Maybe marriage and childrearing are overemphasized
in some communities. But that's a rarity compared with our real idol:
consumerist travel and lifestyle experiences, at the expense of love and
self-sacrifice.
The rate at
which Christian blogs and publishing houses are churning out jeremiads against
the so-called idolatry of marriage and family is dizzying. You’d think we were
living through a repeat of the 1950s, with white picket fences, DuPont
products, and rows of beaming children monopolizing the imaginations of
churchgoers in their 20s and 30s. Just look at the well-trafficked evangelical
writers denouncing the worship of family and fecundity that is purportedly
rampant in our congregations here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
Now we have
books about this fabled outbreak of deified domesticity, most notably Kutter
Callaway’s “Breaking the Marriage Idol” (Intervarsity
Press), which condemns the evangelical church for adopting “a distorted and
distorting vision of marriage, singleness, and sexuality from our cultural
environs,” and of organizing “our entire common life together as if this vision
were normative for everyone within the Christian community.”
I perceive that in every way we
are very religious (or think we are). We have no shortage of
writers bewailing idolatry of matrimony and maternity, which we have allegedly
picked up from the surrounding culture. But if I may draw our attention for one
moment to an altar I noticed in a lonely corner of our evangelical Areopagus,
I’d like to introduce us to the false god we worship unaware, because I don’t
think it is marriage, family, or kids.
Choosing Indulgent
Leisure Instead Of Children
Sometime
around 2033, elderly Americans will outnumber children for the first time in
our nation’s history, according to U.S. Census Bureau estimates.
That not-so-distant year will mark a critical transition in the sustainability
of our population. We will enter what might be called “Japan mode”—a
self-perpetuating spiral similar to what the island nation is currently experiencing,
in which it becomes more difficult with each passing year for the young to bear
the burden of both their aging parents and new children. Put another way, it
may never again be as easy as it is right now to have and raise kids, but the
need for it will continue to grow.
This transition will be the result of decades of Americans’
individual choices involving priorities about college, career, marriage, and
spousal roles. Millions of people my age made and are making the choice to
invest their youth, energy, and money into educations they don’t need and can’t
afford. The job market for liberal arts majors is infamously sluggish compared
with the demand for trades. They’re also investing deeply in animals (dog and
cat ownership is at an all-time high, and the pet accessories market is
booming), and in self-indulgence.
This last
group is particularly detrimental. At least dogs make a lot of people happy.
Performative leisure, on the other hand, just makes most people jealous. While
only a select few actually succeed at making a career out of being tourists,
lifestyle and travel blogging have become a kind of millennial American dream.
Consider this couple with
nearly half a million subscribers on YouTube, who describe themselves as
“professional, full-time travelers.” They’ve been to 66 countries, none of
which viewers can actually see because these two won’t get their impossibly
smug mugs out of the way. They’re living the dream, “falling in love” with each
place they visit, meaning each location they use as a backdrop for their
extended, circumglobal selfie.
Their success is no accident. They’ve figured out how to monetize
their audience’s envy. Their project is not about the places, cultures, people,
or natural wonders they encounter, as a BBC or National Geographic documentary
might be. Those things aren’t even in focus, much of the time. Near pristine
ignorance of the countries they visit is a feature, not a bug, because the
unspoken but in-your-face message of each video this young couple releases is:
“Look at us! Don’t you wish you were here right now, having experiences like
these?”
Of course, children are nowhere in the picture. Neither is the
future.
The Perpetual Spring
Break
The same is
true for Elsa Rhae, a
self-described “Professional Creative,” who has a quarter of a million
subscribers and dwells with her “partner and dog” (not the same person) in a
travel trailer, living a life of “essentialism” and documenting her
experiences. The low-hanging criticism of Rhae’s lifestyle is how unbearably
first-world it is.
But a young
adulthood modeled after “Stuff White People Like” reveals
much more than how frivolous my generation’s conception of the good life has
become. It reveals the ideal that has sapped so many of their will to raise
families and invest in a world beyond their own lifetimes. As they pour their
hopes and imaginations into a perpetual spring break and the experiences they
want, the clock continues to tick, and the years to slip away.
Don’t
misunderstand: millennials aren’t all traveling the world and “vlogging” about
it on YouTube. Most cannot afford that. The vast majority simply watches
lifestyle idols do these things on screens. But their hearts are deeply
invested in this vision of happiness, and they book flights when they
can. Surveys indicate my
generation places travel higher on their spending priorities than cars, homes,
or paying off debt. They view tourism (although they never call it that—tourism
is what their fanny-pack-wearing, Gen-X parents did) as a kind of stand-in for
actual worldliness and learning. This is why those who’ve spent a semester
abroad so often reconstitute their identities around this glorified vacation.
Those who
aren’t globe-trotting are studiously preserving their freedom for experiences
they hope to have. They avoid settling down, integrating in a community, or
building families because that would mean the death of their misbegotten dream
to become “professional, full-time travelers.” Alice Merton’s song “No Roots” is an apt anthem
for my contemporaries, who devote just enough attention to their childbearing
years to wave at them as they pass by.
At precisely the critical point when most millennials are in their
late twenties and early thirties — the point by which human beings throughout
history have always produced the next generation — too many of us are not only
refusing to settle down and become parents, but basking in Christian writers’
misguided, pious-sounding denunciations of these things as idols. I don’t doubt
that there are churches out there where marriage and children are
overemphasized to the detriment of Christian singles. But as a colleague of
mine likes to say, the plural of “anecdote” is not “data.”
The statistics overwhelmingly indicate that if
American adults my age are making an idol out of anything, it isn’t family,
marriage, fertility, or even the future. It is the rootless, fruitless,
experience-filled now. The good news is that
this form of idolatry is self-extinguishing. The bad news is that it’ll take
our society with it.
G. Shane
Morris is a senior writer at BreakPoint,
a program of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview. He’s also written for
Summit Ministries and The Christian Post, and blogs regularly at Patheos. Shane lives
with his wife and three children in Tampa, Florida.