The End of Relevance
Andy Crouch
January 1, 2003
Farewell, Generations X and Y. Adios, Millennials. Ma'a salâma, postmodernity. Algebraic symbols of the unknown, feeble attempts to draw meaning from the turning of a few zeros on the Western odometer, epochal placeholders, your usefulness—already fading long before 11 September—is past. We are no longer, as Richard John Neuhaus put it so trenchantly this week, "on a hedonistic holiday from history." History is back. And we're all in it together. If there is one lesson the church can learn from 11 September, it's the futility of trying to be relevant to the culture. How many PowerPoint presentations on the characteristics of—take your pick—"postmodern culture," of "young people today," of "what seekers are looking for" are going to be dragged to the Trash icon in the next few months? The ill-fated attempt to move from description of culture to prediction always eventually founders on the sheer contingency of human life, the refusal of history to be anything but a random walk. From the length of hemlines to the list of things that "everybody knows," culture always zags when the experts think it will zig. It's happened thousands of times before—from the Babylonian juggernaut rolling into Jerusalem in 587 BCE to the five-week roll of the dice that gave us our current president. On 11 September, it happened again. Shortly before an airplane crashed into the Pentagon a few miles from where I sat toying with the remains of an oversized banana muffin, I had said to a colleague with a perfectly straight face, "Like most people my age, I have very few real heroes." Oh, I was a Gen Xer straight out of central casting—quick to see the flawed human core of every noble endeavor, emphatically including ...
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