I’m trying to hammer this into the heads of people who don’t understand that k-selection = Right != Christ.
You may recall that I asserted:
The solipsistic personality disorder which sees other people as the audience for self-expression, which precipitated the strange conversation, comes from the complete detachment between children and their parents. The Alt-White pagans appear to think that if only they can extract Christianity from the national consciousness, we’ll enter a Platonic paradise, aka Athens part II. They are sadly mistaken about the younger generation’s capacity for metaphysical dialectic. After so many years of being punished by postmodernist teachers for daring to make truth statements, they have ceased to believe in belief itself. The incapacity to distinguish between interpretation and facts is why Generation Z has no imagination. They don’t even understand what it would mean to distinguish between belief and reality. This is the essence of megalomania: “All is known to me and simple. There is only Truth, and those too weak to grasp it. No mystery remains, no need for further discussion. For me, all that remains is navigation—a game to acquire the power I need.”
An exercise in discernment
Here’s the statistical version of this argument (emphasis mine):
An Increasingly Elusive Truth
More than one-third of Gen Z (37%) believes it is not possible to know for sure if God is real, compared to 32 percent of all adults. On the other side of the coin, teens who do believe one can know God exists are less likely than adults to say they are very convinced that is true (54% vs. 64% all adults who believe in God). For many teens, truth seems relative at best and, at worst, altogether unknowable.Their lack of confidence is on pace with the broader culture’s all-out embrace of relativism. More than half of all Americans, both teens (58%) and adults (62%), agree with the statement “Many religions can lead to eternal life; there is no ‘one true religion.’” There’s a sense among Gen Z that what’s true for someone else may not be “true for me”; they are much less apt than older adults (especially Boomers, 85%) to agree that “a person can be wrong about something that they sincerely believe in” (66%). For a considerable minority of teens, sincerely believing something makes it true.
At the same time, some are leaning toward sincerity as a marker for truth, more are leaning hard in the other direction. Nearly half of teens, on par with Millennials, say “I need factual evidence to support my beliefs” (46%)—which helps to explain their uneasiness with the relationship between science and the Bible. Significantly fewer teens and young adults (28% and 25%) than Gen X and Boomers (36% and 45%) see the two as complementary.
Atheism Doubles Among Generation Z
Barna
Voting for Trump is K-selection, but it is not a religious revival.
A third of Generation Z is unable to distinguish between a truth claim and reality, compared with 15% of Boomers. This is a generation of megalomaniacs. But you have to say one thing for megalomaniacs: they are at least willing to advocate for their own interests and have perfect confidence.
First, they have a strong desire to make a difference with their lives and are attracted to what will enable them to make that difference. A faith that is privately engaging, but socially irrelevant, will not attract them. Second, traditional morality will be a tricky conversation, as they are not only sexually fluid themselves, but consider relational acceptance and lifestyle affirmation to be synonymous. Individual freedom is simply a core value. Third, a final faith question will revolve around their amazingly deep sense of awe and wonder about the universe.
Forget millennials. How will churches reach Generation Z?
(Emphasis added because Zodiacism theory.)
Since homo sapiens believes faith and confidence are the same thing (are you 100% certain you’re going to heaven?), I can see how breeding a bunch of cognitively impaired narcissists could look like holiness. Nevermind that faith is actually the opposite end of the trust relation from belief, who even cares how things like trust work? The important thing, apparently, is to just know things with perfect certainty without caring why.
/rant
If you want to get a handle on what Generation Z believes, you can get a pretty good view from here. The dividing line for Millenials is having memories of 9/11, so figure that means a birthday in 1995 or later, or ages 23 and down.