Gen Xers

In a recent Breakpoint devotional, John Stonestreet writes about a disturbing trend that church leaders must face: "The latest numbers from Trinity College's latest American Religious Identification Survey finds that Gen Xers—those born between 1965 and 1972—who walked away from the church aren't coming back.

"Sociologists have long taken for granted that teenagers question and rebel against their parents' religion, then ultimately return when they grow up and have their own kids. But Gen Xers —now in their 40s and raising high-schoolers—aren't following that trend. Hundreds of thousands of them just aren't coming back, and they're not involving their kids in organized religion, either.

"But that doesn't mean our country is filling up with atheistic secularists. These Gen Xers and their kids aren't leaving spirituality behind; instead many are becoming what Philip Clayton of The Los Angeles Times dubbed 'the nones': those who don't identify with any organized faith, but who still consider spirituality, prayer, and transcendent morality important. They haven't abandoned the whole Christian worldview—just the parts that require commitment.

"You might say, or at least Ross Douthat of the The New York Times says, they're not atheists. They're heretics. In fact, Douthat's new book Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics, suggests this de-stabilization of Christian belief might be the most significant cultural trend that no one has talked about over the last few decades.

We've always had American heretics—there were the deists, the Shakers—but the center of Christian belief was coherent, and it provided a stable source of moral norms and fundamental beliefs about human nature and value for the America project. But not so now, Douthat says. Heretics are mainstream—and what he means by heretics are those who no longer look outward for spiritual authority, but inward. The only spiritual authority is one's own self—something Douthat sees not only outside of Christianity but expressed clearly in some of the most popular forms of Christianity itself in our culture.

But self-made religion isn't stable, and won't provide the social cohesion that America has been used to for so long...We need to help students realize that truth is found in God Himself. And it's something fixed, unchanging, but also accessible. We are not the source of our own truth."