We Live in a Circus: The Culture of Pre-Adult Women

1 comments | May 11, 08:55 AM | best-of-earl | by Earl Creps

Janet and I spent two hours recently at a Starbucks (that’s a whole ‘nother blog) interviewing three young women. All were Christians living in the seam between their late teens and their early twenties.

While typed and Jan wrote, our new friends answered one question after another fueled by the caffeine and sugar supplied by ‘Bucks. It was heartening to know that Trisha, Debbie, and Lisa (their new code names) recognized that their responses were conditioned by the framework of a Christian experience. They did not regard themselves or their answers as necessarily typical, and that made them all the more credible to us.

We opened the interview with some general questions about the culture of young American women, but followed many roads after that. Here are some of the key words and concepts that I distilled from our Q&A session:

1. 50-year old youth pastors: The notion of telling young women not to do things because the Bible says so just doesn’t wash in this culture. Pre-adult women are looking for a real live person who can demonstrate the wisdom of biblical concepts from the story of their own life. Interesting, our friends commented that a 23-year old youth pastor simply may not have lived enough life to be able to supply this kind of credibility. Their comments made me wonder if we need a generation of youth ministers in their 40s and 50s who have enough personal history to be witnesses to the truth they proclaim.

2. It’s all about the power: We spent considerable time discussing sexuality, relationships and eating disorders. Debbie summarized some of our dialogue by pointing out that the mania to control their body image among younger women is really about power. Perfecting a certain look gives them influence with men and peers, and, if my world is out of control, at least I can regulate what I eat and how much I weigh. She even drew the parallel to Eve offering Adam forbidden fruit—something to eat—as an illustration. I found this description heartbreaking, and realized in a new way that our message to the young must offer them a new form of power that is achieved by surrender, not manipulation. We should raise the bar, not lower it.

3. Life as a laboratory: The word that really jumped out at me during our talk was “experimentation.” Lisa pointed out that, especially in middle school, young females are now sorting out their ethics and morals by trial and error. This includes “friends with benefits,” and being what I would call an omnisexual, neither gay nor straight, but a fully functioning sexual human being. In three to five years, this critical mass of experimental behavior will arrive in high schools and colleges, although the leading edge of it has already been there for some time. Rather than deduce principles of good conduct from authoritative sources like scripture and parents, some Millennial women are using an inductive approach in which they simply try things out until they find a combination that works—for now. This model of ethical development is doubtless fueled by the failures they observe in conventional institutions like marriage. These interview comments taught us again that the platform for Christian teaching is a credible Christian life.

4. Mentors as parents on “turbo”: Our three interview partners were unanimous in the view that young women are looking for mentoring relationships with older women. They often compared this sort of person to a spiritual “mom” and noted how much different their lives would have been had that person been around during their teen years. We were cautioned, however, that perseverance is absolutely essential. The mentor has to seek out the mentee, then stick with it, sometimes for a year or more, until the relationship solidifies. Often, the young women will prove resistant to a commitment simply because other commitments have proven disappointing. Their comments reinforced for me the New Testament metaphor of the church as the “household of faith.” Perhaps we have made a lot of this much more complicated than it needs to be. Are we willing to set aside some other things to learn how to be a spiritual family?

Our three new friends summarized the state of young women in five words: “We live in a circus”

They were asking us, not for more high-tech programming, but for something else:

* If what we believe is true, we should be able to demonstrate it in someone’s life * The young have to get in touch with the power of God * The older should teach the younger * The older have to live the kind of lives the younger will admire and emulate

Imagine. Christianity.