Discipleship in the Age of White Christian Nationalism

Someone asked me the other day if I miss youth group. My first thought was, “no, I don’t miss it at all.”

Then it snowed 14 inches in Canaan Valley and I wanted to post a picture to see who wanted to go skiing.

I long for the days of late night giggles, long car rides with good conversations, cow appreciation day, and so much more. I miss watching a young person mature over those 7 years of middle and high school. I loved youth ministry.

Around 2015, things started to change. Youth ministry got harder, I thought and I’ve read, that it had to do with the proliferation of smart phones, travel sports, and the changes in parenting styles - but something else happened around that same time, too. 

American Christianity made a choice. 

Some Christians were taken up to the tallest peak and someone said to them, “all this will be yours if you bow down before me.” They took the deal. It wasn’t the universities or the law firms that capitulated first, it was the Church. 

We are decades into this crisis, which is not about declining attendance, but about what it means to follow Jesus. It’s a discipleship problem. It’s not that Americans left the church, it’s that Christians left Jesus.

Ministry programs that were designed for the Cold War era, like youth group, don’t meet the moment. American Christianity is in crisis.

Do you remember the scene in Titanic when Rose’s mother sent her maids back to the room to turn the heaters on? That’s what youth group started to feel like to me - instead of teaching people how to swim, or building more lifeboats, or even acknowledging the damage - we were just keeping a room warm that was going to be at the bottom of the Atlantic in a few hours while sipping brandy and listening to the band play “Nearer My God to Thee.”

This is not a drill.

I know that most of us don’t know what we’re supposed to do and so we default to what we know because the world seems crazy. But, the world where youth group was the answer, the world of stability and relative peace was the abnormal world. That’s why the Bible seemed foreign to us.

The world of nationalism and empire and religious zealots is the world into which the Bible speaks. Making disciples of Jesus Christ is what faithful resistance looks like in this world.