Take a look at this report of the newly-published research by the Evangelical Alliance in England into the attitudes of young people. Here is a resumé of their findings:

Shocking findings of new Generation X survey revealed today

1 May 2001

A third of Christian young adults questioned in a major new Evangelical Alliance survey say they would be happy to 'live in sin' prior to getting married - directly challenging traditional biblical teaching.

The findings in Generation X: Attitudes and Lifestyles show that Christians in the 18 to 35 age group are more likely to see cohabitation as an acceptable first step towards marriage, flatly contradicting one of Christianity's core lifestyle messages. The statistic is even more when contrasted with the results of similar research - carried out in 1995 - which showed then that 28% regarded cohabitation as acceptable. This represents an 18% increase in just six years.

The survey confirms that this new attitude is a minefield for church leaders. Leaders find themselves caught in the dilemma of on the one hand trying to uphold the validity of marriage as the basis for monogamous heterosexual relations - but at the same time not wishing [to] exclude the currently under-represented 20s and 30s age groups from their congregations.

"It is in this area that the biggest problems will be faced both by the church and the individuals concerned when those living together wish, say, to join (or even come) to church, or become believers," the report states.

Views on living together, marriage and relationships were trawled from 515 Christians and 209 of their non-Christian friends who are categorised as 'Generation X-ers', the popular label describing the 14.6 million people born in the UK between 1965 and 1983. It was first coined by author Douglas Coupland in his book Generation X, Tales from an accelerated culture. However the survey, which compares the attitudes of both Christian and non-Christian Generation X-ers towards marriage, has revealed some common ground across both groups. 97% of the former and 84% of the latter agree that getting married should be a lifetime commitment.

But there were also some contradictory messages. Non-Christians give strong support (68%) to the statement that "marriage should be for as long as we love each other", with 32% of Christians also agreeing. Separation was rated OK by 57% of non-Christians compared to just 22% of Christians and divorce by 55% compared to 19%.

"In the 21st century the Church must be more responsive in helping people reconcile their ideals with the reality of living them for those both those inside and outside its community." Matt Bird stressed. "We must support people in a view of marriage that is not another consumerist product, that we can pick up when we fancy and through away when it doesn't please us anymore. Marriage is the foundational building block of society for expressing lifelong love, commitment and bring up children."

The Evangelical Alliance invited Christian Action Research & Education (CARE), relief and development agency, Tearfund, Spring Harvest conferences and Kingsway publishers to join together to commission the survey.

Shocking? One wonders which planet these good Evangelical Alliancers have been living on for the past twenty years. For the fact is that during that period the Church of England, and most of the protestant denominations have been rewriting their beliefs in the vain attempt to attract young people inside their doors: the most obvious field in which this has been the case is that of personal morality.

It should hardly need pointing out that the effect of this has been almost exactly the opposite of the one intended. Young people may be ill-disciplined, inconsiderate, imprudent or a whole number of other things but they certainly aren't stupid. Anyone who has the slightest acquaintance with the Old or New Testaments, with the history of the Church, indeed with Jesus Christ himself, must be able to see within five minutes that morality must come into the picture sooner or later. Of course in the last analysis Christianity is about Grace and not Law, but the road to the Promised Land runs past Sinai, and there is no convenient by-pass. Young people have no time for a faith which places no demands on them.

The biggest mistake was to imagine, as some people did in the '60s, that morality and faith could somehow be separated from one another. It was devoutly hoped that if people could only be helped to see what was in the best interests of Mankind they would somehow, by an irresistible magnetic attraction, be drawn towards it.

But this whole concept had one fatal flaw: It is encapsulated in the question, seldom asked openly but equally often entertained by the young intelligent mind: “Why should I concern myself overmuch with what's in the best interests of Mankind, especially if it runs contrary to my own best interests”.

A perfectly sensible question for any intelligent person to ask. The scale on which it was being thought about was, for a number of years, hidden by the inherent sense of decency and concern for others which many young people acquire as a result of growing up in a family which attaches significant importance to these virtues.

But the rot had set in, and we are now reaping the harvest which was sowed in the time of Generation-X and to a very great extent condoned, if not encouraged by their teachers.

The problem these teachers had stemmed from their cherished belief that (to quote Tennyson's Guinevere) “We needs must love the highest when we see it”. Unfortunately, as Guinevere and Arthur both discovered to their cost, it just doesn't work like that! Incidentally, it's worth pointing out that this particular quotation, coming, as it does, from the end of a tale of shocking marital infidelity and regal disloyalty, was hardly the best place to start the search for such a life-guiding principle.

It doesn't work because, as C.S. Lewis (who died in 1963) had pointed out only a short while before the belief became popular, however many statements we make in the indicative, we can never draw from them a single conclusion in the imperative. We can think of any number of sentences which begin with “I would be well advised to...” or “We strongly recommend that....” and still never be able to progress logically from there to “Do this” or “?Don't do that”

Imperatives are commands: “Do this in remembrance of me"; “Do not commit adultery”??; “Love your neighbour as yourself”; “Feed my sheep”.

In contrast to Commands, which are in the imperative, Statements, or Propositions as they are sometimes called, are in the indicative. They describe what is or is not the case. But logically and grammatically the two are as different as chalk and cheese.

“Smoking can seriously damage your health”; “Heroin is addictive”??. Both statements are perfectly true. Yet neither of them on its own can produce the conclusion “?Give up smoking!” or “Stop taking drugs!”.

Well, to begin with, as I said earlier, there was a residue of moral sense which ensured that many young people lived by the standards to which they had been brought up. If that had continued indefinitely, then those of us who were convinced that ultimately morality is based on faith, and both faith and morality are only realizable through obedience to imperatives, would have looked really silly. Mind you, we'd have been in good company, because we knew, as everyone had always known until the Enlightenment in the 17th and 18th Centuries started raising doubts in their minds, that God's commandments were something to be obeyed whether we they happened to suit our immediate purposes or not.

But we didn't have to wait long to be proved right. In place of the questions like “Is this right?”, “Is that wrong” came the WHIFIDO? Principle, which stands for “?What Happens If I Do/[Don't Do] that?. To which the natural answer is “Well, try it and see”?, with perhaps a cautionary “but be careful” thrown in for good measure.

Once again large tranches of the Church were wrong-footed. Instead of trying to educate their people to understand the difference between Right and Wrong is an absolute one, and how our relationship with God depends, to a large extent on being able to distinguish accurately between them, priests and pastors set about trying to convince themselves and those to whom they were ministering, that the matter of morals was not nearly as clear-cut as had previously been supposed.

They were tragically mistaken. Let's admit that there are always “hard cases”, as even Moses realised: matters which require a particular skill to judge accurately, upon which the whole science of casuistry (which literally means “case study”) which can be brought to bear where necessary; however, the vast majority of moral questions can be answered by using precepts which have been the common currency of most civilizations throughout the world and which have not altered by one jot for thousands of years.

It's not surprising, therefore, that those who have grown up in a society where moral confusion has been not just condoned but actually encouraged, should find themselves deeply perplexed and uncertain about what moral principles (if any) to apply to the decisions with which they are faced nearly every day of their lives. Even the language has been changed to make things less clear-cut.

People today talk about values where once they thought in terms of virtues. Now the difference between a virtue and a value is just this. Virtues are objective, and as such are recognized and applauded by everyone. The person who risks his life to save someone else, the husband or wife who faithfully nurses their spouse through some terminal illness, the parents of a disabled child who put that child's interests before their own are all recognized as practising a virtue. Values, by contrast, can be as many-fold as there are people to espouse them. One person will value success where another will value wealth; this man will look for happiness where that man wants power; Archibald will value serving his fellow-men where Zoe will be dedicate her life to the welfare of wild animals.

The problem is not, you will note, that the causes which they espouse or the values which they cherish are in any way unworthy. It's rather the absence of any sort of objective measuring-stick to enable us to decide between the conflicting claims of the values which we seek to promote. And between these conflicting claims, of course, there can be only one Arbiter, and that is God himself.

However, the most disturbing thing about the Report is its supposition that the answer lies in trying to rewrite the faith, and the moral laws which go with it. Look at what the Report says closely:

The survey confirms that this new attitude is a minefield for church leaders. Leaders find themselves caught in the dilemma of on the one hand trying to uphold the validity of marriage as the basis for monogamous heterosexual relations - but at the same time not wishing exclude the currently under-represented 20s and 30s age groups from their congregations.

"It is in this area that the biggest problems will be faced both by the church and the individuals concerned when those living together wish, say, to join (or even come) to church, or become believers," the report states.

To begin with, its assumption that truth is about “attitudes” is completely mistaken. My attitude towards anything or anyone is a glorious mixture of the objective and the subjective, mostly the latter. It's a statement of how I feel about something at a particular moment in my life. Thus my attitude towards my parents (or my school, or my business colleagues) depends, in part at least, on the kind of relationship I am presently enjoying with them.

But the actual truth about God cannot be seen to depend upon the attitude of the generation to whom that truth is being taught. Of course the imagery and the analogies which are employed in that teaching can, and will, and should vary. Indeed the great strides which our knowledge of the Universe and its contents has taken in the past two hundred years should be a welcome help, not a hindrance, towards helping people think about God, who can only be spoken of by analogy anyway. How incomparably richer our teaching becomes when, for instance, we know so much more about things like energy, power and force, rather than their being mysteries “beyond our ken”, and can use them to help people build up their image of God. The greater our knowledge the richer our source of imagery becomes.

Moreover, if it is true as the Report implies that the “currently under-represented 20s and 30s age groups” believe themselves to be “excluded” from our congregations, there is every reason to ask ourselves why this is so, and whether that exclusion is, as a matter of fact self-exclusion; or, if it isn't, whether there are practices or mannerisms or attitudes on our part to which they might legitimately take exception.

But if the truth, as one suspects, is that the manner of life which those young people have chosen to adopt, even if it is only because it's the current fashion among their contemporaries, is totally at variance with the way we suppose God to have ordained that our lives should be lived, then no amount of accommodation is going to make the slightest difference to their attitude. They may respect us for the courage of our convictions if we stand firm; towards the rather feeble and unconvincing attempts we may make to persuade ourselves that sin “doesn't matter so much after all” they will, quite rightly, show nothing but the deepest contempt.

“What Happens If I Do[n't]” is a well-trodden path to making the wrong decision. I seem to remember that the Fall had something to do with the outworking of that principle in practice!

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