What (Four) Teenagers Think About Religion And Our Biggest Problems Today

As part of a grad school class I’m taking I asked four teenagers three questions about their main concerns in life and how religion or faith impacts those concerns. I thought it would be fun to ask Pastoralia readers those same questions. So first, here are the questions and the responses I received from 4 teenagers:

1. What 3 issues stress you out most?
2. What are the 3 biggest challenges facing our world?
3. Does religion/faith help you deal with these concerns better or make them more difficult? How?

Respondent #1:

1. Figuring out what my priorities are, figuring out how to discover myself, and figuring out how to maintain grades without going crazy knowing that next year is going to be tough and that I procrastinate. I also dislike how my response to having a ton of things to think about is not thinking about any of them. I’m a very relaxed and mellow person… See more though, stress doesn’t get to me too much.
2. Disregard for the environment, poverty/greed, and parochialism.
3. Religion and faith do little for me. I see and respect how faith motivates people and gives them a sense of purpose, but it would be stupid to say something like “We are God’s instruments.” That belittles free will and extraordinary individual morality. What I mean is no because putting things in the hands of some unknown might make you feel better, but it does little to help your problem. Religion does get in the way of the global warming challenge though because some people deny science and endorse the supernatural.’

Respondent #2:

1. School, Grades, finding a job
2. Global warming, america doesnt care what other people think of them, the global and national economy
3. I don’t know, i would say neither. to say that i think religion helps in MY opinion wouldn’t be how i feel but i have this guilt feeling that if i say no it doesnt it would be wrong. i think saying that religion helps … See moreis something we have been accustomed too and for the most part is accepted by society. i dont think i could say yes or no though in regards to religion/faith

Respondent #3:

1. Thinking about college, self-image, and excelling at what is important to me.
2. Realizing the worth of a human being, disreguarding race or gender. Finding more diplomatic ways to solve world issues if possible. Letting go of selfish natures to benefit those in greater need and those with less opportunities.
3. My faith helps me because it gives me hope that someday these issues might be solved or improved. it pushes me toward the direction of helping make a change.

Respondent #4:

1. Future, Family,
2. World Hunger, Religious Conflicts, Environmental damage.
3. No it does not help me, religion tends to create conflict, especially in today’s world. We don’t need religion to solve our as well as the world’s problems or challenges.

Does this tell us anything useful about the worldview of these teenagers? In your experience, to what extent are these responses typical of American teenagers? What does this mean for churches and church leaders?

And, finally, how are their responses similar or different from your own?

My brief thoughts:

• Teenagers today (or, these teenagers at least) are way smarter than we give them credit for.
• Their concerns are more or less exactly the same as mine.
• With the exception of one, there is very little connection between daily concerns and religion/faith and the connection between religion/faith and global concerns is mostly negative. I myself have a great deal of hope for how faith can impact global concerns, but quite frankly I share the disconnect between my faith and my daily stresses. If anything, being a person of faith has only increased by level of concern and responsibility.

Technorati Tags: Church, Culture, Religion, Surveys, Teenagers

Church as Screen Time and Pastor as Parasocial Personality

Just a quick riff on a couple of news items coming out this week:

• First, the introduction of the hologram pastor.
• Second, research published in Pediatrics suggests that childhood obesity in pre-school age children is directly linked to dislocated familial attachments facilitated by too much time in front of the television and too few communal meals with the family.
• Third, a second unrelated research project coming out of New Zealand suggests much of the same conclusions with regard to teenagers. Teens with more “screen time” have significantly lower attachment to their parents and peers (HT: Kara Powell).

There’s a fascinating sentence in the last summary:

“However, it is also possible that adolescents with poor attachment relationships with immediate friends and family use screen-based activities to facilitate new attachment figures such as online friendships or parasocial relationships with television characters or personalities,” the authors write.

I’ve written about this before, calling it the “mediation of experience.” If “screen time” inhibits our social interactions and relational attachments by replacing the real thing with “parasocial relationships” with unreal characters can the same be said to be true of other instances where we replace real live relationships with unreal characters or personalities?

Obviously I think the answer is yes.

One of the problems with the prevailing mode of church in America is that it has turned the pastor into a celebrity personality, complete with a performance-oriented and technologically mediated relationship with an audience. Once the church reaches a certain size, the pastor’s interaction must occur as a performance by a character through media. Cultural expectations about church structure coupled with assumptions about the virtues of media nearly require this. The trouble is, the character that pastor portrays, in my experience, in never quite the real thing. Some pastors try very hard to “be themselves” on stage, but others intentionally slip into a very different persona. But even for the pastor trying to be genuine, it’s very difficult in my opinion – perhaps impossible – to avoid some level of acting when you’re a preacher on stage, largely because of the entertainment-based expectations we currently impose upon the notion of what it means to be a “good preacher.”

One of the bizarre side-effects of this mediated relationship between the pastor and congregation is that, because of the high level of mediated exposure to the preacher, many in the church (most, in the case of very large churches),  actually feel a personal connection to the pastor that doesn’t actually exist. They don’t really know the pastor, in much the same way they don’t really know Oprah or Dr. Phil. They only know your stage persona. This is greatly magnified in those churches who embrace the personality-driven church model and use a charismatic pastor’s performance skills as a means of growing the church.

Hence, the church gathering becomes just another version of “screen time.”

Now consider how “screen time” becomes literally true in the proliferation of video venue churches, where many congregations only interact with a version of the pastor that is literally unreal. Now replace the video screen with hologram which remains unreal, but magnifies the level of illusion.

Moreover, much like the teens in the second study cited above who talk to each other about the fictional characters they’ve mutually engaged as relational surrogates, church members will often interact around the pastor’s persona. In this way a false persona can become a means of false social relationships. This is akin to kids talking enthusiastically about what “happened” to Hanna Montana in the latest episode (nothing happened…she doesn’t exist!). In celebrity-driven churches much of the social energy occurs around the campfire of a false persona.

Does it matter? Is there harm being done by moving church toward just another version of “screen time?” What are the consequences of this to discipleship? Perhaps, like the studies above, the consequences are spiritually obese, socially disconnected and disaffected Christians.

Technorati Tags: Church, discipleship, Media, Mega-Churches, Pastors, Teenagers