Hugh Hewitt has recently been interviewing leaders in Evangelicalism on the state of the movement in the age of Obama. Most recently, he interviewed Al Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.
Here are some excerpts from the interview:
(my comments are in italics)
AM: Very few of them (younger Evangelicals) will read a newspaper. Now they’ll go to newspaper websites, but the reality is that this really is an internet, wired, digital generation. So when they’re sending me information, and a lot of them are so generous to send me things they think I ought to see, it’s always a link. I can’t remember the last time I opened an envelope and pulled out an article. These days, it’s all digital. They’re getting their information from peer-directed sites, where someone will say look at this, look at that. They’re reading blogs, and the blogs are really gaining in this generation in terms of a mainstream kind of orientation of news, especially when they link to established news sources.
Hey, that’s me. I rarely read the newspaper. I subscribe to a lot of the news feeds, but I get most of my news via links from blogs that highlight the…umm…highlights for me.
AM: And then the other thing is, they’re watching some of the most amazing things on television. There’s not doubt that Stephen Colbert, John Stewart, they’re really reaching a lot of young people with pseudo news.
HH: Even your students? Even these Southern Baptist kids who are going to become pastors of Word and Sacrament?
AM: They’re at least looking at it. I’m not saying that they at all buy into the worldview, but they understand that their peer cohort, their friends, the people that they’re going to run into, the people they’re trying to reach, are watching that. And of course, they’re seeing the same stuff.
Many, many of my Christian friends are fans of The Daily Show and the Colbert Report. The folks, both Christian and non, might *say* that they are just watching for entertainment and that they don’t buy into it, but they’re fools if they think the shows don’t profoundly influence them. For instance, both shows made much ado about poking fun at Bush, and if you talk to Colbert and Stewart’s fans, you’ll notice they make fun of Bush with incredible ease.
The comedy news shows are masters of passive-aggressive suggestion and manipulation, and this gets to us.
AM: I Twitter all day long, and I’m on Facebook with thousands of friends that are mostly in that age cohort. You know, like one of my students said to me, if you’re not on Facebook, you don’t exist. Now he meant that just as a word of help, in other words, to say we’re looking at a generation here for whom social media are the main means by which they communicate. This is their accountability. It used to be that people feel like they had to call everyone to stay in touch. Every once in a while, in prehistoric days, they might actually write a note, letter or a postcard. But these days, it’s all check the website, check what your friends are doing on Facebook, and make sure you’re keeping in touch.
As Mohler has pointed out elsewhere, social media is having a profound effect on our worldviews and how we relate to one another…and this goes past merely communicating with greater ease. For one, as others have pointed out, these technologies are idea and worldview laden.
Here are a few implications:
Those who swim in social media often have trouble simply sitting with their own thoughts. They must be on myspace, listening to an IPOD, texting, etc.
On a related note, my students often have an incredibly difficult time dealing with boredom. Thirty seconds, and the urge to pop out the PSP is almost irresistable. It is hard for them to entertain themselves, and a healthy sense of curiosity seems to be waning…and I don’t think this is just because my students are in a nefarious stage. I’m willing to bet you will see the same trends in youth that have grown out of the teen years.
Does heavy multitasking (being on IM, myspace, listening to IPOD, watching TV at same time while trying to do homework) affect the mind’s ability to follow an extended logical argument through text? I think so.
Social media connects us like never before, yet we are more isolated than ever before. We lean more and more on these social media sites to communicate, but at the same time we miss the richness of an actual voice or face-to-face conversation.
Lastly, there’s the phenomenon of being “here but not here.” Almost every day I see a group of friends walking together, and they all are on their cell phones texting. If someone walks out during the day, they often put in an IPOD, sequestering themselves in their own little worlds. The message the ear buds send is clear: don’t bother me. Even if they are socializing with a group of friends, the buds still act as a barrier of sorts.
All this new technology is great. I love m IPOD. But we need to think about possible unforeseen consequences and changes.
HH: Do they (young Evangelicals) care about abortion?
AM: They care deeply about abortion. And looking at the students on my campus, they are passionately concerned about abortion. They’re not just concerned about not having abortions, they’re concerned about having babies. This is a generation ready to have a much larger family than the average Evangelical family of the last twenty or thirty years. They’re pretty comprehensively pro-life. They’re afraid, however, that just being anti-abortion sends a signal that’s just not enough. And so I’m glad to say that they’re very, very pro-life, and I must give a word of warning, that among some younger Evangelicals, that’s just not true. So the ones who come here, they know where we stand on these issues. But the reality is that especially on the issue of homosexuality, even more than the issue of abortion, this is a generation that is thinking in different terms. Not necessarily about the theological or Biblical status of homosexuality, but about how we should respond to it in the culture.
HH: Well, I’ve had that said to me many, many times at the Prop 8 referendum in California, may have been the last victory for a pro-marriage agenda, because the rising age cohort just doesn’t care. Are you confirming that, Albert Mohler?
AM: I’m definitely confirming that, but not…I wouldn’t put it in the fact they don’t care. I wouldn’t say that. I would say that what you have is a group of younger Evangelicals, and I disagree with them on this, Hugh, and they know it, a group of younger Evangelicals, many of whom simply don’t think that’s the right fight to fight.
HH: Wow.
AM: And so it’s not that they don’t care. But you know, I was just talking to an Evangelical leader in Massachusetts who said look, he said my high school seniors have never known a time since they’ve been in high school or middle school that same sex marriage wasn’t legal in this state.
I definitely can second Mohler’s words here. I can’t remember the last time I heard a sermon (or even a peep) at my church about abortion or homosexuality (homosexuality has been mentioned briefly at a forum on sex, but it was so brief that it barely deserves mention).
One thing Hewitt and Mohler didn’t talk about (that I wish they had): the increase in delaying marriage in the young generation.
Check out the following related posts:
Electronic Media Immersion: Some Suggestions (with links to other parts of the series)
How Should we Interact with Youth?
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That whole thing of ‘fighting the right fight’ is such a difficult subject.
In some ways, the church damages the gospel by the way it fights against certain issues. We get seen as bigots and haters and quite rightly from the way some’Christians’ act and talk. So from that point of view, not fighting against those things could be good for the gospel.
However, there is clear biblical evidence that God judges nations on their national morality – and thus he judges the people on what they allow their national morality to be.
That means us. How can we ask God to bless our work if we stand idly by and allow our nations to slide into complete moral bankruptcy?
As far as your comments about multitasking etc go, I know for myself I have huge problems with this. For example, we were sitting with our kids last night and my wife was reading them a story. I couldn’t help pulling out my phone and playing sudoku. I was going crazy with lack of stimulation!
This is a real problem for many people today!
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