May 21 2001

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But don't believe everything you hear. At least three myths are alive and well in our conferences and popular books. Probing these myths—and why they are popular—can give us clues to truly effective countercultural ministry.

Young people are a generation. If you define a "generation" as a cohesive group sharing a common set of birthdates and experiences, with their own personality and felt needs, there has been only one "generation" in American history: baby boomers. No one can miss the spike in the birth charts after World War II. Those babies arrived at a uniquely cohesive moment, when there were just three major television networks, magazines with names like Time and Life, and a series of culture-wide defining historical events, culminating in the Vietnam War.

But there's no similar spike on the charts after 1960, just the normal ebb and flow of fertility that one sees throughout history. What little common ground "Generation X" and its successors share has been created by slightly desperate marketers of consumer products, who made a mint off the baby boomers and aren't about to let generational consciousness grow old along with them. But they are fighting an uphill battle. The two hottest young artists at this year's Grammy Awards, 28-year-old Eminem and 32-year-old Faith Hill, have respectively sold 8 and 6 million copies of their most recent albums. Eminem sings about raping and killing his own mother; ...