Today the church suffers more from the sheer indifference of young people than any other institution in our society. By and large, the young have dismissed the Church as archaic, ineffective, and irrelevant. So concludes John D. Rockefeller 3rd, writing in Saturday Review. The indictment stings. If it is true, we must find ourselves echoing the anguished retrospective query voiced by many parents, “What did we do wrong?” Or, a question more constructive and forward-looking, “What can we do now?”
Since adolescent revolt has been more prominent on campuses than anywhere else, our first inclination is to blame the universities, where naturalistic philosophies and scientism are rampant. Student denunciation of the multiversity has been vociferous for other reasons. They have reproached administrators for inaccessible professors, “rabbit-warren” residence halls, the “vocational” orientation of today’s higher learning, and the IBM impersonality of the institution. When due allowance has been made for these and other shortcomings of the university, the fact remains that home and church have had first chance at today’s student generation and must shoulder a proportionate share of the responsibility.
What is responsible for this generation’s revolt, with its distinguishing marks of sexual freedom, drug experimentation, activism, and desire for “instant everything”?
Behind today’s student unrest is a long period of “child-centered” education, characterized by broad permissiveness and subordination of adult direction. The spirit of that era was vividly lampooned twenty years ago by Robert Hutchins, who remarked, “The academic administrators of America remind one of the French Revolutionist who said, ‘The mob is in the street. I must find out where they are going, for I am their leader’ ” (Time, Nov. 21, 1949).
To understand today’s “mix” fully, one must remember that psychoanalytic psychology and nondirective counseling have also been ground in, followed by Kinsey statistics, offering an alleged “isness” in the place of “oughtness.” All these have profoundly influenced home and family, and are reflected in today’s education, literature, entertainment, psychiatry, and pastoral work. Because comprehension has replaced correction, delinquents have learned to play back in social-work jargon why they are in trouble through no fault of their own (see G. and F. Hechinger, Teenage Tyranny, Morrow, 1963).
Not all the blame can be fixed outside the Church. Some of the contemporary relaxation of sexual standards has been encouraged by ethicists who claim to be grounded in the Christian tradition. The idea that premarital and extramarital sex may be “redemptive” has traveled fast and far under the impetus given by voices from within the Church itself, voices that repudiate not only biblical foundations but also the centuries of human experience embodied in time-tested moral codes. With friends like these, as the quip goes, who needs enemies? Contemporary rejection of the Church by young people is undoubtedly in part an identification with their ecclesiastical elders who are rebelling against biblical authority and Christian tradition.
The dominant idea of situation ethics (which has been called the “non-Christian nonsystem of nonethics”), that love has a built-in moral compass and hence can allow itself to be directed completely by the situation, is a shallow and fallacious anachronism left over from a burned-out faith in the inherent goodness of human nature. Young people are encouraged to dispense with objective, extrinsic norms, leaving themselves free to enter any “emotional blitz” with only a free-floating subjectivism as a guide.
This process is not really the repudiation of all authority; rather, it is the replacement of biblical authority with the authority of mystical intuition. Reinhold Niebuhr long ago pointed out that “the natural passions which exist side by side with the capacity of rationality are always subject to the corruption of human sin.” This fact, coupled with the human penchant for self-deception where egoistic interests are concerned, leaves the man without a code at the mercy of his own rationalization. As Paul Ramsey points out, “there can be no Christian social ethics unless there are some rules of practice required by agape” (Deeds and Rules in Christian Ethics, Scribner, 1967). Abandonment of the boundaries set by the revelation, by history and by society leads to a stance that, “if not antinomian, is certainly anomian.”
“Love alone” fails to take adequately into account the source and nature of divine love. Agape is not a natal endowment like hunger contractions or the ability to vocalize; it is poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit. Faith antedates love, and justice completes it. Without commitment to Christ in faith, there is no agape. Moreover, justice is an essential complement to love, involving a sense of duty to all men. The complete principle underlying biblical codes of morality is a unity of these three. The principle begins in faith, takes the form of love, and extends to justice (see F. S. Carney in Norm and Context in Christian Ethics, Scribner, 1969).
Today’s student activism calls attention, not only to the universal need of youth for a cause upon which to expend their energies, but to a deficiency in evangelical Christianity that has only begun to be met—the imbalance in emphasis upon the regeneration of persons and the overt expression of that change in social action.
Evangelicals have sometimes dissipated too much of their energy upon legalistic prohibitions while neglecting an adequate defense of the principles underlying them. While they were intent, for example, upon boycotting the dance, many of their youth moved directly into overt forms of sexual stimulation, from which the dancing taboo was designed to protect them. Equal effort in the promulgation of Christian reverence for personality might well produce a far greater sensitivity and intolerance of sexual laxness.
The Church has nothing to gain by moving biblical goal posts. Young people will always test for limits, if only for reassurance that someone cares. The wails of protest that emanate from youth’s encounter with rules and limits are not so much the assertions of adequacy they purport to be as aspirations toward an independence that is eagerly desired but still deeply feared.—ORVILLE S. WALTERS, professor of health science and lecturer in psychiatry, University of Illinois.
