Boomer Christianity is Dying Fast

This WSJ article is making the rounds, so most of you might have seen it, but I wanted to make sure it got noticed. Boomer Christianity is Dying Fast. The aging of the mainstream denominations, especially the leadership has been pointed out more and more frequently over the last twenty years.

This hasn’t always been the view of the Catholic Church. Mr. Thomas and his fellow activists are drawn to the imagery of the crusades. Pope Urban II preached the First Crusade in 1095 to a crowd that responded with cries of “Deus vult” or “God wills it.” That phrase is popular among nativists on social media. Which pope is the greater authority on the gospels, Urban or Leo? I don’t know. But a glance at Christian history shows that the current consensus among church leaders hasn’t always been so. Taking the long view, it is by no means a settled position among Christians that nationalism and militarism are “contrary to the gospel,” as Bishop Hudson-Wilkin put it 

I think bringing in Urban II is a bit of an overshoot, but point taken. There are ideas in church leadership which are treated as obvious but would not even be recognised in other eras of the faith. I always hesitate to begin an argument with "One would think..." because it carries a great danger of subjectivity, but one would think that the leader of an eternal church would ask him/herself whether his opinion owes more to his narrow slice of time than it should. I learned decades ago from CS Lewis that while it is true that all eras have their own biases and cannot be entirely objective, this is nowhere more true than among the moderns who insist this. The thing they preach loudest they seem to think themselves exempt from. He called it Chronocentrism and Chronological Snobbery, giving credit to Owen Barfield for alerting him to the illogic of it.

 Boomer Christians are alarmed and bewildered by a return to the faith of centuries past. They forget that the political priorities of their generation emerged from a very unusual historical moment. Their confident worldview was a gift from a different era. And it will, I fear, die with them.

Have some humility.