BLOG 8/21/16. “FORSAKING RELIGION”? NOT REALLY
A recent issue of Atlantic Magazine reports that the generation of college students today are (in its words) “forsaking religion.” Indulge me if I challenge that. I’ve been hearing that kind of appraisal for years. It is true, however, that the culture has changed dramatically as the dominant order of Christendom which existed for a millennium-and-a-half is rapidly disappearing. What is true is that each generation, when it comes of age, has to ask the questions about life and truth and ultimate reality. What many of the persons to whom Atlantic refers are forsaking is more likely the ‘dry wells’ that define so many ostensible churches which they have experienced and been disappointed. Or maybe they are reacting against that phenomenon of zealous folk who (mistakenly, in my mind) label themselves ‘conservative Christians’ as they engage in so many questionable causes, social and political—raising the wonderment of whether they have ever read the actual life and ethical teachings of Jesus. Yes, there are a lot of wacky counterfeits out there, and it is no wonder that thinking young adults would want to distance themselves from such. Then too, if one has encountered some really uncomfortable or negative engagement with something that pertained to be ‘religion,’ that they would understandably forsake such.
Ah! But that doesn’t verify the diagnosis that the whole generation is ‘forsaking religion’. There are always those ultimate questions that lurk subliminally in the human breast. I love to sit over coffee in my favorite hangout and have attractive and successful and thoughtful young urban professionals engage me in conversation—and so often when they find that I’ve had a whole career as a teaching-pastor in the Christian church will cough-up the subliminal dissatisfaction with their not finding ultimate satisfaction in their remarkable accomplishments. Or, some will, in that friendly context, vent their hostility toward anything having to do with religion, and vehemently deny that there is anything there. I love it.
The Protestant reformers in the Christian church spoke of a sensus divinitatus, i.e., a sense of deity that exists subliminally in the human psyche. Or perhaps one could refer to Pascal’s comment about the God-shaped vacuum in the human heart, or Augustine’s classic that went something like: God has made us for himself and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in him. That reality doesn’t go away when one forsakes the institutions of religion, or with the identification with religion. And that reality is so present in the diversity of wonderful conversation partners I encounter these days. Probably the majority have no connection with the Christian church as an institution, nor even have it on their screen, … but this doesn’t mean that they have forsaken religion. Along the way, in my life, some of the most dramatically true conversions that I have witnessed were in the lives of those who appeared to be the most hostile to anything that smacked of a Christian reality. It was when I proposed something as simple as taking a look at the primary documents of the Christian faith that they became conscious of how hungry they were to know the truth, and to be set free, and to find life abundant as Jesus promised.
This was dramatically spelled out in the conversion of C. S. Lewis, when he was a bright star on Oxford’s faculty, and an aggressive agnostic, and who was continually challenged by a few of his colleagues with whom he regularly drank beer. His testimony is almost humorous: “I will never forget that night in the winter semester at Magdalen College when I heard the footsteps of him whom I so desperately did not want to meet. Even the prodigal son rose and went of his own free will back to his waiting father, … but I was dragged, kicking and screaming” (to Jesus).
Forsaking religion? Not really. But really looking for viable answers to the questions: ‘Who am I?’ ‘What does my life mean?’ I see a younger generation not forsaking religion, but looking for authenticity in finding their heart’s true home: explanation, hope, freedom, love, … for God!
