I got up at 6 in the morning to watch Lady Diana Spencer marry Prince Charles

Sixteen years later, I watched her funeral three times in succession in one day, starting at 4 in the morning (I was up anyway with a baby who didn’t sleep).

I have tried to expain to my daughters the importance of Princess Diana (who was called “Lady Di” for years), insisting that they will never, ever understand both how loved she was but also how well-known she was. Culture is fragmented now in a way that it wasn’t then; we all saw the same media, and Diana dominated all of it.

After my conversation with Kristin Du Mez last week on the Bare Marriage podcast about her book Live, Laugh, Love (I talked about some of the critiques in my Substack last Friday), I’ve been musing more about the differences between Gen X and millennial and Gen Z women, and how we got where we are. And I’d like to talk about a few cultural forces (trends?) that younger people may not truly realize, and that I think got us where we are today in the church.

Gen X had a monoculture

Everybody watched MASH. Everybody watched Mary Tyler Moore. Everybody watched Cheers. Everybody definitely watched The Cosby Show. There were really only three networks, and people had their favourite shows, but we all knew these cultural references.  Different generations could all experience the MASH finale at the same time, and talk about it at work and school the next day, and people could all relate.

Because of that it was actually harder to push the super conservative, tradwife type stuff. Sure, it got pushed in fundamentalist churches, but these were the exception. In most churches, the women attending were also watching The Cosby Show, where Clair was a lawyer. They were watching Murphy Brown and they’d watched Mary Tyler Moore. If you were fundamentalist, the only way to keep people from being indoctrinated into equal rights was to tell people they couldn’t watch TV at all.

And some did, and that certainly did produce some fundamentalists. But most people were going to watch TV, and the message from TV in the 70s and 80s was very much about women’s empowerment and racial equality. Girls growing up in the 80s were being taught constantly through media that they were equal; that they could dream big; that the sky was the limit.

Now, certainly there were political movements that were against feminism, but these were largely confined to the political realm (think the fights against the equal rights amendment). The same people fighting against the ERA had daughters watching shows like Moonlighting or Who’s the Boss where a woman was the boss.

And so women in evangelical churches in the 80s were often more exposed to egalitarian ideas than they are today.

Today people can be culturally indoctrinated into tradwife culture in a way they couldn’t before

As media has fragmented, and especially since the rise of social media, we don’t have a monoculture anymore. People can be pushed into subcultures, and then spend their entire life in subcultures. So Gen X women may have grown up in churches and loved Jesus, but also were taught by culture that women were equal. This wasn’t ever a case we had to explicitly make; it was baked into the culture.

So we took our sons and daughters to church, expecting them to have the same experiences we did. You love Jesus, but you also believe that women are equal. And many midlife women are taken by surprise when their kids, or the friends of their kids, turn out to be so sexist. Because older women could co-exist in church spaces and not be sexist; we didn’t really realize how life has changed for younger women.

(Caveat: I realize that many Gen X women are heavily conservative; this appears to be more of an American phenomenon than elsewhere, and even in the U.S., it appears to be focused in certain regions).

Sexual content in media was WILD for Gen X

While we had television teaching about equal rights, those rights really were only about the workplace.

When it came to sex, the sexual content in stuff was WILD, and so, so much more explicit than anything you’d see today. I think there’s this assumption that sexually there’s this trajectory where everything is always getting more explicit and worse, but that’s actually not the case. What’s happened today is that the graphic sexual content has largely been confined to certain areas of media (think HBO shows or porn), while with Gen X it was far more ubiquitous.

The teenage movies we had almost all had nudity in them. Almost without exception. You couldn’t watch a movie aimed at teens without seeing toplessness. Boobs were everywhere. We had big movies that were all about how to get girls into bed, like this was the main aim. We had Revenge of the Nerds (lots of boobs on display in that one too!). All the big action movies had gratuitous nudity too. Seriously, you couldn’t get away from it.

One of the most fun parts of being a mom to Millennials & Gen Z (my daughter Katie bridges those generations) was the AMAZING movies for teens that we didn’t have. Hunger Games? Pirates of the Caribbean? Even all the Jane Austen adaptations! We didn’t have that for Gen X.

And then there’s the coming of age movies and books that we all devoured, that looking back were seriously creepy. Thornbirds, where a priest basically ruins a girl’s life starting when she’s 10, and it’s supposed to be romantic? Blue Lagoon with Brooke Shields, where it’s all about these kids who get shipwrecked and discover their sexuality? And don’t forget the Flowers in the Attic books (how did anyone ever think that was a good idea?).

Yes, there’s lots of sexual content available for young people today, but it’s in places where the point of it is the sexual content. For Gen X, you saw sexual content when you just wanted to see a movie. 

And I just wonder how formative that was. So many of the gross guys talking about sex in the pulpit today grew up on those movies as teens. They watched Revenge of the Nerds. They didn’t see epic movies like Lord of the Rings until they were older; the formative stuff was all about sex.

Parenting was quite hands off

Boomer parents simply weren’t that involved. Even the stay at home moms. I’ve seen time studies that show that today’s working moms spend more time each day interacting with their kids than stay at home moms did a generation ago. When we grew up, the idea was that you played on your own and largely left your parents alone (this is not a commentary on my own mom who read to me a ton and coloured with me and took me to parks!).

But as teens most of us had part-time jobs, something that isn’t as prevalent for teens today. We travelled the city by ourselves, those of us who lived with public transit. We looked after ourselves after school, earned our own money, and were quite independent much earlier, because we could afford to be in a way that is not as true today.

And so Gen X relied on peer groups and culture far more than other generations have.

Gen X kids growing up resembled each other more than Gen Z or Millennial kids growing up. Today there’s such a gap between those raised by involved parents and those not; between those with money and those without; between families that have rules about screens and those who don’t. So we have much more defined subcultures and stratification than we did in my generation.

What does this mean about church culture today?

Putting all of this together, here are just a few thoughts I have about conservative evangelical church culture today, where Gen X pastors make up the majority of the pastorship:

• Pastors are more likely to assume their experiences are the norm. They grew up in a monoculture, and so they assume that those in the pews will also see things the same way they do. That’s why so many pastors are so thrown when younger people especially reject the stuff they teach because they find it not true to reality. There only is ONE reality, after all!
• Pastors are primed to see gratuitous sex content as not that big a deal. Our generation grew up with the objectification of women everywhere. Even as women made progress in the workplace, the sexual objectification intensified. So to sexually objectify women seems normal, and women complaining about it makes them seem like prudes. Certainly men can complain about how women dress; but for women to complain about being sexualized seems like women complaining against the nature of things.
• Pastors are more likely to see social media and other forms of media as a threat to their dominance. The idea of multiple ideas competing for attention is not normal for our generation, and shutting it down seems like the best course of action. And so railing against social media and trying to control the media people watch and listen to will be an increasing part of their efforts.
• Pastors are more likely to point to women as the problem with society. When we were growing up, sure women had more opportunities, but men still had their dinner made for them. They weren’t expected to change diapers or interact much with the kids. So pastors saw both women work and do everything at home, largely without compaining or making a big issue out of it. As women start to speak up about how unfairly they’re treated, it seems as if women are just being selfish, and aren’t strong like women of the past. What they may fail to see is that even though 1970s and 1980s culture opened up the workplace, everything else remained the same. And women have always been overworked and tired.

I do believe that millennials and Gen Z will change the church–by splitting it

Millennials and Gen Zs are far more comfortable with the idea that there are multiple competing worldviews or opinions on things, and far more comfortable finding their own tribe, rather than trying to fit together with people who believe all different things.

Gen X and Boomers tried to paper over problems; millennials and Gen Z are more likely to call them out in the open, and say that they need to live with authenticity.

For the church, that will likely mean a splitting that will increase in momentum. I do believe that while previous church splits have largely been over doctrinal issues, future ones will be more over power and justice. Churches that believe all different things about baptism and the Holy Spirit will cling together based on whether or not they see Christianity as a way love others or as a way to cement power over others. Right now those two groups co-exist in churches and denominations; it’s not likely they will in the future.

We’ll likely see Western Christianity fracture even more, but hopefully out of that fracturing something else will come that will focus more on Jesus and not on preserving culture or power.

I don’t think Gen X can lead that. I think millennials and Gen Z can. And I’m excited to see what they do!

What do you think are the big differences between Gen X and millenials? How do you think this will influence the church? Let’s talk in the comments!