conjectural navel gazing; jesus in lint form

It was actually the generation before the Boomers that 'ruined everything' in church from my end, from Bishop James Pike to the priests and nuns who were/are part of the 'spirit of Vatican II' like Küng and Schillebeeckx. (The same age group that enthuses over those things now.)

And they were the ones steeped in 'Enlightenment' unbelief (maybe with a churchy veneer), a belief in materialism and endless technological progress (ah, ah, Mr Wiiiilson...) eventually reaching perfection (one of the generation before them came up with the 'Omega Point' after all).

It's at least partially true that the hippies were a big, spoiled bunch of middle-class kids but their romantic reaction against a lot of those things had a point and in ways changed the culture for the better, a healthy corrective. (Along with 'looking for tradition', which explains some blacks converting to Sunni Islam or George Harrison and the Hindu tradition. Got a soft spot for George even though he was an apostate.) The trouble was they weren't grounded in truth, in the great tradition of the West and of Christianity, either, so they made the mistakes they did. (Things like stupid Marxist-derived reverse racism and spreading social diseases and drugs addictions, and how exactly did trashing a university library help anyone?)

Like every generation they thought they discovered the joys of sex, drugs, etc. when of course they were only new *to them*. Listening to the great African rhythms of somebody like the late Olatunji you could say the same of rock'n'roll.

That staged-looking picture of hippies in GetReligion - an arty fellow surrounded by lovely girls in saris - could be a circa-1968 re-staging of 'Patience' with the chap holding the sitar as Bunthorne! 'Patience' is commonly thought to be Gilbert and Sullivan making fun of Oscar Wilde. Again, romantic, æsthetic movements are nothing new and of course not all bad.

Like them Miller has a point - what he says is true *as far as it goes*. An antidote indeed to the syrup of charismagelical culture (think Ned Flanders - okely-dokely!).

You could count me as part of the conservative counter-current, 'pre-modern' partially by choice, which isn't really pre-modern and arguably a kind of rebellion but at least in my case not exactly. As I'm four years older than you and spent part of my childhood someplace sufficiently provincial I got the benefit of pre-modern religion (*old-school* middle-of-the-road Anglicanism as I described to Larry earlier) naturally, first hand, not just from my romantic reading from my teen years to today.

I also have a child's memory first hand of the Jesus freaks!

In the Newsweek article there's a caption describing the 'spiritual auditing' of Scientology - sounds like a rip-off of confession and spiritual direction! (Of course father confessors and spiritual directors don't use an 'e-meter', which I understand is a lie detector!)

I can get a transcendental high, deep peace, from praying the office like Janet Hoffman got from TM.

When you overthrow the old régime you don't get liberty but Robespierre and Stalin. So it went with the Boomers in some cases - you got L. Ron Hubbard (again, the generation before them), Sun Myung Moon (likewise) and Jim Jones.

Got a score of 89 on the quiz - most of the questions I got wrong were about contemporary Judaism, a subject about which I'm completely at sea.

74%. Technically, I'm either Gen X or no generation at all, depending on whom you ask, but I'm the child of boomers. Also I was a huge Beatles fan in middle school, which gave me at least two answers.

As you can see I'm technically Gen X as well, born two years into that period - my parents were of the generation before the Boomers. They either didn't take part in 'the ’60s' as popularly understood (for most people really the early ’70s) or were on the losing side of things which may also partially explain me. Unlike them I was and up to a point still am a Beatles fan.

78%, but I'm on the young end of the boomers at 48.

I still think the Enlightenment was a good thing, but over-executed, as so many things are. Questioning tradition is a good thing, particularly when there are large gaps in our knowledge about history. And, especially for an institution that wasn't above the concept of selling indulgences. Talk about materialism.

70%. Born 1969, clearly GenX by demographic determinants.

I suggest you talk to GenXers about faith matters, rather than reading books about it/them. ;-)

Fogey:

Interesting notions. I think it takes will to follow...and if the Boomers are following someone, perhaps it was for good reason. As Rich suggests, it may be worth reflecting on the positive changes made to the American churches. Many were and are necessary.

That being said, I find it interesting that those at the center of the Emergent movement are all Boomers or just on the young side of Boomer.

That the mega church is from the Boomers is also interesting to me. This means that the "worship wars" really are between Bommers and the rest of us tag along somehow.

Megan, I have books about Gen X. I have none about the Boomers, just ones written by them. Heh. I do talk to both. I find that people are people and buy into institutions or not. It is interesting that there are streams of thought or inclination within a generation. Are we really less inclined to trust our institutions as previous generations? I am not so convinced any more.

But that's just me.

The Beatles were okay. I prefer U2. Of that generation of the British Invasion, however, I don't know that anyone is better than the Beatles.

But then The Who appear.

I was born in 1961, on the border between Boomers and Gen X, depending on whose scale you use. I scored 67%, largely due to a consistently lousy ability to retain names. Oy.

I'm right at the split, and my reaction even back in college is that the identified boomer group is much narrower than the media portray. As someone who started college in 1977, I can tell you that we were very much alienated from "classic" boomer culture on many points.

Theologically, boomers haven't been at all important until the whole emergent thing got a name (the leaders are mostly a few years older than I am). Liberal theology belongs to an older era-- indeed, the most familiar names were born in the 19th century! Liturgy? This seems more complicated. The whole St. Louis J-boy scene and other RC stuff is composed of people born at the very beginning of the boomer period. It smells very much of the "we have to appeal to the young people" gestalt of the emergent movement, which suggests that while the songwriters were younger (but not that young-- I think most of this stuff was written in their early thirties) their clerical enablers were of necessity a decade older or more.