Perhaps the Christofascist Zombie Brigade needs these Christian madrassas to train their version of the very same aspiring martyrs we're fighting in the Middle East, because they fear if they don't get 'em young, they might lose them once the hormones start flowing:
Despite their packed megachurches, their political clout and their increasing visibility on the national stage, evangelical Christian leaders are warning one another that their teenagers are abandoning the faith in droves.
Their alarm has been stoked by a highly suspect claim that if current trends continue, only 4 percent of teenagers will be “Bible-believing Christians” as adults. That would be a sharp decline compared with 35 percent of the current generation of baby boomers, and before that, 65 percent of the World War II generation.
While some critics say the statistics are greatly exaggerated (one evangelical magazine for youth ministers dubbed it “the 4 percent panic attack”), there is widespread consensus among evangelical leaders that they risk losing their teenagers.
“I’m looking at the data,” said Ron Luce, who organized the meetings and founded Teen Mania, a 20-year-old youth ministry, “and we’ve become post-Christian America, like post-Christian Europe. We’ve been working as hard as we know how to work — everyone in youth ministry is working hard — but we’re losing.”
The board of the National Association of Evangelicals, an umbrella group representing 60 denominations and dozens of ministries, passed a resolution this year deploring “the epidemic of young people leaving the evangelical church.”
Among the leaders speaking at the meetings are Ted Haggard, president of the evangelical association; the Rev. Jerry Falwell; and nationally known preachers like Jack Hayford and Tommy Barnett.
Genuine alarm can be heard from Christian teenagers and youth pastors, who say they cannot compete against a pervasive culture of cynicism about religion, and the casual “hooking up” approach to sex so pervasive on MTV, on Web sites for teenagers and in hip-hop, rap and rock music. Divorced parents and dysfunctional families also lead some teenagers to avoid church entirely or to drift away.
Over and over in interviews, evangelical teenagers said they felt like a tiny, beleaguered minority in their schools and neighborhoods. They said they often felt alone in their struggles to live by their “Biblical values” by avoiding casual sex, risqué music and videos, Internet pornography, alcohol and drugs.
When Eric Soto, 18, transferred from a small charter school to a large public high school in Chicago, he said he was disappointed to find that an extracurricular Bible study attracted only five to eight students. “When we brought food, we thought we could get a better turnout,” he said. They got 12.
Chelsea Dunford, a 17-year old from Canton, Conn., said, “At school I don’t have a lot of friends who are Christians.”
Ms. Dunford spoke late last month as she and her small church youth group were about to join more than 3,400 teenagers in a sports arena at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst for a Christian youth extravaganza and rock concert called Acquire the Fire.
“A lot of my friends are self-proclaimed agnostics or atheists,” said Ms. Dunford, who wears a bracelet with a heart-shaped charm engraved with “tlw,” for “true love waits,” to remind herself of her pledge not to have premarital sex.
She said her friends were more prone to use profanity and party than she was, and added: “It’s scary sometimes. You get made fun of.”
To break the isolation and bolster the teenagers’ commitment to a conservative lifestyle, Mr. Luce has been organizing these stadium extravaganzas for 15 years. The event in Amherst was the first of 40 that Teen Mania is putting on between now and May, on a breakneck schedule that resembles a road trip for a major touring band. The “roadies” are 700 teenagers who have interned for a year at Teen Mania’s “Honor Academy” in Garden Valley, Tex.
More than two million teenagers have attended in the last 15 years, said Mr. Luce, a 45-year-old, mop-headed father of three with a master’s degree from the Graduate School of Business Administration at Harvard and the star power of an aging rock guitarist.
“That’s more than Paul McCartney has pulled in,” Mr. Luce asserted, before bounding onstage for the opening pyrotechnics and a prayer.
For the next two days, the teenagers in the arena pogoed to Christian bands, pledged to lead their friends to Christ and sang an anthem with the chorus, “We won’t be silent.” Hundreds streamed down the aisles for the altar call and knelt in front of the stage, some weeping openly as they prayed to give their lives to God.
In the context of the Foley scandal and in contrast to the live-and-let-live Christian life of the Amish people of Nickel Mines, PA that is is now under our most unwelcome spotlight, the sheer fear of the self, the terror if you will, that pervades these evangelicals, is highly instructive. The footage that has come to light of Mark Foley talking about exploited children gives credence to the notion that the more you here so-called evangelical Christian Republican clergy, politicians and talking heads ranting about man-on-dog sex, fisting, daddy-daughter sex, man-on-donkey marriage, and other practices that never even enter the minds of those of us who do NOT spend our days obsessing about other people's sex lives, the bigger the window into their own psyches.
Unlike the Christofascist Zombie Brigade, which is trying to cement its children into the fold at an early age, the Amish allow their young people to leave the community and sample the outside world when they turn sixteen, so that they can make a free-will choice whether to spend their lives in the insular community in which they grew up, or leave altogether. It's called rumspringa, and it allows teens to sample the "English" world so that if they do decide to return (and 85-90% do), they have chosen to do so of their own free will. Is there a greater manifestation of the "If you love something, set it free" doctrine in Christianity than this?
By allowing their children to decide their own futures, the Amish ensure that those who do stay are at peace with their decision and with their lives in the community. Now it may very well be that when you're talking about a restrictive, all-or-nothing way of life, the only way to practice that in the modern world is to insulate yourself from exposure to that world.
Most of us would have no problem if evangelicals want to live in insular communities without MTV, video games, cable television, and the other stimuli that they believe is the biggest threat to the fragile little belief system in which they've wrapped themselves. The problem is that because proseletyzing and conversion is such an important part of their faith, these people aren't content to set up communities and live and let live. Instead, they seek to impose their views and their restrictions on the larger community.
We don't see the Amish trying to get the English to turn off the lights, because those who have decided to remain in the community are comfortable in their lives and in their faith. It's those like Mark Foley and Rick Santorum and James Dobson, who clearly grapple every day with the kind of inner sexual demons that most of us can't even fathom, who seek affirmation of the restrictions they need by imposing them on the larger society.
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