Orthodox Twenty-Somethings
The New Faithful: Why Young Adults Are Embracing Christian Orthodoxy
by Colleen Carroll
Chicago: Loyola Press, 2002
(320 pages; $19.95, hardcover)
The Younger Evangelicals: Facing the Challenges of the New World
by Robert E. Webber
Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Book House, 2002
(283 pages; $15.99, paper)
reviewed by Richard J. Mammana, Jr.
It isn’t supposed to be happening. Traditional Catholic piety is finding zealous practitioners at universities across the United States. The children of Planned Parenthood devotees are becoming advocates of Natural Family Planning. Nice suburban girls who ought to know better are making monastic professions in—you guessed it—traditional orders, and there are enrollment spikes on the charts of conservative seminaries across the Christian spectrum.
At the same time, some of today’s Evangelicals are unresponsive to the agendas of their immediate forefathers in worship, theology, and general “church strategy.” They are seeking instead “a biblically rooted, historically informed and culturally aware” evangelization of their hometowns, and the creation of new congregations attuned to the ancient faith. This isn’t quite supposed to be happening either.
None of this is supposed to be happening because it’s not the project for which two generations of Protestant and Catholic clergy have worked. And it’s certainly not what for decades a graying army of secularists has agitated for in American public life. The push for relativist moral teaching, “simplified” worship, interchangeable sex roles, and an utter separation of private belief from political expression has come from the pulpit as readily as it has been demanded by pseudo-intellectual elites. But against all odds, portions of a modern American society, which groans to find itself secularist, is returning in a quiet revolution to the fundamental truths of the Christian religion.
It goes without saying that “the primary cravings of young orthodox Christians in America—for tough time-tested teachings and worship imbued with mystery and a sense of the transcendent—are often the result of deficiencies in their childhood spiritual diet.” The children of liberalism are exchanging the junk food of their youth for him who is the Bread of Life.
Colleen Carroll’s frequently moving account of stages in the ongoing orthodox revival in North American Christianity is the fruit of a one-year grant for travel and research from the Phillips Foundation. She takes readers across college campuses, seminaries, parish communities, and monasteries to find a heartening demographic reality: Where traditional religion is believed and practiced, its adherents aren’t the sour, dour types that popular media would have us think. They’re young, intelligent, articulate, and passionate about converting their peers to their fresh reception of the gospel and its truth. Moreover, where the fire burns most brightly and intensely, young believers tend to be converts from atheism, nihilism, relativism, or plain unexposed-to-religion suburbanism.
Robert E. Webber chronicles a similar phenomenon from a slightly different angle in his The Younger Evangelicals. (His work follows on Richard Quebedeaux’s The Young Evangelicals, published in 1974). According to Webber, the “new kind of Evangelical” who came to prominence in the last decade of the last century shows marked differences from his predecessors in his attitudes toward history, communication, theology, apologetics, and ecclesiology. All of these changes represent a movement from the diffuse teachings and practices of the liberal Protestant denominations toward an apprehension of the Great Tradition of the magisterial Reformation and its antecedents. Webber’s account is fact-driven, while Carroll’s takes the form of personal encounters. The two are complementary, and Webber’s charts and illustrations undergird some of the anecdotal evidence of The New Faithful.
Truth Claims
During my senior year at Columbia, I had the privilege to act as baptismal sponsor for a close friend who was then a sophomore. The Anglican service was as traditional as anyone there had ever seen: The catechumen started at the door, processed to the font, renounced Satan, and was baptized into the death and resurrection of her new Lord. It was a joyous occasion for all of us, and one fellow parishioner mentioned that the atmosphere felt something like she imagined it must have been among the earliest Christians, huddled in a small group, lighted only by the single candle held by the newly baptized.
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more on Orthodox from the online archives
more from the online archives
24.4—July/August 2011
The Cultural Marxists’ Strategic Assault on Religion, Life & Family by Patrick F. Fagan
24.6—Nov/Dec 2011
Liberty, Conscience & Autonomy
How the Culture War of the Roaring Twenties Set the Stage for Today’s Catholic & Evangelical Alliance by Barry Hankins
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