Younger Evangelicals and the Search for Purpose

Note: This commentary was delivered by Prison Fellowship President Mark Earley.
This past spring, the war in Iraq sparked a renewed passion for activism among youth on both sides of the debate. But as the Wall Street Journal put it, "this is not your father’s protest generation."

The protesters of the sixties and early seventies shared a common countercultural vision: a new society with socialist values, sexual liberation, and the end of conventional ideals like monogamy and the nuclear family.

Today in our permissive culture, however, there is not much left to run counter to. "The counterculture of thirty years ago is the mainstream today," said New York State Supreme Court Justice Gustin Reichbach who marched in 1968. "Our success shifted the parameters of what constitutes counterculture."

By contrast, however, today’s anti-war protesters are not countercultural at all. Instead they share one common distinctive: fear. Paul Buhle of Brown University notes that a counterculture forms around a sense that, "Everything I’ve been told is a lie," and it extends to values about all of life—war, race, sexuality, and art. "So far," Buhle writes, "we’ve seen very little of that [today]. The only thing that unites people is fear of the consequences of war."

He’s right. But while the current anti-war movement may not be motivated by a desire for a new counterculture, another group is. It’s the group Professor Robert Webber calls the "younger evangelicals."

Rather than seeking a "change in values" in our culture, they want to live out a different set of values. Webber notes in his latest book, The Younger Evangelicals, that they have a renewed understanding of living in the world, but not of it. "In a sense, they hold the world together," writes Webber. They view themselves as having "a redemptive, transformative place in the world."

The renewed activist spirit among youth is encouraging because, for "younger evangelicals," passion is motivated, not by anti-war fears, but by hope—hope in Jesus Christ. And Webber believes the war on terrorism will call them to clarify the differences between the Church and the nation—and their place in both.

They understand America is not the Church. The nation’s job is not to be identified as God’s people, but to promote the good and the welfare and well being of its people while restraining evil. The Church, on the other hand, is called to be a witness to Jesus in the nation. It "does not ‘have’ a mission; it is mission." And while we are to be good citizens, we are citizens first of God’s kingdom.

"The Church, then, is a counterculture that has a different vision of the world than that of people who are not in the Church," writes Webber. He goes on to say that younger evangelicals can change their world through a worldview that works, "not by power politics, but by a presence of humble servanthood." They want to transform culture by rebuilding communities and meeting the needs of the least of us: the poor, homeless, prisoners, and their children—those who have no advocate.