Beyond Boomerism

Younger generations have to unshackle themselves from being overly wedded to Boomer thinking.

Doug Ponder wrote an interesting piece about the state of evangelical gender theology. He called an essay I wrote on this topic a few years ago “a shot heard round the world of evangelical gender debates.” I hadn’t realized it caused such a stir.

My original piece argued that the evangelical approach to gender known as “complementarianism” was a Baby Boomer theology that would die with the Boomers.

Newsletter #30: Complementarianism Is a Baby Boomer Theology That Will Die With the Baby Boomers

In my piece I noted the profound influence the early cohort of Baby Boomers - ones I define culturally as being born 1942-1954 - has had on our society. Complementarianism was mostly created by this group in the 1980s and 90s, with John Piper (b. 1946) and Wayne Grudem (b. 1948) being particularly influential.

I have found that if you critique any of the major evangelical Boomer figures, you can expect to get a lot of blowback. Some of them are revered to the point that younger pastors and leader have explicitly said to me that they would never publicly disagree with those older figures because they have too much respect for them to do so.

Not only are we living in the shadow of the Boomers because they still hold many of the formal and informal levers of power in our society. We are living in a Boomer world because younger generations have implicitly internalized the superiority of the Boomers and their points of view.

But the Boomers themselves were not like this at an early age. In fact, they were the first to rebel against their parents and elders. The original “generation gap” was between Boomers and their parents. The very young Boomers had such a high regard for themselves that they embraced lines like, “Never trust anyone over 30.”

Consider the way Tim Keller - as a college student - forthrightly judged older generations of Christians and found them wanting. This quote is from Collin Hansen’s book Timothy Keller: His Spiritual and Intellectual Formation.

It marked the first time I [Keller] realized that most older white adults in my life were telling me things that were dead wrong. The problem was not just a “few troublemakers.” Black people did have a right to demand the redress and rectifying of many wrongs. Although I had grown up going to church, Christianity began to lose its appeal to me when I was in college. One reason for my difficulty was the disconnect between my secular friends who supported the Civil Rights Movement, and the orthodox Christian believers who thought that Martin Luther King, Jr. was a threat to society. [emphasis added]

Keller also assembled his own approach from an eclectic array of influences. He had the discernment to separate what was useful to him from what was not useful to him (or even wrong) in older people’s approaches.

You know what I call his approach? Smart. We should be imitating him in this.

Similarly, complementarian gender theology was an explicit rejection of the existing conservative Christian approaches to gender. John Piper once said as much himself with regards to the previous “traditional” approach. Piper and Grudem titled their book Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood. The very name suggests that the previous generation had lost it such that it needed to be recovered. Sociologist James Davison Hunter, in his academic book Evangelicalism: The Coming Generation, also noted that the strand of evangelical gender thinking that became complementarianism was different from the one which continued to hold to the gender roles in place prior to second wave feminism.

Again, think about the incredible Boomer self-confidence involved in believing that they had rediscovered a Biblical truth that previous generations had lost.

Following generations have been much less willing to assert themselves in this way. And when they do, their attempts are not treated as legitimate in the way that the Boomers’ were.

I’ll return again to the case of Millennial pastor and theologian James Wood, whose very winsome article about the continued applicability of Tim Keller’s ministry model to today’s changed cultural conditions received incredible blowback. This included what were, in my opinion, actually slanderous statements about what he said made by some bigtime people.

What’s interesting is that so many of Wood's’ harshest critics weren’t Boomers, but younger generation leaders who treated him as if he’d just committed lèse-majesté against the king.

It’s very clear that a lot of people think Keller - or Piper and potentially others - are beyond all criticism. Even if they say some type of criticism might in theory be valid, it never seems to work out that way in practice. They treat these Boomer leaders better than Catholics treat the Pope. You can get treated as if you’ve committed blasphemy if you dare merely to disagree with one of them.

Younger generations need to unshackle themselves from the Boomer worldview. The Boomers had a lot of great qualities about them. Their self-confidence allowed them to build institutions and movements. Their work ethic has been incredible.

But they aren’t perfect. Their self-confidence can go too far. The Boomers, the first to reject the views and even moral standing of their parents’ generation, continue to believe they themselves got everything basically right. They usually don’t accept that any of the criticisms directed at them or believe younger people’s different ideas contain much truth or usefulness.

They, after having believed they knew better than their parents, often refuse to put trust in the next generation. We see this most obviously in the fact that they won’t go away, continuing to cling to power and declining to give younger generations the platform that older generations gave them. Donald Trump’s line that, “I alone can do it” sums up the attitude.

Boomers are also generationally solipsistic. That is, they lack the empathy that allows them to understand how younger generations see the world. They don’t believe younger people’s perspectives on their own lives are valid. How often to you hear Boomers say to some Generation Z guy, “Yeah, you are getting screwed over” as opposed to dispensing some “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” advice or “when I was your age…” lecture? All of us are like this to some extent, but Boomers take it to the next level. Boomers honestly cannot comprehend why younger people might think about the world the way they do. In fact, Boomers are not infrequently horrified by what they see coming from younger generations.

Younger generations need to take a step back and acquire more critical distance from these figures. As with what Keller saw in his forebears, some of what that generation of evangelical leaders believed about gender is just plain wrong.

This is one reason why the manosphere ate the church’s lunch. It should be embarrassing to church leaders that someone like Jordan Peterson became the person young men look to to explain the Bible to them. People pay Peterson over $100 a seat to get to hear him give sermons on Genesis. Similarly, when millions of young men tune into podcasters but not the church, that should prompt some self-examination. But it never seems to do so.

The Boomers who created complementarianism were right to see that 1950s gender roles were culturally contingent, not something taken directly from the Bible. But you you know what? Boomer gender thinking and theology is also culturally contingent.

Complementarianism is not the faith once for all delivered to the saints. It’s a product of the the 1980s and 90s (drawing on currents from the 1970s). They didn’t get the term “servant leader” from the Bible. That phase was coined in 1970 by a business executive named Robert Greenleaf. Greenleaf didn’t get it from the Bible either, but the essay where he coined it does cite people like Herman Hesse, Albert Camus, Machiavelli, and Paulo Freire (among others).

This doesn’t mean that the Boomers got everything wrong or that complementarinism was not useful for its era. But those people in the 1950s didn’t get everything wrong either.

The key is, neither group got everything right. It’s obvious that evangelical Boomers had a thin anthropology of gender, took an essentially “Biblicist” approach to their theology, and have an incorrect model of intersexual dynamics.

I’m not here to give a point by point rebuttal of complementarianism. Rather, I want to stress the first step: it’s time to free yourself from blind adherence to Boomer figures and teaching. They didn’t blindly follow the people who came before them, that’s for sure.

Many Boomers were solid people with a lot of good ideas. But they weren’t perfect. Their ideas certainly weren’t perfect. And most importantly, their ideas were mostly tuned to their own cultural sensibilities and the conditions of a cultural era in America that is no more.

We actually do need to learn from the Boomers - less from what they said but what they did and how they approached the world. It’s time for new generations to create their own ideas and approaches tuned to their cultural realities and the conditions of this age.

Younger generations won’t get everything right either, of course. We should have the humility that the Boomers lacked. If not, then we will lose the moral authority to speak into the lives of generations after us. This is what happened to the Boomers. Unable to admit to have gotten anything wrong, or that the world might have fundamentally changed in ways that call for new approaches, younger people have tuned out and even become actively hostile towards the Boomers.

The evangelical world needs serious emerging thinkers and leaders to dig into the big issues of the day and update the church’s approaches the way the Boomers updated gender theology 30-40 years ago. But that won’t happen unless younger thinkers are able to break out of their captive mindset to Boomer leaders and their ideas.