The Return of Apathy

Jay Kesler tells what today’s youth have and don’t have in common with previous generations.

Jay Kesler has ministered to youth for 30 years through extensive speaking, his Family Forum radio program, and his Person to Person column in CAMPUS LIFE magazine. Decades ago Kesler determined to read 400 pages every week, and has largely maintained that goal—despite traveling widely and combining his presidency of Youth for Christ with pastoring a Baptist church outside Chicago. A thoughtful observer of the subtleties of human relationships, he has written nine books.

Last July 31, Kesler left the presidency of YFC to become president of Taylor University (Upland, Ind.). CT chose this occasion to ask him about today’s youth and how parents and church leaders can minister to them.

How are today’s teenagers like those you have seen in the past?

Many observers of today’s youth culture want to equate today’s teenagers with those of the Eisenhower years. You see articles with black-and-white photos of ’55 Chevrolets at the local drive-in, girls standing around in bobby socks, and waitresses whizzing about on roller skates. And the author concludes that today’s kids are a lot like those in the picture—both groups are apathetic and self-centered.

There may be some truth to that comparison. It’s not inaccurate to describe most adolescents of the fifties and those of the eighties as self-consumed and apathetic about the world.

But I see a huge difference. Students in the fifties were apathetic about the world because they didn’t know much about it. That was pre-Sputnik and nearly pretelevision, pretransistor, and precomputer.

Missionaries came to churches with snake skins and pith helmets. And most Americans viewed the rest of the world as uncivilized. We’d never seen downtown Nairobi, Buenos Aires, or Singapore on the evening news.

Even our young men who fought overseas during World War II and the Korean Conflict weren’t that informed. They carried their own culture with them.

Today’s teenagers are apathetic not because they don’t know enough to care about the world; they’re apathetic because they know just enough about the world to think that they don’t matter. They’ve seen so much on television and discussed so many big issues in their social studies classes that they feel helpless and hopeless in the face of the incredible global problems. Today’s teenagers may not be able to locate and name any more countries in world geography classes than their parents or grandparents did. But they know so much more about the world that they see their own undeniable impotence to solve the world’s problems.

But during the sixties, youth believed they could make a difference.

The idealism of American youth was whipped to a frenzy during the sixties.

The young people of the sixties went out into the world, fighting in Vietnam or reaching out through the Peace Corps. They found out what some of the world’s problems were. They proposed solutions. They got involved. They took action, sometimes violent action.

But in the end, the guardians of the status quo rose up and said, “Wait! We want to solve the problems, but not at the expense of the structure.”

The result? Many kids in the late sixties and early seventies turned on and dropped out. Since society couldn’t be changed, the next best option seemed to be turning on to your own world and dropping out of this one. For some dropouts the result was devastatingly destructive; but after a while, most of them gave up the dream and rejoined the mainstream of society. So Jane Fonda is teaching yuppies to exercise, and Tom Hayden is in conventional politics.

Can we help young people feel that they can make a difference?

It is encouraging to see Christian leaders helping youth groups get over this sense of impotence through summer mission activities. And rock stars using their leadership potential for famine relief is also a good sign. These deserve our applause.

Considering the mood of today’s youth, what do individual congregations and families need to be doing to combat the problems we’ve talked about—self-centeredness, for example?

When it comes to families, I think the old saying that “Christianity is more caught than taught” is still true. Families have got to be intentionally Christian in this culture.

We will never see our kids grow to Christian adulthood if we just float along. The Christian family that wants to survive as a Christian family today has to sit down and analyze its everyday approach to living out its faith. Are our goals self-serving, or do we live out God’s concern for others? Are we just polite materialists rather than impolite materialists? Are we just secularists who don’t swear and drink, or are we qualitatively different people? What do our kids see in us?

We ought to be examining these questions regularly, because our children will be like us.

The local church has to ask a lot of the same questions as families. But I think the local church needs to become an agency, a sponsor, that will give kids a chance and a place to reach out and put a self-sacrificing gospel into practice.

There’s a lot to commend summer mission programs for young people. Your church could send a check to Haiti or Mexico, and you could probably build a church and supply a month’s worth of medicine for a poverty-stricken village. And it may cost twice as much to send a team of scared, inexperienced teenagers down to lay bricks and hold vacation Bible schools for kids who don’t understand half of what they’re trying to say.

But from what I’ve seen, I’d say the extra money is well worth it. American kids need that chance to live out their faith and discover the joy, the purpose, and the sense of identity they get by helping someone else in great need.

What else do our youth need help with?

Adolescence is by definition a time of identity crisis. It’s the time when everyone begins to struggle with the meaning of life and ask: “Who am I? What am I? Why am I here?”

But I doubt that any previous generation has had more discouraging, hopeless, unsatisfying, and frightening answers to those questions. The identity crisis of today’s young people, individually and corporately, is the largest single factor affecting this generation.

This is why so many kids are buying into the pop psychology that paints self-satisfaction as a noble goal. Be yourself. Find yourself. Express yourself. Satisfy yourself.

Some people call it narcissism. But I think it’s not just simple selfishness. It’s selfishness for lack of an alternative. Kids feel they may as well take care of themselves because they can’t make much of a difference in the bigger picture anyway. This might be what the biblical phrase means, “without a vision the people perish.”

How good a job would you say the church does with the “why” questions young people ask?

I think we are often afraid to face the “why” questions. We forget that all real truth is God’s truth. It’s like we want to divide our minds into two completely separate compartments, one for secular truth (What is the speed of light? Where is Iceland located? How do you build a sewage treatment plant?), and one for spiritual truth (How many days did it take God to create the world? How do you pronounce YHWH? Can you recite the Apostles’ Creed?).

On one side of our mind-made wall, we keep secular truth, which we see as something dangerous, like a saber-toothed tiger. We don’t dare let it over the wall or it might devour the little bunny rabbit of sacred, spiritual truth.

That’s a crippling and tragically unbiblical fear. Christians, of all people, shouldn’t fear truth. Our God is Truth. And we need to help our young people understand that. If we don’t honestly face the “why” questions in our churches, we will lose our young people. And if we don’t honestly face those questions biblically in our Christian colleges, we will have nothing more than a secular college with prayer before classes.

As you now go to deal with young people in a different setting—from the parachurch ministry to a Christian institution of higher learning—what new strategies will you encourage the Christian community to rethink in terms of evangelism and discipleship?

All my life I’ve tried to communicate that evangelism is more than soul winning—if soul winning is understood simply as saving a person from going to hell. The integration of faith and learning and the need for young people to develop a truly Christian world view is part of the broad definition of evangelism.

There’s a growing attitude among secular educators, and some Christian educators I’m afraid, that a liberal arts curriculum is impractical, almost quaint, something that creates little tweedy people, not the source of the movers and shakers of industry. But while we Christians need to train people in management, business, and communications, that will never be enough. No matter how great human technology or commerce is, if we don’t understand the “why” questions, if we don’t understand history’s great events, philosophy’s great ideas, or theology’s explanation of God and humanity, then so what? We need a Christian synoptic, a biblical world view.

What are some encouraging signs you see among youth today?

Far and away the most positive thing I see is the care that so many young people are giving to the selection of their mates and to the careful, loving raising of their children.

You’re talking about Christian young people?

Secular kids are very interested in this too; they may experiment sexually before marriage, but when they’re ready to settle down they want to do it right. They’ve seen too much divorce and disruption to want to risk it. But I don’t know how well they can do it without a captain. When Christ is the captain, I’m very optimistic.

I’m curious and hopeful as I wonder what kinds of children are going to be produced by young Christian parents who are so very concerned to do a good job. There was a song back when I was a boy called “Doin’ What Comes Naturally,” and most of my generation took that approach to family. They got married that way, and they had their kids that way—doing what came naturally. If they had a good enough background, it turned out okay. But the divorce rate among Christian families today seems to indicate that we haven’t done significantly better than the rest of society.

The present group of committed Christian young people, at least those who want to be countercultural, seems to be very eager to develop solid families and homes. Some of them care so deeply that they may need a little more encouragement toward taking risks. At times they are so perfectionistic and want to do it so well that they are afraid to do anything. But I’m very heartened by the intentionality of many young people and their families.

Christian parents who grew up in the sixties tell us: “Our teenagers are more conservative than we are.” Do you find this true?

In many cases. But Christian parents who were not very deeply involved in the sixties counterculture are different from parents who were deeply involved.

It has been estimated that in the sixties about 65 percent of all youth experimented with drugs. Therefore we know that about 65 percent of the parents of today’s teenagers are former drug users or continue as recreational drug users. So a lot of parents may be more experienced with drugs than their “more conservative” teenagers.

How do you explain the apparent shift toward social and political conservatism among young people?

Much of it is an outgrowth of fear—on at least two fronts:

One is nuclear fear. Kids are very acquainted with technology, but they also know its foibles. The parents of today’s kids were part of the generation that looked to science as the salvation of mankind. But to the kids, science represents the destruction of mankind. So they are saying that we can’t just pursue science endlessly, it’s liable to end in the destruction of the world. Parents generally have an optimistic technological view. But the kids, many of whom have a better awareness of nuclear issues than their parents, are genuinely scared. A majority of them believe there will be a major nuclear war in their lifetime.

A theologian or philosopher might talk about “angst,” but kids don’t know angst from animal crackers. Nevertheless, they experience it. The threat of nuclear death hangs over them like an atomic sword of Damocles.

Second is the fear of losing what they have. They aren’t ideologically conservative in the sense that they would say, “Better dead then red.” They would say, “Better alive than dead.” They’re ready to do whatever is necessary to preserve their own lives and the quality of those lives. They hear strong confident voices in national leadership and trust them. Their parents were let down by their leadership and are more skeptical and questioning.

At the same time, much of today’s youth generation has lost a lot of social consciousness because they have not seen the glaring inequalities their parents, the sixties people, have. They have never seen all-white restaurants. They have never seen separate drinking fountains and rest rooms. They have never seen people forced to ride in the back of the bus.

In fact, buses represent a completely different social issue for “conservative” white kids today. Many of them have to get on a bus with people they don’t understand culturally and head clear across town for a school where they they feel alien and frightened in a setting that isn’t as clean or familiar as their neighborhood school. They’ve never seen Uncle Tom; they don’t understand Eliza running across the ice on the river. They only see, and often resent, the concessions they are forced to make to accommodate groups of people who are different. These kids are scared of losing what they have. And they’re conservative because they want to conserve their rights, privileges, and possessions.

You could see this attitude in the theater this past summer. One of the most frightening things in the world is to sit in a theater and watch Rambo remake history along macho-man lines. Millions of American kids went to watch and cheer this movie. And they went home feeling proud of their country because one fictitious American with a naked chest could kill several hundred little “gooks” with his gun, while their bullets didn’t even touch him.

This kind of conservatism seems nothing more than an attempt to restore a bashed self-image. It’s part of the national search for answers to the questions: Who am I? What am I? Why am I here?

It’s symptomatic of a lack of faith. They don’t find meaning in the fact that they are children of the living God. They don’t find their meaning in the fact that Jesus Christ is indeed God’s Son and can live in their hearts and that they are part of a larger cosmic picture. They don’t believe the wrongs of this world will be righted in eternity.

If you don’t believe those things, then you try to do something right now. You get something to try to fill your empty soul and psyche. The American psyche is empty now. Kids are experiencing that emptiness, too.

So the shift toward conservatism among youth isn’t the wonderful sign of coming revival some Christians see it to be?

I see little reason to start celebrating. The trend among secular youth is growing in too many negative directions. I’ve been very concerned about the rising interest in the KKK among youth.

More and more kids are buying into the cultural norm. And before we Christians start cheering them on, we need to remember that today’s cultural norm is materialist, and it’s built on a solid base of selfishness and value goals like getting, keeping, enjoying. In many ways, today’s conservative youth are trying to disprove the biblical teaching that man cannot live by bread alone. They think they just have to find the right bread.

Save the Family

My primary concern about the family is not sociological, societal, or economic; it is theological. We are attempting to reach a generation of lost young people.

When you try to reach these kids with the message of Christ, it dawns on you what the Devil is doing. Yes, he uses pornography and the sexual revolution. But they are only diversions. His real strategy is the systematic destruction of the family. When he destroys the family, he destroys the redemptive plan of God. From Genesis to Revelation, the consistent illustration in Scripture to help us understand the eternal God is the family. God is a father, not a “great Imperial Potentate.”

When YFC first started working with delinquent kids, we tried to reach them by using ordinary materials picturing God as a heavenly father. We discovered that these materials were not working. To these kids a father was someone who comes home on Friday night, slaps mother around, and keeps you awake until 4:00 A.M. putting his fist through the drywall. These kids were hearing that there is a great big fellow like this who wants to get his hands on them.

We can preach, buy television time, and finance super Christian organizations, but as the family breaks down we won’t be communicating because God is our father, and we are his children; Christ is a bridegroom, and the church is his bride. We are brothers and sisters. The Devil knows what he’s doing—breaking down the fabric on which this eternal communication hangs.

What are we going to do? First, we’ve got to become actively concerned about the things we can change rather than fussing about the things we can’t change. One thing we can do is honestly commit ourselves to the biblical view of love, commitment, and covenant. My wife and I are committed to what we call “terminal monogamy.” “O love that wilt not let me go.” The most important thing a church can do today is make sure its own families don’t let go.

Second, we need to establish priorities. We must be careful not to become upper middle class at the expense of our souls, our children, our families, and our marriages. A boy is better off raised on linoleum with his father than on a carpet without him. Setting realistic priorities may well mean that we can’t have all the accouterments of the middle class and still have Jesus. Some of us may have to make very clear personal choices—like living within our income.

Third, if possible, put your roots down and establish the home geographically once again. Refuse to move. Give our children extended families. I don’t know how comforting IBM or GM will be in our old age. But I would much rather have my children come to Thanksgiving dinner than the chairman of GM.

Fourth, families need to become a part of the church. I have a friend who has moved his family 25 times in 35 years. Incredibly, he has one of the finest families I have ever known. Whenever his family moved to a town, they never looked for that little house “we always wanted” first. Instead, the first thing they did was find a church that ministered effectively to the children and then moved into a house just as close to that church as possible. They remodeled those houses—they didn’t remodel their family.

There isn’t anything more important for the family today than to be an integral part of a functioning local church—to be an active part of the body of Christ.

By Jay Kesler, from a speech at the 1982 National Association of Evangelicals’ “Save the Family” convention.

What is that bread?

It’s not just money. It’s quality.

I’m amazed how many young people will not look at a car that is not at least BMW quality. They want quality food, quality watches, quality homes, quality enjoyment, quality everything—the best that materialism can buy. Those who have had a great deal of that, youth who have driven their Maseratis around until they are tired of it, have to search elsewhere for satisfaction.

They try to live on the bread of sensuality. Normal sexuality tied to commitment, responsibility, and family doesn’t have enough pizzazz. It asks for too much sacrifice. So people look for a way to express their sensuality and satisfy themselves at the same time. What you end up with is a masturbatory approach: Satisfy your sexuality with a partner who also is enjoying his or her own sexuality—each for selfish pleasure. Biblical sexuality is based on mutuality, not self-satisfaction.

There’s so little understanding of the biblical principle of gaining your life by losing it. The cultural norm says you can gain your life by gaining more things, more experience, more pleasure.

I’m afraid one reason today’s kids are falling victim to this philosophy is that their parents, including too many Christian parents, are also trying to live on a diet heavy in bread. Just read the cover copy or the advertisements in the magazines on your coffee table; they review the finest stereo sound, the best of everything. This seduction affects Christians and non-Christians alike. We must be intentionally Christian and pray much to avoid being deceived.

If anyone should be able to see through and reject the materialistic philosophy, it should be the Christian church. But I fear we’ve so adapted ourselves to the cultural norm that we’re not in a strong position to lead our youth to a more biblical standard. The church is far quicker to applaud and embrace the “conservative” self-centered values prevalent among youth today than it was to accept the justice-seeking, other-centered idealism of young people in the sixties. That’s because today’s kids aren’t challenging the secular societal norms.

Sometimes I think the punk rockers understand the futility of trying to live by bread alone better than the Christians. They may not see anything beyond their hopelessness. But at least the punk rockers recognize the ultimate meaninglessness of materialism.

You mentioned fear as a major reason for youthful conservatism. Are there others?

A related motivation is a longing for security. Not only can you see it in the self-centered pursuit of things, you can see it in the reluctance of so many kids to get involved or reach out.

I regularly talk to professors in our Christian colleges who are trying to get kids to understand the social dimensions of the gospel and its responsibilities. But it’s hard to get an audience. Professors who were turned on to the radical Christian gospel in the sixties are near despair now.

Youth leaders and teachers constantly tell me that you can’t get kids to share their opinions in a group larger than three or four. One professor with a national teaching award told me that if it wasn’t for a middle-aged homemaker in his class, he’d have no one to talk to. The kids sit there like they’re painted on the chairs. They just stare at him because they can’t share their opinions for fear of rejection.

This is no cause for hate or anger. It is a reason for sadness, a symptom of almost terminal selfishness, a disorder we Christians need to try to cure.

We need to help our young people understand the sense of satisfaction, purpose, joy, and pleasure that comes only from serving, giving, and losing yourself for others. I wish we could show them the joy in the heart of someone like Mother Teresa, a woman who looks about as far from a centerfold as any woman could. And yet something in her eyes makes you say, there is a happier, more beautiful woman than ever was airbrushed.

How do we communicate to our youth a gospel of sacrifice and service?

I believe that is the challenge—really a double-barreled challenge: evangelizing secular youth and discipling Christian youth.

I am personally of the opinion that church youth work is doing the best job it’s ever done in its history. But the challenge for the church about its own youth is to examine our message constantly so that it is not simply a pious restatement of secular norms. It also must be more than simple salvation—how to save your own soul. We must care for the souls and lives of others across the whole world. This is what Jesus taught. Anything short of that is a truncated gospel.

Our church kids need the actual gospel of sacrifice and servanthood that challenges these norms of selfishness, personal satisfaction, and materialism at their very foundation. To get understood on this gospel, we adults are not only going to have to preach it, we’re going to have to live it.

But even voicing this challenge, I have to say again that I’m thrilled by what is happening in church youth ministry. It’s been my experience, in the hundreds of high schools across the country where Youth for Christ carries on its ministry, that student leadership is often disproportionately Christian, especially in suburban areas. More and more Christian kids, church kids, set the pace in their schools in academics, sports, and almost every other way. And they’re open about their faith.

Some of this is due to their commitment to Christ and the support of good Christian homes; but some, I’m afraid, is due to the fact that the competition at school is dropping out because of drugs and low motivation.

It’s an exciting trend. But I think we’re only deceiving ourselves if we see this as a sign that we’re winning the battle of evangelism. While the leadership structure in our high schools may be disproportionately Christian, the other end of the student population is less Christian than ever. Perhaps it’s a reflection of society at large, but our upwardly mobile Christian teenagers seem to be drawing farther and farther away from the lost kids at the other end of the spectrum.

What kind of problem does that present for evangelizing youth?

There’s now a greater chasm between Christianity and the general North American youth population than I can remember. And the gap is going to get even greater.

A generation has passed since Francis Schaeffer began talking about a secular America living on the memory of their parents’ Christianity. Unchurched kids today have no Christian memory at all. Most of them don’t have a “Faith of Our Fathers” to come back to.

The implications for evangelism are sobering. We have to start from scratch, assuming nothing. We can’t assume a foundation of basic accepted Christian values or virtues among the secular kids we try to reach.

If you want to get an illustration of just how far the basic experience of youth is removed from Christian values, read a book like Teenagers Themselves, attend a secular rock concert, watch two hours of MTV. You’ll probably come away depressed, but you’ll also realize that we in the church need to rethink a lot of our assumptions about how to evangelize our nation’s youth.

For years now American society has played to the youth culture. The media certainly do. Industry has discovered young people as consumers. And adult fashion follows youth fashion. Do you see today’s adult world leading youth or trying to follow youth?

While American society may have glamorized youth and the young in the past, I think we’re entering a time when the world is pretty much going to ignore youth.

In Western countries we have a declining youth population. We also have a tremendous problem brought upon us by the aging population and the effect of medicine, public health, and increased longevity. The focus of society’s attention is not going to be on youth, but on our rapidly aging population.

Sociologists refer to this trend as the pig-in-the-python phenomenon. Picture the bulge in a python who has swallowed a pig whole. Our society is the python, and the baby-boom generation is the pig. As the baby boomers age, the big bulge moves along. And there’s not much interest or concern about what’s coming after. The concern stays with the pig that continues to stretch the python at the seams.

And now that the bulge has moved to where the youngest baby-boomers are in their midtwenties, the smaller group behind them is not of much interest to people. School referendums are lost, we quit building new schools, and the ranks of teachers begin to thin.

I think those Christians who are in youth work will be fighting a difficult battle at every level for the next 10 to 15 years. America will have to find new solutions to the coming problems and demands imposed on society by the aging baby boomers before we can again attend to youth problems. I’m afraid that in the meantime we’ll pay a high price in the lives of the next generation of American youth.

How is our society going to pay for this neglect?

What I see coming is a turn to nationalism and a society determined to use its great youth resource to secure the future and to try to maintain a healthy consumerism by way of an intensified nationalism. You can see the seeds sprouting in the Rambo audiences I mentioned.

I feel bad about the negative direction this discussion seems to be going, but American youth are not far at all from where German youth were in the thirties, feeling frustrated and impotent. The right demagogue railing against the right scapegoat could lead them astray.

Western culture is at a major crossroads with youth today. I don’t want to be an alarmist, but we as Christians need to realize that the trends in today’s youth culture are not just a new generation’s manifestation of adolescent behavior, not just another version of pink pedal-pushers and angora sweaters. The last time around, the pink pedal-pushers, angora sweaters, and Beatle haircuts were draped over young people who, for the most part, still lived in the shadow of the previous generation’s Christianity. This time, the youth don’t have that Christian memory.

But lest we end on such a discouraging note, let me say I am continually heartened by the sincerity and quality of commitment I find in committed Christian kids around North America and the world.

A friend shared with me his joy that when his high-school daughter returned from a church evangelism and service project overseas, she was a transformed person. She now wants to give her life for the service of Christ.

Another young man, very dear to me, spent six hours of his day off taking a derelict from doctor to doctor seeking medical help and assuring him of Christ’s love.

This is the hope of the future. There are thousands of others like them out there.

The potential of today’s Christian youth is greater than ever. God’s power is the same today as it was yesterday. And it’s our challenge as Christian adults to see that our kids tap into that power and find their true identity and happiness as servants of Jesus Christ.

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