It’s too bad that attention to the Gospel isn’t always as strong as it used to be.  Sermons don’t always break through the secular fog that seems to hover over most congregations.  The 1960s anarchists evolved into Generation X yuppies, but they didn’t want to let go of the sex, drugs, and iconoclastic lifestyles.  Everyone was having too much fun sinning.  It’s hard to recognize a modern day Sodom and Gomorrah when it’s tricked up in electronic luxuries.

     Sure, some people still go to church on Sundays, but they watch television the rest of the time.  Yes, there are still families, but most of them are dysfunctional compared to the past.  They’re not very durable either.  Divorce is rampant, and the church quietly hopes that repeated marriages will finally take hold.  Won’t happen.  The sins of one generation will be visited upon the next.

       Divorce, contraceptives, and abortion all spring from sexual hedonism, but couched differently.  Gay lifestyles, too, though publicly promoted as being more respectable.  Good thing that liberal self-righteous is handy to make experimentation seem more than it really is.  John Lennon is a convenient feel-good bromide, as is pop culture in general, including its incessant campaign to promote and validate itself.

      In her article “The Divorce Generation,” Susan Gregory Thomas sees that society is helplessly committed to runaway divorce rates and the promotion of broken, fragmented families, now seen as normal.  Christians need to study the problem more than they have been.  Who else will?  Thomas suggests that intervention won’t be easy because many Christians have already internalized and accepted the 1960s values that they should be challenging:

     My husband and I were as obvious as points on a graph in a Generation X marriage study. We were together for nearly eight years before we got married, and even though statistics show that divorce rates are 48% higher for those who have lived together previously, we paid no heed.

     We also paid no heed to his Catholic parents, who comprised one of the rare reassuringly unified couples I’d ever met, when they warned us that we should wait until we were married to live together. As they put it, being pals and roommates is different from being husband and wife. How bizarrely old-fashioned and sexist! We didn’t need anything so naïve or retro as “marriage.” Please. We were best friends.