A Faintly Glimmering Radio Station

I play MusicLeague with members of my family and their friends. The Cake song, “Frank Sinatra,” made one of the playlists. It hit me hard — Cake wrote a song about how quaint Frank Sinatra records were for them and now almost 30 years later, Cake is quaint to GenZ. The chronological distance that my generation has to Frank Sinatra is now the distance between my sons’ generation and Cake. Cake has now become that faintly glimmering radio station they themselves sang about.

It makes me wonder, what are our children to make of our 3,000+ year-old faith? Is it a quaint and faintly glimmering radio station? How can it possibly be relevant today? What does Christianity have to say about social justice, environmental disaster and living a modern life? As I reflect on my own faith journey, I see a lot of my own GenX disillusionment and cynicism in GenZ. There’s real stuff to do right now, who has time for the old religion? Who isn’t torn by a desire to solve the worlds problems with material practicality instead of going deeper into what the Holy Spirit has to offer?

Everything around us from the socials to bumper stickers to the nightly news shouts that Christianity is the faith of prosperous, white evangelical nationalists. Christians don’t seem to care about justice, the environment, equality, rights or peace. That’s peculiar, because these ideals are not progressive dogma but deeply Biblical and Christ-centered. In fact, most of what the average humanist Redditor is espousing sounds a lot like Christian principles. I think GenZ of all generations would really resonate with Jesus’ message. So why don’t they?

One side of the problem is that we’ve held up Bibliolatry over the evolving tradition of faith. Our faith heritage, like all other paths to God, is a long, beautiful, winding and ever-evolving tradition. Yet, many American Christians maintain that the Bible is the only word of God and is infallible, inerrant and unchanging. With inerrancy as subtext, you should unquestionably conclude that Christianity has lost it’s relevance. How do the old ways apply today unless we’re willing to accept modern applications of our faith tradition? What does the Bible say about abortion? Nothing. What does the Bible say about artificial intelligence? Nothing. What does the Bible say about slavery? Slaves should obey their masters. What does the Bible say about vaccines? Nothing. To think that the Bible is some ultimate rule book, we might as well use an abacus instead of an iMac.

Yet the flip-side of the same coin is that we’ve somehow ignored the most attractive parts of our faith in our modern lives. Some of this is because conservatives don’t want to hear the more progressive messages in the Bible. Some of this is because progressives are just bad at promoting Jesus. But a life lived in faith is a life steeped in the helpful wisdom from your many faith ancestors. They may not tell you what to do but they can model how they tried to be faithful to God. That’s the exciting stuff, but we’ve somehow perverted that message into a secret club membership that gets you into Heaven.

One possible antidote is to show how the dots have connected over the centuries. God didn’t stop speaking 2,000 years ago, and if She did, then we’re in our rights to ignore Her because a lot has changed. But if you see yourself standing in a stream that is at once old, even eternal, and yet somehow always rushing and changing, your faith can become grounded and dynamic all at once. The water rushes by and in so doing, cuts a long-lasting channel to God’s sea.

Here are just a couple of ways the old religion can at once ground us and move us forward.

The Biblical Call for Justice

I’m big on justice. I named this blog for Micah 6:8. I wrote at length about how the Bible promotes justice in the post The Book of Amos on Social Justice drawing in a large part on ideas from Marcus Borg. Social justice has been the prophetic message all along, but that message isn’t convenient to elites who benefit from inequality. And I hate to break it to you, but most of us are elite in someway or share in some privilege that we want to see protected. Americans are the most privilege-curious people on the planet. It’s part of our national religion to protect the wealthy from taxation because who knows, maybe I’ll be a billionaire one day. If you do become a billionaire, don’t overlook this:

Matthew 19: 21-22

Jesus said to him, “If you wish to be perfect, go, sell your possessions, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.” When the young man heard this word, he went away grieving, for he had many possessions.

The Kingdom of God has started right here, right now, and we are called to be Christ’s hands in the work of the kingdom. Jesus points out that attachment to material wealth, status and privilege keep us out of that kingdom. This kind of message is not disheartening to most of GenZ, it is invigorating. We should all try to live our lives promoting social and economic justice, but don’t forget to preach about it, too, if you want to show how faith is still relevant.

Stewardship of Creation

Hypocrisy makes religion irrelevant. You may not hold climate change as a top priority, but if you believe in science and you trust our scripture, you cannot deny we have a responsibility to work on climate. I don’t think it’s a radical idea that God made us stewards of creation. God loves all of creation so we must love and respect all of creation. Christ is in all. Promote honest discussions about these issues that are centered in faith, not the stock market, not your for-profit news channel talking points and not politics.

To my conservative friends, I will listen to your honest arguments against environmental programs. Do some programs and regulations overreach? Perhaps. But your arguments would land better if they were brought through faith and not through materialist assumptions. In other words, I might be open to hearing how certain regulatory efforts come into conflict with economic justice, but don’t just tell me that environmental regulations are bad for the economy. There is no economy if the world overheats. If you’re a free-trade devotee, give me a free-trade solution, don’t punt the football to the next generation. Show me that you are prioritizing one element of your faith (economic justice) over another (environmental stewardship). I’m open to hearing how regenerative agriculture is a better way forward than regulation, I’m not open to outright climate denial. If you confuse these issues with your God-given responsibility for protecting the environment, you will push GenZ out of the pews. We can’t be taken seriously if we’re ignoring our own scripture.

Environmental advocacy should be core to your Christian faith. We cannot abnegate our sacred trust at a real cost to future generations. We see the writing on the wall and God wants us to act. Some evangelicals have promoted the idea that God will intervene or that the world will end before climate disaster strikes. No. God will likely not save you if you decide to walk on a train track at midnight.

But what does the Bible specifically say about climate change? Again, really nothing. But the Bible is a story based on the importance of future generations. Environmental degradation leaves a dire future to future generations. The Bible demands you care for the poor. Climate change disproportionately affects the poor. Climate programs are an act of compassion towards the most vulnerable and as you’ve done to the least you’ve done to Jesus. These are the extensions we need to make as a people of faith. Climate action is a terrific way to model how faith is relevant in our own times by extending these Biblical themes to modern issues.

It’s Always Been Relevant if You Stick With It

We’ve established false alternatives that we can either live faithfully to the old ways or we can abandon them and be modern. Open dialogue with each other and with our own tradition doesn’t mean changing the core tenets of Christianity, but rather applying them thoughtfully to new situations. God will meet us and guide us through these changes. God’s love doesn’t stop with the words of the Bible. Instead, the Bible points in a direction — that ever flowing river to God’s sea — and our responsibility as Christians is to constantly move forward in that direction. We can learn about core Christian principles like compassion and justice in the Bible and then we are free to update and apply those ideas to contemporary social issues like climate, poverty, racism, and immigration.

I can understand why GenZ mistrusts Christians when some evangelical or fundamentalist interpretations of scripture have been used to justify an unjust society. If you study the historical context of various passages rather than taking every single phrase as immutable truth, you can learn to live by the broader themes of love, respect and accountability found in the Bible. I say it all the time, if you don’t think slaves should serve their masters, don’t think it’s right to continue patriarchal hierarchies in society, eat delicious bacon and you believe in a heliocentric solar system, you have it within your skill set to move past any other outdated ideas you’ll find in the Bible. Focus on Jesus and keep moving forward.

You’ll find a lot of treasures worth collecting when you study the entire faith beyond the Bible. We can see that our faith is a living faith. We can learn how Christians before us applied faith to new issues in their era. Living the old faith is miraculously also the way forward, but only if we keep it moving forward, well lit, looking to the future. Don’t tie yourself to dead dogma just for dogma’s sake, that’s not what real allegiance to faith in Jesus requires. Staying relevant to GenZ and beyond isn’t about messaging, ad campaigns, social media or insistence on your one truth and interpretation. Staying relevant is about following Jesus into the future, even and especially where the Bible is unclear.

Instead of a Bible verse, I will leave you with this lyric from Cake’s, “Frank Sinatra.”

Beyond the suns that guard this roost
Beyond your flowers of flaming truths
Beyond your latest ad campaigns
An old man sits collecting stamps
In a room all filled with Chinese lamps
He saves what others throw away
He says that he’ll be rich someday

The old faith keeps us grounded. It’s worth all of our time to collect the old stamps of our faith, to light our rooms with the old lamps, to step beyond our culture’s faith in commercialism and greed for real spiritual riches.