Many have just been finding out the news: The 2016 U.S. Presidential Election ended in a significant electoral win for Trump, while Hillary retained a slight edge in the overall popular vote. My Facebook wall is covered with people in the various stages of grief, mostly Christian millennials.
Why do millennial evangelicals break so sharply with their elders, who voted overwhelmingly for Trump, in not only not refusing to support him but finding it repugnant that any evangelicals could?
I believe there is a very natural answer, and in exploring it we also discover one of the primary reasons churches have had such difficulty attracting or keeping millennials. Let's take a look:
1. How do we "do" our Christian Identity in an Election Year?
As Christians we recognize that our political identity, if we are to have one at all, must be subservient to and interpreted in the light of our Christian identity. We are not voiceless in a democracy as Christians were in the Roman Empire, but are blessed to each have a tiny part and responsibility in self-governance. But without any clear examples in scripture of being a Christian in a post-Christian political climate, there is no roadmap on how to do this. Many people end up with an unsatisfying hybrid that seems open to guilt attacks from both sides.
On the one hand you might hear, "How come you seem to love your version of America more enthusiastically than the Jesus?" and on the other, "If you have the chance to stand against aggressively anti-God forces in our culture, how can you be a Christian and not do that?" My Facebook wall has been full of both sentiments.
2016 has been very eye-opening for me in this regard. I have watched a wide range of people, many with a firm grasp of scripture, promoting opinions and ideas that stem from a secular humanist worldview utterly at odds with that of scripture itself. They do this with the best of intentions and without perceiving anything paradoxical, and indeed often regarding themselves as the prophetic voice of moral authority and justice, crying out in a wilderness of idolatrous patriotism and cold-hearted preference for order rather than chaos.
There are multiple reasons for this unconscious dichotomy, but a primary one begins, I submit, with the unfortunate reality that when it comes to "doing life as a Christian," evangelicalism tends towards the very abstract. A focus on sound doctrine and careful theology attracts abstract thinkers, and without an intentional effort to provide a rich and thorough Christian life, courageous obedience lived out in the flesh and not merely the mind, the whole thing perpetuates itself as a series of propositions. We might have very sound doctrine, but struggle to make that sound compelling to those who prefer to sleep in on Sunday mornings.
2. Leadership: The Vital Missing Element
To avoid the problem above and flesh the Christian life out in a concrete and not merely abstract sense (or really to tackle any difficult task in the world) people need leaders who set examples to follow. So, in a healthy church, younger Christians are led by older Christians, new believers are discipled by spiritually mature and godly men and women, and in this way the Way of Christ is not merely explained but demonstrated to a new generation.
Generally speaking, it can be seen that Millennials especially tend to choose their leaders based on Causes, on shared burdens and passions. When they find leaders setting the pace to address causes dear to them, they follow. Having become followers, how they "do" their faith and how other convictions are ranked will follow the example of those leaders too. Here's an example to show what I mean:
Suffering
It has become widely recognized in recent years that the Church in America lacks any coherent theology of suffering. For generations now, Americans have viewed suffering as inherently wrong and unnatural, vs. a natural and unavoidable part of life in this sin-corrupted world, and indeed something to be bravely embraced on some level by Christians (2 Tim 2:3). Americans on the whole are so suffering-averse, however, that many people consider infanticide by abortion a reasonable decision based on even a high probability that a child's life on earth might involve lots of suffering, or if having the child would result in too much emotional suffering on the part of the mother.
The message is clear: avoiding suffering is considered more important than life itself.
The extreme desire to avoid suffering is a truth of the human condition, of course, not specifically an American problem; a major world religion (Buddhism) is based largely around how to utterly escape it. So one can't expect Americans--who find themselves born into a nation where suffering is remarkably absent, historically speaking--to suddenly rush to embrace it. In 2016 no one can be unaware of just how much suffering there is in the wider world, however, so the question of what to do about it is still urgent and pressing.
Like any generation, Millennials want an enemy to conquer. Born into comparative ease, peace, and plenty, many have noticed all do not equally share in these riches, and have chosen injustice as their adversary. But young Christians in the US who are passionate about alleviating suffering and injustice didn't find much in traditional churches on that topic. Seeking to better educate themselves and get involved in the ministry of alleviation of suffering, they quickly found that the Left 'owns' this topic, though they typically don't think of it as "the Left," only "those voices speaking up about suffering and justice." And especially for younger people, those voices who speak in a way that resonates with their passion on this subject will soon come to have authority for them on other matters as well.
3. Millennial Convictions
So on the political side of things, that's how you suddenly have a generation of young Christians who, for example, largely don't see what the big deal is about socialism. Why should they believe you about the long-term dangers of a particular economic approach, a topic they don't know much about, when you don't speak out for the causes they do care about?
Yet when they find that the people who speak with passion about the things they too are passionate about, also promote socialism, globalism, and other pet topics of the Left, parents and conservatives in general foolishly believe that will then discredit those leaders in their eyes. That is very much not the case, as many people found to their surprise in the 2008 election (where attempting to discredit Obama by explaining his socialist leanings, they were met with a response of "Sounds great, why would free education be a bad thing?").
Passion may initially spring from a child's inherited worldview and education, but the natural teen/tween rebellion against the worldview imposed by parents is augmented and crystallized if they are guided by leaders who raise their voices to support that person's passion in directions away from the traditional values they grew up with.
If the Cause of Christ is Not Exemplified... (Then the World has many Compelling Ones to Choose From)
Some millennials are well-meaning and passionate to a degree that older people have trouble believing. We really want to change the world, in fact we were taught it's our responsibility to do so, to the extent that if we, individually, cannot see that we've significantly impacted the world in some way to make it a better place, we feel like a failure. Like the generation of the American cultural revolution, we're a generation in search of a Cause, but now with the internet there are a plethora of worthy causes clamoring for our time, efforts, and sympathies. When previous generations in the Church failed to present the Cause of Christ in a compelling way--a call to action and not merely assent to carefully worded intellectual propositions that were understood to imply action but somehow tended not to get around to it--then millennials went to find their Causes in other places, and Cause is the native language of the Secular Humanist Left, and now, many Millennials too.
It's truly a tragedy that the Church lost most of a generation who were all geared up to pour themselves into the work of the gospel, because it largely lacked anyone with the maturity, intensity, and willingness to lead them. Outside the Church, this could be blamed on generational tendencies (The materialism of Boomers and cynicism of Gen-Xers were ill-equipped to guide the self-sacrificing passion of millennials), but with an enduring mission from Christ to reach the world, the Church doesn't have that excuse.
Either way, many millennials found that passion and drive to sacrifice oneself to a greater cause in the ideological Left, and that's where most of them have found their worldview home. It's a view that will lead them further and further from the scriptural truth they still cling to simultaneously, and my Facebook wall is a testament to how some will choose scripture and slowly mature out of progressive ideology while keeping its strong points and thereby nourishing the church, while others will slowly take leave of one biblical principle after another to embrace more radical leftism.
For now, they are very much Christians, but they're also very much plugged into Causes under the leadership of both Christian and secular bloggers, thought leaders, and communities, and the local church is always going to fall short of what the combined efforts of online movements can provide. The internet also provides the illusion of impressive perpetual progress, whereas actual people in the concrete world just don't seem to cooperate, a fact I'm all too aware of as I invest tough years of gospel work in a local community.
4. Trump, the Earthquake which Revealed the Fault Line
With a generation of Christians passionate about social justice and understanding that topic from a mix of good biblical admonitions and bad secular humanist ideology, that older evangelical church leaders would support the candidacy of someone like Donald Trump seems less problematic than utterly absurd and repulsive. The reaction is not logical but visceral, an instinctive aversion born simultaneously from Christian-moral disapproval over his legacy of prideful worldliness and from Popular-moral disgust over his white, male, one-percenter entitledness. This hybrid of the latest crowd-sourced morality and unchanging moral standards of scripture is where many millennials are caught, and Trump is the living symbol of everything this hybrid worldview detests and condemns. When they compare Trump to Hitler, that is what they mean: he is not merely wrong, not merely sinful, but he unabashedly commits precisely those biases and sins which are most morally fashionable to hate just now, making him an pariah in their eyes, deplorable and indefensible.
To ally yourself with such a bully-pariah, in their minds, can only result in the destruction of your witness and the grief if not anger of Christ. That Trump is the subject of many grateful testimonies from "the least of these" is totally ignored, along with any other evidence that goes against the narrative about him. Part of this is politics as usual. In an election, all people have voices they listen to, websites they frequent, and narratives that align with their worldview, and are not usually open to persuasion on that front. (Witness how Wayne Grudem, a good man and respected theologian who wrote a reasonable--if insufficiently articulate and excessively partisan--argument that voting for Trump could be morally acceptable if it were done with certain facts in mind, was absolutely castigated. I rarely saw anyone tackling his arguments, merely the idea that he could align himself with the person their trusted sources told them Trump was disqualified him in their eyes.)
People who seek Causes to which to sacrifice themselves have a weakness in this direction, a tendency toward revolutionary or even fanatical thinking. All for the Cause, We for the Cause, Nothing as important as the Cause. Older evangelicals and traditional churches, weighed in these scales, will be found very wanting.
If discipleship and mentoring relationships been established earlier in the lives of more millennials, there would at least be a deeper level of trust and respect for authority present. The anger toward evangelicalism would be something more like frustration and confusion, which indeed one sees in many millennials as well. A productive conversation between the old, perhaps too cynical or too politically-influenced, and the young, inexperienced in life and dogmatic in the direction of their passion, could have taken place, for the enriching of the Church.
Yet this is not what has happened, instead we see something closer to a schism emerging.
Q: So, What Should Churches Do?
How to get millennials back? I submit the best way is not, at this late hour, trying to belatedly jump onto the bandwagon of Social Justice, as I see churches and christian groups doing now. The American Church is forever missing these big cultural shifts, finding itself several steps behind, resisting, then apologizing profusely and trying to catch up, meanwhile missing the next big shift.
Social Justice as the cause de jour overlaps with commands we already have in scripture, to remember the oppressed, show loving-kindness to the downtrodden, etc. We don't need the Church to join the social justice movement, led by worldly academics and, often, those who profit from the disorder wreaked in the name of justice by well-intentioned but naive young people, but we do need to be the Church to the world, and part of that always involves Christian charity (in the older, broader sense of the word).
In other words, if we do the Christian Life as instructed by Scripture, social justice will result naturally from that. Bringing the Church into a secular movement or being instructed by it will simply give moral authority to those outside the Church. (Much could be written on that particular topic, but this blog is already too long...)
A: Fill the Leadership Vacuum
There is often a statement made in the context of egalitarian vs. complementarian views on marriage, to the effect that someone has to lead in a marriage, and if the man can't or won't, the woman can't be blamed for trying.
Not commenting on that here, I nevertheless think the situation with Millennials, Causes (particularly Social Justice), and the Church is very similar. If the Church is being the Church--which means not merely assent to rightly-constructed theological propositions and proper inductive Bible study methods, but also being the Hands and Feet of Christ--then to whatever extent the social justice movement has biblical elements, they will be happening already. If they don't at all, one can't blame millennials for joining a movement which is providing the secular moral equivalent of that, and simultaneously trying to understand it in light of Biblical truth, which is exactly what we see happening from youth groups to famous seminaries.
But how much better would it be if the Church, like Paul, emphasized discipleship and leadership. I believe trying to bring back disillusioned millennials by appearing to belately embrace their Causes will not produce the results hoped for in any long term or satisfying way. However, if we begin training a generation of leaders, starting with ourselves, to proactively love and disciple students and young believers, then we'll have a generation who will tend not to leave the church.
Speaking from my own experience, growing up attending a number of churches, there was no intentional system of discipleship or Christian leadership training in place at any church I've ever attended. Only two men ever put effort into discipling me, even in an informal sense. (for which I remain grateful to this day)
Changing that massive leadership vacuum would be the biggest step towards preventing the "vanishing millennial" problem from continuing and worsening. As Trump's rise to the presidency has so effectively demonstrated, there is a quiet but widespread thirst for bold leadership in America. Trump won, partly, because he is an effective leader; he is bold, confident, persuasive, not easily daunted, able to cast a vision people want to be a part of, and recruit people to his banner. Many people want to follow such a man.
Few would suggest, however, that he is a model of Christian, servant-hearted leadership. Perhaps one day he will be. Stranger miracles of grace have happened. But that specific kind of Christ-like leadership many Christians were saddened to find lacking in Trump can't be found outside the Church. Christ-likeness can only be had from Christ.
So rather than venturing belatedly into the world of Social Justice or other Causes dear to the hearts of millennials, I submit evangelical churches should begin to train in and practice courageous Christian leadership, and recommit to a culture of discipleship, and see what happens when that leadership is not merely put to use in the business world, as is too often the case, but invested back into the Church. New ministries. Proactive work for the Kingdom. A Cause to be passionate about: the Cause of Christ, not merely as an idea but modeled by leaders who train leaders who know how to reproduce themselves too. Christians of every age, millennials very much included, would come to be a part of that.
And I think we might all be surprised and give glory to God at what would result.
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