Moving Beyond the Shock Absorber - Part 6
Haight Ashbury district
Part six of a 10-part series from an article by Stuart Crawshaw that appeared in The Briefing in 2008 titled: Moving beyond the shock absorber: The place of youth ministry—past, present and future
New ideas
The Industrial Revolution of the 18th century created the modern age of the 20th century. The increasing use of machines and the movement of people from villages into cities led to new social arrangements that allowed the ideas of the Enlightenment to take firm hold in the West. Biblical ideas were vigorously defended from within the church, but were increasingly marginalized. As evangelicals debated secularism and emerging modern values, those values found a back door into the church through youth ministry.
After four cycles of youth ministry, the church had succeeded in becoming a modern institution. While it defended its pre-modern faith system, its expression of community had become modern. This expression in turn affected its value system. No longer was it necessary to have a village church from which to pass on the Bible from one generation to the next; now, the congregation could meet once a week on a Sunday in a style that suited their modern world.
This modern church was soon to be tested by another major quake. The 1960s created a second tremor of the same magnitude as the cultural upheaval of the original Industrial Revolution. Young people rejected modernism in favour of a new value system. Along with this, they rejected the church as a modernist institution. Youth ministry, again, was the church’s first response, in the form of the Jesus Movement.
The post-war economic boom
At the end of the Second World War, there was economic prosperity and the biggest baby boom in history. During this period, technology, again, dramatically transformed lifestyles. The car played a significant part, starting a new migration. The steam engine had caused a move from villages to the cities; now the car was the ready means for migrating from the cities to the suburbs. Once people live within walking distance from work, schools, church, shops and family; the car created a situation whereby people could live at a distance from their work, family or social support networks. People moved to the suburbs in droves.
Because of urban sprawl, Australia was now more in touch with the USA than Britain, as had been the case before the war. A symbol of post-war development in Australia was our country’s first home-built car, the FJ Holden. Every family, through its share in growing industrial-based wealth, aspired to own a car along with the great Australian dream: a home on a quarter-acre block in the suburbs, equipped with all the latest labour-saving consumables.
The changing social conditions were, in turn, another significant erosion of community. The Industrial Revolution eroded village life, however, in the cities, the extended family had remained relatively intact. But the car and the move to suburban living saw the nuclear family become the most common social unit. Despite increasing material prosperity in Australia, the sense of belonging to a community was further fractured.
This was all seen as progress at the time because it was accompanied by greater material prosperity. Sheltering under the American nuclear umbrella and sharing its technology and culture, Australia looked to the United States for leadership. The great cultural changes that would shake US society came to our shores as a necessary consequence.
The baby boomer youth quake
It was not long before the baby boomer generation began questioning the American dream of material prosperity. During the late 1940s and 50s, countercultural groups, philosophers and painters had begun to deconstruct Modernism. In other words, they pointed out the inconsistencies in a value system that promised happiness purely through economic prosperity. Now in the late 50s and 60s, young baby boomers began a revolution that, at its height, turned the modern the world upside.
The city of San Francisco featured. The Berkley campus of the University of California became a hotbed of student action—first, for civil rights, and then, for free speech. These protests were driven by a recognition that wealth-based success was not for everyone. They were picking up on issues of racial inequality highlighted earlier by the Beatniks from the 50s.
Rebellion was not restricted to student political action; other young baby boomers were questioning the status quo. From the beginning, rock ‘n’ roll music was viewed as dangerous by middle class white parents. At first, the new music was only recorded on black record labels and played on black radio. But soon white young people began tuning into the music late at night on their car radios. Again, technology was allowing new lifestyles to emerge. Young people did not have to listen to what their parents listened to on the radio at home; the transistor gave them a choice. Rock ‘n’ roll and, later, other music styles became significant disseminators of new youth cultures in America.
Rock ‘n’ roll had a broader appeal than student politics, and quickly defined a generation. But the ideas of the political activists influenced the words and message of the music. Young people embraced the new style and the emerging culture as their own. They had found a voice to challenge modernist and capitalist values, and an opportunity to establish their own ideas. New values regarding sex, drugs, style and lifestyle were broadly adopted by the generation.
By the end of the 1960s, young people everywhere were recreating American culture. The growing difference between the Boomers and their parents was being called ‘a generation gap’. The concept of ‘teenager’ had been emerging slowly over the past 100 years, but the rock ‘n’ roll generation was different. In the past, those in their teens had looked and sounded much like adults; now there was the most striking contrast ever between two successive generations.