Hat tip to author JD Cowan for bringing my attention to the following chart:
According to those numbers, religiosity – read: Christianity – among Americans aged 18-35 plummeted from near 90 percent in 1991 to 75 percent in 1998.
My, what could have happened in between?
The mean age of people who were 18-35 in 1998 was 26. That’s smack dab in the middle of Generation X.
Those same Gen Xers would have been entering college for the first time in 1991.
Where After the Ball, a 1989 gay propaganda book by Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen, was in vogue.
It can’t be overstated how influential that book was. Almost overnight it whitewashed the image of sodomy from a seedy vice practiced at bathhouses and truck stops to a self-affirming activity enjoyed by people who were just like Ward and June Cleaver – aside from leading sterile, promiscuous sex lives.
The glut of pozzed content pumped into the media in the book’s wake was no accident.
NormieCons should take two lessons from the above.
First, sodomy is incompatible with Christianity. Despite various wolves in sheep’s clothing preaching otherwise. The numbers show that poz and apostasy go hand-in-hand.
The establishment GOP’s growing penchant for Death Cult sacred cows should be a blaring wake-up call.
Second, sending Xers and every later generation to college was an utter disaster. Boomers may have thought it would get their kids low-work/high pay jobs, but for the most part it reverted them to heathenry and buried them under unserviceable debt.
The Death Cult’s capture of all media and academia on the Boomes’ watch decimated American Christianity. The result is the Clown World you see outside your window.
You can tell the Cult planned it this way by how shook they are at Elon Musk taking over Twitter.
If they cared about their kids futures – especially in eternity – BoomerCons should have spent the past 30 years and their unprecedented wealth buying every media outlet, Big Tech firm, and private college.
It’s still not too late. If folks like Peter Thiel and the Mercers just bought controlling interest in Disney, we could turn this ship around.
But that’s not gonna happen because, as Uncle Elon himself tweeted:
Old age is at long last removing Boomers’ death grip on the levers of power. Generation I-can’t-change-a-tire is taking the reins just as everybody drops the dollar as their reserve currency and the US falls to third world status.
Change is coming.
Be prepared.
I’ll note that the background lore of my hit mecha thriller Combat Frame XSeed is starting to read like the daily news. Get a glimpse of the post-future.
Elon’s tweet is golden. I can speak for this being gospel in Science. Until that scientist-on-a-pedestal passes on, little or nothing new gets a look.
Dr. Planck would agree.
Two interesting things about the authors of the After the Ball book, from wiki:
“Hunter Madsen, a social marketing and advertising executive.”
“When [Kirk] died, he was found alone in his apartment by two friends. The cause of death has never been publicly revealed.”
Not much else to add on to that.
I have to say, looking back, that it did feel like my peers were less and less interested with Christianity as the ’90s went on. I never put much stock into it back then, but I guess it really was a sign of the times.
When your entire conception of Christianity is formed by Psalty the Psalmbook and Bibleman and felt banners and the local pastor being busted for sex pest-ing,one can be forgiven for assuming it’s a crock.
The degree to which Boomers dropped the ball and failed to communicate the truth of the faith is staggering.
I stumbled across another datapoint in the Gen Y question a few days ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25dAWgXqChg
While the guy in the video is lower energy than Jeb Bush and says some stuff which is pretty lame (such as being insulted about being “lied to” about Pluto being a planet) his overall discussion of the issue is pretty spot on. A Generation continually given advice that was either bad from the start or which was obsolete by the time it would have been useful. He also notes the trouble talking about the generation at the end of the video and in the description.
Comments full of people agreeing that people who grew up in the 90s are not millennials and several people talking about remembering Generation Y and Millennials specifically being called different things in the media until it became inconvenient. The only people dissenting are people coming at it from the angle of “but the OFFICIAL SOURCE says you’re a millennial.”
He also brings up a silly but reliable indicator in the comments: If Spongebob was a big part of your childhood, you ain’t Gen Y.
Easy rule:
The Simpsons = You’re Gen Y
Spongebob = You’re Millennial
Ironclad
Here’s one I came up with recently. I call it the Lunchables test:
Gen Y never ate Lunchables and/or thought they were gross.
Millennials loved them and wax nostalgic.
The more you think about it, the more telling it is.
Wow, that’s a good one. I actually do remember thinking they were gross as a kid. Gen Y is pretty used to being puzzled by some of the things Millennials rave about from their childhood which are objective step downs from what they had, such as Blockbuster over local video stores.
Then you realize how fast all of that went away and it makes sense.
Gen Xer here, who first saw Lunchables as a young man, and thought they were sufficiently gross-looking that I never once tried them. Besides their insane packaging-to-actual-food ratio, they looked like the cold lunch equivalent of TV Dinners for the kids who rode the short bus.
I’m just on the north side of the border; I saw The Simpsons and not Spongebob; but I liked Lunchables. Just the cracker combos, mind you. What that “pizza” hoped to achieve, I’ll never know.
As for the main point – well, school didn’t turn me, as I was raised atheist. (But NOT postmodern, thanks be to God. Reality was knowable and the pursuit of truth was worthy.)
I agree completely with one exception: I’m not tracking with you on Thiel, unless you exactly mean him as an analogue to Elon – a useful ally on a specific issue, but not to be trusted much further than that.
I mean, he’s “married” to another man, was a WEF Young Global Leader, and admits his Christian views are heterodox. That sounds like an uneasy alliance for the long-term.
I said that Thiel would never buy Disney and turn it around. The point is that almost every Conservative billionaire is useless on cultural issues – in Thiel’s case, for some of the reasons you listed.
The great apostasy among 90s Xers matches my own recollection of the times and people I knew during them. It fit perfectly with a classic Xer attitude – mixing correct skepticism of corrupt worldly authority with woefully incorrect “non-serviam” skepticism of even rightful authority, up to and including God.
No accident that libertarian, conservatarian, ‘South Park Republican’ and other “socially liberal… but fiscally conservative! ™” idiocies were so popular among my generation.
And yes, I was one of those idiots.
At least you could change a tire.
We at least could do that. Our esteemed host had it right when he said that Gen-X got the last rubbery chicken wings of the feast. The last generation to see a fading glimpse, as adults, of what our civilization had once been, before Ground Zero.