A Fascinating Look at the Faith of Young Seekers

Generation-Xers, by some definitions the 80 million Americans born between 1961 and 1981, have been variously portrayed as slackers and cynics, entrepreneurial cyber-elitists and idealistic multiculturalists. They have also been seen as religiously indifferent, staying away from mainstream churches in droves.

But in a new book edited by two of Southern California’s most prominent religion scholars, Gen-Xers emerge as a deeply spiritual generation creating eclectic new communities of faith that reflect their own lifestyles, are innovative in form and yet are often conservative in creed.

“Gen X Religion” is a fascinating foray into the spiritual expression of a varied group of youthful seekers. The rich collection of essays examines Christian tattooists and Goths, who express their faith in body markings, piercings and costume. There are essays on Latino and African American churches that use rap and hip-hop, drama, poetry and dance to animate traditional text-based services with the multimedia images favored by youth.

The book examines the rapid proliferation of Korean American Christian communities at UCLA, churches that began in surf shops and those that offer theologically conservative teachings delivered in the language of pop culture.

Several essays focus on congregations striving to overcome the racial self-segregation that still characterizes most churches today, reflecting the multicultural values of a generation raised in an era of equal opportunity laws. Other essays examine churches that reflect the Gen-X desire for authenticity: a faith lived out in daily life, not simply preached on Sundays.

The most striking of these is the small Church of the Redeemer, started by a group of well-educated, upwardly mobile young Christians who voluntarily moved to South-Central Los Angeles to live among the poor and make the needs of the neighborhood their own. Braving the perils of drug-dealing and gang violence, church members offer meals, tutoring and Christian services to their neighbors. They have also initiated projects to improve the neighborhood--leading the charge to close a liquor store, raising money to plant trees and paint murals, organizing the area’s only street fair every Halloween. Such courage and commitment belie the apathetic image of Gen-Xers and highlight their idealistic pursuit of authentic experiences.

The book’s editors, Richard W. Flory of Biola University in La Mirada and Donald E. Miller of the USC Center for Religion and Civic Culture, offer illuminating chapters that attempt to define Gen-Xers and posit a theory of their religion. What characterizes this generation, Flory writes, are multiculturalism, technological literacy, diminishing economic opportunities and a rootlessness born from the mobility and high divorce rates of their parents.

These experiences have helped form what Flory calls the five characteristics of Gen-X religion: a sensual and experiential faith incorporating image, music and dance; an entrepreneurial one that creates new religious expressions based on their existing lifestyles; a desire to find religious identity in community, as opposed to the individual spiritual quests of their baby boomer parents; a commitment to be inclusive of gender, sex and race; and an insistence on authenticity.

Flory ends his chapter, and the book, with suggestions to religious leaders on how to draw Gen-Xers into their churches, mosques and temples. These include: Tell stories at sermon time, preferably in multimedia presentations, rather than giving rationalistic religious expositions. Give them space to create their own religious expressions. Downplay hierarchies of authority.

Such advice may be hard to follow. One minister of a leading church in a low-income part of Los Angeles recently lamented that his very traditional congregation had just spent thousands of dollars on a pipe organ--”an instrument of the 19th century”--rather than a $100 keyboard and was resisting his moves to institute more lively services. And for such inherently hierarchical institutions as the Catholic Church, appealing to the Gen-X desire for egalitarianism poses a challenge.

The book, by design, is not meant to be a definitive look at the entire range of Gen-X spirituality. The religious communities covered are nearly all based in Southern California, and nine of the 11 essays focus on Christianity--the others look at Sinai Temple’s popular “Friday Night Live” services for Jewish singles and at the Goth culture.

Nor is the book meant as popular reading. Although the writers--many of them Gen-Xers themselves--kept their essays largely free of academese, it is fundamentally a scholarly product that can’t help but include subsections on topics such as “the philosophy and epistemology of Gen-Xers.”

But for those curious about what lies beyond the baby boomers’ vaunted personal spiritual searches, the book is an engrossing look at the colorful ways in which Gen-Xers are making an unconventional mark on the American religious landscape.