Some of the lessons Father Kevin Martin learned in seminary have faded with time, but he remembers when the future Episcopal priests were taken to see Catherine Deneuve play a Paris prostitute in the soft-porn “Belle de Jour.”
The late 1960s were heady times at Yale University’s Berkeley Divinity School, he said. The sexual revolution inspired people in clerical collars to do things that, today, would turn a sexual-harassment attorney into a pillar of salt.
“It was the spirit of the day,” said Martin, who leads a renewal group called Vital Church Ministries near Dallas. “We were supposed to be broadening our theological horizons and getting in touch with our feelings and all that. . Their goal was to blow our boundaries to bits and they did just that for many priests of my generation.
“Now these priests are becoming our bishops.”
Believe it or not, some major social institutions are only now feeling the full impact of the baby boom generation, the 77 million Americans born in the era after World War II. This generation revamped Hollywood and has tenure on college campuses. Boomers run the business world, have conquered Washington, D.C., are reshaping the U.S. military and are poised to flood the medical and retirement systems.
So what’s left? The oldest boomers are in their late 50s. This means it’s finally time for them to rule the gray-haired hierarchies that control mainline religion. This demographic reality is a “ticking time bomb that is destined to reshape the institutional church as we know it,” said Martin.
Consider the Anglican sex wars. Clearly, this battle over the Bible and marriage is rooted in cultural and theological differences between elite First World progressives and growing churches led by Third World traditionalists.
But it’s also true that many Episcopal leaders are doing that baby-boomer thing that they do.
It would be hard to find a better summary of this worldview than a comment by bishop-elect V. Gene Robinson, the noncelibate gay priest whose election in New Hampshire sparked a series of pivotal meetings—last week in Dallas, this week in London and next week in Lagos, Nigeria—that could reshape or shatter the global Anglican Communion.
Soon after his election, Robinson (born May 5, 1947) candidly agreed that his upcoming consecration represents a major change for Anglicanism. But change is not always bad, he told reporters. “Just simply to say that it goes against tradition and the teaching of the church and scripture does not necessarily make it wrong,” he said.
To which millions of boomers, but not all, would say “amen,” according to Martin.
“Generally speaking, we are a disillusioned idealistic generation that learned to mistrust the leaders of government and who came to admire innovation and non-traditional behavior,” he said, in a recent online essay. “Our numbers are so large that any Boomer activity produces an entire trend. . This was as true of hoola-hoops as it was of anti-Vietnam war protests. Boomers are militant individualists who ironically create fads and movements and then follow them.”
As a rule, this generation trusts its feelings and seeks truth through personal experience, which means ancient doctrines may be ignored or redefined. The final authority is the individual believer or, perhaps, a movement of like-minded individuals. Boomers are pro-choice and pro-change about nearly everything, as long as they are the ones doing the choosing and changing.
The ultimate boomer sin—perhaps the only remaining sin—is saying that some old law or dogma can prevent people from doing whatever they want to do. Boomers rarely tolerate people they believe are being intolerant.
The Episcopal establishment’s problem, said Martin, is that it wants to reshape church doctrines while leaving church institutions and loyalties intact. This may not work, especially when dissenters are ordered to keep sending offering checks to that giant, remote, authoritative, national church headquarters.
Boomer bishops may find that other boomers are hard to herd, especially about topics as heated as marriage and sex. The bishops must grasp this reality.
“It’s silly for them to think that they are going to be able to get compliance from us after all of this,” said Martin. “It’s too late for that. You say, ‘March!’ and the boomers just don’t want to fall into line.”
Terry Mattingly teaches at Palm Atlantic University and is a senior fellow for journalism at the Council For Christian Colleges and Universities. He writes this weekly column for the Scripps Howard News Service.
