Faith Journal

Teaching young 20-somethings will put you in your place.

My encounters with fresh-faced grad students (I teach a writing seminar at Vanderbilt Divinity School) let me know the ground is always shifting, the clock ticking.

These kids weren't around for Sputnik, Vietnam and new Beatles LPs. I grew up thinking Watergate and Mary Tyler Moore would always matter. But Nixon today is as hopelessly distant to them as Truman was to me.

Society's reflex is to judge them harshly for being young. Ministers write books warning that the spirituality of teens and young adults is imperiled -- more oriented these days to iPod than Paul.

From my perch, though, the youngsters look unstoppably resilient, full of high spirits. They might lack historical perspective, but they major in buoyancy, eager to find answers to their own meaning-of-life questions.

I say give them a break.

The latest raft of new studies suggests otherwise. Youth are in trouble, we are told.

The Millennials (the generation born 1982-2002) are more stressed and depressed than the earlier wave of Gen-Xers, says one national survey. Other observers say they're materialistic, cynical-smart and complacently relativistic. One new book, Engaging the Soul of Youth Culture, by Walter Mueller, describes that elusive but handy enemy, postmodernism, and its affect on youth. Postmodern kids are streetwise but intensely spiritual, the book suggests. They're suspicious of objective truth, but they long for connection and permanence. They're plagued by too many options. Values and meaning are up for grabs. Faith is a smorgasbord of choices. The upshot: pessimism and confusion.

But something's usually missing from this conversation — adults willing to own up to the world we've created for the young. The kids are not to blame for this era of:

• voracious workplace pressures to satisfy wolfish Wall Street bottom lines and runaway CEO salaries.

• a numbing array of choices (20,000 ring tone options for the cell phone) just because the technology allows it.

• an eBay attitude that everything has a price.

• a culture of Hummers, junk mail and other celebrated excesses.

• a decades-long addiction to oil, guaranteed to keep us vulnerable to terrorism and climate change, with no serious energy solutions in sight.

This is the moral milieu the baby boomers are presiding over, the reality show defining young people's horizons. Despite our much-noted rebellion against government and business and all other institutions, we boomers (I'll be 50 this year) have done little to teach youngsters some skepticism about the celebrities they look up to or the overstuffed debt on cheap credit that the grownups' financial institutions cheerfully offer them. Such skepticism would be radically subversive: it would break the spendthrift economy as fast as you can say American Idol.

Secular stresses inevitably distort spiritual attitudes.

A decade ago, an important but neglected book by poet/critic Robert Bly, The Sibling Society, argued that affluence and technology are making us a nation of half-adults. Millions of adults now are stuck in a twilight adolescence of their own, insisting on immediate pleasure, comfort and excitement, and showing impatience with traditional wisdom and organized religion.

"Adults regress toward adolescence, and adolescents - seeing that - have no desire to become adults," he writes.

"Perhaps one-third of our society has developed these new sibling qualities. The rest of us are walking in that direction. When we all arrive, there may be no public schools at all, no past paradigms, because only people one's own age will be worth listening to."

A true adult respects the past and masters the chaos of the present, Bly says.

"An adult is able to organize the random emotions and events of his or her life into a memory, a rough meaning, a story."

The true adult, too, preserves "his or her intensities, including those intensities proper to his or her generation and creativity, so that he or she has something with which to meet the intensities of the adolescent."

In the churchgoing sphere, I believe, those adult intensities should include showing how Jesus' gospel words liberate people from the modern power of envy, perfectionism and lust for fame.

All is not lost. Other research says the youthful Millennials show a surprising interest in classic faith and ancient worship practices, defying the boomers. They're more hopeful: many grew up in an era more tolerant of children (remember the "baby on board" signs in the '80s), or were raised in yuppie privilege. Scholars Neil Howe and William Strauss call them the next great generation. They're energetic, team-oriented and community-minded - potential world-saving spiritual heroes.

But they await our next move to help them imagine a less frenzied world, a life of fewer toys, less hysteria, more exercise, and more exuberance.