Young Adults And Not-So Youthful Christian Politics

Among the many things we can still learn from Freud, even though psychotherapists with nothing better to contribute have relegated him to library archives, is that there is a big difference between wishes and truths, and that most of us wish that this were not so. Just as the show was getting under way this election year with the first primaries, I found myself full of hope over the prospect of younger voters, at least this one time, tuning into politics as intensely as they will all too soon turn on to money-making. Maybe, just maybe, they will show the compromised and jaded generations ahead of them ways of bridging ideological differences, healing hurts, and building community that those generations, mine especially, have so far failed to bring to fruition. Or if not this, maybe they will at least get out and vote.

I think, and not just wish, that I will be able to sustain this hope in the months ahead. But I know it is not going to be as easy as I wish it could be. For over thirty years now, this country has been swept up in a wide-reaching and deep-going culture war between militant spokespersons for conservative and liberal ideologies who, until recently at least, have given no indication of a readiness to re-think issues in a spirit of negotiation and compromise. The pity of it is that the hostilities break out just as easily in religious circles as they do in political ones. In the churches, too, the noise generated by militants quickly drives out both civility and sensitivity to genuine prophetic voices, as well as to the need for nurturing fellowship in the midst of respected differences. And by reverting to the language and style of jihad, theological ideologues discourage the kind of careful, time-consuming consideration of all sides of complex issues that alone can bring about Christian unity.

In 1984, the Gallup people polled enough people in a sufficiently sophisticated way to turn up some interesting statistics (I am still not sure we should call them "facts") about the religious alienation between conservatives and liberals in America. It reported that between 20 and 25% of Americans considered themselves to be "very" conservative religiously, and that a similar proportion considered themselves to be "very" liberal. Particularly disturbing was the finding that each side held quite negative views of the other side, and that these hostile views were strengthened and not modified by personal contact and engagement. Sociologists still regard this study as establishing a kind of baseline for measuring subsequent changes in the religious opinions of Americans.

As the new millennium was just getting under way, the Gallup organization published a follow-up study of its earlier one, and posited even more disturbingly that the polarization had intensified. And now we get back to the point of this column: the polarization includes the very young adults among whom both religious leaders and politicians are today showing a readiness to bet the farm. If Gallup's 1999 findings still hold, then even more young adults identify themselves as religiously very conservative or very liberal than they did in 1984. Their political orientation consistently follows their religious one; in both groups, the two orientations largely coincide. (Religious leaders might note, also, that four conservative young adults attend church regularly for every one liberal young adult that does. But this is a subject for another time.)

It may be, of course, that young adults' getting high on bridging differences would have little to do with making churches and electoral processes less divisive. After all, if half of this population is strung out on ideological differences, the other half is not, and strategists --- both political and religious --- have long argued that there are enough people closer to the center of things to counterbalance the effects of people further out in both directions. Further, most people tend to form strong opinions issue by issue, and factors other than ideological ones tend to influence this more chaotic approach to social issues a lot. It is easier to remain a gay-baiter when you have only straight kids, or a support-the-troops-no-matter-what outlook if it is somebody else's who is doing the fighting, or an opponent of guaranteed health care when you have parents who don't need it.

But wouldn't it be something if this present generation of young adults would indeed grab hold of the message that we have in our society the freedom and the responsibility both to disagree with one another and to search, together, for ways to be both authentically Christian and proudly American, with justice and maybe even love to all? Even more delicious is the possiblity that it will be the younger adults among us who finally tell the religionists and politicians who act otherwise to grow up.