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Where does this hunger come from?

The hunger comes from a lot of different places. If you feel like you weren't fed growing up, then you're going to have intense hunger. So some of it is just I didn't get what I needed from my church. Some of it is I didn't get what I needed from my family. Rising divorce rates affected this generation—leading to a breakup of family, breakup of community, a sense of feeling isolated. So all of that has contributed.

Yet, some of this trend, I believe, is just the work of the Holy Spirit, and that's what the young believers will tell you. They'll refuse to chalk it up to sociology or rebellion. The gospel is timeless and the attraction is timeless.

How does the path of these young believers differ from that of their parents' and grandparents'?

For one thing, this may be one of the first generations where faith is such a conscious choice. It's not something embedded in their family anymore. I searched far and wide, and I didn't find too many people—even among the ones who had been raised in strict Catholicism or in the evangelical subculture who had never questioned their faith. They just don't have that luxury anymore. The culture questions them every day. I quote Os Guinness saying that on the one hand this situation is great because faith is a conscious choice, and on the other hand that can lead to problems, because if something can be consciously chosen it can be consciously rejected when it becomes inconvenient.

What do the new faithful struggle with in orthodoxy?

The crux of their struggle is how they live the orthodox faith in a culture that is not orthodox. Some struggle with isolation. They want to preserve their beliefs, they want to stay safe, and they want to keep their children safe. But they risk winding up with only friends who think exactly like they do and taking only jobs where their beliefs will never be confronted. Faith can suffer if your full concentration is on yourself and on just preserving what you've got rather than spreading your talents outward.

The flip side is assimilation, another struggle that the new faithful face. A lot of them are zealous about evangelism, so intent on transforming culture with this gospel that has changed their lives. But they can sometimes become naïve about where and how to do that. They sometimes can see Christian themes and truths in places where they don't exist because they want to see them and want to reach out to the world. That's a great instinct, but there are some media through which the gospel doesn't flow well. There are some song or film genres, for instance, that don't work to spread the Christian message. Sometimes, in their eagerness to spread the gospel, the new faithful can see their own faith get weakened or compromised.

Could you give an example of such zealousness gone awry?

Some young Christian artists incorporate gospel messages into heavy-metal rock songs and horror films. They often have thoughtful reasons for doing so. But in some of these cases, such as a discordant, angry song with Christian lyrics or a grizzly, despairing film with an underlying moral theme, the medium overpowers the message. I think movies and music that show glimpses of the true, the good, and the beautiful, even when they are not overtly evangelistic, are more powerful vehicles for transforming culture.

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August 5 2002, Vol. 46, No. 9