Last week, I introduced you to a real live ‘Gen Z expert,’ Tanita Maddox. As I noted at the time, Maddox has been very busy writing articles and recording videos about her subject matter for other evangelicals, who apparently know absolutely no Gen Z people. One of her articles of note is ‘5 Questions Gen Z Is Asking: A Doorway for Biblical Conversations‘ (archive). In it, she apparently decides to play the ‘wrong answers only’ game. Luckily for her, her wrong answers are exactly what evangelicals ache to hear about this newest generation slipping through their control-hungry fingers.
(IMPORTANT NOTE ABOUT TODAY’S QUOTES: All quotes come directly from source material. However, I did make one editorial change to quotes from Tanita Maddox: I left out her citation superscript numbers. She offers citations for some of what she asserts. If you want to check them out, they’re on her post. From what I saw, she uses mostly culture-war fundagelical sources.)
(This post first went live on Patreon on 12/12/2023. Its audio ‘cast lives there too!)
About ‘Wrong Answers Only’
A few years ago, people began playing with each other by asking a silly or simple question and then requesting ‘wrong answers only’ as replies. Sometimes, these can be hilarious. Their current top-ranked post involves a Reddit community trying to figure out what a shotgun might be (archive). The wrong answers included:
- School supplies
- Some kind of mechanical horse leg
- A mute button for people
- America’s penis
- The friend making machine
- A rifle (which is one wrong answer that our community of pedants might appreciate)
It reminds me of a game I played in school that asked students to figure out all the uses that a set of small portable stairs might serve. The exercise wanted us to think outside the box—or in this case, the stairs.
But in today’s case, Tanita Maddox plays the game in a very different way. She’s not interested in teaching evangelicals to think outside the box. Nor is she interested in being funny—not intentionally, anyway.
Instead, she’s selling evangelicals something they want even more than a successful capture of Gen Z. Today, I’ll show you what that is.
Christianese 101: ‘Biblical conversations’
When evangelicals use the word biblical as a modifier, they mean that its object is presented in the way they like best. So a biblical marriage is one run to evangelicals’ vague-but-exacting specifications: Straights-only, opposite-sex-only, a big alpha male breadwinner husband and a pretty, sweet, eternally-submissive and eternally-sexually-available homemaker wife popping out babies on the regular till menopause.
Biblical finances (archive) center around donating usually well more than 10% of one’s income to religious causes.
Likewise, biblical parenting (archive) focuses on raising children within an ultra-authoritarian framework so they’ll be so locked into evangelicalism that they can’t even think about disobeying their parents or leaders—or about deconverting.
Generally, a biblical worldview is one that evangelicals favor: Culture-warring, extremist, authoritarian, and cruelty-is-the-point.
In the case of biblical conversations, these are conversations that might possibly potentially maybe perhaps turn into evangelism pitches. They are like fishing lures (archive). Evangelicals throw them into the waters of their relationships with heathens.
In theory, a biblical conversation spikes heathens’ interest in evangelicalism (archive). It’s not technically an actual example of friendship evangelism. There, evangelicals form fake friendships for the purpose of sneaking evangelism attempts into heathens. No, a biblical conversation is deniably plausible as just friendly chatter that just so happens to zero in on evangelical interests.
You might be thinking right about now that I think biblical conversations are just as cowardly, dishonest, manipulative, and fake as friendship evangelism. And well, you’re right. They absolutely are. Evangelicals use them when they’re too nervous to actually start issuing a real and easily-identified-as-such sales pitch.
(Speaking of biblical worldviews and conversations, don’t miss this hilariously-bad paper (archive): ‘A Biblical Conversation About Transgender Identities.’ In its preview, our old pal Preston Sprinkle (YES! He’s back!) notes that he waffled a bit on whether to call the paper ‘A Biblical View’ or ‘A Biblical Conversation.’ Of course, it is a paper about his viewpoint. It is not a conversation at all, not even a one-sided one. Moreover, we already know Preston Sprinkle. He ain’t going to change any of his culture-war opinions. He’s pretended that this is totally a possibility for years now. So far, though, he hasn’t actually done it yet.)
In today’s case, Tanita Maddox wrote an article for Logos about how to use Gen Z’s concerns about evangelicals and evangelicalism to begin “biblical conversations” with them.
The Big Problem Here with Gen Z
We almost immediately begin with an assessment of The Big Problem Here. I love when evangelicals do this. Hucksters, in particular, love this technique. They define the worst, most pressing part of a problem, and then offer up a solution to it. Almost always, this solution involves audiences buying something the problem-solver is selling.
In reality, their solution won’t do anything at all to fix the problem. Usually, they haven’t even defined the problem correctly. But they don’t need to. Once they’ve got their marks’ money, it doesn’t matter if their product actually works. I don’t think I’ve ever seen any evangelicals offer a money-back guarantee on any surefire evangelism strategies they sell. There’s a reason for that!
After defining Gen Z as born between 1999-2013, Maddox tells us what The Big Problem Here is with them:
One reason Gen Z finds matters of faith, the Bible, and Christianity irrelevant is because Christian adults use their time and platforms to answer questions Gen Z is not asking while ignoring the ones they are asking.
See? It’s so incredibly simple! Evangelicals just need to answer the questions Gen Z young adults are actually asking! And they need to stop ignoring those questions too!
You can almost hear evangelical audiences asking, But gosh! What questions are they actually asking? We just don’t know any Gen Z people at all, anywhere, not in our whole lives! Be our Gen Z whisperer, Tanita Maddox! Tell us what KIDS TODAY are REALLY asking evangelicals so we can tell them that evangelicalism is the product they need!
It’s like she’s writing about how to get the denizens of Sentinel Island to listen to evangelism. It’s like Gen Z is some rare, unheard-of bird that birdwatchers want to track. Or a foreign food that foodies will just love—but which is impossible to find in America.
Thankfully, Maddox offers the solution to The Big Problem Here!
She’s gonna show evangelical old folks how to answer Gen Z’s real questions.
Wrong answers only for Gen Z: ‘Do all people matter to God?’
In her first real live Gen Z question, Maddox tells us that Gen Z cares a lot about “inclusivity.”
This question is based in the way Gen Z values tolerance, acceptance, and inclusivity. Gen Z only knows a world that has had female presidential and vice-presidential candidates, a Black president, and legalized gay marriage and marijuana use in a number of states.
Ultimately, this is a question of social justice: Does God care about the needs, dignity, equity, and belonging of all types of people in all places? This question comes from a caring place, wanting all people to belong and be loved by God.
Oh, but a bunch of meaniepie heathens have somehow given Gen Z the feeling that evangelicals are hate-filled bigots who consider lots of people subhuman and less-than.
The solution, of course, is for evangelicals to make a clear distinction between how they behave and what the Bible and their god demand of Christians. Do what they say, not what they do.
In fact, here’s how she suggests using this question to open a biblical conversation about evangelical bigotry and cruelty:
Due to unfamiliarity with the Bible, much of Gen Z has not been exposed to how God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit interact with power, oppression, gender, race, ethnicity, government, culture, etc., in Scripture.
Because Gen Z generally views Christians as ignorant, judgmental, and anti-homosexual, they project such opinions onto the triune God and the Bible. This question reflects the bias Gen Z brings to the Christian faith overall.
See? That’s just Gen Z’s bias. They’re wrong, and evangelicals can totally correct that mistaken impression.
Wrong answers only for Gen Z: ‘What is true?’
Maddox’s second question plays semantics games with the word “true.” She asserts that Gen Z is so whirled around mentally by “being globally connected and surrounded by digital media” that they’re earnestly wondering what actually is true now.
Gen Z has had a different relationship with truth than generations past. Truth, for Gen Z, is interconnected with their generational values of acceptance, tolerance, and personal freedom. In their view, subscribing to truth results in the oppression of those who do not ascribe to that truth. As a result, Gen Z’s cultural context of personal truth then does not recognize universal and absolute truth.
Evangelicals love to slide between the two accepted cultural definitions of truth: objective reality, and religious claims mistaken as objective reality by believers. (Here, I use only the objective-reality definition. I will always clarify when discussing evangelicals’ fake-reality version.) Maddox does this in her article.
Gen Z is adept at recognizing false truth claims, far more so than any other generation has been up till now. Maddox can’t accept that they long ago discarded her religious claims as objectively false. Her tribe sure can’t, either! So she uses the fake-reality definition of “truth,” then uses it to slam Gen Z:
Simply holding up a Bible and stating that it is truth has the potential to unintentionally provoke feelings of intolerance, exclusion, and oppression. Understanding this disconnect can prevent creating and perpetuating such misunderstanding and division. Gen Z would rather uphold tolerance and acceptance than believe in a truth that does not align with other people, values, or belief systems. They often hear truth articulated in personal terms: “my truth,” “your truth,” or “their truth.” Gen Z is searching for truth, while believing in moral relativism.
At the same time, Gen Z highly values social justice. One complexity for Gen Z is the value for truth in the context of personal freedom comes in direct conflict with the value for social justice. I have watched Gen Zers wrestle with trying to figure out what social justice looks like, what is right and what is wrong, without an anchor of truth: How do I fight against what is “wrong” when the individualized idea of truth says each person can define what is right? The result is a generation that wants to fight for what is right without any truth dictating what the right thing is. It is reasonable to conjecture one reason Gen Z seeks to identify truth is to satisfy their longing for justice.
Her answer to this question implies that evangelicals should drill down harder on having the “truth” (by their definition), so that all those social justice issues fall into place. Once Gen Z accepts evangelicals’ off-brand Dollar Store “truth,” they will fulfill their “longing for justice” at last.
I cannot imagine a better way to turn Gen Z off than to make objectively-false truth claims to them. But Maddox has nothing else to offer, and neither does her tribe.
Wrong answers only for Gen Z: ‘Am I safe?’
As soon as I saw that question, I knew we would get a reference to Aslan from Narnia. And we sure do. We’re getting there. First, we must erroneously define safety:
Dr. Jean Twenge identified Gen Z’s value of safety by explaining this generation is always asking: “Is it safe?” A natural extension of this question is to apply it to personal experience by continuously asking: “Am I safe?” Though safety includes physical safety, like from a global pandemic or school shooting, but safety also extends beyond the physical: emotional, psychological, or perceived safety as well as safety from shame, embarrassment, risk, or failure.
Smoothly, Maddox moves into slamming so-called “cancel culture,” implying Gen Z is scared of cancellation. That is the only “safety” this question will cover. Maddox tells evangelicals that Gen Z totally does want to explore evangelicalism, but they’re totally scared of evangelicals’ potential mistreatment of them:
Gen Z wants a place to ask questions about the Bible, the triune God, and faith without feeling shame, judgment, or embarrassment. Because Christians are viewed as judgmental and intolerant, it makes sense that Gen Z questions whether or not they are safe in churches or even with God.
I saw that and laughed till the cat glared at me for waking her up. Not even evangelicals are “safe in churches or even with God.” Their entire worldview is one of constant, harrying terror of absolutely everything. They’re the most risk-averse people I’ve ever encountered. But at the same time, they’re the nastiest bunch of people I’ve ever encountered. Maybe their constant fear leads them to to protect and advance their own interest at the expense of others. Whatever it is, you should never feel at ease around evangelicals. They are constantly looking for weaknesses, especially in their enemies.
Also, “Christians are viewed as judgmental and intolerant” because they are, in fact, judgmental and intolerant. But don’t worry, evangelicals, she assures them. At some point, they can’t be held at all responsible for how heathen young adults view them. They’re just like Aslan, you see:
The difficulty around the topic of safety is it is individually defined, and most of the time it is not verbalized. Each person gets to decide what safe means and to expect safety from others. It becomes even more difficult when we can see that God’s definition of safety is often different than ours. As C. S. Lewis wrote of the lion Aslan, “Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good.”
So it’s totally okay that Gen Z is absolutely not safe around evangelicals.
I still think it’s hilarious that she doesn’t take into account physical safety. Nobody’s physically safe around evangelicals, either. I don’t think many people, particularly in America and most particularly in the American South, has escaped harm from the hands of evangelicals. Their pastors can’t even be trusted to keep their dicks in their own pants. The weaker and more marginalized someone is, the less safe they are around evangelicals.
Wrong answers only for Gen Z: ‘Can I trust you?’
Gosh, y’all, Gen Z is sooooo incredibly used to people editing photos and running sockpuppet accounts that they’re “left… in a skeptical place.” They need to trust that evangelicals are who they say they are, and do what they say should be done:
The question of trust can also be expressed in a familiar saying: “Do you walk the walk or just talk the talk?” They want to know: “Are you who you say you are?” [. . .]
As discussed earlier, Gen Z describes Christians as hypocritical, the opposite of authentic and trustworthy. The question then moves to matters of faith: Can I trust God exists? Can I trust God is good? [. . .] The key here is not to just tell Gen Z: “Yes!” The key is to help them come to such conclusions by showing them through stories, passages, and interactions within the Bible.
It’s really hard to tell if she’s advising evangelicals use their real names online. Many do, but it doesn’t make them more trustworthy!
Either way, she clearly implies that evangelicals will earn Gen Z’s trust by thrusting Bible verses at them to support their claims. That’ll totally make Gen Z trust evangelicals and the Bible!
But I can think of nothing less effective. Gen Z is likely already aware that the Bible is a purely human-made document. They already know evangelicals are hypocrites who can’t even follow their own rules. Nor does it take many interactions with evangelicals to know that they are not authentic at all.
Because Yahweh/Jesus isn’t talking to anyone, the only way to judge Christianity is by judging Christians. Using the Bible to support biblical claims doesn’t work. What would work, though, is evangelicals following their rules and being truly authentic. That’d be mind-blowing. But we’re in no danger of it happening, and we never were.
Finally, Maddox counsels evangelicals to listen to Gen Z:
We do this [evangelizing] better when we first listen to our Gen Zers. We let them ask, process, and share without interruptions or knee-jerk responses. This not only gives us the right context to answer their questions, but ultimately builds trust.
Yes, because once the little darlings are recruited, evangelicals can drop the nice act and start treating Gen Z the way they vastly prefer with interruptions and knee-jerk responses.
Does Maddox think Gen Z doesn’t notice that the only time evangelicals are truly kind and patient with heathens is when they’re trying to recruit them?
Wrong answers only for Gen Z: ‘Am I enough?’
Oh my gosh, this question also made me laugh. It conjures up images of I’m in Love with a Church Girl, a terrible evangelical movie from 2013. There’s this hilarious scene in it where the drug kingpin (played by Ja Rule) squints meaningfully at his church girl crush and informs her that he is far too wicked to ever be forgiven by Jesus. “God don’t want nobody like me in his church, okay?!?” he yells at her.
The crush, of course, dutifully tells him that Jesus only wants him to “come as you are.” (If you’re wondering, the movie also features a very meaningfully duck-faced Stephen Baldwin, so it’s not all bad.)
Apparently, our game of Wrong Answers Only has alighted upon this particular common flower:
This is a question of self-worth and value. In fact, a parenthetical qualifier can be added: “Am I enough (to be loved and valued)?” As seasoned followers of Jesus, we may first interpret this question as it relates to sin and to the holiness of God. We may hear this question as we hear that of the rich young ruler: “What must I do to inherit eternal life” (Matt. 19:16). But this is not the angle through which Gen Z is asking the question.
Gen Z lives in a world that demands much of them—and punishes failure in ways that older folks can’t even imagine.
That part is true. Yes, Gen Z (oh, and Gen Alpha too, I suppose) do indeed inhabit such a demanding world. Once they make a mistake, it might live forever online. And all too many of them use popularity on social media to gauge their value and worth. But where Maddox takes this truth delighted me to no end:
Gen Z may naturally wonder: does God weigh my accomplishments and failures to determine my value the way digital world does? This could lead Gen Zers to conclude that they will never be enough for God to love them. Love and value are tied together for Gen Z, and this impacts their sense of belonging and acceptance: being “enough” will lead to being accepted and loved. Acceptance can be defined as being wholly seen and received, regardless of one’s flaws, accomplishments, and other measurements or qualifications that could be applied.
Gen Z wants to know God loves them in the midst of their failures and imperfections, especially since that is not what they are experiencing in this cultural moment.
Yes, uh-huh, JLawOKThumbsUp.gif. That is exactly what Gen Z wants to know but has never heard from older evangelicals. Nope, that’s never been exactly what evangelicals have been saying for generations. Nor has it ever been a central selling point for Christianity as a whole for centuries. Nope, nope. This is totally all new, and somehow Gen Z has never heard it!
If they haven’t already realized this, it won’t take long for Gen Z to notice that evangelicals’ central lived reality differs from that message, though. It’s not “Jesus loves you as you are!” No. It’s really “Jesus loves you as you are! But he’ll sure let you go to Hell if you don’t change to suit evangelicals’ whims!”
Our Wrong Answers Only Parade now includes Bible verses!
Having asserted that Gen Z has these burning, pressing questions, Maddox now answers them in the way I suspected: She uses only evangelical talking points and Bible verses to answer them. It’s so funny to see how poor this section is at addressing what Gen Z is actually asking. As just one example, here’s the biblical conversation she imagines springing from her first question:
Do all people matter to God? God is a just God and creates all people in his image. He sees the poor and oppressed (e.g. Luke 6:20–26, James 1:27). Jesus interacts with the powerful and powerless, rich and poor, male and female, groups and individuals, religious and pagans, Jews and Gentiles, and so on. It is through each of these interactions we see how God cares for people.
But she’s not interested in actually accurately describing Gen Z. Nor is she interested in actually recruiting them, it seems. If she were, she’d be doing a lot better at evaluating them. And she wouldn’t be trying to sell them repackaged, warmed-over culture-war talking points. Those didn’t even work on Millennials, and they work even less on Gen Z. So the answer she presents here won’t work.
The Bible is only a set of claims, not also the evidence supporting those claims. So instead, Gen Z correctly judges this assertion by observing how evangelicals themselves behave. Gen Z can see that not all people matter to evangelicals. They can see that evangelicals mistreat and abuse the helpless and marginalized, that they hate and despise the poor, that they ally themselves with the worst-of-the-worst in politics, that they seek control over all others.
It’s the Problem of Evil, writ anew in fire for a new generation: If their god is okay with all that, then he is not just or loving. If he is not okay with all that but it happens anyway, he isn’t worth what evangelicals say he is.
I suspect the average Gen Z response here would be, “Your book of myths sounds nice, but it’s weird how evangelicals don’t listen to it at all.”
Twisting real Gen Z questions to offer what evangelicals really want
And now we come to why Maddox has a career as a “Gen Z expert.”
I’m not saying Gen Z doesn’t have those questions. It seems like they do. It’s just that evangelicals can’t answer them in a way that would result in massive recruitment. Maddox has, here, only provided evangelical talking points. Her implication is that evangelicals have been right all along. They just need to find a way to convince Gen Z of that.
And she’s the “expert,” so obviously evangelicals can trust her opinions!
Maddox, of course, offers no evidence that any of her suggestions work to recruit Gen Z into evangelicalism. But then, nobody in the Christ-o-sphere expects her to do that. If her advice sounds Jesusy enough, they’ll accept it as a recommendation. That’s all she has to do: sound more Jesusy than her rivals.
In a similar vein, I don’t remember seeing any Gen X or Boomer “Millennial experts” back in the early 2000s-early 2010s. But then, by the time evangelicals realized Millennials were drifting right out of reach, their decline had already begun. It was already too late to change anything—if they’d even wanted to change anything, which they didn’t and still don’t. Back then, we saw lots of “church revitalizers” and whatnot instead. Each huckster promised surefire ways to amp up a congregation’s size and fervor. None of it worked. All the money those panicky church leaders spent just went into hucksters’ pockets, and those churches closed anyway.
Those hucksters made money because they told their marks what they always wanted to hear: Their claims were true, their culture wars mandatory and divinely-blessed, their scandals mere hiccups in the vast ocean of Jesus-osity. No huckster made money telling a revitalization client to make the changes needed to draw more customers into their churches. If the pastors of these churches might have agreed with such suggestions, their outraged congregations sure wouldn’t have.
Very similarly, it seems to me that the main tasks of a “Gen Z expert” involve convincing evangelicals that they’re right, that they’ve always been right. Thus, they don’t need to change anything they’re doing. No, no! They actually need to drill down harder on what they’ve always done! Gen Z will totally realize they’re right, one day! Evangelicals still have a shot at reclaiming this lost generation!
The best part of this sales pitch is that it’s timeless. In ten years, Tanita Maddox won’t even really have to change anything when she becomes a “Gen Alpha expert.”
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