Educational buffoonery, familial dysfunction, the soul-numbing internet, and more.

Readership: Christians; Men
Theme: The Protestant Reformation 2.0
Note: Images contributed by Tubal Cain.
Length: 1,600 words
Reading Time: 8 minutes

Intro

A Summary of Religious Shifts (1970–2025) listed the Key Drivers and Influential Factors to be…

  • Convergence / Secularization of the church, as seen in its norms and values.
  • The cultural shifts on marriage, gender, and sexuality that have infiltrated the church.
  • Evangelical fatigue as a result of its cultural accommodation, AKA ‘convergence’ with Feminist values.
  • Liberalization in Mainline denominations, leading to mass attrition.
  • Lower birth rates, especially in Mainline groups.
  • A growing perceived irrelevance of Christian values with respect to cultural values.  [Jack perceives that this characteristic is beginning to reverse.
  • Those who are drawn to Non-Denominational and Pentecostal strains appear to be seeking less structure and more vitality in their faith.
  • The minor numbers who shift to more conservative and structured traditions, such as Anabaptist, Catholicism, and Orthodoxy, appear to be disillusioned conservatives seeking to reconstruct their faith.

Here, I only summarized what was reported in the literature, saving my personal analyses and viewpoints for another post.

In the comments, Joe2 and Kevin Blackwell dug one layer deeper to speculate about the underlying causes.  Their views disagreed with each other, but I agree with them both.  So here are some insights to unpack, and more of my own assessments.  All explained here.

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The Internet’s Disintermediation of Social Intercourse

Joe2 wrote,

“I think the internet is a key correlation for younger adults switching to “None.”  Before the Netscape Navigator was released in 1994, the internet was primarily text-heavy and used by academics, scientists, and military personnel.  Netscape created the first highly successful commercial visual web browser.  It transformed the internet into an accessible, graphical information highway that anyone could navigate.

Younger adults today were brought up with computers, starting in kindergarten, and are computer savvy.  They are comfortable with computers; it’s part of their life.  With a few clicks, they can find everything about any religion from the internet.  As a result, I think they lose interest in church and see it as not being very relevant to their life in a computerized world.  OTOH, the older generations had no such experience with the internet and actively needed a reason for leaving a faith tradition.”

Here, Joe2 brings up two causes:

  1. The internet, smart phones, text messaging, etc., as manifested in platforms like Bumble, FB, IG, OF, Threads, Tinder, TT, X, YT, et al., have become a social intermediary that has almost totally replaced real face-to-face human interaction.
  2. It’s a spiritual law (not sure if we have a name for it though): Knowing factoidal information about a religion (or anything at all, really) aims to satisfy the fleshly mind’s curiosities, but it also tends to dampen one’s genuine interest in it and also one’s passion for the faith-led development thereof.

I have something more to say about Joe2’s first point.

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The Ubiquitous Ignorance of Social Skills Among Gen Z

Young people don’t even know how to make friends anymore.

I’m serious.

For the last two years, my students have been asking me how they can find more friends and/or find a boyfriend or girlfriend.  (These are college-aged young people born after 2005, i.e., Gen Z.)  From my talks with them, now breaching hundreds of hours, I’ve learned that the social norms of interaction that are taken for granted by those of us who grew up without the internet are completely unknown to Gen Zs.  They’re asking me about this because they intuitively know it is imperatively important to their lives, but they really DO NOT know how to do it.

And … because older generations take these things for granted, they cannot very well explain it either.  Instead, they just blame Gen Zs for being bland and dull, for having “The Gen Z Stare”, and for being difficult to talk with.

It’s not that Gen Zers can’t find good information online (as commenter Kevin Blackwell said), but that anything and everything online is just bland !nF0Rm@t!0N! upon !nF0Rm@t!0N! in a world of !nF0Rm@t!0N! OvErL0@d! — and it is all !nF0Rm@t!0N! that has NO real meaning to them, hence the breakdown and disconnect.

Prof. Jordan Peterson’s point about the lack of meaning among today’s youth still applies as much as it did 5 years ago in Peterson’s heyday, except among Gen Z, “meaning” is increasingly becoming more of an esoteric, nebulous concept that lies beyond their grasp.  They don’t know how to identify it, and those few who can don’t know what to do with it, and this is deeply frustrating to them.  This is a real problem in today’s youth.

But … when I tell my students how to create Frame, adopt a clearly recognizable social role, approach people congenially and in alignment with one’s social role, place expectations, pursue Flow, and set proper boundaries to form trust and increase opennness … they are utterly flabbergasted!!! — so much so that it is even surprising to me to see their responses.

It is a skill that cannot be learned outside of regular committed social intercourse, i.e., NOT online.  But once I explain it, they catch on quickly, and then they’ll run with that baton all the way to the finish line with googly-eyed OMG-JOY!!!  (I’m thinking this just might be the current iteration of the culturally relevant gospel. If I should write a book about this, it would be a bestseller among Gen Zers — worldwide!)

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Poor Catechesis

Kevin Blackwell wrote,

“I think the turnover is due to poor catechesis from parents.  This leaves them completely vulnerable to the social indoctrination in primarily college but also now reaching all the way down to kindergarten and preschool.  In addition to enforced social norms through TV and movies and every human you walk by.

I don’t think this has to do with the internet.  With all the knowledge at your fingertips, finding the truth should be easier.

I used to be fairly bothered by the direction of the world until I heard that the more evil there is, the greater the chance to attain higher levels of virtue.  Instead of focusing outward to what can’t be controlled, focus on Jesus.”

Yes.  There is also a problem of poor catechesis, from parents, teachers, online sources, and practically everybody and their brother, really.

For older generations, church is a social group of friends and high-quality acquaintances, and a place where the ‘better’ people in the local community condense, congregate, and commingle.  But for Gen Zs, it is NOT.  Instead, church is seen by them as an odd mish-mash of fundamentally opposing cliques of misfits, ranging from…

All of these people are so spiritually immature that they’re intolerable, insufferable, and yea, even shameful to the true, holy name of Christ. Yet, that is what we have within what we currently call the church.

Worse, most churches are not teaching anything much different from what the wider culture is pushing.

Much worse, most Christians are not outwardly, visibly much different from seculars.

And so, the average Gen Zer arrives at the very rational conclusion: “What’s the point?”

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Parental Divorce and Familial Dysfunction

Here, I’ll add [Jack’s point] that a lot of the poor catechesis from parents is because of parental divorce and familial dysfunction, as I described before.

In the past, young people identified with a religion simply because their parents did, and because they were raised to believe as such.  No matter how biblically accurate or practicably useful their religion is, it stands as a bonding element, a common identity, a mutual faith, and a shared activity for the family.

But when parents are divorced:

  • The nature of parental divorce invariably destroys their children’s connection to God, and replaces it with bitterness, hopelessness, and uncleanness.  Ask me how I know.  It takes a whole $%&#@ lifetime to recover, and only through decades of silent suffering, diligent prayer, and God’s grace.
  • Divorced parents’ religious beliefs mean next to nothing to their children, because whatever they believed, it obviously couldn’t accomplish the most fundamental aspects of life — it didn’t create and/or protect a beautiful family life, and it didn’t ‘work’ for them.

As a result, and more so with every successive generation, marriage becomes a meaningless risk, divorce becomes commonplace, religion becomes hollow.  Thus, the number of “Nones” continues to rise, just as we have been seeing.

The Flesh / The Devil

Finally, we mustn’t forget that the Devil / egotistical pride / the fleshly nature / the human cognitive predisposition / the mind-warping libido of youth / etc. are always constantly beating the drum of heart-numbing logic, humanism and hedonism, and thereby casting a spell of delusion over a Generation Z that apparently doesn’t know right from wrong.

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The Red Pill Stands as a Bastion of Truth

To end on a positive note,

  • Feminism is quickly falling flat because it doesn’t get to the truth, and the sumptuous lies it promulgates are rapidly becoming obvious as of late.
  • MGTOW and The Red Pill continue to receive continual coverage and further expand because these movements actually have something meaningful, real, and useful to say.

I hate to say this, but just as the Beatles once said, blasphemously, but rather truthfully, that they were “bigger than Jesus”, I dare say the Red Pill is more truthful than the average Protestant pulpit or any ‘Christian’ marital counseling session.

I think the only real working option for the church at this point is to get Red Pilled Fast and Furious and juxtapose this information with The Real Bible™ ASAP, as opposed to a watered-down, Fempowered, scriptural exegesis filtered through the Blue-tinged lens of Complementarian / Feminism.

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