Tag: baby boomers

Blame Trump on Sunday School

Published on by D. G. Hart15 Comments

Stay with me.

It looks like evangelicals who go to church don’t support Donald Trump:

Across all the states, the March 15 elections showed that, on average, a super-majority of 60 percent of evangelicals voted for someone other than Trump. Furthermore, there continues to be strong evidence that the more religious a voter is, the less likely they are to support Donald Trump. For example, in Missouri exit polls, which tracked church attendance, Trump performed much worse than Ted Cruz. Of those who attend religious services “more than once a week,” Cruz garnered 56 percent of the vote, outpacing Trump by a full 26 percentage points. Among those who attend religious services once a week, Cruz earned 50 percent of the vote, which was a full 17 points above Trump.

In contrast, with those who only attend services “a few” times a year, Trump won 48 percent of the vote to Cruz’s 29 percent. If Missouri’s numbers are indicative of voters in other states, then Trump does much worse among those who actually take their faith seriously enough to attend religious services consistently.

So, who is responsible for nurturing evangelicals who don’t go to church (and vote for Trump)? Sunday school is.

Church leaders sensed that Boomer parents wanted the one hour break from their kids—that they wanted to focus on their own spiritual life for an hour away from the distraction of their children. And, again, we assumed, reasonably so, that worship targeted to adult boomers would not be all that engaging for kids. So dynamic Sunday school programs were created to engage the kids at their level in their language while their parents were in worship. In fact, some churches didn’t (and don’t) allow kids into big people worship at all.

The result: Many of these innovated congregations had a positive, significant impact on the lives of disenfranchised Boomers and their kids. Many saw their congregations and their children’s ministries grow exponentially. The evangelism imperative to reconnect with Boomers seemed to work.

But there was (and is) one huge unintended consequence: We have raised the largest unchurched generation in the history of our country.

Admittedly, there are many reasons why each generation in our culture is increasingly distanced from the church. Some have to do with societal shifts that have nothing to do with the church. Some have to do with the inability of the church to articulate the Gospel in compelling ways.

But perhaps one of the reasons has to do with the Sunday School shift…as we shifted kids out of the main worship experience, en-culturated them in their own program, and robbed them of any touch points with the rest of the body of Christ. Another way of saying it: by segregating our kids out of worship, we never assimilated them into the life of the congregation. They had no touch points. They had no experience. They had no connection with the main worship service—its liturgy, its music, its space, its environment, and its adults. It was a foreign place to them. And so…once they finished with the kids/or youth program, they left the church.

In other words, parents who forced their kids to sit through boring church services and eat broccoli at Sunday dinner reared people who vote — wait for it — for Ted Cruz.

Doh!

The State of the Boom

Published on by D. G. Hart25 Comments

Why is it called “The State of the Union” instead of “The State of the Republic”? Maybe because we fought a war to preserve union without paying too close attention to what it means for republicanism?

This is a backhanded way of saying I didn’t listen to the President’s address last night. I never do, whether it’s a Republican or Democrat, because the rhetoric is so pretty and predictable and long. It is all theater with little substance, but it is bad theater, comparable to Breaking Bad or Mad Men.

I did read through President Obama’s address, though, and I can’t say that he led me to think that he is one of the smarter men in the nation (he may be but if so he felt compelled to sink to the level of his audience and speech writers). Here are a couple of the ephemeral bromides scattered through the text. First on American exceptionalism:

At this moment – with a growing economy, shrinking deficits, bustling industry, and booming energy production – we have risen from recession freer to write our own future than any other nation on Earth. It’s now up to us to choose who we want to be over the next fifteen years, and for decades to come.

Does the President really believe this or is he an American patriot simply going through the motions, someone who needs to get right with the United States’ real redemptive purpose?

Here is how the President concluded:

I want future generations to know that we are a people who see our differences as a great gift, that we are a people who value the dignity and worth of every citizen – man and woman, young and old, black and white, Latino and Asian, immigrant and Native American, gay and straight, Americans with mental illness or physical disability.

I want them to grow up in a country that shows the world what we still know to be true: that we are still more than a collection of red states and blue states; that we are the United States of America.

I want them to grow up in a country where a young mom like Rebekah can sit down and write a letter to her President with a story to sum up these past six years:

“It is amazing what you can bounce back from when you have to…we are a strong, tight-knit family who has made it through some very, very hard times.”

My fellow Americans, we too are a strong, tight-knit family. We, too, have made it through some hard times. Fifteen years into this new century, we have picked ourselves up, dusted ourselves off, and begun again the work of remaking America. We’ve laid a new foundation. A brighter future is ours to write. Let’s begin this new chapter – together – and let’s start the work right now.

Thank you, God bless you, and God bless this country we love.

I find it hard to believe that the President’s baby boomer cohort believes any of this. They certainly don’t find it inspiring or ennobling, if they are honest. Where is the old ideal of “speaking truth to power,” or being suspicious of the establishment, or how could this verbiage summon up some kind of commitment to a common purpose like the one that Martin Luther King legitimately inspired? And if a public official is going to traffic in such triteness, does he or she need to go on for close to 70 minutes (I know this because the address was still on the radio as I engaged my bedtime toilet). (And why, oh why, does the Governor of Michigan need to warble on for over an hour about the State of the State?)

Again, this isn’t the President’s fault or a complaint about policy. This is a lament about where the new order for the ages has wound up. This is what passes for intelligent reflection about important matters before the nation that is supposed to be an example to the rest of the world. But as a baby boomer who knew other boomers who thought they could do a lot better than their parents, I am still wondering when we are going to find those better achievers or find the honesty to admit we were wrong.

Belfast Replay: DG Opens for PJ

Published on by D. G. Hart14 Comments

Talk about Providence. The weekend I was in Belfast (2 weeks ago) witnessed two book talks by authors from the U.S. The first was me talking about Calvinism (more below), the second was P. J. O’Rourke who was promoting his new memoir, Baby Boom. PJ spoke at the Ulster Museum, an impressive facility in Belfast that covers most aspects of Northern Ireland politics and culture. I chatted at the Evangelical Bookshop, an unusually good bookstore operated by the Evangelical Presbyterian Church. If you ever get to Belfast, you should visit both.

It almost goes without saying that O’Rourke was funnier than I, even though we both used stages of life to frame our subjects.

PJ contends that you cannot understand the boomers as a block since the dates for this demographic cohort run from 1946 to 1964. The experience of people like him who were born just after World War II was different from boomers like me who grew up in with the threat of missiles in space. The older boomers smoked a lot more dope. The youngsters paid attention in school. So O’Rourke divides the boomers into the grades of senior high school, with the seniors (himself) being a whole lot more experimental than the freshman. In the senior group, running from 1946 to 1951, are such disparate figures as Hillary Clinton and Cheech Marin. To the junior class (1951-1955) belong the computer whiz kids, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. O’Rourke didn’t mention any representatives for my sophomore class (1956 to 1961). But the standout from the freshman class is Barack Obama, a group of Americans so swimming in the BS produced by the seniors that Jeremiah Wright’s rants about African-American brains could never have distracted Obama from his smart phone.

I used age to divide Calvinism into its old, middle-aged, and young identities. Old Calvinism (1520 to 1660) includes the institutional churches that arose with the help of the magistrates — why we call it the magisterial Reformation. This Calvinism was established, national, institutional (read churchly), and had its greatest influence among the Swiss, Scots, Dutch, English, and Germans (all of which except for the Swiss became the major exporters of Calvinism to non-European settings).

Middle-aged Calvinism (1660-1800) was on the move. It transferred from Europe to Africa, North America, and Australia through colonialism (English and Dutch) and immigration (Scots and Germans). Calvinism also spread beyond the walls of the institutional churches through the rise of experimental Calvinism (also nadere reformatie) which strove to make all of life reformed especially since the national churches (England and the Netherlands) would not. Middle-aged Calvinism also spread through the auspices of foreign missions, first created by parachurch agencies inspired by experimental Calvinism (and the example of David Brainerd), with the established churches bringing up the rear of support for foreign missions — many were still trying to do home missions (the American West or the Scottish Highlands).

The youngest group of Calvinists, the truly Young Calvinism, were the churches that after 1800 began to extricate themselves from the confining compromises of ecclesiastical establishment by forming either voluntary or secessionist communions. The Dutch kicked off the process in 1834 with the Aufscheiding, which later inspired Abraham Kuyper and the Doliantie which formed the backbone of the GKN (1892). Then came the Free Church of Scotland with the disruption of 1843 led by Thomas Chalmers. In the twentieth century the chief efforts to leave behind Reformed establishmentarianism came from J. Gresham Machen who withdrew from the Protestant mainline through the doctrine of the spirituality of the church, and then from Karl Barth who articulated such a high view of divine transcendence that Christian truth could never be reduced to societal or cultural (or even ecclesiastical) norms.

By this scheme the so-called “New” Calvinists are really middle-aged since Edwards is their home boy, a man who stands smack-dab in the middle of Calvinism’s second stage. This also means that if the New Calvinists want to be truly young, they need to come to terms with Chalmers, Kuyper, Machen, and Barth.

O’Rourke still isn’t laughing even if he is home by now and taking his advance and honorarium to the bank.

Good News — Megachurches Are Facing Retirement

Published on by D. G. Hart21 Comments

. . . and will be in nursing homes within 15 years.

That, at least, is a plausible conclusion given how closely the megachurch experience correlates with baby boomer demographics:

Even though megachurches only account for 0.5 percent of the 320,000 Protestant churches in America, nearly 10 percent of Protestant churchgoers attend one.

Only 21 percent of megachurches were founded in the last 20 years (the median founding year: 1977), and only 22 percent were founded by their current lead pastor.

The average (median) age of megachurch lead pastors is 55, while nearly 1 in 5 are under 45. Only five percent are under 40. (CT recently noted how one of America’s youngest megachurch pastors drew scrutiny for how his building a “big house” was connected to his bestselling book.)

Meanwhile, some aspiring sociologist needs to figure out why Delaware, Maine, Rhode Island, and Vermont escaped the megachurch bug (and why South and North Dakota did not).