. The savage's dance to Nyonga does not really cause the crops to grow. Having been so often deceived by looking along, are we not well advised to trust only to looking at? in fact to discount all these inside experiences?

Well, no. There are two fatal objections to discounting them all. And the first is this. You discount them in order to think more accurately. But you can't think at all - and therefore, of course, can't think accurately - if you have nothing to think about. A physiologist, for example, can study pain and find out that it “is” (whatever is means) such and such neural events. But the word pain would have no meaning for him unless he had “been inside” by actually suffering. If he had never looked along pain he simply wouldn't know what he was looking at. The very subject for his inquiries from outside exists for him only because he has, at least once, been inside.

This case is not likely to occur, because every man has felt pain. But it is perfectly easy to go on all your life giving explanations of religion, love, morality, honour, and the like, without having been inside any of them. And if you do that, you are simply playing with counters. You go on explaining a thing without knowing what it is. That is why a great deal of contemporary thought is, strictly speaking, thought about nothing - all the apparatus of thought busily working in a vacuum.

The other objection is this: let us go back to the toolshed. I might have discounted what I saw when looking along the beam (i.e., the leaves moving and the sun) on the ground that it was “really only a strip of dusty light in a dark shed”. That is, I might have set up as “true” my “side vision” of the beam. But then that side vision is itself an instance of the activity we call seeing. And this new instance could also be looked at from outside. I could allow a scientist to tell me that what seemed to be a beam of light in a shed was “really only an agitation of my own optic nerves”. And that would be just as good (or as bad) a bit of debunking as the previous one. The picture of the beam in the toolshed would now have to be discounted just as the previous picture of the trees and the sun had been discounted. And then, where are you?

In other words, you can step outside one experience only by stepping inside another. Therefore, if all inside experiences are misleading, we are always misled. The cerebral physiologist may say, if he chooses, that the mathematician's thought is “only” tiny physical movements of the grey matter. But then what about the cerebral physiologist's own thought at that very moment? A second physiologist, looking at it, could pronounce it also to be only tiny physical movements in the first physiologist's skull. Where is the rot to end?

The answer is that we must never allow the rot to begin. We must, on pain of idiocy, deny from the very outset the idea that looking at is, by its own nature, intrinsically truer or better than looking along. One must look both along and at everything. In particular cases we shall find reason for regarding the one or the other vision as inferior. Thus the inside vision of rational thinking must be truer than the outside vision which sees only movements of the grey matter; for if the outside vision were the correct one all thought (including this thought itself) would be valueless, and this is self-contradictory. You cannot have a proof that no proofs matter. On the other hand, the inside vision of the savage's dance to Nyonga may be found deceptive because we find reason to believe that crops and babies are not really affected by it. In fact, we must take each case on its merits. But we must start with no prejudice for or against either kind of looking. We do not know in advance

whether the lover or the psychologist is giving the more correct account of love, or whether both accounts are equally correct in different ways, or whether both are equally wrong. We just have to find out. But the period of brow-beating has got to end.

Boston College philosophy professor Peter Kreeft’s approach really sticks to my ribs.

How’s this for a consideration to chew on?

Someone once said that if you sat a million monkeys at a million typewriters for a million years, one of them would eventually type out all of Hamlet by chance. But when we find the text of Hamlet, we don't wonder whether it came from chance and monkeys. Why then does the atheist use that incredibly improbable explanation for the universe? Clearly, because it is his only chance of remaining an atheist. At this point we need a psychological explanation of the atheist rather than a logical explanation of the universe.

I need this kind of bolstering when I fold my hands and drop to my knees, principally because I need my Christianity to have an aspect of being raw, of deadly seriousness.

I want my devotion to be built on that foundation of which Christ spoke in the parable of the house that could withstand hurricane-force winds.

The notion of meeting people where they are enters into discussions about sharing the faith, and properly so.

But don’t give someone you’d like to share the Lord with the impression that you’re chomping at the bit to get to the may-I-tell-you-about-Jesus moment.

That’s going to end the encounter more often than not.