Smokin' in the Boy's Room

From Politics & Evangelical Theology :

"The conservative evangelical right is aging. Those who joined Jerry Falwell in the heady days of the Moral Majority have a lot of gray hairs to show for it. Yes, some of them might be due to Jerry Falwell himself, but most simply because of the passage of time. In my experience there is a multitude of younger evangelicals who are wary of the politics of their parents and, for a number of reasons, are abandoning conservative political principles. They are the ones selecting “Other” on their Facebook profiles.

One reason is ideological, plain and simple. The “God Is Not a Republican!” slogan is having an effect. Many have come to share the belief that somehow politics belongs to an entirely separate realm from religion and that God simply doesn’t care about political issues, or they have embraced postmodern multiculturalist pragmatism and deny that one set of principles is better than any other. Yet another reason for the defection is, I suspect, psychological: being “progressive” in our day is really cool and trendy (even down to the word itself!) and many younger evangelicals (being human beings, after all) crave acceptance and desire to be relevant. Then there is, of course, the sociological element: it is simply true that youth often rebel against their parents. While smokin’ in the boy’s room and R-rated movies worked for fundamentalists of an older generation, wearing Obama “Hope” T-shirts is the thrill of choice for many 21st century evangelical youths."