Don’t Call me a Millennial
In order to talk about what it’s like being a Christian in a Millennial’s world, we must first define Millennial. According to the Pew Research Center, a Millennial is someone born “between 1981 and 1996 and the first generation to come of age in the new millennium.” However, if one were to ask an “older Millennial” (myself included) if they felt like they were a Millennial, most of them would say no. There are a group of us, born between 1981 and 1985 who just don’t fit in with the Millennial group. We are the last generation of adults who were around before internet and email, before cell phones, before helicopter parenting. A great number of us have parents who are still married to each other. Most of us had required typing class (on a real typewriter) in high school rather than its replacement: computer science class. The last generation to be “free-range.” The last generation of kids who were able to go out and play in the morning, come home for family dinner, leave to play with friends again only to come home for the night when the street lights turned on. No one had a cell phone, we fought our siblings for the cordless phone when we wanted to talk with our friends. Most families did not have a home computer much less internet access. Our report papers were still hand-written, even in high school, unless specifically requested to be “word processed.” We passed notes in class. Teachers confiscated “beepers” or pagers when they were found on students because, “No one should be contacting you while you’re in school. School is where you come to learn, it’s not a social club.”
Then came Columbine and 9/11; nobody felt safe anymore. Shattered the perception that children were generally safe in their neighborhoods. I was a junior in high school when the Columbine Massacre happened. The following year we started lock-down drills for the first time. I was a sophomore in college when the nation was rocked by 9/11. We could see lines of cars waiting to gas up from our dorm room window. We had been living in a time of relative peace, since the Gulf War.
Most Millennials left the Church as they graduated high school and never returned. Citing that organized religion is a thing of the past, closed-minded, even bigoted. Yet there is this group of “older Millennials” who have returned. And still many, who never left.
Younger Millennials, many of whom, graduated college right as the Great Recession took hold of the job market (2008), making it extremely difficult to find a good paying job with benefits that would allow them to pay back all the student loans they took out to pay for the highly expensive college education they were told they needed. Older Millennials, many of them, were able to land jobs after college (2003-2006) before the job market took a nose-dive.
Millennials have shaped the faith-culture we see today. They have resurrected the “Spiritualist” movement (popular between 1840s-1920s), there are more ghost hunting and cryptozoological hunting reality shows on television now than there were less than 20 years ago. More people say they are “spiritual” rather than ascribe to any formal religious beliefs. Most people believe: “all roads lead to heaven” or that if one is “basically a good person they will get to heaven.” The newest theory is that when we die we “reach a higher vibration” if we lived a “good” life, then we get to come back as someone else.
Millennials have also been labeled disrespectful, lazy, know-it-alls, unable to do things for themselves, technology obsessed, entitled, God-less, and self-absorbed. They believe they have to be unique, expressive in some way. If they aren’t doing this, that makes them somehow “less.” Heaven for bid society frown upon them because they take time off to raise a family.
Those of us in our mid to late 30s care less about how many social media followers we have. If we have Facebook, it’s to share photos of our children so that family, who may not get to see them daily, can see what our little ones are doing. We still prefer talking on the phone with friends and family over texting. We also prefer to visit in person rather than see what everyone is up to on a computer screen.
That being said, I was taught to respect others. God comes first, above everything else. If you fail at something, pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and try again or try something new. I’ve failed at a lot of things in life, but I’ve never given up and expected anyone else to “take the reigns” for me. If something needs to be done, do it yourself, don’t expect others to do things for you. I gave up a career path in order to raise my children and I don’t regret it one bit. I’ve never expected anything less of myself, except to be who I was created to be.
Stay tuned for Part Two: Spiritualism
http://www.pewresearch.org/topics/millennials/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiritualism