I believe one key is to renew our commitment to the church as an intergenerational family, in which each person has a unique role in helping the others toward our shared goal of maturity in Christ…Young people need adults in their lives who are modeling a vibrant spiritual maturity. One reason no one wants to grow up in America is that many adults don’t make their life stage look very attractive.

The house lights go down. Spinning, multicolored lights sweep the auditorium. A rock band launches into a rousing opening song. “Ignore everyone else, this time is just about you and Jesus,” proclaims the lead singer. The music changes to a slow dance tune, and the people sing about falling in love with Jesus. A guitarist sporting skinny jeans and a soul patch closes the worship set with a prayer, beginning, “Hey God …” The spotlight then falls on the speaker, who tells entertaining stories, cracks a few jokes, and assures everyone that “God is not mad at you. He loves you unconditionally.”

After worship, some members of the church sign up for the next mission trip, while others decide to join a small group where they can receive support on their faith journey. If you ask the people here why they go to church or what they value about their faith, they’ll say something like, “Having faith helps me deal with my problems.”

Fifty or sixty years ago, these now-commonplace elements of American church life were regularly found in youth groups but rarely in worship services and adult activities. What happened? Beginning in the 1930s and ’40s, Christian teenagers and youth leaders staged a quiet revolution in American church life that led to what can properly be called the juvenilization of American Christianity. Juvenilization is the process by which the religious beliefs, practices, and developmental characteristics of adolescents become accepted as appropriate for adults. It began with the praiseworthy goal of adapting the faith to appeal to the young, which in fact revitalized American Christianity. But it has sometimes ended with both youth and adults embracing immature versions of the faith. In any case, white evangelicals led the way.

Saving the World

Juvenilization happened when no one was looking. In the first stage, Christian youth leaders created youth-friendly versions of the faith in a desperate attempt to save the world. Some hoped to reform their churches by influencing the next generation. Others expected any questionable innovations to stay comfortably quarantined in youth rallies and church basements. Both groups were less concerned about long-term consequences than about immediate appeals to youth.

In the second stage, a new American adulthood emerged that looked a lot like the old adolescence. Fewer and fewer people outgrew the adolescent Christian spiritualities they had learned in youth groups; instead, churches began to cater to them.

Between 1930 and 1950, Americans got blasted by the Great Depression, World War II, and the cold war. Youth pastors, politicians, and parents all wondered if America and its “way of life” would survive. In the public mind, young people held the key to national survival. After all, millions of young people were unemployed, and Hitler and Stalin were riding to power on the backs of easily manipulated youth. Torrey Johnson, the first president of Youth for Christ (YFC), spoke for many when he said, “If we have another lost generation … America is sunk.” In a world of impending doom, who could argue against doing whatever it took to Christianize and mobilize the young saviors of the world?

The 1940s also saw the birth of the “teenager.” Unlike the more diverse youth of previous eras, teenagers all went to high school and participated in a national youth culture increasingly dominated by the same music, movies, products, and cultural beliefs. Although it may seem that the teenagers of the 21st century bear little resemblance to those of the 1950s, crucial similarities remain in the structure of adolescent life and its relationship to the church. And one of the most important traits is the aversion to growing up.

When asked to sum up what was most important to her and her friends, one mid-1940s teenage girl said, “We just want to live our own lives. We’re not in a hurry to grow up and get all serious and morbid like older people.” Of course, girls who just want to have fun make poor saviors of the world. But except for a few Roman Catholic youth and their leaders whose voices were largely ignored, Christians turned a blind eye to early warning signs that youth culture frivolity might swamp Christian activism.

Failed Attempts

Each branch of American Christianity responded differently to the growing pressure to juvenilize. Mainline Protestants, such as those who ran the Methodist Youth Department, assumed that young people were natural political activists. They successfully mobilized an influential minority of young people to fight for racial integration and other progressive political causes.

One mid-1940s teenage girl said, ‘We just want to live our own lives. We’re not in a hurry to grow up and get all serious and morbid like older people.’ Of course, girls who just want to have fun make poor saviors of the world.

But their attempts to adapt to youth culture proved clumsy. In 1959, a national convocation that tried to use Beat culture and existentialism to shake up the supposedly apathetic teenagers of the “silent generation” backfired and led to the resignation of the conference organizer. More often, youth committees and “rhythmic games,” the Methodist answer to dancing, competed poorly against other youth culture entertainments.

African American Baptists taught young people to speak, act, and dress like adults and to use their Christian maturity to shame segregationists. This strategy succeeded beyond everyone’s wildest dreams in the sit-in movement of the early 1960s. But in the pressure cooker of the movement, the religious fervor that initially motivated many young activists turned into a zeal for destroying anything that seemed to get in their way, including the very black churches that had nurtured their activism. Meanwhile, African American churches had not developed much expertise in creating youth-friendly environments that could sustain teenage loyalty in the face of the upheavals of the 1960s and ’70s.

Pre-Vatican II Roman Catholics grew up in what journalist Garry Wills later described as “a ghetto, undeniably. But not a bad ghetto to grow up in.” Their families, neighborhoods, schools, and youth clubs were all saturated with Catholic identity markers. Drilled in memorization of the Baltimore Catechism, they knew the facts of their faith better than subsequent generations. But when they voiced tough theological questions, they often felt rebuffed. And they struggled under intense adult pressure toward sexual purity without being provided a fully satisfying rationale.

What seemed at the time like an unassailable, effective approach to youth socialization turned out to be quite fragile. When the institutions of the Catholic ghetto began to shake and Americans simultaneously decided that religion should be an optional, personalized activity, Roman Catholics were unable to adapt. They had not learned how to create the emotionally satisfying, entertaining youth environments that would be needed to sustain religious interest among the young in post-1960s America.

Evangelical Success

In contrast to other Christian youth leaders who ignored, suppressed, or adapted clumsily to youth culture, white evangelicals—like those who founded Young Life and YFC—embraced it. They created a youth-friendly version of old-time religion that they justified in part by insisting they had no intention of tampering with what happened in church. With a dream of beating “the world” at its own game, they started weekly Saturday night youth rallies held in auditoriums and featuring live radio broadcasts, upbeat music that mimicked the crooner and big-band styles of the day, brief testimonies by recent converts, and short, fervent sermons tied to current events. Stadium events like the May 1945 Victory Rally in Chicago drew thousands to spectacles of patriotism and piety and won respect even in the secular press.

Since the fate of the world depended upon winning as many youthful converts as quickly as possible, preachers at YFC rallies didn’t worry about ways they might be subtly altering the gospel message. Billy Graham, who got his start as an evangelist on the YFC rally circuit, claimed that “the young people around the world today who are having the best time are the young people who know Jesus Christ.” Jim Rayburn, founder of Young Life, agreed: Accepting Christ as Savior did not mean giving up pleasure and wearing a long face. As he put it, “It’s a sin to bore a kid.”

At the same time, the new breed of evangelical youth leaders stressed that following Christ included absolute obedience to his commandments and separation from “the world.” This seemingly contradictory combination of fun and moral strictness actually worked quite well at capturing teenage loyalty in a competitive religious and entertainment marketplace. Mainline Protestant youth leaders often complained that YFC rallies were stealing young people away from more worthy, social gospel-oriented youth programs.

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