Grilling the youth pastor

It's the question that preachers, teachers and parents dread, especially if they were shaped by the cultural earthquakes of the 1960s. But no one fears it more than youth ministers, who hear the private questions that young people fear to ask their elders. Youth pastors work in the no man's land between the home and the church.

This is the question: "Well, didn't you do any of this stuff when you were a kid?" The young person may be asking about sex, drinking, drugs, cheating or, perhaps, lying to parents about any of the above.

If youth ministers stop and think about it, they will realize that they usually say something like the following while trying to answer these questions, said the Rev. David "Duffy" Robbins, a United Methodist who teaches youth ministry at Eastern University near Philadelphia.

"If I answer that it's none of your business and the answer is between me and God, there's a pretty good chance you'll hear that as a 'yes,' " said Robbins, writing in Good News magazine. "If I answer 'yes' to your question, there's a pretty good chance that you'll take that as permission to make the same mistakes that I've made. If, on the other hand, I say 'no,' there's a good possibility that you might reason that then I couldn't possibly understand what you're facing or what you're going through right now.

"So, what that question amounts to is a lose-lose proposition for both of us, and I'm not willing to put us in that position, so I'm not going to answer that question."

There was a time when youth pastors -- not to mention senior ministers -- would have felt more confident answering.

There was a time when adults thought it was their duty to tell young people that some things were right and some things were wrong -- period. The assumption was that adults had a sacred duty to serve as moral examples and that was that. Candor was rarely part of the equation.

Then the pendulum swung in the other direction, said Robbins, and many religion leaders joined what is often called the "authenticity movement." The goal was to open up and level with young people in an attempt to impress them with displays of openness and vulnerability. By sharing the details of his or her own sins and temptations, the youth pastor hoped to gain credibility -- inspiring young people not to make the same errors.

But there's a problem with letting it all hang out, said Robbins.

"It so easy to get carried away and, before you know it, your whole body language and the relish with which people tell these stories can send the wrong signal. You may end up leaving a kid thinking, 'Well, I wonder if I could do something really bad like that. That sounds kind of cool.' "

The problem, he said, is that it's hard not to cross the line between honest, transparent disclosure and imprudent, naked exhibitionism. Nevertheless, it's true that young people need to hear that it's normal to struggle with sin and temptation and that there are adults who want to help them, because they have faced many of the same issues -- in the past and in the present.

"It is completely appropriate, for example, for the students in my youth group to know that I struggle with lust," noted Robbins. "On the other hand, if I continue by saying, 'In fact, Sally, your mom is a fox!' -- that crosses a line."

This kind of self-exposure has to have a purpose, said Robbins. It's a good thing for adults to acknowledge that they struggle with sin, but it can be destructive if that's the end of the story. Young people need to know that God "loves us the way that we are, but he doesn't intend to leave us as we are," he said.

"It's one thing for me to tell my youth group that I struggled with this or that sin and, with God's help, have managed to put it behind me," explained Robbins.

"It's something else to just say that I struggled and struggled and struggled and that there just doesn't seem to be a way to be forgiven by God and go on to lead a better life. ... That isn't much of a Gospel, now is it?"

The new campus rebels

They are the campus rebels, the young women who refuse to play by the rules laid down by a male-dominated culture.

They wish that more young men would focus on their minds and souls, instead of their bodies. They are tired of crude social games that serve the desires of men rather than the dreams of young women.

They are rebels, the religious women who struggle with the frat-boy patriarchy that rules the modern university campus on nights and weekends.

"There is a mini-revolt going on out there and you'll find it in the Christian groups that you find on most campuses," said Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, co-director of the National Marriage Project at Rutgers University. "The students in these independent religious groups -- especially the girls -- are the new countercultural revolutionaries at our modern secular universities."

That's the good news. The bad news is that if alternative religious groups didn't exist on most campuses, then these young women would have "nowhere else to go if they are looking for the kind of moral support that they need to find some way around the 'let's get drunk and hook up' scene," she said.

Secular and religious researchers have tried to describe the causes and the effects of this alcohol-fueled sexual mayhem on mainstream campuses.

Thus, publications ranging from Christianity Today to Rolling Stone have published reports on this issue, with predictably different verdicts. Much of the news coverage has focused on novelist Tom Wolfe's profane morality tale "I Am Charlotte Simmons," in which a brilliant Christian from the North Carolina mountains suffers a moral collapse during her freshman year on an elite campus that is famous for academics, basketball and sexist lacrosse players. Many critics noted a resemblance to Duke University.

College administrators have responded by focusing on alcohol abuse and its impact on campus life. However, they have failed to realize that alcohol is linked to other moral issues, said Whitehead, author of a book on a related topic, "Why There Are No Good Men Left." Administrators must understand that campus gender roles have been turned upside down, with mixed results.

Only a few decades ago, men ruled the classrooms on most campuses, stressed Whitehead, writing in the progressive Catholic journal Commonweal. There were more male students and more male professors, resulting in powerful networks that dominated academic life. Women, however, controlled campus social life, with all of its formal and informal rituals of dating and courtship.

Times have changed.

"Women now rule the classroom," argued Whitehead. "With the strict enforcement of laws prohibiting gender discrimination and sexual harassment, the classroom has become more egalitarian and merit based. Women have flourished academically in this well-regulated environment.

"On the other hand, men increasingly set the rules for an unregulated social life. ... They've streamlined the old system. They've eliminated the time-wasting efforts to attend to women's wishes and gotten down to the fundamentals of adolescent male desire: playing competitive games, drinking with buddies and having sex with lots of compliant women. They've also taken charge of party venues and themes: they rent off-campus party houses, stockpile massive quantities of alcohol, hire strippers and organize female wrestling and wet T-shirt competitions."

It's hard to party harder than the guys who make the rules and the girls who are willing to play by them.

Yet, when reporters and researchers ask the right questions, even many young women who are not religious sound stunned by the choices they have to make when it comes to alcohol, clothing and sex. One Duke coed told Rolling Stone: "I have done things that are completely inconsistent with the type of person I am, and what I value."

Whitehead said that these young women often sound like they have been abandoned, rather than "empowered." Their confused statements sound like they want help, but don't know how to say so.

"In many cases their moral compasses have become so disoriented that they can't even describe how they feel," said Whitehead. "These young women feel bad, but they can't pin down why they feel bad. They feel guilty, but they've been taught that there's no reason to feel guilty about anything. ...

"Many girls sound like they want a way out. If their own parents and churches won't help them, who will? It sure doesn't seem like their colleges are going to."