When nutball fundamentalist preachers called Rock-and-Roll “the devil’s music,” the world laughed at how reactionary they were, and how very unprogressive.  But since those days in the 1950s, study after study has shown that, in many ways, they understood way more about music than the world.  They understood what Plato understood, which is that A) music is powerful, and B) its messages, both in form and content, are transformative in good ways and bad.  I aint saying rock is the devil’s music, however.  I’m just saying you are what you eat, so to speak.  A new report in The Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine says that “kids are receiving about 35 references to substance abuse for every hour of music they listen to.”

Researchers from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine studied the 279 most popular songs from 2005, based on reports from Billboard magazine, which tracks popular music. Whether a song contained a reference to drugs or alcohol varied by genre. Only 9 percent of pop songs had lyrics relating to drugs or alcohol. The number jumped to 14 percent for rock songs, 20 percent for R&B and hip-hop songs, 36 percent for country songs and 77 percent for rap songs […]

The study authors noted that music represents a pervasive source of exposure to positive images of substance use. The average adolescent is exposed to approximately 84 references to explicit substance use per day and 591 references per week, or 30,732 references per year. The average adolescent listening only to pop would be exposed to 5 references per day, whereas the average adolescent who listens just to rap would be exposed to 251 references per day.

If you listen to poorly made music all your life, you’ll grow up to believe shoddy craftsmanship is okay, and maybe even preferable.  And if you listen to as much music that celebrates depravity, in any form, the same will happen.  Where shall wisdom be found?  I hate to give up my Zeppelin.

I don’t like it when I see men dressed like boys, and women dressed like girls.  I have no problem with tennis shoes, or with shorts, or with baseball caps.  I just have a problem when, aside from the size and cost of the clothes, it’s hard to tell the difference between what a boy and a man are wearing.  The same for women who try to look like young things.  Even when she’s got the body for it, it’s just a little embarrassing.  Part of the problem here is that we so desperately want to look and act and be young.  We want to discover our inner child.  We wear shirts that say “Runs with scissors” and “Eats glue.”  We sit in great big Starbucks chairs with our shoes off and our legs Indian-style, like Kindergarteners on growth hormone.  I can’t stand it.  Those kinds of things are the subjects of this book, called The Death of the Grown-Up by Diana West.

The gist of it is this: In a now-vanished age, parents knew the difference between right and wrong and taught it to their children. For reasons that might have been fascinating to explore, the same generation that fought World War II, the Greatest Generation, rejected this role, raising children more interested in self-gratification and creating their own culture of music and clothes than in emulating their parents.

“The common compass of the past - the urge to grow up and into long pants; to be old enough to dance at the ball (amazingly enough, to the music adults danced to); to assume one’s rights and responsibilities - completely disappeared,” she writes.

West’s book makes some pretty big jumps from this idea to the destruction of Western Civilization, but it may be worth a skim in the bookstore.

Ms. West does know how to set the pulse racing. Along the way, we read of parents who hire strippers for their children’s parties, schools that have dropped honor rolls as too hurtful to students who do not make the list and a suburban mother outraged that her daughter has been suspended for giving oral sex to a classmate on the school bus. In court the mother argued that the school “was not clear in its written policies that oral sex on a bus was unacceptable behavior.”

Ah, it is quite nice to be a grown up.  Not always fun, but quite liberating.

We seem to be writing a lot about work, as I’ve done recently on napping (at work), vacations (from work), and pouting (about work).  In the course of writing those posts, I came across this piece from last year about how younger employees - i.e., recent college graduates - need too much coddling in today’s workplace.  They’re expectations are high, and their thresholds for pain are low. (But let’s be careful not to turn this into a “kids-these-days” hate-fest.  I am almost one of those kids, given my age.  And besides, kids-these-days can do a lot of things better than kids-back-in-the-day.  But back to today.)

Nurtured on a steady diet of self-esteem, the swaggeringly confident children of the ’80s and ’90s are flying the nest and starting to land in the workforce. They’re clamoring for quick feedback, meaningful involvement, and pumped-up recognition-and roiling old-school colleagues who dub them impatient, needy, and arrogant. The kids are frustrated too: Entry-level duties are a far cry from the dream jobs they’ve been made to feel are their birthright.

So why is Generation Y like this?  The article suggests a few causes: too much praise as children, an inability to recognize their ability to “improve over time,” the false idea that they are gifted, and so on.  But they’ve done some good things for the workplace, too.

They’re civically engaged (garnering comparisons to the “greatest generation”), and they can be surprisingly loyal. “They’ll quickly leave a company, yes,” says Tammy Hughes, president of workplace consultants Claire Raines Associates. “But they will be extremely loyal to companies that demonstrate loyalty to them, and it’s a very civic-minded loyalty. They expect companies they work for to be responsible.”

So, they’re not so bad.

If you’re a 2008 high school graduate raised in an American evangelical church, chances are you may have been inadvertently poisoned by those idols which Francis Schaeffer warned us of 40 years ago - personal peace and affluence. Get good grades, go to a good college, get a financially stable job, get married, have 2.5 kids, and live in suburbia, so as to isolate yourself from the reality of poverty and a post-Christian culture. It’s not that any of these things are necessarily bad, but idolatrous Christians tragically nurture kids to live for perverted ideals like “a nice life” rather than the costly priorities of the Kingdom.

With the threat of “flipping burgers,” many Christian parents guilt-manipulate the children God has given them into pursuing safe majors like “business,” instead of what God has laid on your heart - maybe political science, psychology, music, sociology, and so on, because God’s sovereignty is not enough to “fall back on.”

After speaking at a Christian youth conference, a high school senior proudly confessed to me that he wanted to be a lawyer because that would enable him to own a nice house to provide for his family. What a depressing vision. It made me nauseated. In John Piper’s words, that’s a wasted life.

I would like to apologize to any high school senior taught to serve the Christian version of the American Dream. You were created for mission and you were never encouraged. In high school, you were baby sat, entertained, shamed, taught how to be “nice,” kept busy with lots of programs, told not to sin (have sex, watch porn, get drunk, have long hair), and ventured on 10-day missions trip to Jamaica over Christmas. But you were never given a picture for your role in the mission of God to redeem His creation. Your faith has been totally undermined by a Christianity of privatization: you and Jesus. You were given the monastic vision of Christianity as a life of personal piety in isolation, raised to live in the Christian ghetto where it’s safe.

Pursuing the adventure of being “salt and light” is not something you were encouraged to do, especially if that meant sacrificing your personal safety and material comfort. Many of you have been discouraged from sharing your life with non-Christians because it was not modeled for you. This is not the way of Jesus, and for that I apologize. Class of 2008, seek first the Kingdom, not putrid idols like a struggle-free life and upward mobility.

Gone are the days when parent/teen disagreements simply lead to pouting. These days, conflict often ends in murder. I would not dare offer conjecture about the recent killings of parents by upset teens, but we need to seriously discuss the way we teach conflict management. What has been most surprising to those of us who research youth culture is that these kids do not fit the expected profile: These parental murderers are middle-class, suburban “good kids” with good grades.

Last week, Lewin Carlton Powell III, 16, was arrested and charged as an adult first-degree murder with killing Donna Rosemarie Campbell-Powell, 39, the boy’s mother. Powell III was “straight-forward” with police about killing his mother and, later the next morning, trying to kill his father, Lewin Powell, a police source told the Baltimore Examiner. “He was matter-of-fact” about the killing.

Powell, an honors student at McDonogh School, had argued with his mother about slipping grades, the source said. According to the Examiner the teen hid his mother’s body in the garage. Powell’s father came home from work around midnight and fell asleep on the couch. The next morning the father awoke when his son began beating him with the same bat used to kill his mother. “Thank God you’re here,” the elder Powell told police, according to the Examiner. “My son killed my wife.”

Last February, in the Baltimore area, Nicholas W. Browning, a 16-year-old sophomore, was indicted on murder and handgun charges in the deaths of his parents, John W. Browning and Tamara Browning, and younger brothers 14-year-old Gregory and 11-year-old Benjamin. All four were shot as they slept in their Cockeysville, MD home. Browning, in a dispute with his parents, murdered his entire family and then “hung out” with friends the next day, as if nothing happened.

One wonders what makes teenage boys snap like this in the first place. Does this represent the kind of demon possession that the Bible talks about? Is it simply sin? Or is something else more evil going on? Are there sociological factors, etc.?

The approach of summer brings with it appeals to support short-term mission trips, often to third-world countries. These trips frequently involve youths. Before their journey they troop to the front of the church, and we pray for them. Sometime later they return, and dutifully recount lives transformed, their own as well as those they went to help.

It’s something I want my own children to do when they are older, but on the immediate economics alone, youth-oriented mission trips are indefensible. People in need of churches, housing, and the Word could use the dollars and a couple of Christian men with carpentry skills far more than a passel of unskilled kids who are rounding out their spiritual resumes. But is there more here than the immediate economics?

One can argue, for example, that a spiritual resume is precisely what today’s kids need — to be exposed to the grit of poverty and the plight of the unchurched in forgotten reaches of the world. What Christian parent wouldn’t want his children to see first-hand, albeit in a relatively safe way, the world we have been protecting them from, and presumably preparing them to enter? The difficulty is that in calling these journeys mission trips, we divert resources from more effective missions. Given the reality that most families have limited budgets, forking over $25 for Jimmy’s mission trip to Brazil, and $75 for Susie’s mission trip to Kenya, means a more effective program gets $100 less.

But what if Jimmy and Susie are transformed by their experiences, such that they are more likely to give of their time and resources in the future? Then that $100 may reap dividends beyond what appears at first glance. I don’t deny that possibility, and hope, each time a young person from my own church goes to a distant country, that it proves so.

Still, it seems we ought to relabel these endeavors, perhaps calling them “Christian study abroad programs.” This is likely to wound someone’s sensibility about these things, perhaps especially those involved in the dozens of organizations specializing in Christian youth mission trips.

We all want these trips to be meaningful and valuable, but unfortunately, research by Calvin College’s Kurt Ver Beek indicates that short-term mission trips don’t lead to greater subsequent involvement in the lives of those they are intended to help. Nor do short-term missions result in significantly greater giving by mission-trip participants or their host churches. (For links to Ver Beek’s research, and articles discussing it, click here.)

The real test, where youth missions are concerned, is what these young people do when they are grown. I have no doubt that some of them are profoundly changed by a mission trip, making its cost a bargain. I also have no doubt that others get a good tan from their trip, and little more, beyond reinforcing the view of foreigners that Americans are vain and silly. But that’s the lot of any church, isn’t it, that the movers are mingled with the talkers, the saints with the sinners? And if we ever start separating these groups, I for one will be in big trouble.

So I’m wondering, what should our response be to the onslaught of youth missions this summer? What questions ought we to ask? Should we simply be thankful that young people are showing any interest in missions at all? Should we politely suggest that they can have experiences that are just as meaningful in our own inner cities, children’s hospitals, and poverty-racked rural areas? Should we pony up and keep our mouths shut? Am I a bad Christian for asking?

Young people are taking longer to grow up. Studies show 18- to 30-year-olds are waiting longer to marry, have children, finish school, and establish financial independence. Young adults also tend to leave the church during this period.

Justin Moffatt, college pastor at Christ Church in New York City, calls it “Rumspringa,” after the Amish practice of releasing youth from normal restraints for a time before they decide whether to join the church permanently. He is familiar with delayed responsibility and drifting from the church. “Students bring their parents to Christ Church and say, ‘I go here,’ and I have to tell the parents, ‘They’ve been here twice this whole semester.’” He listed several reasons young people slack off from church: tiredness, busyness, self-sufficiency, lack of motivation, difficulty forming relationships, or a flat-out desire to sin.

Many are also troubled by intellectual problems that confront them as their knowledge expands. “In high school,” Moffatt said, “a good student knows, say, 98 percent of the curriculum. But when he leaves home, he finds the gap between what he knows and what he can know much larger than he thought. Overseas travel, wide reading, and relationships can all have this effect. But instead of letting what they do know inform what they don’t know, students often think the other way around. I want them to think: ‘I don’t know why there’s suffering in the world, but I do know that God is love.’”

How should the church engage young people? “Too many Christians let fear dictate their actions,” Moffatt said, “whereas Ecclesiastes says ‘Cast your bread upon the waters. Try things in faith.’ I think the church’s default position should be ‘Grow up,’ but there needs to be flexibility. We need to disciple [youth] with care and love.”

Matthew Murray - 24, raised in a Bible-teaching home - walked into a church and a parachurch ministry a few days ago firing gun shots at Christians. Murray then died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. We may never know why this happened but Murray’s life, as associated on the ex-Pentecostal website “Azusa Street Survivors,” paints a chilling narrative. Murray’s screen name is thought to be “nghtmrchld26.” The FBI has pulled several posts by nghtmrchld26 that speak with detail about shootings, being homeschooled, and rejected by YWAM.

The Associated Press reports nghtmrchld26 saying on Sunday, “I’m coming for EVERYONE soon and I WILL be armed to the @ %$ teeth and I WILL shoot to kill.”

Describing his daily home life on December 24, 2006 nghtmrchld26 wrote, “We had bible memory, hymn singing, and prayer for at least the first two hours of the day growing up all the way till age 18. I don’t think it worked at keeping me in their system though.”

He also seems to resent religious people who wed Christianity with Republican politics: “I remember growing up in pentecostalism/evangelicalism, we were always told to support the republicans/conservatives and to ‘hate those evil satanic democrats.’ Jesus never said to put our trust in any political leader, yet we see so many christians trying sooooo hard to believe that ‘America was founded on fundamentalist evangelical christianity’ and we must turn america back towards God!!!”(January 14, 2007)

What are we to learn from this? We may remember that the shooter of the Virgina Tech massacre, Seung-Hui Cho, who killed 32 people and wounded many more, before committing suicide, was also reared in a suburban conservative evangelical context. Both Murray and Cho experienced rejection and pain from the Church and retaliated later. The two seem to have amazing similarities in their stories of conservative Christianity and experiencing rejection by the “beautiful people.”

Cho was rejected by kids in his youth group. On May 8, 2007 Murray alleges that YWAM rejected him because he wasn’t cool enough, “social enough,” and too “introverted.” Murray then laments, “If you’re an extrovert, and popular, then yes, there is plenty of love waiting for you in christianity.”

What, if anything, is happening in evangelical sub-culture that seems to be producing a generation of angry, vengeful young men (and angry middle-aged blogging men)? As the story of Murray’s life unfolds, I’m sure we will learn more about whether or not his perceptions were actually true. For now, it seems that evangelicals may need to start paying more attention to what’s happening to young men. Over the years I’ve seen this more and more in youth and college culture: In order to be loved by the masses one needs to look like an Abercrombie and Fitch model, be extremely outgoing, and publicly sinless. There are even some ministries and churches over the years that targeted “popular” kids in high schools and colleges to draw others. Many young people perceive this to be the case in the church and harbor anger.

Go for the influencers, right? Shouldn’t the church be different, some ask?

In the end, it will be difficult to reconcile this evil violence with a confession of faith like the one written on April 2, 2007 by nghtmrchld26.

For me, yes, “Jesus is the way” indeed. Jesus is an archetype, the perfect man and divine at the same time. Indeed, we all need to be “more like Christ” as in reality, we all have the spark of divinity within all of us. I have found the becoming like Christ is not something that suddenly happens after converting in a church or saying a sinner’s prayer, this is evident. Rather we become “like-Christ” as we trod The Path, awakening to more and more light. Jesus didn’t say “pray the sinners prayer” but rather “he that believeth on me shall have everlasting life.” How do I “have faith in Christ”? Well, by believing in the mystery and archetype of the Christ, knowing that humanity is not without hope and that the Divine Plan will indeed be fulfilled.

Arvada police spokeswoman Susan Medina won’t confirm that nghtmrchld26 is Murray. Sadly, he’s an influencer now. Nghtmrchld26 has not posted since the horror unfolded Sunday.

Irène Némirovsky’s posthumously published novel, Fire in the Blood, tells how the young grow old and how the old grow young again. The narrator, Silvio, is a prodigal son who says he wandered so far from his village in France that by the time he returned, “even the fatted calf had waited for me so long it had died of old age.” Once he loved, lived and sinned passionately. Now the fire in his blood has cooled, and he watches with jaded detachment the loving, living and sinning – the “energy, vitality, desire” – of the young people around him.

Then their scandals trigger a memory of his own past, and his own past secret dreams invade his quiet life. Are people truest to themselves when fire throbs in their blood, or when fire turns to ice? Does the lover or the husband know the real woman? Silvio answers that the lover knows “the passionate, happy, daring woman who delighted in pleasure,” and the husband “owns only a pale, cold imitation of that woman, as artificial as an epitaph on a tombstone.” The husband owns her virtue, but the lover possessed her youth.

Némirovsky, born in 1903, lived in France before she died in Auschwitz in 1942. She paints a small, exquisite picture of a region with “something restrained yet wild about it” — a fitting setting for the upright villagers and the secrets they themselves have forgotten.