(I had the opportunity to teach at St. Michael’s Church, Charleston a few months ago. This is part of what I shared there)
My calling in life has been primarily to ministry with teenagers. For years I considered myself a student of youth culture, learning to make sense of the latest trends and communicating their significance to their parents. Ten years in I found myself in England learning not only the culture of a different country but the language of teens there. It was a steep learning curve to grasp the language and culture quickly in order to minister without offending people or being brushed aside. There were words that came out of my mouth that had radically different meaning to Brits.
I’ve not faced such a steep learning curve until recent years. Over the past few years I’ve worked hard to understand the changes taking place in our culture and particularly in Generation Z (which at this point spans roughly 9 to 24 year old’s). Our culture is changing so rapidly that it is difficult to keep up with. I have countless conversations with people who have no idea what is going on in the world around us. It makes me picture cruising down the highway watching the landscape go by, but then suddenly accelerating to Indy car speeds and everything outside the window is a total blur.
Our subject is how culture impacts family, so let’s first define family. The family is not an institution designed by man. It was created by God for the benefit of man, and man has been given stewardship over it. The basic biblical family unit is comprised of one man, one woman—and their offspring or adopted children. We see established in Genesis 1 & 2 that one man and one woman join in a spiritually and physically committed union for a lifetime, conceiving and rearing children.
Yet in our current culture, traditional definitions are being dismantled and replaced by new ones. It’s been a few years now since the redefinition of marriage by the US supreme court. In other countries there have been attempts at marriage between multiple people and also between humans and animals. So, it only makes sense that our culture wants to redefine family as well. What was given to us by God: the institutions of marriage and family, are being reclassified as social constructs that should be redefined according to the direction that our society is moving. Gender is also considered a social construct and so we now cannot define what is a woman or man. But we can name a biological male as woman of the year or give the golden globe award for best actress to a biological male or declare Jeopardy’s winningest female ever which also happens to be a biological male. Nevada’s Miss USA winner is also a biological male.
We recognize that marriage and family are not social constructs but gifts from God that provide structure and order in our lives. Derrek Jeter (the writer not the baseball player) takes all this a helpful step further in providing what I think is a good definition of a Christian family. “A Christian family is a group of people who are related to each other through marriage, birth, or adoption and are committed, first and foremost, to the person and work of Jesus Christ, faithfully witnessing to the love, power, and forgiveness of God to a watching world in its unique time and place.”
I started off talking about our rapidly changing culture and my main argument here tonight is that cultural changes are driving a wedge into families. So, I want to spend the rest of our time looking at what changes are dividing the family and what we can do about that. Please know that I am about to step into some topics that are rather hot. I am trying to do my best to show how the subjects themselves are divisive rather than argue for a position. Here are three sources for the growing division.
1. A more significant gap between the generations is developing.
With each previous generational shift, we saw minor adjustments to life which meant more opportunities, freedoms, leisure, prosperity, and so forth. Yet we generally held common beliefs about what is true, what is right, what is good, etc. Our families shared values, norms, & traditions with most in our communities, churches, schools and so on. We grew up with a general desire to conform to these values, norms, and traditions. Teenage rebellion, always a thing, was about pushing back against these and being the radical for a few years before coming to your senses.
Culture went into hyperdrive. We suddenly accelerated into warp speed and now we are at a place where parents and their kids noticeably differ in their values, norms, and traditions. It disturbs me to see so many adults that don’t see what their children are being taught or their teens are expressing on social media, or their young adults are campaigning for. And the grandparent generation (which I am a newbie to) largely cannot make any sense of the radical departure from the values, norms, and traditions that have been part of our lives for decades or generations.
So what are we learning about Gen Z that is so different from other generations?
GenZ is the most ethnically and racially diverse generation. 48% are ethnic minorities. While diversity is a beautiful thing, we have to be aware that it challenges values, norms, and traditions. Sadly, many of our kids are being taught ideologies about race and ethnicity that contradict the Bible. These ideologies teach radically different definitions of words like privilege & race. The result is kids having a very different view of our nation, our history, and even the church than their parents and grandparents. This is a significant issue that divides families. We will come back to this issue later.
GenZ views sex and gender different to previous generations. More than half want more options than male and female. LGBTQ movement is increasingly deceiving kids related to their identity / sexual behavior. Nearly 100% of teens will struggle with sexual formation issues of some kind. A very small percentage of their parents or grandparents struggled in this way. That makes it very difficult to understand one another.
GenZ grew up with more technology in their hands than the computers that put the first men on the moon. They never knew a world without smartphones. Most of them love social media and live on it. What social media like TikTok and Instagram produce is a pressure to present a happy, healthy, self… living a very desirable life. They then tend to compare their own reality to the illusion that others create. To call it deeply unsatisfying is an understatement. I am sure Taylor covered this reality in depth.
Gen Z report higher levels of anxiety, depression, loneliness, and suicide than any other generation. Let me throw in an anecdote here. In the first church I worked for, I was primarily doing high school ministry. I worked with hundreds of students there every year and saw maybe 1 or 2 in a hundred that struggled with anxiety or depression. Those students were Gen X’ers for the most part. As I transitioned into my next ministry, I was working with millennials. There I worked with more students who struggled with depression and or anxiety. I would estimate 1 or 2 in 20. Just a few years ago I was at a retreat where I was meeting with our youth commission. These are leadership level hs students from churches around the diocese. I don’t recall what prompted the sharing but several in the group talked about their depression or anxiety or both. It led me to ask the group for a show of hands. I first pointed out that my hand was going up. How many of you have struggled with Anxiety or depression? Nearly every hand went up. And I should point out this was pre pandemic.
My point is this. The parents of Gen Z (for whom these issues are common) are largely Gen X who only saw a small minority of people struggle with anxiety or depression. Until I experienced anxiety myself, I had very little idea of what that was like. These are issues that significantly affect families. On a more positive note, discussing mental health is not taboo like it was for older generations.
So #1 is a more significant gap between the generations. (more to come)
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