Young Evangelicals leaving church, going liberal, new book says
by Joel McDurmon on Dec 22, 2011
CNN
opines on the new book by Barna Group president, David Kinnaman, which addresses why young Evangelicals are rapidly leaving church never to return. Their departure from congregations parallels their departure from Evangelical values:
Seven in 10 millennials say sex between an unmarried man and woman is
morally acceptable (PDF). (According to Kinnaman, young Christians are
as sexually active as non-Christians.)
• Most women in their early 20s who give birth
are unmarried.
• More than six in 10 millennials (including 49% of Republican millennials)
support same-sex marriages.
• Six in 10 millennials say abortion
should be legal (PDF), a higher proportion than found in the general population. A higher percentage say abortion services should be available in local communities.
Millennials also part ways with conservative orthodoxy on wealth distribution and caring for the environment. According to
a report in The Christian Science Monitor, three out of four say that wealthy corporations and financiers have too much power and that taxes should be raised on the very wealthy, and two out of three say financial institutions should be regulated more closely. In addition, most say that creationists’ view on evolution is
outdated.
The editorialist, Laura Stepp, adds, “Sounds a lot like Democratic ideology to me.” She’s right about that, although her answer to the question “why?” is oversimplified:
These young dropouts value the sense of community their churches provide but are tired of being told how they should live their lives. They don’t appreciate being condemned for living with a partner, straight or gay, outside of marriage or opting for abortion to terminate an unplanned pregnancy.
It’s more than that. It involves an entire culture of indoctrination about worldview, including sexual mores (and notice, all of the bullet-points above are about sex), that begins early in public school, and explodes into manifestation when a child is given freedom from parental supervision for the first time at college. Stepp’s anecdote reveals this clearly:
Brittany, a 24-year-old veterinary technician, is an example of the newly disaffected. In high school, she attended a conservative Episcopal church in northern Virginia. She enrolled in college thinking of herself as a conservative and not wanting to have sex until she was married. Her views changed when she met her boyfriend. She began to question the theology of her home church on a number of social issues.
The story might as well have said, “Brittany said she believed in biblical values
until she got alone with her boyfriend for the first time, got passionately aroused, had no accountability, and had sex.
Then she needed a new values system to justify her desire to continue premarital sex and help her not feel guilty.”
There is much more to this story, of course, but liberal indoctrination that begins in childhood is a huge element. Public schooling was designed very early to disaffect children from their parents’ religion. As Charles Francis Potter famously wrote already in 1930:
Education is thus a most powerful ally of humanism, and every American school is a school of humanism. What can a theistic Sunday school’s meeting for an hour once a week and teaching only a fraction of the children do to stem the tide of the five-day program of humanistic teaching?
By the time they arrive at college, these kids may still be members of the church, fans of Tim Tebo, and even quoting Bible verses on the surface, but inside they’ve already been converted to “Democratic ideology”—
because their parents entrusted the vast majority of their development to liberals long ago.
Young Evangelicals leaving church, going liberal, new book says|American Vision News