Among people in my age bracket–I’m forty– who grew up in the evangelicalism of the 1990s, the cool thing is to deconstruct our faith and criticize our parents and churches who urged us to pursue purity and biblical norms for relationships. Mark me down as a child of the 90s who is thankful for my parents and small Southern Baptist Church who laid the foundation for my Christian life. As I type these words, I keep thinking of a Miranda Lambert song, The House that Built Me. My parents and my home church are the house that built me..
I’m not perfect, my family isn’t perfect, and my home church isn’t perfect, but my church and my parents are the house that built me. It was under the teaching, preaching, love, and discipleship of a small Southern Baptist church that I learned about God’s love for me, God’s love for those less fortunate than me, and the necessity of the gospel for conversion.
Did we participate in True Love Waits rallies? Yes. Were there aspects of purity culture and True Love Waits that deserve critique today? Absolutely. But, is it all bad? Is it really bad to encourage kids to wait until they are married to engage in sexual activity? Is it a bad thing to avoid alcohol and drug use? Is it bad to discourage pornography?
Rather than imposing dress codes and placing the onus on young ladies to keep guys pure, we should have been speaking of holiness in the heart, telling young girls that they were wonderfully made, and expecting young men to fight for holiness and purity. When we told teenage boys that they are expected to lead in their homes, we should have warned them that leadership in the home begins with leadership over their own body through discipline and training.
Should Christians have been more careful to emphasize forgiveness and grace than sexual purity? YES!
But, what did my church teach me? What did other evangelical students like me learn? We learned that the Bible actually has answers for life. We learned that there were adults who cared about us enough to teach us about the Bible and to talk with us about sex, and relationships, and purity, and marriage. We learned that we could ask hard questions in church. We learned (or at least I did) that the church is a safe place in the storms of life.
Contrary to what some others suggest, I was never taught that Jesus was like John Wayne. Instead, we were discipled by men who had attended Promise Keepers rallies and learned to forgive and be forgiven. Most people aren’t writing about this, but we were discipled by men who were heavily influenced by Promise Keepers and John Eldridge. The men who led student groups in the 90s cried and were emotionally engaging.
Why was Mark Driscoll so newsworthy in the early 2000s? It isn’t because he was representative of mainstream evangelicalism. Driscoll’s brash, bombastic style didn’t look like a church anyone attended in their teenage years. Driscoll suggested you could love Jesus and slay dragons. This was revolutionary.
This toxic masculinity that so many are reacting against was not prevalent in the 90s and early 2000s, if it were, Driscoll wouldn’t have been a big deal.
Many in my generation are looking back on their youth group experiences and rebelling. They were told to pursue purity, so they are rebelling sexually. They were urged to avoid alcohol and drugs, and so are rebelling by drinking heavily in their 40s.
In all of their rebellion, what most of these ex-vangelicals neglect to realize is that their evangelical privilege (one of the preferred terms) shielded them from the pain and regret associated with sexual licentiousness and alcohol abuse. Claiming that their parents robbed them of sexual exploration and liberties with alcohol, these people are dreadfully ignorant of the heartache from which they were saved.
For those who took their purity pledges to heart, they have never had to wrestle with the consequences of sexual sin. For those who avoided alcohol and drugs, they have never awoken in a stranger’s bed, or paid for an alcohol ticket on campus, or been pulled over for drunk driving.
For those who had the privilege of growing up in a healthy, intact family in the 1990s, there is a 95% chance that they are living financially secure lives. Let’s just be honest, you really need a lot of extra time on your hands to have time to bash your parents on instagram and twitter. You need even more extra time on your hands to rehash frustrations about your church youth group from 20 or 30 years ago.
Who has that kind of time? People living very comfortable, stable lives. What sort of people tend to have those kinds of lives? People who went to college and found well-paying jobs. And, how does that happen? You guessed it, by growing up in stable homes with stable parents who set healthy boundaries and helped their kids to achieve–the kind of families who were plugged into evangelical churches in the 1990s.
Ex-vangelicals are often guilty of biting the hand that fed them.
Evangelicalism of the 1990s is the house that built me. Do I look back at the builders and wish they had done things a bit differently? Of course. But, I may also forget the secular environment that led to a particular kind of Christian reaction (For instance, see We Can’t Talk About Purity Culture Without Talking About the 1990s). When we look back at the 1990s, we talk about grunge music, gangster rap, baggy clothes, and neon colors. But, the 1990s were also hyper-sexualized. Purity culture was a reaction against a huge cultural influx of sexually explicit music, movies, and television (Melrose Place, anyone?). In 1992 Real World became the first reality TV show. It was hugely popular. Wikipedia lists some of the recurring themes of The Real World as sexuality, politics and religion, and abortion. The 1990s were a complicated time to be a teenager.
Can I look back and wish for my church to have taught me differently? Yes. But, as a forty year old man, I can make adjustments in my life without disparaging those who were doing their best to teach me to love Jesus and grow up to be a godly man who would love his family, contribute to his church and society as a whole.
It turns out, when I pull the plank out of my own eye, I realize that my kids are going to be frustrated about the way I handle some things in their lives. When I pull the plank out of my own eye, the dust in the eyes of my home church doesn’t seem to be quite as significant.
Can we try to avoid the mistakes of our predecessors? Yes. But, we will fail. And, in humility, as I try to do my best with the youth of this generation, I celebrate families and churches that did their best in the 1990s. And, in that celebration, I am thankful for the evangelicalism of the 1990s that, though imperfect, built me into the man, husband, father, and pastor I am today.
Photo by Alex Jones on Unsplash
