Virtual Faith: The Irreverent Spiritual Quest of Generation X

Christian Century, Dec 9, 1998 by Charles R. Foster

The young people in Virtual Faith represent another group that has had little contact with the church--GenXers, or those middle-class, educationally successful young people born between 1961 and 1981. This book is a generational autobiography of their quest for religious meaning. According to Tom Beaudoin, a GenXer and theology student, the distinguishing feature of the GenX experience is the influence of the images and values of television and popular music.

Wade Clark Roof observes that Beaudoin "takes us on a romping, eye-opening voyage through GenX culture--its music, its fashion, its imagery, its spiritual quests." Many readers will consider that culture to be not only irreverent, but sacrilegious. It turns the authority of tradition upside down, relativizes religious imagery and symbols, and celebrates theological ambiguity. Beaudoin contends that unlike previous generations of students and young adults, who contested secular culture with critiques found in religious tradition (Beaudoin's mentor Harvey Cox would be one good example), he and his peers embrace pop culture as the primary source of and catalyst to faith. They then turn to religious traditions to confirm, support and energize symbols and myths.

Beaudoin models the "ministry imagination" he espouses by leaping back and forth between the religious themes of an MTV clip and the exegesis of a biblical passage. This, he says, is the GenXer's way of nurturing "virtual faith." By this term he means that "Xers live religiously in real ways (involving real faith, real practice and a real spiritual journey)," while simultaneously imitating "real faith and real practice, simulating what they expect institutional religion and real religiousness to be." They want both the "real thing" and an "imitation" of the real thing--the "genuine and the posture, the authentic and the artificial."

The GenXer is suspicious of institutions, especially religious institutions. He focuses on personal experience in the spiritual quest, and on a sense of suffering expressed in a psychological and spiritual crisis of meaning. The GenXer also accepts the ambiguity that may be found in the fusion of sacred and profane, spiritual and sensual, orthodox and blasphemous in popular culture. He does not reject or dismiss faith tradition or religious institutions, but they are not the only sources of spirituality. The implications are clear: If traditional Christianity is to engage the spiritual quest of the GenXer, it must attend to the ways in which these young adults draw on the church and popular culture.

Read together, the three books suggest that the range and diversity of youth and young adult experience in the U.S. is much broader and more diverse than is evident in most congregational ministries. The labels we use--"youth culture," the "silent generation" of my own college years, or "GenXer"--do not describe the experience of many youth and young adults. The teenagers in Youth Leadership and the GenXers in Virtual Faith have possibilities that are distant to the young people in Cold New World. While the racism and classism that weigh heavily on Finnegan's youth may represent intellectual or political issues for some of Beaudoin's GenXers, it hardly catches the attention of the youth that Long and Fertman describe. The teenagers they describe do not share the suspicion or disregard of institutions--including the church--that is found among GenXers and the disenfranchised young people in Cold New World. The traditional values, symbols and practices that provide the context for nurturing youth leadership for Long and Fertman function only as backdrop for the imaginative reconstructions of pop culture undertaken by Beaudoin's peers, and they may generate negative self-images for Finnegan's youth.