The coming generation’s values and idolatries are both different and similar to those of past generations. Young people of the 2010s have been shaped by different forces, and if we can imagine how they will behave over the next few years, perhaps we will be in a better position to serve them. To put it another way, the question of youth work is a question of young people, and their struggle to get on in life. They too are looking for significance, safety and happiness. They are doing it in their own way, though, and I would argue that, although they express themselves in new media, the main social forces which shape their approach have been active and increasing in potency for over a century. But first, a bit of history.
The rise of identity formation
Identity formation is a relatively new phenomenon. The contrast is easiest to see if we jump back to the pre-modern period.
The vast majority of people in the past were not able to make the kinds of choices we take for granted, about who they wanted to be. The roles people fulfilled were linked, to a much greater degree, to inherited factors, such as family and marriages. A person did not even usually get to choose who to marry, because the choice was much too important to leave to individual whim. A boy learned his father’s trade, and a girl her mother’s, and an appropriate match was made from a limited pool. At marriage, a new family was formed, but often it lived in close proximity to the existing unit, either to take care of the ageing parents (before social security, a family was the pension people provided for themselves) or because housing was expensive, or the father’s workshop was also the son’s.
In the days before transport infrastructure, large urban populations, and the agricultural surplus which modern farming advances made possible, basic subsistence demanded that those whose roles were handed down to them by their parents should persist in them. After all, if your father was the village smith, and you decided you wanted to be a baker, then who would fit shoes on the horses? And if there was already a baker, how could he cope with the introduction of competition? What if there was a fixed number of people needing bread in his village? Where a society is unable to increase demand, supply must remain more or less static, to avoid an economic crisis; competition and its associated boons depend on free markets, with the infrastructure and regulation to support them. In other words, there were reasons a person could not just decide for himself what he wanted to do with his life.
It isn’t wrong to want to be loved, liked and approved of, but it is a problem - a sin even - if that is the source of your soul’s satisfaction
There are countless examples of this kind of economic regulation in the towns and villages of the middle ages. Trade guilds, confraternities, legal instruments which stipulated the regulation weights and measures of goods and services, tax structures which supposed that people were ‘villeins’ - that is, bondsmen of a local lord - such things were how our society coped with the need to feed itself, and ensured stability when its resources were limited. The opportunity to try new things was not open to all.
Identity formation became a different thing after the Great War. Those who considered ‘the human problem’ (as Aldous Huxley famously referred to it) felt that the moral, intellectual, and social good of society had become a question of ‘modernity’ and ‘progress’. In 1934, the fascist American poet Ezra Pound told the world to ‘Make it New!’ ‘Any work of art,’ he said, ‘which is not a beginning, an invention, a discovery, is of little worth.’ This age believed advances in science and education were the answer to moral failure. Although George Bernard Shaw could observe that, ‘Science never solves a problem without creating ten more’, he was a believer in progress, and he also believed that people should not waste their time on social questions. All problems were educational problems, material problems.
It took the Second World War, Auschwitz, and the H-bomb before the paroxysm came. Aldous Huxley’s conclusion was a complete reversal of his pre-war optimism, ‘Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.’ Therefore, in the sixties, identity formation became the issue in the culture war which pitted young against old in a dramatic and rebellious clash of ideals.
The freedom generation sang songs about it. If we can’t be good, we must at least be free. After all, as Bob Dylan sang, how many times must the cannon balls fly before they’re forever banned? Or how many years can some people exist before they’re allowed to be free? Stick it to the man. Personal choice, individualism, consumerism, non-conformity: the thread connecting them all is liberation, the new ultimate value. How does a child of the post-war generation know he is all right? He is free: socially, personally, intellectually, ideologically, materially, sexually. But this ‘freedom’ is narcissistic, and its sacraments are abortion and divorce. This ‘freedom’ does not bring happiness, but isolation, loneliness, heartache and despair. Even at the time, popular culture reflected this anxiety and tension. The Kinks sang: ‘It’s your life and you can do what you want. Do what you like, but please don’t keep me waiting.’ They also mocked the nostalgia of their parents’ generation: ‘Ma and Pa look back at all the things they used to do, didn’t have no money and they always told the truth. Daddy didn’t have no toys, or mummy didn’t need no boys... Yesterday was such an easy game for you to play, but let’s face it things are so much easier today. Guess you need some bringing down, and get your feet back on the ground.’
Postmodernism, relativism, pluralism – we are ‘condemned to be free’, as Sartre said, and ‘we do not judge the people we love’, because ‘existence precedes and rules essence.’ Where anything goes, everything goes. We find we’re getting nowhere, and begin to believe there’s nowhere to go.
The answer to the need for approval is approval: not the approval of the world, or any of its groups, but the approval of the one who made the world and all its people
Identity formation today
So where are we now, and where are we headed? It seems to me, that the new ultimate virtue addresses the need for fulfilment, meaning and purpose by seeking it in ‘approval’. But it is a special kind of approval.
By our culture’s understanding, you are ‘all right’ if you have approval measured in whatever social capital you prefer as an individual. How do I know if I am all right? I am successful within my tribe. We know that we are free to choose our tribe, but our tribe gives us rules and standards, measures of success and failure, and the chance to progress. What is more, the choice of tribe is not fixed, and need not be narrow. If you are not academic, can you be sporty? Or do you like finding prime numbers? Hill-climbing? Software? Flower arranging? Porn? There are a billion new connections ready to be made in our brave new world - an internet of connections. An advert for phones proclaims the new doctrine, ‘Connections make our lives meaningful’. Our whole lives are overlapping networks of sociability – coteries of fellowship and communion – pregnant with novelty, the prospect of acceptance, and the offer of genuine significance, safety and happiness.
But the new search for identity and meaning, significance and safety, is charted through rough waters. The sea drowning our children and young people is ‘glory’: it is the idolatry of work and exhaustion. Its squalls are either failure and incompetence, and the drenching misery of setback, bitterness and jealousy; or temporary success and its collateral emptiness, a vacuum made worse by being inexplicable.
Our young people know how this game is played. Its stakes are Facebook likes, retweets, and viral fame or infamy. Look at me. Look at me. Please. Look at me. Their willingness to behave without tolerance towards any and every threat to this new ultimate good is written in capital letters under every YouTube video. The weapons of this war are liberation dogma, and legal enforcement of a popular agenda. Whose morality? The mob’s. A certain kind of bullying is now a virtue. The marginalisation of the ‘out’ is normative and likely to increase, where the guiding principle is the tyranny of the majority. Everything is personal. Every judgement leads to judgementalism. It’s going to get ugly.
Attacking approval addiction
Much of the Bible teaching centres on the idolatry of approval hunting - to expose the truth that it’s just another form of idolatry. That is, it is how people are tempted to meet a legitimate need through an illegitimate means. The truth is that it isn’t wrong to want to be loved and liked and approved of, but it is a problem - a sin even - if that is the source of your soul’s satisfaction - the thing you must have, without which you feel worthless. It is wrong because Jesus’ verdict on our lives matters more than the verdict of a million retweets. I will quite often have conversations with young people about the content of their Facebook and Twitter feeds, and the issues of approval usually surface in those in a lighttouch way. Sometimes, the things which people expose about themselves on Facebook are more revealing than they know.
As a youth worker, reading the feeds means listening for the missing replies, and noticing the posts that are ignored. People use Facebook to make a public statement, but also to control the image their friends have of them. Not everything is a problem - after all, people use fashions in clothes to do the same things - but everything is a clue.
With individuals, I often find that the doctrine of forgiveness is the thing that unlocks the idolatry of approval hunters. That is, whenever someone has something they need to forgive, we help them see that there are only three paths open to them. The path of low self-esteem is to accept the wrong, and acquiesce in the verdict that the perpetrator’s actions speak, ‘You are the kind of person it is alright to mistreat, because you are worth nothing’. Obviously, this is destructive and tends to destroy people from the inside out. I find that self-harmers and girls who stay with abusive boyfriends for the sake of approval and control tend to be in this group.
The second alternative is the path of vengeance or bitterness. Where a young person meets with disapproval of the sort that brings them genuine injury, they often seek redress and revenge. That is, where the verdict against them is ‘you are worthless’, their response is to say, ‘I will prove my worth by not letting this insult or injury stand’. Obviously, this alternative breeds violence and unhappiness in its own way. Helping young people to see that their need for approval within a group is dangerous and unsatisfactory is a matter of conversation, and reason, with compassion.
However, the Christian has the third alternative: forgiveness. It is a unique facet of Christian living that we can forgive by choosing to believe not our attacker’s verdict (that we are worthless), but Christ’s verdict. The world does not have this alternative. Young people seek to receive the verdict of the group from which they draw their approval and in which they forge their identity, but what if the problem comes from within that group? Christ’s opinion is that we are approved, not on our own merits, but on his. What is more, we are so loved that the eternal son of God was willing to die to bring us into relationship with him. The one who had everything wanted one more thing: us. And he was willing to undergo more than mere disapproval: he died in humiliated, lonely disapprobation in undeserved pain on a cross. Getting to know this helps young people when they have a sense of injury to their personal approval rating - the thing they track most in all the world. The answer to the need for approval is approval: not the approval of the world, or any of its groups, but the approval of the one who made the world and all its people.
So what does this mean for Christian youth work? Our job is to be certain of our saviour, while we are merciful to those who doubt. We are to be a living, serving explosion, blowing up their paradigm, rebuking their priorities, and a rescue team, taking them to the only one who really can save. The truth is that this generation is thirsty, but it drinks from the toilet. We must facilitate a loss of faith in the secular certainties. We treasure the source of all value, next to whom all other treasures are trash. We seek our praise from the Lord’s ‘well done’, which is what ‘Hallelujah’ really means. If we are given grace to do this, we discover our own significance and safety in the ultimate reality: we belong to a covenant-making God. Although we were more corrupted than we ever knew, we are more loved than we could ever imagine. This generation wants to know who it is, but needs to know whose it is.
