Radical Christian Millennial
The second reason we don’t want to go to your stuffy, sawdust-smelling church is that we just don’t see the point. Many church services are simply an excuse for middle-aged white suburbanites to assuage their guilt for a couple hours every Sunday (or maybe just on Easter and Christmas, if you’re like my family). Most of the ones that do take an active role in the community are stuffy and out-of-touch at best, horrific at worst.
We don’t want to sit in your uncomfortable pews and sing songs written decades (or centuries) ago about how much we love God and how fantastic Jesus was. We don’t know anything about God or Jesus, except that they are apparently extremely concerned with who we have sex with. That doesn’t sound like the Ground of All Being, or any type of savior I want to know. It sounds like a sexually-repressed old pervert.
When I participated in Democracy Spring back in April, I brought a big cardboard sign emblazoned with a cross that read: “Christians for Campaign Finance Reform.” I played Christian apologist to at least half a dozen different left-wing activists while I was there, and when I explained to them that radical egalitarianism was at the heart of Jesus’s message, that it really isn’t about sex at all, at least a few of them were astounded. I truly felt like I might’ve given at least a couple of them a new perspective on our old, old religion.
On the day we were arrested protesting at the capitol, I was cuffed and put in a long line next to a guy we called “Pastor Dave.” He was the minister at Emanuel United Church of Christ in Philadelphia, and he had driven all the way to D.C. just to be arrested for the cause. What’s more, he told me he had been arrested dozens of times before for protesting other social injustices.
Do these members of the clergy who are so concerned with getting Millennials into church have any idea how many of us would come if we saw more people like Pastor Dave, out in the streets, putting their money where their mouth is for the Kingdom of God? How many of us would be forced to say, “Maybe there’s more to this whole Christianity thing than I thought”?
And then, if this new breed of activist ministers were to lead their new youthful flocks in these types of demonstrations? Fighting for women’s rights, Black Lives Matter, economic justice, environmental justice (“Creation Care”), et al? The Christian Right has been able to mobilize their congregations against all of these issues with alarming effectiveness, but a concentrated pushback from the left, which actually has scripture on their side, would not only overwhelm the opposition, but might just save Christianity in the process.
I don’t see any of this happening. Unfortunately, “progressive Christianity” all too often means a progressive theology but a complete absence of politics. I’ve cased the joint at several progressive congregations in my area, and at each of them sent emails to the pastors asking to be as involved as I possibly can. I’ve never gotten a reply, and I’ve never witnessed anything more than singing and reading inoffensive Bible verses together.
The only way to get Millennials back into the nave is to combine progressive theology with progressive politics. You might not like it; most clergy certainly don’t. But you’re never going to get the lazy, indifferent, or ignorant among us into religion. They’re too busy drinking and smoking pot and watching cartoons.
But the activists among us? The Millennials who are, to use the technical term, woke? There’s an entire generation of potential radical Christians in the streets, fighting for BLM, fighting to dismantle the patriarchy, fighting for a more socialistic economy, fighting for an end to corporatism and political corruption and American imperialism.
My sincerest hope is that some denomination will be the first to launch an organized, politically active, unapologetically leftist, radically inclusive effort towards working with these people. Not converting them; see, that won’t work. Working with them. Throwing the weight of their congregation behind their causes.
Maybe it’ll be the UCC. Maybe the Episcopalians. Hell, maybe even the Quakers. I don’t know.
What I do know is that the first denomination to do this will see their membership explode.
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