Now that Gen Z people are reaching adulthood in great numbers and Gen Alpha is poised to enter it, evangelicals are starting to panic. And I mean really panic. For years, their largely-Boomer leaders have panicked about Millennials. Then, they panicked about Gen Z and still are, as we’ll see. And now, they must add Gen Alpha to their panicking plans. Today, let’s check out how evangelicals plan to win back these two largely-lost generations. And then, let’s see how they plan to force them into the fold anyway when honest persuasion proves impossible.
Let’s check out how evangelicals plan to win back these two largely-lost generations. And then, let’s check out how they plan to force them into the fold anyway when honest persuasion proves impossible.
OH NOES, ONLY 4% OF GEN Z PEOPLE HAVE A ‘BIBLICAL WORLDVIEW’
Nobody really has a completely uniform definition of the generations, so I’ll offer this one as a guide. Right now, Gen Z consists of people ranging in age from about 12-27. So their oldest members are already in the workforce and having their own kids. Gen Alpha is usually reckoned as people born since 2010 or 2012, so their oldest members are 12-14. Yes, there does appear to be some overlap there!
Suffice to say that Gen Z’s youngest people are hitting adulthood soon, while Gen Alpha’s oldest people will reach that line not far behind them.
And this is a huge problem for evangelicals because of what they call the 4-14 window. This term means that if children aren’t indoctrinated in Christianity’s biggest ideas, then it’ll be almost impossible for evangelicals to convert them later. Very, very few people convert to Christianity, much less to evangelicalism, in adulthood without having first been indoctrinated as children.
By “indoctrinated,” however, they don’t mean fully converted to any particular flavor of Christianity. No, all they need a child to believe are the baseline assumptions of evangelicalism. These include but are not limited to:
- The world should be fair
- A supernatural world exists
- Some part of humans remains sentient and aware after death
- People should fear threats that sound super-scary but lack supporting objective evidence
- Humans need supernatural help to get through life and can ask for that help with a reasonable expectation of getting it
- Especially when it comes to the supernatural world, apologetics arguments and anecdotes constitute all the evidence anyone needs to support claims—so turn those critical thinking skills off!
As long as kids believe these basic claims, evangelicals have a good shot at converting them in adulthood. With these forming the bedrock of their critical thinking skills, people are so much more vulnerable to manipulation. Really, it’s only a matter of time before some authoritarian recruiter picks them off.
But if their marks don’t buy into these baseline claims, Christian recruiting pitches will sound very weird and off-putting to them as adults.
Of particular note, kids who don’t buy into these claims grow up into adults who also won’t put those ideas in their own future kids’ heads. The lack of indoctrination becomes a virtuous cycle. It only increases with momentum—unless something really big happens to stop it. (<– this will become important shortly)
So in 2018, when faux-research huckster George Barna fretted over only 4% of Gen Z having “a biblical worldview,” he technically meant a right-wing, hardline evangelical worldview. But in reality, he meant the 4-14 window. That window had already closed on a big chunk of Gen Z. And Gen Alpha was coming right along behind them.
I suspect that evangelical leaders have largely accepted that they’ve lost their chance to capture Millennials. But their hucksters are still shilling solutions to win Gen Z. And a few have already started shilling Gen Alpha solutions.
Shilling matters more than actual success with Gen Z and Gen Alpha
Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) leaders created NextGen to focus on the evangelism of teens and young adults. They’ve partnered with a consulting firm, Auxano, to shill products to churches with promises of huge growth among young adults.
What’s hilarious is that Auxano’s website contains not one mention of its SBC affiliation. I went all over it with a fine-toothed comb and found nothing. I was positive it had to be affiliated simply because their NextGen group (which is also Lifeway) talked it up so much and so many of its leaders have SBC seminary degrees. In the end, I finally found its affiliation mentioned in the SBC’s 2021 Annual Report (p. 107)! There, we discover Lifeway praising it as a “significant accomplishment”:
Prior to the global pandemic year, the team was breaking year over-year records for the Resourcing area of Auxano, Lifeway’s consulting department.
Wait, what?!?
Auxano isn’t some third-party group. It’s just Lifeway’s name for their “consulting department!” And yet you will search Auxano’s site in vain for any signs of affiliation with either the SBC or Lifeway. This obfuscation is intentional, as we learn in the next year’s Annual Report (p. 181):
We are intentionally designing our new line of NextGen curriculum to be used by churches we don’t currently serve. The goal is to design an experience that will help churches engage those in their neighborhoods who are far from God, many of whom have little or no background in the faith or may have had no exposure to church. We are intentionally designing this new resource to reach and appeal to new people in new places and we are excited about bringing this resource in 2023.
Moreover, NextGen itself is thick as thieves with the allegedly corrupt SBC empire-builder Johnny Hunt. Almost more than anything else, conflicts of interest define the evangelical crony network. Nobody holds evangelical leaders accountable for anything, so they only get in trouble when their misbehavior and grifting become downright ridiculous.
So by deceiving their customers about exactly who’s selling them all these revitalization and indoctrination services, the SBC has created a viable income stream in their time of decline.
Hooray Team Jesus! It’s not lying if they’re lying for Jesus, after all!
NextGen tells evangelicals to focus more on “discipling” children
Evangelicals know that their beliefs and broken system aren’t compelling by themselves. Most people rightly reject their hilariously ham-fisted control-grabs. Their claims, similarly, sound ridiculous to most people—as do their threats.
As a result, evangelists cannot recruit enough people with honesty. Instead, evangelicals use psychological manipulation to convert children, and then pile on more manipulation to keep them in the fold. No gods are required for this process to work—which is good because the SBC hasn’t got a real one doing anything for them!
Since the department’s creation a couple of years ago, NextGen has been focusing more on what evangelicals call discipling. In general, evangelicals themselves have focused on discipling for at least a decade. This creepy term means crushing people’s independence and curiosity so hard that they can’t even imagine disobeying their masters or entertaining wrongthink. Obviously, discipling is much easier with children, who are already extremely vulnerable due to their dependence on their parents and caretakers.
In their media handouts, NextGen tells church leaders that lots of children attend churches’ Vacation Bible School (VBS, an annual evangelical day camp that lasts a week or so every summer) without their parents. Thus, it’s a piece of cake to get them indoctrinated in those big ideas without worrying about their parents objecting to it. Here’s how they sell the idea (emphases in original):
As you reach families this summer, fostering a sense of belonging and connection has become more important than ever, especially for younger generations like Gen Z and Gen Alpha.
Studies show that despite being more connected than any other, these two generations also suffer from more loneliness and anxiety than any other.
The church has always had the answer: disciple-making. We’ve often just failed to think cross-generationally, instead segregating age groups and isolating some of our best leaders.
It’s worth noting that again, evangelicals have focused on “disciple-making” for about a decade. Their decline has continued throughout this time. In fact, the percentage of Gen Z people with no religious affiliation appears to be rising steadily year by year. Likewise, I’ve heard nothing in the Christ-o-sphere about some grand revival of children or teens. But I sure do see churches talking about using NextGen processes and ministers to help them disciple their children.
Alas, evangelicals have decided that discipling is super-duper-Jesusy. In their warped worldview, anything really Jesusy-sounding has to work as advertised. And so they can’t let it go. They’re like that monkey in the fable that gets its fist stuck inside a trap because it refuses to let go of the treat it’s grabbed. (What’s even funnier here: Evangelicals know and love this story!)
A hip, with-it Gen Z dad compares Jesusing super hard with skateboarding well
Our next OP made me cringe so hard my vertebrae are still making their way back from outer space.
In his July 2nd post, Stephen McAlpine describes how his son learned how to do a basic move in skateboarding. His son kept crashing to the ground because he couldn’t “lean in” as he went down a ramp. Instead, he leaned back—and crashed, over and over again. Only when the lad trained himself to lean in instead of back did he successfully complete the skateboarding trick.
Guess what, everyone? GEN Z IS JUST LIKE THAT WITH JESUSING! McAlpine writes:
There’s an interesting phenomenon underway among a younger cohort of Christians in the West today. And it’s this: Faced with a plethora of challenges; a growing secularism, a hardening against the gospel, a rejection of a biblical understanding of humanity and sexuality, Zoomers are leaning in. They’re steeling themselves and saying “Okay, if I’m going to believe this thing, then I’m going to go all in.”
That’s right. After watching a couple of generations of Christians leaning back in the face of growing hostility, there’s a sense among the newer generation that if you’re going to bother with Christianity, then bother with it. Don’t faff around the edges, or try to make it softer and easier. Instead, lean in!
I’ll give him extra credit for using the term “faff about,” because I love it. Otherwise, this ain’t news. Back in 2022, I wrote about it here. At least since then, we’ve all known that Gen Z is far more willing to try to recruit people to their religion than older people are. That just stands to reason. They don’t know yet how impossible it will be to make friends and keep them in adulthood. To them, making friends is as easy as saying “hi” to the person sitting next to them in Geometry class or attending an anime club meeting after school.
Gen Z people are more willing to evangelize because they take evangelical claims a lot more seriously than older people do. In that way, they’re like new converts to any very demanding authoritarian group. They don’t yet know the sting of constant disappointments, the endless rationalizations, the never-ending process of faucets shutting off to the Faith Pool—and the struggle to keep the working ones delivering water.
Instead, it’s all so real and so pressing and so intense for them.
How churches will totally appeal to Gen Z, according to this guy
Forget all that. Stephen McAlpine is sure that if churches just Jesus super-duper-hard and stop caring what society thinks of them, that’ll bring the kids in for sure! He writes:
Faced with record numbers of “nones” and faced with a dramatic decline in church attendance, those who thought that they could modernise the church to ensure it kept in line with the zeitgeist on all things cultural and sexual, have discovered that people who might despise and reject you if you maintain the central tenets of faith, simply ignore you if you don’t. The Boomers led the decline. And fed it. Despised and rejected wasn’t in their leather, insignia-ed attache case.
But given we worship a despised and rejected Saviour, then it seems to make sense to go for that. And Zoomers are. Not in total. But a growing number.
I’d really like to know who “despises” and “rejects” Jesus. I personally don’t think highly of him at all, but that isn’t a popular viewpoint. Rejecting evangelicals’ control-grabs and recruitment pitches isn’t the same as rejecting or despising Jesus. Even atheists tend to like him, though they really shouldn’t. As so many evangelicals do, maybe McAlpine just likes feeling persecuted.
It’s much more of a certainty that he likes thinking his religion is not only the most Jesusy one out there, but that it’s some hidden gem that will solve all of humanity’s problems:
We’re in deconstruction la-la land in which cowards and liars are ruling us, and the hard left and the hard right are joining hands in an anti-Semitic barrage whilst our leaders kow-tow to them. We’ve got two ageing Boomers in the USA telling us they should be President when one of them doesn’t know how to tell the truth, and the other one doesn’t know how to tell what day of the week it is.
At least he doesn’t idolize Donald Trump, I suppose.
Many, many citations needed
To appeal to Gen Z, McAlpine insists, evangelicals should drill down all the harder on the culture wars and false claims that have turned off previous generations. This time it’ll work for sure!
But as a Christian I’d have to say the signs are that younger Christians are getting used to the idea that no matter how kind and nice and smiley they are, the world is going to hate them. Yes folks, that’s right, Zoomers, it turns out, won’t be the snowflakes.
No, the snowflakes are my generation. The X-Gens who, faced with the scorn and hostility of a rising secularism that pushed hard on the sexual ethics button to see if we would roll over, rolled over! Not everyone rolled over, but all too often many in our cohort did. And now they are sad and washed up and the funky churches they planted with such grand plans to identify with the culture are sad and washed up too. Hey fellow X-Gen skatepark dude, Kurt Cobain would be 57 if here [sic] were alive. Maybe bald. Let that sink in.
Aww, he’s big mad that Gen Xers approached his religion in a way King Him doesn’t like. Kurt Cobain also wouldn’t be evangelical, so there’s that.
McAlpine doesn’t offer any citations for anything he’s saying here, but I can help him out. The following megachurches were founded by people who were either Gen X or extremely close to it. You might have heard of one of two of these:
- Late 1990s: Lakewood Church of Houston, Texas; it was founded in 1959 but became a megachurch under Joel Osteen (aged 36 in 1999 – barely a Boomer)
- 1996: Life.Church, Edmond Oklahoma; founded by Craig Groeschel (28 at the time – Gen X)
- 2000: Gateway Church, Southlake, Texas; founded by Robert Morris (age 38 – Gen X). Also The Rock Church of San Diego, founded by Miles McPherson (40 – very early Gen X). Also also NewSpring Church of Anderson, South Carolina, founded by Perry Noble (28 – Gen X)
- 2006: Elevation Church, Charlotte, North Carolina; founded by Steven Furtick (age 26 – Gen X)
These churches are very far from “sad and washed up!” He may criticize Gen X for not Jesusing in the exact way he prefers, but these churches’ many thousands of members would likely find something to criticize about him as well.
Even as a None and Done, it’s still sad to see Christians tearing each other down to help themselves feel better. I know why they do it and why they must, but it’s still sad. Also, it’s completely un-Jesusy, but what would a heathen like me know about little things like Jesus’ prayer that all the world would know his followers by how well they loved each other?
The nuclear option: FORCING indoctrination down the throats of Gen Z and Gen Alpha
So far, we’ve seen two exhortations from evangelicals who are sure they know how to fix evangelical decline. The first wants more “discipling,” which is just basic emotional manipulation. The second wants everyone to Jesus harder and drill down extra-hard on the culture wars to appeal more to the tiny percentage of Gen Z and Gen Alpha who are still willing to involve themselves with evangelicalism.
In the first case, an entire denomination has thrown itself into this idea. In the second, an individual evangelical speaker/writer seeks to gain buy-in for his ideas.
However, our third OP reveals that evangelicals have largely decided to go with simple coercion. Last week, Lauren Griffin wrote an article for Religion News detailing evangelicals’ attempts to force public schools to indoctrinate children during class hours. It’s a chilling story for anyone who understands the necessity of keeping religion out of the public square:
State officials in the South have recently reignited debates over teaching religion in public schools, with Oklahoma’s superintendent of schools issuing a mandate for schools to teach the Bible and Louisiana passing a law requiring schools to display the Ten Commandments.
The push is ultimately aimed at prompting the newly conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn a 1980 ruling on a similar law in Kentucky. Their argument is that the Bible is a historical text as well as a religious one and should not be disqualified any more than founding documents that make references to God or a creator.
So evangelicals are once again gearing up for a big fight in court, just like they did leading up to Kitzmiller v Dover Board of Education in 2005. To get in front of a conservative-heavy Supreme Court, which they hope will allow their demands, they’re throwing everything they can at the wall of separation.
But this newest attempt to force indoctrination on children goes way, way further over the line
In her article, Griffin describes how this newest attempt to force religious programming on children might backfire on these utterly-dishonest evangelicals.
Louisiana’s bill, for example, places the Ten Commandments alongside the Mayflower Compact and the Northwest Ordinance, historical documents that also mention God or religious liberty. Ryan Walters, the Oklahoma state superintendent who issued the directive, suggests teaching one is no different from teaching the other.
But placing these documents in public schools alongside other historic yet obsolete documents may just make these biblical texts appear historical and obsolete too.
And this is completely true. The moment “Bible 101” becomes yet another set of facts to memorize, yet another test to take, yet another subject to briefly master and then forget, it will stop being special. It will become no different from that class in “Alabama History” I had to take in freshman year in Mobile. Ironically, all I remember of that class now is that it was the first time I noticed that “Baton Rouge” meant “Red Stick.” (Baton Rouge is a town in Louisiana. Back in the 80s at least, it was famous for speed traps—it probably still is that way, too. It sits smack dab on I-10, and I swear its cops eat their young. They are ruthless.)
If evangelicals get their way, then their beloved religion will not become more special to children. It will only become more onerous. Worse, good teachers try to instill and encourage curiosity in their students. Nothing about Christianity really stands up to a lot of curiosity. That’s why it lays such a heavy emphasis on obedience.
That’s also why evangelical parents do their best to crush the curiosity out of their kids with “shut up, that’s why” methods of teaching religion. Creationism is probably the best example of exactly the opposite of good education. It preaches rather than teaches. It indoctrinates rather than encourages. Creationist resources stress obedience to authority, not teaching children how to question and evaluate what they learn.
Over and over again, I’ve talked to ex-Christians who were Creationists from childhood before deconverting, and over and over again they talk about the heartache of realizing they’d lost their entire sense of scientific curiosity. Their situation truly is heart-wrenching. They’ve got to build a base of science learning from the very bottom.
But the situation gets even worse (for evangelicals) when we consider the context of what evangelicals want to do in public schools. Religion needs a certain context, or else it becomes obviously man-made. I didn’t figure that out that till the first time I attended a Pentecostal prayer meeting in a college conference room.
That’s probably why Catholicism is so heavy on what people derisively call “smells and bells.” Masses hit completely differently in very plain, undecorated churches than they do in super-fancy ones full of paintings, wall hangings, candles, and sculptures. Praying feels different in a secular conference room than in a church setting. And so does sitting in indoctrination class.
I can’t wait for the first crop of children to detect the stark difference between Bible classes in church versus those in a public school. It’s gonna be lit.
Doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results
Evangelicals are really bad at learning lessons indirectly, so they haven’t looked much at how religion is treated in Western countries that have an official state religion. I specify “Western” because these countries also tend to robustly protect human rights and civil liberties. Evangelicals want the best of both worlds: A country that lets them do all the stuff they want to do while also allowing them to commit egregious religious overreach against others.
When we look at countries like that, we see that religion isn’t a big deal to its people at all. They don’t attach much importance to their official religion’s documents, customs, or symbols. All that religious stuff has been thoroughly secularized. It’s another tax that they don’t want to pay, or another tedious set of rules to ignore.
America is already trending in that direction. Forcing public schoolteachers to indoctrinate children will only hasten evangelicals’ decline—especially among children savvy enough to recognize what they’re doing, and especially for kids whose parents realize what’s going on. There’ll be at least one or two of those kids and parents in every classroom, I’m betting.
If evangelicals think those kids will keep their observations to themselves, they are even more delusional than I thought.
Evangelicals have been targeting children for years, but they’re getting desperate now
For many years now, evangelicals have targeted unattended children. They know these children’s parents wouldn’t approve of their kids being indoctrinated.
But hey, it’s not like those parents are nearby right now, is it? Grooming kids is fine if it’s for Jesus!
Vacation Bible School (VBS) has always been a great way for evangelicals to get children away from their parents. But it’s not quite the sure thing they thought it was, or they’d be pushing it harder than ever. Instead, many churches seem to consider it a waste of resources. Some have even started charging parents money for these day camps!
Likewise, after-school religious clubs have snagged a few children whose parents had no idea what was happening there. The entire evangelical movie God’s Club was about that deceptive recruitment strategy. But parents wised up, it seems. I haven’t heard a lot about them lately.
What evangelicals are trying to do now is far more egregious—and far more indicative of their overall desperation to capture the next generation of children before it’s too late.
If a pet strategy doesn’t work, then do more of it but harder
When I was Pentecostal, I had a very simple opinion of evangelism: It should be based on the truth and contain only true claims. My testimony—a little speech Christians develop to quickly describe how and why they converted, and how life looks for them afterward—might not have been at all impressive, but it was completely true, at least as far as I understood things.
But I really wasn’t different from my peers, at heart. We’d all latched onto an approach we liked, and we all decided that whatever we’d adopted was the most Jesusy one that ever existed. My approach was just really ineffective. Theirs weren’t really better, but they had the advantage of being very popular strategies that remain so today.
Evangelicals are still doing the same thing we did back then. When their super-ultra-Jesusy approach fails, they don’t question it. Indeed, they can’t: In a broken system, the message is always perfect. Instead, they just trot it out again expecting different results.
When we see evangelicals committing overreach, we should place it within the context of what general strategy they’re using and why. They are authoritarians, yes, but they are very dysfunctional ones with no accountability at all. To them, any form of power is theirs to command—which very much includes dishonesty and coercion. When their power-grabs fail, they think they just need to grab for power again, but harder this time.
They can’t use honesty as a persuasion tool because first and foremost, they know the truth won’t be persuasive at all. Secondly, as a group they’re not honest people. They don’t value honesty, and they certainly don’t reward truth-tellers bearing bad news for the tribe.
In other words, we can expect more flagrant overreach from them in coming days. They are absolutely desperate to regain their lost coercive power, and they will do anything—even disobeying their own god’s direct orders—to get it back.
Hey, they can always apologize later to Jesus if they offend his rarified sensibilities. This, however, is the real world we’re talking about here. Their opportunity to regain power in this world is shrinking by the day.
I have a lot more faith in these two upcoming generations, Generations Z and Alpha, than I do in evangelicals. I just can’t wait to see evangelicals’ not-as-immovable-as-they-wish rock smashing against the actually-irresistible force of kids today!
NEXT UP: A retrospective look back at the landmark Creationism lawsuit that largely kept taxpayer-funded schools safe from evangelical overreach for years. See you soon!
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