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Show Are Today’s Young People Turning Away from Religion? Not whenit's a modernreligion designed to meet modern problems, says this famous author-preacher who has a deep, abiding faith in our younger generation SN’T IT about time that we stop picking on our young people? Let’s declare a moratorium on the constant complaints that our teen- agers are under-achieving, misbehaving, rebelling dropouts from church, home, and society. We have in our midst, of course, many irresponsible rebels who are blindly lashing out at authority of all kinds. We have our slovenly hip- number of communications from young people to the Foundation for Christian Living, which my wife Ruth established nearly 30 years ago to fill requests for copies of sermons, booklets, and other materials. One of the mostrecent letters that came to me from a teen-ager commented: vocation at which I spoke. They were respectful, quiet, and alert. Not a banner was waved nor an epithet shouted. After the meeting, I attended a student-faculty reception whereI had an interesting chat with one of the student leaders. “I don’t see any long-hairs or farouts around here,” I observed. “Oh,” he replied, “that stuff is scorned aroundhere. Weall want to get somewhere. We believe our country offers opportunity, and we mean to make the most of it. We weren't never understand how shecould read those. I had a weak faith and never the younger generation. As a minister, I keep hearing lamentations that young people are leaving the church in droves. While it is true that many of the “far-out” “But one day my motherinsisted that I read one of your sermons, After reading it, I found out that T had made a grave mistake. It led me to the New Testament. Now, I 1 believe in young people—such as that boy. He struck a solid note when youth have become dropouts from regularly attend church and take the revolt, have had to contend with their church and synagogue, they are in a minority. Frankly, I wonder if these particular youngsters wereever really “with it” in the first place. I believe in young people. I believe in them because wherever I go—and in my travels I “cover the waterfront,” so to speak—I see many young people in churches. They are nice, clean-cut, fresh-looking, washed Holy Sacrament. NowI look forward to the day when your sermons come.” Wehear complaints that boys and nagging, overambitious parents, who andscrubbed, not the scraggly, longhaired, unbathed specimens so no- ticeable on the streets. You won’t read about them in the newspapers or see them portrayed I could really believed in God, even after eight years in a Lutheran school. girls are straying from the church because they say the church is not “reievant” to the great problems of our day. The people who feel this way might stop talking about it and get busy to try to make it “relevant” on their terms. 1 believe in young people—they are muchbetter informed than ever before. They have matured intellectually, so they can handle a lot more information than my generation did in movies or on tv. Only the “wayout” young person is “news.” I meet upbeat young people everywhere I go, particularly on college campuses. One I encountered was the young son of a friend, who accompanied me to dinner in Europe last summer. He was working as a waiter in a Swiss hotel before entering the Cornell University Hotel School. We gotto talking about young people and religion, particularly at the New En- as teen-agers. The new cropof young- gland preparatory school he had attended. He had been a leader of a sters is pretty well up on national and world events and seems to think because we wanted to make something of our lives.” he said he was in college because he wanted to be there. Many of our young people, particularly those in wanted them to go to colleges such as Harvard, to make top grades, to be the most popular in school, to excel in athletics, and so on. How can young people survive under such pressure? Isn’t that one reason we have so many dropouts? The parents who pressure and nag probably are less interested in their children than in their own egos and pride. Instead of letting young people develop normally according to their own interests and what seems best for them, they want to plunge them into competition. It gave me somesatisfaction to help one boy who was being driven a lot about the problemsof the day. to distraction by an overambitious mother. He had been kicked out of several schools and was the low man wherever he went. When things reached what seemed to be a hopeless impasse for him, I asked the head- a wonderful job. They have organized what they call the “Gillnet Gang,” after the fishermen’s net used bySt. Peter. With the slogan “guerrillas for good,” these teen-agerssecretlyfilter through the streets at night, paint- market for the attention and interest of young people. this unique activity is that the young- Why, I ask, don’t schools find spiritual leaders who are red-blooded men who know the score and can make sters are performing their good religion so exciting that nothing will teaching their elders a lesson. religion could not compete in the open sent here by our parents. We came A group of adolescents in Ann Arbor, Mich., for instance, are doing ing over obscene words scrawled on public structures and performing other public-spirited deeds. One night they boarded up a dangerous condemned houseto keep children out ofit. Quietly, they planted flowers in a downtown area while adults wrangled about who was responsible for the task. The most interesting thing about dance seemed to indicate a view that Family Weekly, April 6, 1969 ness school in Burlington, Vt. About 1,000 young people attended a con- I believe in young people—because scarcely a week passes without a ceives your sermons, and to resort to requiring church atten- Sin, Sex, and Self-Control” of men? so of our total teen-age population of more than 40,000,000, perhaps we should stop lumping all young people in our darkest thoughts about I told him that any school that had and Champlain College, a two-year busi- represent only about five percent or rebellion against mandatory atten- VINCENT PEALE I “1am 16 years old, and, to tell the truth, I never cared much for you or your teaching. My motherre- he was curious as to my reaction. Author of “The Power of Positive Thinking,” This is not an isolated situation encountered another group at not do this, how can it expect to com- pies, our hopeless young narcotics eddicts, and other juvenile delinquents. There are far too many of them for comfort, but because they dance at Sunday chapelservices, and By Dr. NORMAN keep students away? If religion canpete in the struggle for the interest works anonymously. They don’t seek or want personal credit, and they are master at a fine preparatory school to accept the boy. “T will take him only if you'll make me a promise—that for the four years he is here his mothe.” never visits him on the campus,” the headmaster stipulated. “If I can just sep- arate this boy from his mother, we can make something out of him.” The mother accepted the judgment that the boy had been too closely supervised and subjected to too much parental pressure. Four years later he was graduated and is doing well at Boston University. I believe in young people—with parents such as the father I encountered in a Fifth Avenue bus in New |