Members of Generation Z who desire a sense of transcendence in their worship may simply need to look a bit harder. By fostering a dogmatic commitment to the authority and sufficiency of Scripture while retaining a deep respect for church history, much of evangelical, conservative, Reformed Christianity has managed to guard itself from the spirit of the age. Young people should by no means compromise on the true gospel (Galatians 1:8-9) to find a tradition that has retained its sense of reverence.

Polls consistently show that members of Generation Z—loosely defined as the cohort born between 1999 and 2015—are far less religious than their parents and grandparents. Young Americans are twice as likely to identify themselves as atheists in comparison to other adults, while a mere 59% identify themselves with some form of Christianity—a significant decline from the 75% of Baby Boomers who say the same.
Surveys also find that members of Generation Z are more socially progressive than other Americans, with as many as one in five identifying themselves as “LGBTQ.” Although some young people certainly attempt to blend the doctrines of biblical Christianity with the falsehoods of modern leftism, there is a remnant drawn to conservative religious traditions with weightiness and transcendence—which may even claim to uniquely feed the soul in a relentlessly materialistic era.
Talk to members of Generation Z who grew up in loosely evangelical households and you will discover that many have since turned to Roman Catholicism rather than the generic version of megachurch Christianity. The ornate architecture of cathedrals, the advent of the Latin Mass, and the otherworldly nature of chants are, to many young people, a departure from the emptiness of the modern age.
Take, for example, actor Shia LaBeouf, who recently made headlines for converting to Roman Catholicism. In an interview with Bishop Robert Barron, he explained that “Latin Mass affects me deeply.” When asked why, he said: “Because it feels like they’re not selling me a car.”
Big-box evangelicalism, on the other hand, is by no means transcendent. Pastors and worship leaders often find themselves limping and thrashing about their altars (1 Kings 18:26) with moralistic, therapeutic sermons and emotionalistic, shallow music. As LaBeouf correctly diagnosed, many evangelical churches merely make attempts at “selling Jesus” to their members. In the words of Pastor Rick Warren, you can simply give Jesus “a sixty-day trial” or get your money back—a tactic that is quite literally taken from car salesmen.
Read More
Related Posts:

God often trains men to be faithful husbands and fathers by giving us great examples to follow — the faith of Abraham, the conviction of Moses, the leadership of Joshua, the wisdom of Solomon, the heart of David. Sometimes, however, God trains us for faithfulness by showing us just how wicked men can be. He trains us to love by showing us men who failed to love, to lead by showing us men who failed to lead, to fight by showing us men who refused to fight, to die for others by showing us men who saved themselves. And as husbands and fathers go, few were as corrupt and shameful as King Ahab.

I had never thought of myself as passive. Throughout high school and college, and all throughout my twenties, I had been the driven dreamer and achiever. I thought of myself as the organized one, the proactive one, the disciplined one, the visionary. I was the one who initiated next steps, important meetings, needed changes, group plans, hard conversations.
And then I married, and marriage showed me sides of myself I had never had to see.
A man does not change much by making vows and putting on a ring, but an awful lot changes for a man that day. The apostle Paul tried to prepare us: “The unmarried man is anxious about the things of the Lord, how to please the Lord. But the married man is anxious about worldly things, how to please his wife, and his interests are divided” (1 Corinthians 7:32–34). Divided me was not as put-together and proactive as single me had been. And as the pressures rose and the cracks began to show, I suddenly saw just how tempted to self-pity and passivity I could be.
What God Expects of Husbands
Over the first year or two of marriage, the passivity of Christian husbands went from a foreign and somewhat perplexing problem to a profoundly familiar and personal and humbling one. Vision and initiative were easier, in some ways, when they were fenced into certain parts of my life. Now, as two became one, all of life required a leading love.
Will I give myself up for her good again today (Ephesians 5:25)? Will I keep pursuing her, studying her, wooing her? Will I develop and carry out a vision for our family? Will I consistently open the Bible and pray with them? Will I lead our family in loving and serving the church? Will I lean into conflict with patience and love, or will I withdraw? Will I anticipate our family’s needs and preserve space to rest? Will I discipline our children, even when I’m tired? Will I bring up difficult conversations and make tough decisions? Or, like Adam, when God comes calling, will I hide and point the finger somewhere else (Genesis 3:12)?
God expects much from husbands. As my senses have been heightened to my own tendencies to passivity, stories of husbands in Scripture — good and bad — have come alive with greater gravity and relevance for marriage.
Weak and Wicked Example
God often trains men to be faithful husbands and fathers by giving us great examples to follow — the faith of Abraham, the conviction of Moses, the leadership of Joshua, the wisdom of Solomon, the heart of David. Sometimes, however, God trains us for faithfulness by showing us just how wicked men can be. He trains us to love by showing us men who failed to love, to lead by showing us men who failed to lead, to fight by showing us men who refused to fight, to die for others by showing us men who saved themselves.
And as husbands and fathers go, few were as corrupt and shameful as King Ahab.
When we first meet the man, Scripture tells us, “Ahab the son of Omri reigned over Israel in Samaria twenty-two years. And Ahab the son of Omri did evil in the sight of the Lord, more than all who were before him” (1 Kings 16:29–30). The kings before him were a cauldron of evil — conspiring, deceiving, stealing, murdering, and in it all, insulting God by choosing idols over him. Ahab, we learn, was worse than them all.
And his marriage was at the center of his rebellion. “As if it had been a light thing for him to walk in the sins of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, he took for his wife Jezebel the daughter of Ethbaal king of the Sidonians, and went and served Baal and worshiped him” (1 Kings 16:31). He first mocked God by marrying an idolator, and then — as God warned would happen — he caved and bowed in submission to her and her god.
The facets of Ahab’s wickedness are worthy of much reflection, but here I want to focus on a scene that exposes the allure and peril of his passivity.
Seduction of Self-Pity
When 1 Kings 21 opens, Ahab covets the vineyard of his neighbor, Naboth, and asks to buy it from him — disregarding God’s law that prevented the permanent sale of land (Leviticus 25:23). Naboth doesn’t merely refuse because he wants to keep his land; he refuses because to do otherwise would be to disregard God. Now watch how Ahab responds, crumbling into self-pity and passivity:
Ahab went into his house vexed and sullen because of what Naboth the Jezreelite had said to him, for he had said, “I will not give you the inheritance of my fathers.” And he lay down on his bed and turned away his face and would eat no food. (1 Kings 21:4)
Read More

This life demands more of us than we can imagine, but not more than we can bear. Because we don’t bear it alone. True conscience is not a hyper-individual inner experience, but a knowing with others, a cleaving to the wisdom of God’s Word and the witness of his body here on earth, the church. Conscience, understood this way, demands not that we follow every whim of our fallen minds, but that we collectively trust in the grace and goodness of the Father.

Growing up evangelical, I was taught that your personal conscience is law. God uses the Holy Spirit to guide and convict us through our innermost selves. So when the conscience speaks, not to listen is a sin. Your conscience can be mistaken, of course, but really only in one direction: a seared conscience. If you are insufficiently attentive to God’s word, or if you allow a particular sin to dominate you, then your conscience, rather than being God-guided, becomes “seared”: deaf to the promptings of the Spirit. But otherwise, I was told, when your inner voice speaks with conviction, you are morally obligated to obey.
What nobody told me was that your conscience, or what feels like your conscience, can be entirely mistaken through no fault of your own. Just like it’s possible to feel no guilt when you should, it’s possible to feel guilt or anxiety or shame over things that you shouldn’t feel bad about at all. Nobody told me how your mind can be your own worst enemy. How it can fixate on imaginary sins. Nobody warned me about moral scrupulosity, the type of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) I suffer from. Nobody warned me how anxiety and fear can take the thing you care about most – your faith – and turn it against you.
OCD is what psychologists call an “ego-dystonic” condition: your fears come from the things you value the most, your greatest hopes, your most cherished aspirations – the kind of person you most deeply desire to be. I deeply desire to be a trustworthy, safe, responsible, morally upright person. So my OCD takes the form of fear that I’m exactly the opposite. Fear that I’ve behaved irresponsibly. Fears that I’ve harmed people in the past. And no matter how little evidence I have for these fears, no matter how many times or in how much detail wise friends reassure me that I haven’t harmed anyone, my OCD never lets me accept that reassurance. There’s always something my friends must have missed, that I must have overlooked. There’s always “one more thing.”
Having OCD is like living with Columbo. There’s always just “one more thing,” one more doubt, one more detail. One more fear. And each fear feels like an accusation. The accusation that I’m an immoral, irresponsible person who has done grave harm and must live under judgment forever. That I can never be redeemed.
OCD is surprisingly prevalent in the general population: around one in every hundred people has it. In spite of this – and in spite of how disabling the condition can be – the condition is widely, sometimes frustratingly, misunderstood. Typically, when people hear the term “OCD” they imagine obsessively tidy people: it’s not uncommon to hear someone refer to themselves as “a little OCD” about tidying their desk. The better informed, when asked about OCD, may think of someone who compulsively washes their hands. But the reality of OCD, especially in its severe and extreme forms, is much more debilitating.
It’s washing your hands until they bleed. It’s ruminating alone for hours about harms you fear you’ve caused. Thinking over an event that occurred a decade ago again and again, finding it impossible to let go. And those are the good days. On the bad days OCD can look like locking yourself in the bedroom to agonize alone for ten or twelve hours. And when you’re done, you have a kind of hangover to deal with: the physiological cost of intense, anxious focus on the same thought for hours on end. Your body is worn out. Your mind is in a fog. And even then, when you’re wracked with shame over your endless rumination, the guilt you feel acts to tip you back into the habits that brought you to that point in the first place. Just check one more time. One more thing.
Read More
Related Posts: