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Beavis and Butt-Head Get Saved
By Thomas G. Long

"American Christians ought to be scared as hell." This remark, the religion editor of a weekly news the end of a long, wandering telephone conversation in which he and I had been ambling, like tourists at Gettysburg, over the battleground of contemporary American Christianity. We had surveyed the scenes of a number of skirmishes-the hand-to hand combat of Southern Baptists, the abortion clashes of Roman Catholics, the mounting bitterness about clergy misconduct seemingly everywhere, the struggle over sexual values among Protestants, the crossing of swords over declining membership and strategies for church growth, the firefights over feminism-just to name a few.

There was some scary stuff there; we spotted bitter battles underway all over the place. However, it was none of these more obvious conflicts that prompted the journalist's "scared-as-hell" warning; indeed, he had in mind something far more alarming than church quarrels. American Christians should be frightened, he claimed, because the chain linking the generations in the Christian community seems to be breaking apart. American Christians ought to be terrified, he said, because "little Christians are simply not growing up to be big Christians any more."

He is right, of course. There is perhaps no more distressing failure of the American church, especially mainstream moderate-to-liberal Protestantism, than its seeming inability to pass on what matters most-its faith and life-even to its own youth. This is not a new problem, certainly. Biblical scholar Michael Fishbane has observed that implicit in the famous recital formula of Deuteronomy ("When your children ask you in time to come, 'What is the meaning of the decrees and the statutes and the ordinances that the Lord our God has commanded you'. . ."-Deut. 6:20) is the perennial tension between the older and younger generations in the religious community. The youth's question, in effect, can be paraphrased, "What is all this stuff that God has commanded you?" The text invites the older generation to respond to this "you language" with "we language," recounting the faith narrative in a way that incorporates each new generation into the story ("We were slaves in Egypt. . ."). It is a

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"supreme and recurrent" biblical theme, notes Fishbane, to transform uninvolved children "from 'distemporaries' to contemporaries." ¹

It has never been easy to beckon our children to the life of faith; even the ancients frankly recognized that. Generational tension, resistance, and separation are expected and recurrent features of the process, and no cause for surprise or alarm. To borrow Fishbane's terms, the scoff of youth "What is all this stuff?" may be "recurrent," but the task of summoning each new wave of young people to the adventure of faith is, nonetheless, "supreme."

But in our time, my journalist friend was warning, something has gone wrong. The time-honored process by which youth move through protest and interrogation to mature discipleship seems, in many cases, to have derailed. It is impossible to hide the tact that fewer and fewer Christian communities are able-or perhaps willing-to speak with confidence and effectiveness the kind of generationally embracing narrative called for in Deuteronomy. Thus, fewer and fewer "little Christians" are growing up to be "big Christians," and, according to my friend, we "ought to be scared as hell."

But not everyone is trembling. Some say that the drift of young people away from the church is part of the natural rhythm of religious development and, thus, no cause for profound concern. The twenty-somethings, the so-called "Generation X," so absent from religious life, are simply off somewhere working out their identities. Give them some time and a little patience and they will show up again at the church door as maturing thirty-somethings, with children in tow, scrubbed and ready for church school.

Maybe, maybe not. Church membership data are ambiguous and notoriously difficult to interpret, but some of the evidence suggests that the majority of the church's youth walk out the door never to return. Even those who do come back often do so less as pilgrims and more as consumers, with a tepid, self-serving, product-oriented, view of religion. In this issue of THEOLOGY TODAY, three sociologists of religion report on a study in which they tracked the religious histories of 500 "baby boomers" who had been confirmed as young people in the Presbyterian Church (USA). They found that about half of this study group are now essentially "unchurched" and that the most prominent theological viewpoint among them-both "churched" and "unchurched"-is an amalgam of somewhat vague religious attitudes that the researchers have named "lay liberalism."

Lay liberals, they discovered, are broad but not deep, long on tolerance but short on loyalty. They channel surf across the religious spectrum of American life, selecting those options that match their lifestyles and meet their personal wants. Congregations that produce desirable "products" attract these "boomers," but, as the research team reports, "when the

¹ Michael Fishbane, Text and Texture: Close Readings of Selected Biblical Texts (New York: Schocken Books, 1979), p. 82.

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commodity is no longer needed or if it is poorly produced, boomers will shop elsewhere."

To be sure, some Christian congregations have attempted to mold their program and mission to fit the expectations of these "lay liberals." Many suburban churches hum with a wide variety of through-the-week activities, all focused on the various needs of "boomers"-parenting classes, support groups, exercise programs, and the like. The larger and more successful of these congregations become something like religious shopping malls with designer boutiques aimed at every taste.

On the one hand, this approach seems obviously superficial and even destructive to the character of the Christian faith-a long way indeed from "pick up your cross and follow me." On the other hand-and more charitably, perhaps-it is a vast and risky experiment in evangelism, an attempt to run halfway down the road with the ring, the robe, and the sandals toward a once-disaffected younger generation now slowly making its way home. Time will tell.

In the meantime, however, there is a growing recognition that it is not enough for the community of faith to wait around for the "boomers" to drift back. More and more, there is a deepening awareness that a "boomer"-oriented program of faith formation is, at best, making up for lost time and that opportunities to help shape the faith of young people are being squandered every day.

Conventional wisdom holds that there are three broad phases in religious commitment: There is childhood, a pliable and receptive age when religious instruction can and should be given; there is mature adulthood, when people, given the right incentives, can be persuaded to take on the responsibilities of institutional church life. In between childhood and adulthood, there is the vast wasteland of adolescence and young adulthood, a time when most people wander, or run, away from their religious roots. The most that a community of faith can do in this middle period is to wait patiently, to leave people alone in their season of rebellion, smiling with the knowledge that, by the time these rebels arrive at their thirties, they will probably be back in the pews and may well be heading up the Christian education committee.

This conventional wisdom is wrong, a relic of Christendom. Far from being a time when the community of faith should back away and grow silent, adolescence, with all of its untamed energies and protests, is a moment most ripe for religious decision-making, a time when the church should issue its most direct and challenging call to faith. Far from simply serving pizzas and chirping blandly, "We're standing with you in your struggle," the church, to the contrary, should boldly call its youth to -dare we say it?-a heroic form of faith.

The word "heroic," Ernest Becker reminded us in The Denial of Death, makes us blush. The word seems too big, too romantic, too triumphalistic. But our embarrassment, observed Becker, cannot conceal the truth that to strive to be a hero-to have one's life rise above the mediocre, really to count for something extraordinary, to outshine death, to be capable of the

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highest generosity and self-sacrifice-is what we most deeply need and want. ²

That brings us to two of America's more visible adolescent anti-heros: Beavis and Butt-Head. This cartoon teenaged duo have become the stars of Music Television (MTV), arguably the culture's most powerful and pervasive medium of communication with young adults (MTV's target audience is twelve- to thirty-four-year-olds). The "Beavis and Butt-Head" show is a house of mirrors, a subtle piece of irony, since viewers presumably sit on the couch and tune in MTV in order to see Beavis and Butt-Head sitting on the couch watching MTV. The pair crack smutty jokes, make animal-like snorts and snickers, and frequently mutter, "That sucks." Phyllis Zagano, writing in a recent issue of America, deemed Beavis and Butt-Head to be . . .

… the cartoon representations of everything that can possibly go wrong with an adolescent boy. The half-hour episodes … show the pair at their undeveloped best: telling very stupid jokes, behaving like idiots in the back of their high school classes, and masturbating while they watch rock video on MTV. ³

Public commentary on "Beavis and Butt-Head" has, quite naturally, been overwhelmingly negative, primarily on the assumption this undynamic duo serve as sinister role models, that youth will somehow imitate their anti-social behavior (indeed, recently, when a young child started a fire in the manner of a similar scene in "Beavis and Butt-Head," MTV officials sought to deflect public protest by moving the show to a later time slot).

However. most fans of "Beavis and Butt-Head" probably stand little chance of imitating their behavior. These viewers are not potential arsonists, car thieves, reform school inmates, or even strong candidates for high school detention hall. Indeed, my guess is that "Beavis and Butt-Head" finds most of its audience among typical suburban high school and college students well on their way to commonplace and respectable adult lives.

For such people, "Beavis and Butt-Head" does not lure them into unconventional behavior. To the contrary, it protects the conventionality of their lives by warding off threats from two directions. On the one side, Beavis and Butt-Head are such outrageous, anti-social jerks, they provide comic and moral reassurance to nervous young people. I may have wild urges, a viewer will think, but those idiots act on them. In this regard, they serve the same social scapegoating function for teenagers as humor directed toward the unfortunate class "nerd."

On the other side, though, Beavis and Butt-Head constantly attack the heroic, in Becker's sense, wherever they see it. Whenever anyone in their environment stands out, takes a risk, ventures off the beaten path to offer

² Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (New York: The Free Press, 1973), pp. 4-7.
³ Phyllis Zagano, "Beavis and Butt-Head, Free Your Minds!" America (March 5, 1994), p. 6.

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a gesture of wisdom or generosity, or even dares to dress outside the code, the verdict is swiftly pronounced: "That sucks." This functions to sharpen the viewers' cynicism so that it can deflate any such urges to step outside the bounds, especially to respond to real-life calls to heroism, internal or external. Beavis and Butt-Head work hard to make the world safe for mediocrity. Viewers can come away reassured that they are neither in danger of being pushed out of the pack as nerds nor summoned to stride out as heroes. The crime of "Beavis and Butt-Head" is not that it is anti-social but that it is so blandly and cynically bourgeois.

No wonder young people in our culture fight strenuously against the heroic. The call to heroism must be resisted by them precisely because it is so dangerously compelling to them and so potentially costly. They take refuge in cynical pop-art like "Beavis and Butt-Head" because it shields them from the strong winds that would blow them into the risky and adventurous sea. The church should not choose this moment to serve them another slice of pizza and inquire whether they have decided to be a dentist or a vet; it should call them out of the harbor and into the open sea, into the wind-swept, costly, sacrificial faith adventure of a lifetime.

We remember with embarrassment, perhaps, the youth conferences of a previous day in which insistent speakers did just that, pressing on their youthful hearers the claims of Christ, the needs of the "missionary fields," the urgent call to "full-time Christian service." These speakers were often naive, generally culturally myopic and even imperialistic, and usually sentimental. But they were seized by a vision that faithful people are called to extraordinary lives of kindness and service, and they were unashamed to announce to young people that God calls them not to blandness but to heroics.

Ernest Becker closes his great book with the thought that heroics finally comes down to self-offering, that the most we human beings can do is to fashion ourselves into something of noble purpose to be placed into the confusion of life-to make ourselves into an offering, an offering finally to God. Human beings as an offering to the world and to God? Beavis and Butt-Head would say, "That sucks." The danger is that our young people will find out that the church agrees.