Confessional Mobility: The Search for New Boundaries
Johnny Seel
April 1, 1995
Peter Berger reminds us that "The 'wisdom of the world' today always has a sociological address." What each of us puts forward as assumed "wisdom" frequently says more about each of us than it does the topic at hand. We are all more culturally defined by our history, class, and educational levels than we are comfortable to admit publicly. All of our choices are made in context.
In this light a sensitivity to "generations" is a valuable tool both for cultural analysis as well as spiritual faithfulness. One of the ongoing challenges of every follower of Jesus is to be aware of but not captive to the spirit of the age-including the patterns of one's own generational cohort.
In their 1991 bestseller Generations: The History of America's Future, 1584-2069, William Strauss and Neil Howe propose that a generation is defined as "a cohort group whose length approximates the span of a phase of life and whose boundaries are fixed by peer personality." The definition has two elements: The length of time required to produce offspring-approximately 18-24 years-and peer personality, the shared patterns of behavior and belief that dominate a group born during the same period of time.
Describing a Collective Pilgrimage
One of the patterns that seems to characterize believers among Generation X (those Americans born between 1961-1981) is a sense of collective pilgrimage, the movement from one faith community or tradition to another. Catholics are becoming Pentecostals, evangelicals are migrating to Catholicism, and Anglicans are in conversation with the Orthodox. Traditional lines of religious demarcation seem no more relevant today than the political labels of a two-party system. As soon as one takes up a label, one finds he or she immediately ...
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