by Patrick West, Spectator
Many teenagers today find Christianity off-putting because Jesus seems too fond of ‘mansplaining’. He appears to have a ‘God complex’, while the Almighty is alienating on account of being ‘really violent and aggressive’.
These are the findings in the report Troubling Jesus, the third part of Youthscape’s ‘Translating God’ project, based on a recent survey of 14- to 17-year-olds. Drawing on five reading groups, in which teenagers reacted to passages of scripture traditionally understood as conveying ‘good news’, Youthscape faced reactions ‘radically different’ from what it says might have been expected.
While Jesus was not only seen as a condescending male chauvinist and God the Father as a bully, many youths discerned other issues in the readings. One respondent found an ‘unequal power dynamic’ at play in the scriptures, while another had ‘concerns about consent and abuses of power’ she saw in the relationship between man and the divine. In the minds of some young people, the report concludes, Jesus ‘is a troubling figure. Arrogant, powerful, religiously motivated and male’.
These reactions may indeed be radically different to traditional interpretations, but they’re entirely in keeping with the mores of today. This report merely confirms how wokery has become embedded in the mindset of more than one generation of youngsters – teachers of today would have imbibed hyper-liberal ideology when they were at school or university ten years ago – and indicates how its doctrines and mantras are now repeated with all the due diligence of a new faith.
If an obsession with sexism is one chief preoccupation for generations Y and Z, so is the belief that all human relations can be understood in terms of power dynamics and the assumption that they’re all necessarily hostile. This belief has its origins in the teachings of Michel Foucault.