Feral Adolescents

In one of many articles about the riots in London, one newspaper reporter wrote,

Part of the problem is that the breakdown of the family (or an unwillingness to form one) has left a generation of feral adolescents without fathers or any adult males to act as role models. Parents rarely know what their children are doing, and exercise little power or authority over them. Instead, their loyalty is to the gang and to its codes, rather than to the prevailing moral orthodoxies of the majority of the population. Low-level criminality is a way of life – as, for some, are drugs, robbery and routine armed violence.

Feral adolescents–that what they are being termed.  Young people brought up with no civilizing forces around them.  No manners, no respect for others, no restraints upon behavior, no boundaries, no decency, no moral or spiritual foundation.  I’ve seen them described as barely human, looking to satisfy only their physical needs for food, sex and entertainment.  So why not riot and destroy?

What have we come to?  There is no one cause of this, of course, but in case you didn’t know, in England, new parents, very, very rarely actually married to each other, will occasionally show up churches wanting to have their babies “done.”  In other words, they know they are supposed to have some sort of ceremony at church when they have a baby, but have no idea what it is, what it means, or why do it.

But when we baptize a baby, there are vows that parents make on behalf of that child, vows that include rejecting evil in all its forms, fighting injustice, and putting full trust in Jesus Christ and promising to serve Him as Lord.  Vows are serious business–but they’ve lost their meaning in England.

We’re not that far behind.