Why Johnny Can’t Believe

The Ambient Worldview Runs Deeper than We Think

Johnny first attended church in utero. When he was one month old, his parents presented him to the congregation in a dedication ceremony, and he was later baptized at summer church camp. True to their pledge, Johnny cannot remember a time before adulthood when he did not attend church with his family.

He joined the church praise band as a bass guitarist, and through high school, teachers and youth pastors appreciated his respectful and dependable presence. Admiring adults assumed Johnny would marry, become a deacon, raise a family, and eventually serve as a church elder. By all accounts Johnny’s parents had done an admirable job of raising a good Christian son. To his faith community he embodied the hope and future of the church.

Then Johnny graduated from high school.

The Drift Away

It surprised no one that he chose a private university that had been established by the denomination of his upbringing. After moving out of his parents’ house and into the men’s dorm, Johnny joined a social club and met some musical classmates with whom he formed a campus rock and roll band. He played intramural sports and studied enough to earn acceptable grades. Though anticipating four years in the same location, he never affiliated with a local church and attended services at a nearby congregation only when his parents came to town. College life was rich with friends and social opportunities that made sleeping in on Sunday morning an easy default; he was certainly not alone in this in his dorm. In the independence of early adulthood, the inclination to disciplined faithfulness waned, and going to church ceased to register as something all that important. Though campus life offered a vein of organized spirituality he was familiar with, it never became part of his routine.

After graduation he landed a job with a growing tech company, and, shortly after settling into the first phase of a promising career, he began sharing an apartment with a young woman he met at work. She had no faith background, and concern for faith compatibility did not enter into relationship decisions. Religious practices and conversations were not a part of their relationship. By this time, church life for Johnny no longer carried the social currency it had when he was growing up in a small Bible Belt town. Though they never considered themselves atheists, anyone meeting the pair would likely, and correctly, perceive them to be a normative and secular aspiring-class couple.

Why did Johnny’s faith prove so shallow and vulnerable? According to some studies his child-to-adult “walk away” trajectory is the reality for a large majority of youth raised in American churches. Several points of vulnerability left Johnny’s childhood faith tentative and fragile.

First, the core of Johnny’s spiritual heritage should have been a deep-rooted belief in the biblical accounts of creation, fall, alienation, atonement, reconciliation, and salvation. He remembers a few stories that delighted him as a boy, such as Noah and the Ark, David slaying Goliath, and Joshua’s march around the walls of Jericho, but as an adult, Johnny simply does not know the Bible as a whole. Having viewed theology and apologetics as the purview of preachers and Bible college professors, he struggles to articulate the core tenets of Christian faith.

Second, while Johnny’s psyche has a place for spirituality and for socially advantageous moral codes, he does not intuitively hear or think of the biblical narrative as having seamless connection and relevance to his own time and place. In his daily walk, the religious and the secular coexist as parallel yet separate realities, each with its own language and context.

Coworkers and friends attest to Johnny’s being “a good person,” and many of his peers find succor with him in the notion that God is love, is endlessly forgiving, and remains eager to accept and bless us just as we are—more of a Great Affirmer than the Great Redeemer.

Contrast Johnny’s tacitly religious worldview to that held by most in early America, especially after the Great Awakening, where a rigorous Christian religious tradition suffused intellectual and cultural life. For the majority, to grow up and be educated in America meant one would be biblically literate and would navigate life according to a communal Christian worldview. Common conversation shared the metaphors and the language of Bible stories and permeated cultural institutions like education, entertainment, and the news. A biblical moral philosophy with respect for Scripture and fear of God gave steady guidance to civic life.

But beginning in the early 1900s, faith and religion were gradually leeched from public education. In the 1970s, academia and popular culture began moving away from a position of indifference to Christian cultural heritage toward one of open disdain, then to one of overt hostility. Mainline “High Church” Protestantism went into steep decline even as evangelical traditions like Johnny’s offered a fleeting hope of holding faith and contemporary culture in a compatible balance of sorts.

As the church followed the cultural drift in matters of spiritual training, Bible classes were curtailed at the same time parents were being replaced by youth pastors. Meanwhile, entertainment supplanted the spiritual disciplines and Christian service as objectives of church life for the young. As feelings gained emphasis over knowledge, emotionally compelling praise services came to overshadow didactic teaching and scriptural literacy. Consequently, in contrast to his parents and grandparents, Johnny graduated from high school virtually biblically illiterate. Scripture provided moral aphorisms that influenced his intuition to stay out of trouble as a teen, while snippets of Scriptures had served to prooftext Sunday morning sermons. But even as his upbringing and worldview bear an unmistakable Christian patina, he does not possess the inclination, let alone the tools and confidence, to live against the grain. His intellectual and psychological bearings are not anchored in a substantial biblical-theological foundation.

Faith Traps

Imagine, however, that in the first months out of his parents’ home Johnny had recognized his deficit and, facing a spiritual crisis or merely feeling uneasy about neglecting his faith, had picked up his Bible and initiated a sincere searcher’s read through—much like the spiritually adrift pagan turning to the Gideon Bible in his hotel room. Were Johnny to do so, he would be confronted with two belief traps—”credibility blocks” effectively set by the same forces that had purged American public life of biblical influence in the last century.

To begin with, the opening statements of Genesis would instantly clash with the pervasive secular materialism assumed and taught throughout Johnny’s education and reinforced by the culture beyond church. While he might seek consilience in a form of theistic evolution and find “Christian” influencers to support such a position, the conflict between the foundational tenet of purposeful intelligent agency behind creation and the corrosive neo-Darwinian origin story he’d been spoon-fed since grade school would remain an unsettling intellectual tension, fueling a formidable undercurrent of doubt pulling against everything that follows. His Christian college experience provides, at best, paltry resistance to this block. Fearing censure from the guardians of academic respectability, both the science and theology professors at his alma mater simply play it safe, avoiding formidable questions on metaphysical origins and feeling relieved that most students don’t ask difficult questions or seek substantial guidance. Consequently, Johnny and his peers graduated unprepared for the cultural and intellectual faith challenges of a post-Christian world.

Secondly, a teleological foundation for understanding human sexuality as bi-gender, procreative, naturally heterosexual, and bound by divine covenants and prohibitions outlined in Scripture grates against secular demands for toleration in matters of private behavior, especially matters of sexual identity and practices. For Johnny, his girlfriend, and their generation, the greatest ethical faux pas is the imposition of one’s personal beliefs or boundaries upon others, especially if they are conservative or religiously informed. Consequently, Johnny’s heart is set against a biblically faithful conception of sexuality, another cloud obscuring the plausibility of orthodox Christian faith from Johnny’s tacitly secular mind.

The Role of Prior Motives

Johnny’s journey attests to the logical and historical connection between materialistic assumptions, popular skepticism, and moral relativism. Upon publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859, many of Charles Darwin’s scientific contemporaries recognized weaknesses in his theory. Among them was English biologist and comparative anatomist Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895). Yet even while Huxley held reservations regarding the evidential and logical integrity of natural selection’s broad postulates, he recognized the theological implications and found in unguided evolution an irresistible social utility. Though raised an Anglican, he coined the term “agnosticism” to describe his own abandonment of theistic leanings. An aggressive and skilled debater, Huxley appointed himself “Darwin’s bulldog” in the court of academic and public opinion, and his progressive animosity to Christianity spawned a family heritage with a long and influential reach. One of his grandsons, Julian Huxley, became an influential evolutionary biologist, eugenicist, humanist, and advocate of open marriage. Another grandson, Aldous Huxley, authored the dystopian classic Brave New World and from academic appointments in the U.K. and U.S., advocated for greater Western acceptance of Eastern pantheism. In a candid admission as to his ethical bias, he wrote,

I had motives for not wanting the world to have meaning; and consequently assumed that it had none and was able without difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption. The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in pure metaphysics. He is also concerned to prove that there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do. For myself, as no doubt for most of my friends, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom. The supporters of this system claimed that it embodied the meaning—the Christian meaning, they insisted—of the world. There was one admirably simple method of confuting these people and justifying ourselves in erotic revolt: we would deny that the world had any meaning whatsoever.

Here the influential public intellectual ostensibly committed to reason speaks the quiet part out loud. He is not the only one to do so. In 1997, esteemed American philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote,

I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear myself: I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God, and naturally, hope that I am right in my belief. It’s that I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that. My guess is that this cosmic authority problem is not a rare condition, and that it is responsible for much of the scientism and reductionism of our time.

We do well to take Huxley and Nagel at their word, recognizing that their claims to voice the motivations of many are correct. Their prodigy are legion, and the legacy in contemporary thought and culture—and in the church—is incalculable.

A Generation Unprepared

As we push back against reasons to disbelieve and deconstruct, we must contend with how neglecting theology and biblical literacy for decades has left Johnny’s generation defenseless against both erudite antagonists and the pernicious drip, drip of culture, vulnerable ultimately in mind and heart to the moral relativism of our age and the metastatic unbelief that follows. By early adulthood, Johnny and his church youth peers were unprepared to defend the faith of their upbringing. Thus, they find life is easier, both in their own minds and in our culture at large, more tranquil and less risky of embarrassment when they simply leave the big questions alone.

Gen Z to the Rescue?

Lest we think all is lost, winds of change are about in both North America and Europe. Trend watchers such as Pew Research and the Barna Group have registered an uptick in post-pandemic church attendance, in proclamations of belief, and in a hunger for the Bible, especially among our youngest adults. Astonishingly the trend is being led by—get this—young men. And the return is not to the liberalized or woke varieties of Protestant or Catholic Christianity. Having been offered the choice between the patronizing emptiness of consumerist religion, the emasculating and spiritually tepid postmodern social gospel, or the rudderless anxiety of unbelief, young men are choosing instead the authority and conviction of orthodox fellowships that provide clarity and uncompromising guidance in building personal character and strong families and that call for sacrificial commitment. Herein lies a remarkable opportunity for churches prepared to lead and nurture the souls of hungry young men, and hopefully young women as well. With masculinity losing currency in our secularized culture at large, the church has an opening to reclaim its rightful place where men are welcomed and affirmed as men and are mentored toward healthy spiritual adulthood and faithful leadership.

Perhaps Johnny and his girlfriend will make the bold journey to authentic faith after all. If so, the couple could go on to construct a solid foundation of knowledge and reason upon which to moor their hearts and minds, a marriage, and the generation they may go on to parent. As their faiths mature and gain confidence in the special revelation that comes through disciplined study of the Bible, so will their ability to recognize, understand, and untangle the web of fallacies behind the West’s post-Christian unbelief.

Guidelines for ­Cultivating Faith Against a Tide of Ex-vangelicalism
by Bruce Woodall

The church should never seek relevance by identifying with contemporary culture. Trying to be a baptized version of pop culture will at best make us a silly imitation of it. We are called to challenge culture, not to emulate it. When the church comes to look and sound like the misguided world around it, it ceases to offer a redeeming alternative.

Traipsing after Jesus were curiosity seekers, fakers, and opportunists. Though he welcomed anyone to stop and listen, he never catered his message to please the masses or to appease the insincere. Neither should we. Since knowledge, not emotional manipulation, builds confident and courageous faith, following are suggested guidelines for training minds and hearts to intentionally follow the head, who said, “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.”

1. Disown cheap grace.

Church as primarily entertainment is a crumb trail into this trap. There must be a call to commitment. Otherwise, we offer a counterfeit gospel which inspires no one and will never make disciples.

2. Dismantle the age silos.

Some churches have drifted into a structure seemingly designed to quarantine the youth away with the youth pastor. Youth and adults need one another, and the biblical imperative is clear in commissioning older generations to mentor the younger. Unless we experience life together, discipleship will not happen.

3. Read the Bible.

Children’s minds are steel traps for good stories well told, and the biblical narrative is the motherlode of great stories. Read and tell age-appropriate Bible stories from the nursery on. By grade school read the biblical accounts to children straight from Scripture.

4. Contextualize Scripture.

Middle school youth are capable of grasping its historical narrative, as delivered to us through a variety of literary forms speaking to real-life circumstances. Teach Scripture as the lens through which we understand not just the Bible itself, but ourselves as well as all of history, ideas, and cultures.

5. Cultivate a fascination with maps and timelines.

Enthusiasm to understand the who, where, and when is infectious. Correctly seeing God’s interactions with and revelations to man throughout history brings the God of the Bible into the here and now.

6. Expand the vocabulary.

We need big words if we are to understand and speak against sophisticated unbelief—words like worldview, teleology, scientism, vitalism, hermeneutics, etc.

7. Get real.

Teach how base reality, the cosmos we experience, is comprised not just of the four classic elements, but of five: time, space, matter, energy—and information. While not a complete argument for the existence of the immaterial first cause or the immaterial soul, the reality of information bears witness to the pre-eminence of Logos, as declared in Scripture.

8. Prioritize family time.

In homes, reclaim unhurried family mealtime, and make the table an electronics-free zone rich in discussions of individual family members’ experiences and news from a biblical worldview perspective. Also thoughtfully plan and prepare for the weekly assembly. Look ahead and structure the family schedule such that joining your congregational assembly becomes a central and joyful anchor of edification.