Mend the gap

Can The Church Reconnect The Generations?

Rachel Gardner, Jason Gardner

• Publisher: IVP
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781844742844
• eBook ISBN: 9781844747733
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christianity

Pop music, piercings and peers.
As society alters beyond recognition, the gap between young and old threatens to become a deep fracture in the heart of families, communities - and churches.
Urgent surgery is required to mend the gap.
Resisting simplistic solutions, Jason Gardner deftly analyses the reasons for the growing generation gap, including the role of the church. He provides practical steps forward for church leaders, youthworkers and parents. Underpinning this hopeful book is an unshaking belief in Christ's burning ability to inspire a 'whole big bad beautiful mix of people to follow him, regardless of their age'.

Part 1
Making the Gap: Youth Culture and Consumption

1. In the Beginning: Empire Ideals and Adolescence

I see no hope for the future of our people if they are dependent on the frivolous youth of today, for certainly all youth are reckless beyond words. When I was a boy, we were taught to be discreet and respectful of elders, but the present youth are exceedingly unwise and impatient of restraint.

(Hesiod, Greek poet, 700 BC)

...without some ability to understand youth’s existence as a social relation, the complex forces that give form and content to the lives of the young become impossible to comprehend.

(Phil Mizen, The Changing State of Youth)1

As Hesiod’s quote highlights, the old have often despaired of the young on the grounds that the future of society rests on their shoulders. Although such concerns have been aired through­out history, they came to a crescendo at the beginning of the twentieth century. Thanks to the fruits of industrialization, European empires had expanded all over the globe. As Britain would find out, however, the main­tenance of those empires depended entirely upon the state of the nation’s youth.

So the second quote is an apology for this first chapter’s headlong dive into history. Much of contemporary society’s approach to young people is rooted in the social ‘earthquakes’ of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In order to understand how we relate to young people today, we have to delve into the cultural traditions and attitudes surround­ing ‘youth’ that have sprung up over the past 150 years or so.

Fake expectations?

As the number of prime-time TV hours dedicated to ‘improving’ our teens increases (Brat Camp, Ian Wright’s Unfit Kids, etc.), it serves only to remind us that we believe society’s success lies in how our culture influences and forms our young. Writer Lev Grossman states, ‘When it comes to social change, pop culture is the most sensitive of seismo­meters.’ 2 The media’s fascination with troubled youth tells us that there’s a huge concern over the state of young people. If we fail them, we fail ourselves – and TV seems to be suggesting that we’re doing precisely that.

When it comes to looking at the prospects of society, or discussing the moral health of the nation, the debate frequently focuses on the current condition of youth culture. As psychologist Christine Griffin notes,

Young people are assumed to hold the key to the nation’s future, and the treatment and management of youth is expected to provide the solution to a nation’s problems from drug abuse, hooliganism and teenage pregnancy to inner city riots.3

Such attitudes are prevalent in society and they do underline the heavy expectations that are placed on our youth. At one time, when notions of citizenship had not been superseded by consumerist ideals, it was seen as the responsibility of the community at large as well as the state to nurture positive ambitions within the young and also to develop an understanding of social responsibility.

However, in today’s society the adult populace is reluctant to commit much spare time to providing a space where young people may be educated about their role in society, or can at least establish healthy mentor relationships with adults (both the Girl Guides and Scouts associations, for example, are currently desperately short of volunteers).4 Often the only people providing such a role are youth work professionals or teachers via the citizenship curriculum. There’s a certain hypocrisy in maintaining high expectations for our young whilst rarely lifting a finger to contribute to the fostering of such ideals ourselves.

Nonetheless, as a brief review of the history of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries suggests, it was the extreme pressure placed upon young people to live up to social ideals – to create a flourishing and morally upright society (and, of course, to maintain ‘progress’) – that actually led to divisions between young and old. This current obsession with the state of young people today is one we’ve inherited.

Empire ideals

At the dawn of the twentieth century, the South African war raised concerns over the poor performance of young British soldiers.5 As the structure of the Empire depended on its ability to police and extend its borders through military might, Britain became obsessed with how best it might improve the mental and physical health of its young men.

The young were seen as the formational blocks of a healthy society. As Nancy Lesko notes in Act Your Age, her treatise on adolescence in the twentieth century, a ‘strong fear of decline [is] a central component of the discourse of civilization and its technologies of progress’.6 Question: How do we stop the rot? Answer: Through the rigorous education of the young. Hence the public school system excelled in taking young white males and placing them in a strict regime of mental and physical education, in order to rob them of the wayward and distracting emotions and motivations of adolescence. (The schools were single sex to remove boys from the ‘feminizing’ effects of women.) Robert Baden-Powell, an army general and hero of the South African war, provided his solution to the ‘youth problem’ in the form of the Boy Scouts – a regime of healthy outdoor activity and community service that encouraged within its members loyalty towards adults and Empire.

Of course, the emphasis was on producing ‘sociable’ European white men, as they would be the mainstay of any successful empire. Darwin’s theories of evolution had been bastardized and subsumed under the rhetoric of the pompous Empire machine. ‘Survival of the fittest’ was key, and as white European males dominated the globe, it was obvious that they were at the top of the pyramid, arch-predators in the scheme of life. Inspired by Darwin, social theorists and scientists drew up a pecking order for Homo sapiens:

The Great Chain of Being; a rank ordering of species from the least primitive to the most civilized, based on evolutionary theory. The great chain of being located white European men and their societies’ norms and values at the pinnacle of civilization and morality.7

They largely saw the natives of colonized nations as primit­ives, forming the lower ranks of the ‘Chain of Being’, in need of education, civilization and discipline in order for them to advance. The young white male was seen in the same light, as Alan Prout and Allison James point out:

During the 19th century western sociological theorists, the self-elected representatives of rationality, saw in other cultures primitive forms of the human condition. These they regarded as childish in their simplicity and irrational in their belief...the savage was seen as the precursor of civilized man paralleling the way that the child prefigured adult life.8

It’s easy to trace the current ‘moral panics’ over the state of our youth today back to these earlier paranoias about the future of the Empire and the need to control and coerce the young in order for them to become ‘good citizens’. We can also trace back to this age the development of the idea that institutions, not families or communities, took the dominant role in nurturing responsibility within the young. This was obviously reflected in the various Christian-based youth organizations that sprang up during this period – for example, Sunday schools, Crusaders, Boys’ Brigade and Campaigners.

The fact that many parents today blame ‘school’ for their children’s behaviour may be partly due to the influence of consumerism, but it is also due to the influence of this dependency on institutions. For instance, the daily papers recently reported that some parents were insisting that the school should decide when their children were to go to bed.

It’s a question to which we’ll be returning: have families within the church become too dependent on the institution of youth work to raise their children within the faith community?

Education, adolescence and more expectations

Once upon a time, the move from child to adult was relatively easily marked. As Christine Griffin remarks,

In pre-industrial European societies there was no clear distinction between childhood and other pre-adult phases of life. The main stages of childhood, youth and adulthood were defined primarily in relation to one’s degree of dependence or separation from the family of origin.9

Adulthood was defined by economic ‘emancipation’ – the ability to support yourself (or contribute to the support of the family) via work or by getting married during your early teen years. There existed no limbo period during which children had time to evolve emotionally as well as physically into ‘grown ups’.

One of the main impacts of the industrial advances of the late nineteenth century that contributed to the evolution of youth culture was the creation of greater wealth for society as a whole and more disposable incomes for families – the expansion of the middle classes. Children were no longer expected to support themselves with full-time work. More and more families could also afford to put their children through further education. It was no longer the preserve of the elite.

The role of education in creating strong bonds amongst peer groups cannot be underestimated. In 1875 the US government set aside tax monies to provide further tutelage for American children, extending education from the age of 14 to 17. Other countries followed suit. In Britain in 1880 school attendance for 5- to 10-year-olds became compulsory, and by 1918 the school leaving age was 14.10

Lengthening the period young people spent more or less exclusively among their peer group had obvious ramifications for the development of youth culture. In the late 1950s only 4% of the UK population was in higher education. Today, with more and more people heading into further education (the British government has approved a target to see 50% of young people in tertiary education), the crucial role that higher education has played in cementing peer group affiliations is immeasurable.

For many young people at university, their early adult years are lived within the context of independence from parental influence and the freedom of celebrating being 18-plus amongst their peers. As a result, many young people’s first experience of adulthood is one that is largely detached from any sense of social responsibility. The main commitment is, of course, to study for a degree, but the lifestyle that often accompanies it becomes the basis for people’s experience of ‘adult’ life – good times with friends.

Another area of nineteenth-century progress that certainly helped sow the seeds of twentieth-century youth culture was the development of the social sciences, in particular psychology and its re-evaluation of childhood development. So a crucial factor in the creation of the teenager was a switch in definitions: ‘adulthood’ was no longer arrived at through economic independence, but through a biological journey that came to be termed ‘adolescence’ – ‘the period of rapid growth that occurs between childhood and adulthood’.11 It’s a word derived from old French via Latin that simply means ‘grow up’ (ironically a frequent instruction aimed at teenagers by their parents).

It was American psychologist G. Stanley Hall who instig­ated this change in perception and coined the phrase. He focused on the onset of puberty as the defining shift away from childhood. This meant that the main emphasis in the understanding of this transition period was on the biological aspect of ‘growing up’, centring on physiological drives that led to ‘sexual awakening’.12

Hall referred to the ‘hormonal upheaval’ undergone during ‘adolescence’ as the ‘storm and stress’ period when young people experienced conflicts related to sexuality and self-identity. It was seen as a time where the ‘freedom’ of youth needed to be tempered with a healthy amount of discip­line in order to control ‘unhelpful’ impulses, particularly of a sexual nature.13 Hall’s ‘storm and stress’ theory is without doubt the birthing ground of the myth of the ‘troubled teens’, a time when young people are inevitably set apart from the ‘normal’ world of adults.

As Bradford Brown and Larson note, this view of adolescence became prevalent particularly in the US and in Britain:

The common term for adolescence in the United States, teenager, brings forth images of recklessness, rebellion, irresponsibility, and conflict – hardly a flattering portrait but one that captures the worried stance that most adults in society take towards young people.14

So adolescence came to be seen as a ‘cocoon’ period from which would emerge the adult of the species. It was thought that exerting a certain influence on the environment of the young during this period of identity searching would result in the ‘moulding’ of an ideal adult. This is illustrated, as mentioned previously, by the harsh upbringing boys had within the public school system.

Allowing uncertainties over the ‘maintenance’ of progress and the stability and future of the nation to impact society’s perception and treatment of the young had major repercussions. One such development was the ‘commodification’ of youth. Producing healthy and intellectual adults with an appetite for competition who were also responsible citizens would obviously have positive implications for the future of industry. This was a notion still alive and kicking in the late twentieth century, as highlighted by this quote from John Akers, chairman of IBM in the 1980s:

Education isn’t just a social concern, it’s a major economic concern. If our students can’t compete today, how will our companies compete tomorrow?15

Lesko concludes that educational policy is largely governed by a desire to protect industry and commerce and encourage notions of social equilibrium – and so, to an extent, schooling seeks to manipulate young people into becoming ‘productive’ members of society.16 As she points out, teen­agers are ‘carefully attuned to adults’ overt and covert messages’. T...

Table of contents

• Mend the gap
• CONTENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• Part 1 Making the Gap: Youth Culture and Consumption
• 1. In the Beginning: Empire Ideals and Adolescence
• 2. The Cost of Cool: The Impact of Consumerism
• 3. Swapping Loyalties: The Rise of Peer Influence and Youth Management
• Part 2 Mind The Gap: Generational Tensions and the Church
• 4. Technology and the Transfer of Power
• 5. ‘Mummy, What’s an Adult?’
• 6. Family Life and Discipling Young People
• 7. Church and the Generation Gap: A Growing Conflict and Challenges to Discipleship
• Part 3 Mend the Gap: Being God’s Kingdom Community
• 8. Generational Tensions: Can the Gap Be Bridged?
• 9. A Family Affair
• 10. Mend the Gap
• Bibliography
• Appendix 1: Glossary
• Appendix 2: Resources