A New Moral Order

By Jeanine Plant, WireTap
Posted on October 30, 2006, Printed on November 22, 2008
http://www.wiretapmag.org//42811/

Lauren Sandler fraternizes with all manner of young evangelicals across the country, chronicling her discovery of a burgeoning youth movement in her new book, "Righteous: Dispatches from the Evangelical Youth Movement." She calls this motley group of 15- to 35-year-olds -- the anti-abortion activists at the Rock for Life festival in Illinois, Christian hipsters in Seattle, the skaters in Portland, students at the conservative Patrick Henry College in Virginia -- the Disciple Generation.

They confound demographic categories, are galvanized equally by culture and Christ, and rebel against the secular onslaught of rampant consumerism and the overwhelming nature of infinitely accessible information. Sandler deftly walks us through this generation's many contradictions: they're operating at the grassroots level and in mega churches, are similarly welcoming to recovering drug addicts and paragons of virtue. But more than that, they're at once countercultural (both rejecting the mainstream and employing it for their own recruiting ends) and obedient to authority, whether it's to men or George W. Bush.

WireTap: You describe the Disciple Generation as a slew of disparate groups that seem to connect through a sense of outsiderness within a predominantly secular culture. Do you think they exploit their outsider status and use their feelings of persecution to their advantage?

Lauren Sandler: I do. Even this morning when I was doing an hour of talk radio with Jan Mickelson in Des Moines, Iowa, he was saying to me: of course Christians feel persecuted on your side. He was really into this "us and them" polarity that I'm hoping to break down. But he kept saying, "On your side, you have Hollywood, you have hundreds of thousands of people in the universities who are being fed Godless, liberal ideas. You have the whole world and you mean to tell me that you feel threatened by a couple hundred kids at Patrick Henry College or a bunch of kids in skate parks?" There is really this idea alive in this population that the secular world is organized against them, and they can point to every type of power out there.

They can point to cultural monoliths to the university systems, to all of the things that formulate how we live in the secular world and look at them as a force to keep down Christians -- to keep evolution in schools and creationism out, to keep gay people from having certain freedoms in this country, to keep women from having the right to choose to have an abortion. And because of that, there is this real sense of persecution, which is ironic to me when you look at who is sitting in the Oval Office, or when you look at people who are in our military during this war, or when you look at who is sitting in offices in Capitol Hill. But there really is a persecution mentality, which I think is an incredible fire under this population. I think there are few things like persecution to intensify the will toward battle, towards action, and I think it has been a really effective motivating force.

WT: You write that "their lives are a criticism of our own." Where do you think secularists have failed young people in the Evangelical Youth Movement?

LS: I think that the secular world does a pretty lousy version of providing people with answers. Why are we alive?! What is the purpose of our lives?! Who are we?! To me, that is not a big problem, because I am someone who comes from a loving family. I have a great husband, great friends. I had access to terrific education. I had the luxury to spend time considering different ideas and trying to develop my own answers and my own sense of my own purpose in life, which I haven't figured out yet, but that is what the journey of life is.

But I think that for a lot of people, and a lot of people have told me this, I must have talked to hundreds of young Christians who would talk about this: The world is overwhelming. It's chaotic. We live in an era of global terror, of overwhelming media, the internet, cable. I mean it's too much. There is no road map anymore, and I think a lot of people yearn for that. They yearn for communities that they can feel safe within. They yearn for a life with meaning. They yearn for a sense of themselves. And I think the secular world does a pretty bad job leading people towards that. I have listened to a lot of evangelical teens, 20- and 30-somethings talk about how corporate and consumerist and entertainment-obsessed and empty our secular world is. And I have many of the same complaints. But they're the ones who are organizing against it and finding their own answers -- finding their own mirrored society that they can live within that will provide some sort of meaning. And I think it is time that the secular world wakes up to that idea. We have to start controlling the rampant capitalism and the obsession with celebrity culture. I feel like entertainment is fine, but there has to also be substance and purpose and respect for each other. That is a real weakness in the secular world right now.

WT: Emotionalism and anti-intellectualism inform this movement quite extensively. I got a sense of this from your descriptions of James Dobson's radio show. Could you talk a bit about that?

LS: It's hard to talk about it around James Dobson, because I do think that James Dobson is quite intellectual, and very well-educated and very smart and a rhetorical genius. He takes what often amounts to a degree of hate speech, and makes it sound like cool, rational discourse. He is not the best example of that.

However, there is something called Bible-onlyism, which is the notion that the only book that should matter in life should be the Bible. And you either read things that support the Bible, or you don't read anything but the Bible. And I met plenty of people who don't read anything but the Bible, and who have been told that evolution is just a theory and therefore they shouldn't pay attention to it. They have been fairly conditioned not to be intellectually curious about things that might challenge what they believe, to believe that that's the devil's work, or that that's sinful in some way. And that, to me, is deeply anti-intellectual. It's funny, I just wrote this article about Stephen Baldwin, who just wrote a memoir called "The Unusual Suspect" for Salon. Stephen Baldwin says, after I was born again I turned off my mind, because my mind is Steven Baldwin, but my heart is God. And if I just listen to my heart, that's God talking to me.

WT: I was struck by what you wrote about the skater service in Portland: "What they preached was not of ritual, tradition, or dogma; it was of simple spiritual salvation." What does this mean to the movement overall?

LS: It's a fiercely anti-institutional movement. Evangelical Christianity has always been anti-institutional. The whole notion that you have a personal relationship with your savior and that nothing needs to be mediated through a priest or a reverend, that you can worship independent of wherever you are -- that is inherently anti-institutional. And this Disciple Generation is especially anti-institutional.

I met lots of people who never go to church, and who talk about "four-walls" Christianity, the notion that Christianity should not be something that is contained within four walls. It should be everything that you do -- what you wear, what you listen to, how you talk. That to have something that separates it out so that you have one way of living on Sunday and the rest of the time you are living the rest of your life is not how one lives a full life of faith. And so certainly there are megachurches, which are drawing young people. There are worship services with live rock music. There is an element of that which is drawing this population. But more importantly is the population that is not focused on church but is focused on the inerrancy of the Bible, the notion of salvation through Jesus, and the idea that God is there looking out for them all the time.

WT: You describe several anti-abortion activists as single-issue voters, and I'm wondering how they justify their stance in the face of the reality of women around the world dying from unsafe abortions everyday?

LS: I have a very easy time talking about this as someone who is pro-choice. If you believe that a fetus is a baby, and you look at the numbers that have been aborted, and you consider that, like most people in the anti-abortion movement do, that one-third of our generation has been aborted since 1973, then of course it feels like a Holocaust. Of course it's more important than anything else. That isn't how I see it, so I disagree with them. However, I can understand how that becomes a single-issue in the same way that the actual Holocaust, if that was something that people would vote on, that a court could determine, to me, that would have been worth having as the only issue I cared about. And so for people who believe that, that's how they feel, and they really relate the pro-choice movement to Nazism.

There is a pamphlet and a T-shirt out there with three icons on it: one is an ownership deed for a slave, one is a swastika, and one is the NOW "Keep Abortion Legal" sign. And it says: "Personhood Redefined." And if that is what you believe, that is what it feels like. I completely understand that. But I think that gives people who are involved in the anti-abortion movement much more motivation, much more emotionalism, much more drive than secularists have protecting the right for choice.

WT: Would you say evangelical women often stereotype all secular women as having had abortions?

LS: The anti-abortion activists that I met did. I don't know that all evangelicals [do though,] because I just didn't have those conversations with enough people to know. But certainly the women that I met at Rock for Life were very open with me about that, and in all circumstances, except one, I just sort of ignored it. I was in one situation in which I guess I felt particularly vulnerable or defensive, and so I said that I hadn't had an abortion. I really felt like a real coward and a sell-out for doing that because it shouldn't matter if I did or not. So that is sort of an interesting dynamic that happens when you are surrounded by people who believe something very different from what you believe and are quite critical of you for believing so differently. But you want to be liked a little bit. You want to feel a little accepted, and that was my moment of weakness around them.

WT: The blatant lack of religious iconography in Patrick Henry's auditorium -- a flag hanging in lieu of a cross -- was quite disturbing. How does the evangelical notion that Christianity is interchangeable with nationalism come to bear on this movement?

LS: There is definitely a strong sense out there that this is a Christian nation -- that that is the nation's exclusive history, and the only decent future for America. It was interesting to listen to guys in the Air Force talk about fighting this war in Iraq to bring back Jesus, who believe that the military is God's mission tool. It was interesting to go to Patrick Henry and see how intricately connected notions of nationalism and fundamentalism are. And I do think for many people that fundamentalism and nationalism are inseparable. That to be American is to be a Conservative Christian, and that the rest of us are merely polluting a Godless country. And it was interesting to hear that not just from guys in uniform, but from punk rock kids and skate kids and women who looked like Pacific Northwest Riot Grrls. There is a real sense of taking back the land.

Jeanine Plant is a writer living in Brooklyn.

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