In the last post I said that the primary reason the Church is missing lots of young adults has little to do with the the mission, theology, or politics of the Church, but much to do with demographics. The economic and social forces that prolong adolescence and delay “settled” adulthood are what keep people from participating in worship. I’m also bracketing my qualms about equating “adulthood” with “settling down.” Some of the most visionary and mature Christian adults I know never settle.

But now I want to backtrack a bit and say that this extended adolescence is also part of what creates friction between unchurched young adults and “The Church.” There are two components to extended adolescence. One is physiological and sexual, and the other is social.* These are related issues, but I want to illustrate them separately.

First, the physiological and sexual. People hit puberty earlier. The research varies, but the most extreme research suggests that the average age of menarche has fallen from age 15 (or even 17 in rural, nutritionally-poor areas) to age 12, with some girls having their first period as early as 8 or 10. The most conservative research suggests that the drop is more modest, perhaps from 13-and-a-half to 12-and-a-half. Regardless, people’s bodies mature earlier and they marry later than they did 100 years ago. If you roll the clock way back, some people estimate that Mary, the mother of Jesus, was just 13 when she was betrothed to Joseph.

Now, if people are maturing earlier and marrying later, they have a longer period of time in which to be sexually active. While Jane Austen’s heroines typically married somewhere between 18 and 21**, the average age of marriage these days is 27 or 28 (as I pointed out in the last post). So the time between when someone begins to sexually mature and the time at which they marry (if they marry at all) can be as long as twenty years.  That’s two decades.

During this time, a human being becomes socialized to their peer group. They begin placing more weight on what their peers think than their families. We encourage this process through factory education, where we isolate persons from those in other age groups, teaching them as a class or cohort, and refer to them as a “generation.” So their primary source of character education comes not from family, not from church, but from their peers.

And media.

Mary Pipher, Carol Gilligan, Jeane Kilbourne, and a number of other feminist psychologists, sociologists, and other researchers have pointed out that this is when girls get socialized to think of themselves as objects, to lose their voice, to develop eating disorders. Although their parents have been telling them from birth that they can do anything, be anyone, and have social equality with men, they are relentlessly educated by the media and by their peer group that their primary value is derived by being sexually attractive and sexually pleasing to men. There is a similar social travesty that happens to boys, but for the purposes of considering extended adolescence and how it impacts what we do as church, it’s easier to see in our culture with girls. What is on the cover of men’s magazines? Women. What’s on the cover of women’s magazines? Women. Women as objects. Women as infantile. Women bound, powerless, and dehumanized.

We dump young teenagers into this environment, and the only advice they hear from the church is “do not have sex.” For 20 years. Oh, and don’t touch yourself. Although the Bible doesn’t say a word about masturbation, it’s assumed that any sexual pleasure you give yourself is wrong and shameful. It’s a theme the popular culture is all too happy to take up with either mocking or shocking. Mocked in movies like American Pie, or expressed as shock when the surgeon general mentions the word.

Imagine yourself as a teenager immersed in this environment. You are told you must suppress all sexual feelings for 20 years. Save yourself for marriage. Yet you know that nearly half of all marriages end in divorce - in fact, it’s likely that your parents are divorced, and one or both of them may be living with a girlfriend or boyfriend. See the problem?

Now, follow me carefully here. I am not talking about premarital sex,*** or pornography, or media culture. I am talking about the church’s credibility. From the beginning of puberty, everyone knows the church is not credible on this issue. We all know it, and nobody says a blessed thing about it. Into this credibility gap we are sold a vision of ideal sexuality, involving all kinds of products ranging from cosmetics to viagra. Sexual fulfillment becomes something you buy, not something that comes from deep intimacy with another human being. We are taught to be immature, and to linger in this state well past “adulthood.” Our extended adolescence is characterized by immature sexual attitudes and sexual anxiety.

By contrast, adulthood is associated with boring and unsexy things: minivans, baby spit-up, balancing checkbooks, paying the bills. Corporate-produced mass culture offers us a choice between this world, and the world of young, idealized, sexualized hipness, and even the most media-savvy of us buy into it.

The second component of extended adolescence is social, and it has to do with responsibility and the relative value of your contributions to society. I like to use the illustration of a reality television show that came on PBS several years ago called Frontier House. Three families go to spend several months in Montana, living as the pioneers did. When the kids first begin the adventure, you hear them complain. “What are we going to do for all these weeks? It’s going to be horrible! There’s no television, no cell phones, no video games, no malls.” Over the course of the program, you get to see what they fill their time with. They learn to ride horses. Because they have no mp3 players, they make their own music. Some learn to play the guitar. They milk the cows. The collect the eggs. If they fail in their chores, the family suffers. But the cool thing about the program is that you see the kids absolutely bloom. They grow up.

At the end of the show, they return to their homes. They wander their McMansions like zombies. The modern world sucks the life right out of them. And they say, “there’s nothing to do here but watch television, play video games, and go to the mall.” In Montana, they are useful. They actually contribute to the survival of their family and the flourishing of their community. In the modern world, they become surplus people. They have no social value except as consumers, and they know it. They can do two things - go to school, and buy crap. This is why all media culture is geared toward teenagers, who have the most disposable income and the most time on their hands. They have no other use.

Again, follow me carefully. I’m not arguing that “kids today just need to get a job.” That’s just it. They don’t need to get a job. There’s nothing that depends on them getting a job except some external expectation that they “learn responsibility” or some such dreck. You can’t just give them more chores and drill a work ethic into them. Our society considers them surplus people. They are an economic problem, which is why we need to delay their entry into the workforce for 20 years (during which time, by the way, they aren’t supposed to “do it"). And they know it! On a gut level, the place that tells them they are a fully functional, competent human being who have the skills to survive on their own, they know that they are still children.

And when they act out this anger, frustration, lust, or despair, we blame it on hormones. Or we make up some ridiculous generalization about “kids today.” I say it makes sense when prisoners act like prisoners. 

When these teenagers become young adults, the landscape changes a bit. Now, when you work in a retail store to make money to pay bills, you get to become part of that shallow society. Now you get to sell crap to teenagers. And when you grouse about having a dead-end job, or about your tremendous debt-load, or about the fact that your career has no meaning, or if you demand better, you are vilified by news pundits as belonging to an ”entitlement generation.” Why can’t you just shut up and work for The Man, like your grandparents did? Why are you so spoiled? Preachers parrot back this conventional wisdom in pulpits all across America, again losing credibility with young adults.

But I do believe that part of what the church needs to do is to help people grow up. Not just by helping “young adults,” because we have several generations of people who have grown up under this same model who have been educated to be consumers. Nor am I suggesting we all need to move back on the farm or become Amish (though there is something appealing about that). But I do think that part of what is called for is a radical re-visioning of our lifestyle and how we behave as communities together. How do we give teenagers meaningful work? How do we create a community in which “unsettled” young adults can make important contributions to a community’s thriving? 

*(When I use the term “extended adolescence,” I do not mean to denigrate adolescents or to use it as a purely negative term. Donald Joy’s book Bonding: Relationships in the Image of God is where I first grew to like the idea, and I’ve found it to be useful in explaining the way that we simultaneously idolize and infantilize youth. “Adolescence” the way I use it here is a social construction which our media culture uses to educate children to be consumers and to prevent adults from growing up.)

**(I’m not claiming that Jane Austen’s works are reliable estimates of average age of marriage, but it’s a nice reference point to consider. There is some debate about whether these age differences are as extreme as I’m claiming. Regardless, I think it’s pretty significant for the church if 100 years ago, the span of time between when one matured sexually and the time of socially-acceptable sexual experience was shorter than today.)

***(When I’ve talked about this with other church workers, they inevitably get frustrated and ask, “well, what should we do, then - pass out condoms?” This misses the point. I do not seriously think the church should either a) promote earlier marriage or b) encourage sex outside of marriage. But I do think our credibility is at stake if we do not honestly confront the economic forces which impact families and human sexuality.)