It has been five years since my book The Selfie Vote was released, and now seems as good a time as any to engage in some pundit accountability.
With the benefit of five years to look back, one prediction that turned out to be wrong was my speculation that the newly chosen Pope Francis would bring about greater interest in Catholicism or in Christianity generally on the part of millennials. At the core of The Selfie Vote was an argument that, to bring my generation aboard, old institutions need to modernize. “One often hears non-Catholics say they like what the new pope has to say, and his focus on elements of the faith that have universal appeal has the potential to draw the less religious to want to learn more,” I wrote.
Yet in the intervening years, Pope Francis’ favorability among all adults has fallen to Benedict XVI levels, U.S. Catholics have become significantly less upbeat about his papacy, and less than half of Catholics under age 50 say he is doing a good job “standing up for traditional morals.” The new pope did not boost Catholic affiliation among the young in the United States, but church attendance did decrease, and older and more conservative Catholics are where Pope Francis’ favorable ratings have fallen the sharpest.
At the same time that I’ve been reflecting on the way young Americans think about faith and culture, and where I got it wrong about Pope Francis and millennials, two articles have come out reminding me of how some young people actually crave the more traditional path, rebelling against the very changes being driven by their own generation.
The first article is an absolute must-read by Eve Fairbanks titled, “Behold, the Millennial nuns.” A decade ago, 9 in 10 nuns in the U.S. were over age 60. Young women were simply not choosing religious life. And yet Fairbanks notes, something is changing:
“You get the sense that these young women get a kick out of demonstrating their enduring link to ‘basic bitch’ concerns like food Instagramming, college sports or Benedict Cumberbatch’s facial hair, and then pulling a fast one on the rest of us with flinty tweets like ‘You die unprepared without the sacraments.’ These young women have one last surprise: They tend to be far more doctrinally conservative than their predecessors.”
The story Fairbanks illustrates is not one of more young women discerning to live the religious life because the church has made it easier to join in order to boost recruiting, or because nuns are becoming “cool”; to the contrary, it is because religious life is so different from the modern path, and expects so much of its adherents that more young women are being drawn to it.
The other news pertained to Joshua Harris, the author of 1997’s Christian publishing blockbuster I Kissed Dating Goodbye. Harris is sadly in the news this week because he announced he is separating from his wife of 20 years, a fact which is newsworthy precisely because of how enormously popular his book and “purity culture” was in Christian youth group culture during the late 1990s and early 2000s. I Kissed Dating Goodbye urged teenagers to not just practice abstinence until marriage but to not date or even kiss their intended spouse before marriage, either.
Rather than winning popularity through modernizing and liberalizing, or trying to make a case to reconcile Christianity with modern dating culture, I Kissed Dating Goodbye took an especially conservative perspective on dating. That is not to say Harris got it entirely right; Harris himself last year disavowed his views and apologized for promoting views he says are not derived from the Bible itself. Nonetheless, it is undeniable that, at the time, those views promoting a very chaste approach to romantic life found an enormous and eager audience in Christian teens looking for a radically different path than the dating lives of their peers.
The desire to live according to old ways or traditions is not always confined to religious life; whether we’re talking about a to return to paleolithic era dietary trends or to an era before screen time dominated childhood, there are countless secular expressions of wanting to go back to the habits and behaviors of a previous era for one reason or another. While in the aggregate, cultural change continues apace, the path for institutions to win over younger audience is not necessarily to simply abandon traditions, but rather to discern what is worth changing and what is absolutely worth preserving even in the face of that cultural change.
Indeed, it is sometimes the very members of the generation driving change who may look around and find that they themselves want to choose a radical, countercultural path of being deeply “small-c” conservative.
