The young get religion

Young people, teens and young adults, have always searched for meaning and truth. Now, a lot more of them are finding it in religion than…maybe their parents?! So, USA Today decides to do this story on how that can be a divisive thing.

Pamela Moss worships every Sunday at Messiah Baptist Church in Grand Rapids, Mich., where they preach the Bible straight up, sing the old hymns “and then let me get on with my day.”
But her son, George, 24, is a fervent Evangelical, witnessing to strangers and praying “in a church that looks like a gym. To me, he’s just out the gate,” his mystified mom says.

Stephen Rochester, 32, grew up “Jewish lite” in St. Louis, says his father, Marty. “So I was stunned when Stephen went religious with a capital R,” switching to his Hebrew name, Shaya, and adopting the black hat of Hasidic Jews.

Mari Beth Nolan, 22, grew up a “Christmas and Easter” Catholic. Now she plans to go to work at a missionary clinic in Ecuador, leaving her parents proud — but confused.

Why confused? Because maybe a lot of parents didn’t learn, practice or teach their faith too well….maybe?

Statistically, these devout young people are “floating below the radar,” says Rabbi Zalman Shmotkin of Chabad.org, which encourages Jews to deepen religious practice.

Such stories are ancient: Abraham smashing his father’s idols; young Jesus teaching his elders; Buddha leaving his father’s home.

“Freaked-out parents are nothing new here,” says the Rev. Jeremy Johnston, executive pastor of First Family Church, a Baptist megachurch in Overland Park, Kan..

“The parents are intimidated by their child’s depth of feeling. They threaten college students to ‘cut off tuition support if you’re going to be such a fanatic.’ They think the normal way to be a young adult is the way they were. But it’s not.

That is abundantly clear in the secular culture, particularly on college campuses.

“We tell young people when they are all wound up in new faith that the best thing you can do is show your parents the changes God is working in you. Parents can decide for themselves whether they want to follow.”

Isn’t this sort of a role-reversal? I guess with a culture out of control and parents out of answers, it’s more like a course correction in the order of things.