The truth is that everything we need to know about salvation and the Christian life is in God’s Holy Word and the church catholic has been reading that Word together for two millennia. It isn’t all about “control, authority, and power.” It’s about truth, what is and that truth, God’s truth, can be known in Scripture. Obviously, I think someone should tell the truth to Millennials about what’s happened to them. There is a way forward but it won’t be easy. 

Most of the students I teach are so-called Millennials. A few generations ago Americans were raised by parents. Then they were raised by the television. This generation was raised by the computer and related (mostly mobile) media. AsThomas de Zengotita has noted, the modern world is paralyzed by “options.” This is especially true of Millennials. They’ve been presented with so many choices throughout their lives that they find it very difficult to make choices for fear of missing out on something. I understand this intellectually, I see it but it’s difficult for me to relate to it.

I had more choices than my parents but the world in which I was raised was more like theirs than it was like that in which the Millennials have been raised. My parents chose to raise us, in certain respects, in an old-fashioned way. I mowed the lawn with a manual push-mower (no engine) until we got an electric mower (that required running a cord through a window). There was no snow blower for us. I was the snow blower. We had three channels on TV. I’m still impressed by high def color TV, a multiplicity of channels, and air conditioning.

Millennials, of course, assume these things as basic. They’ve been bombarded with sophisticated, demographically targeted ads to which, I’m told, they’ve developed an equally sophisticated filter. Indeed, my experience tells me that Millennials have been conditioned to be skeptical about all mass messages, whether ads or lectures. In their world, nothing really counts unless it is delivered personally, in the form of a text message to their phone. I haven’t figured out how to send my lectures in the form a text message and I’m reasonably sure it isn’t going to happen anytime soon.

They’ve been so bombard at the very same time they’ve been told (and apparently persuaded) that the world around them is an arbitrary social construct. They probably know intuitively that food doesn’t just appear in the market but, in their experience, it does. Yet, paradoxically, they some of them are foodies” of some sort. Their practical alienation from nature and their theoretical rejection of the idea of nature—any such thing as nature or fixity or what Ken Myers calls “giveneness”—means that they regard claims about what is “natural” as arbitrary and thinly disguised, illegitimate attempts to wield authority.

These factors and others contribute to a kind of Gnosticism: skepticism about sense experience. The real is the screen and the screen is real, which, paradoxically requires them to believe their eyes. Perhaps we should speak of a selective skepticism. Because their skepticism is incomplete, they are minded to believe that there is secret knowledge “out there” somewhere (e.g., an unwritten apostolic tradition). Some of them seem content to rest on implicit faith, a trust that authorities whom they don’t know have possession of what they themselves do not and probably cannot know.

This is part of the attraction of Orthodoxy and Romanism to evangelicals. Epistemic skepticism produces despair and the only way out seems to be blind, implicit faith in the Roman magisterium or in an exotic Orthodox tradition and metropolitan. This is combined with a deep-seated belief in autonomy, which they exercise in choosing which claimant to “apostolic tradition” they are, paradoxically, autonomously choosing going to trust.

How is this possible? Their Baby-boomer parents, buoyed by the Reagan prosperity, needy for approval from their children and to demonstrate their “success,” vowed to bear any burden, to pay any price to make sure that their children had it all. So, Mom and Dad stood in line at midnight for the latest Christmas toys. They turned off the scoreboard so that no one’s self-esteem would be damaged.

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