Becoming the Great Us: From Me to Thee

People who know such things—social psychologists, culture watchers and historians—have referred to Millennials (the generation born after 1981) as potentially the greatest generation since, well, “the Greatest Generation,”comparing favorably to the crop of people that pulled the United States out of the Great Depression and carried the country through World War II. Step aside, Boomers and Xers, and let the healing begin.

Unfortunately, they were saying these things about Millennials sometime late in the last millennium. More recently, they’ve changed their tune to less apocalyptic, more pessimistic labels: “The Dumbest Generation,” “Generation Me” and “the Entitlement Generation.” What a difference a decade makes.

In reality, of course, self-absorption is the kind of problem that extends well beyond any one generation. The 1970s, when Boomers were getting their first jobs and Xers were learning to burp, were referred to as the “Me Decade,” and philosophers and theologians throughout history have recognized narcissism, or superbia (self-absorption), as one of the seven deadly sins. So college students acting entitled or inordinately prideful or self-obsessed can’t be blamed on the bottled water their parents drank during the 1980s; the blame belongs square on the shoulders of the human condition. G. K. Chesterton made it as clear as he did unavoidable: “The problem with the world,” he wrote in response to a particularly self-important question, “is me.” And by that he didn’t mean him. He meant us—all of us.

So the social psychologists making these accusations of the Millennials have their own baggage to contend with. Nevertheless, Millennials would benefit by rejecting the defense mechanisms of their parents—a steadfast cynicism that deconstructs even measured and constructive critique rather than giving the matter some thought—and reconnecting with their earlier ancestors from the mid-twentieth century. Generation Me, with a little circumspection, could become Generation Thee: a people taken not with itself but with God, whose agenda is not do-more-get-more but “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done.”

It’s a big step for a whole crop of people to make, but not so big as one might imagine, and not so unique as the culture watchers might suppose.

There are, actually, a number of significant parallels between the age of Y2K and the era of WW2. Both generations will be defined in history by profound events of human violence: for the Greatest Generation, the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Holocaust and the bloodiest war ever, which culminated in the explosion of two atomic bombs. For the Millennials, mass school shootings, protracted wars in the Middle East and two planes flying into the two towers of the World Trade Center in New York.

Both generations inherited a volatile economy and experienced profound technological advances—the dawn of the television era and the nuclear age for our grandparents, and our own entrance into the bio-tech century and the digital age. Both saw significant cultural developments in music—jazz and rock for our elders, hip hop and house for us—and both witnessed new considerations of how the Christian faith is to be practiced and handed down.

Much noise is made today about the Emergent conversation and the new monasticism and other streams of renewal or seeds of destruction, depending on your perspective. Yet there’s a sense in which these experiments in Christian piety are reminiscent of how self-conscious fundamentalists in the 1940s began to identify themselves as “neo-evangelicals” and launched massive innovative movements: Billy Graham’s crusades, Christianity Today, Campus Crusade, the Urbana Student Missions Convention. The Greatest Generation, one could argue, was great not simply because it delivered the country from the Great Depression or because it helped to deliver the world from the racist, fascist powers that threatened to destroy it. It was great, in a sense, because it took Christianity more seriously than it took itself.

Thomas Merton and Dietrich Bonhoeffer both came of age and wrote seminal works during the Depression and the Great War. Each had ties both to Europe, which suffered the evils of war directly and persistently, and the United States, which entered its maturity as a global power even as it stayed relatively safe on the other side of the ocean. Bonhoeffer chose to leave New York and return to Germany, where he offered a prophetic witness against the Nazis that ultimately cost him his life and continues to shape the church today. Merton chose to enter the contemplative life in a monastery in Kentucky, where his profound insights about the times and the human condition percolated and ultimately gave spiritual direction to a generation and beyond on any number of new frontiers. As differently as their lives played out, they make appropriate patron saints for the Greatest Generation, and their insights can continue to shape us as we undertake the journey from Gen-Me to Gen-Thee.

The pieces are already in place for the journey: a willingness to ask questions of the Christian faith while remaining fiercely devoted to it, a commitment to stay in step with a broader culture that is undeniably in flux and unknowingly in need of wisdom, and a real sense that we are witnessing history every day just by waking up. These realities place real demands on us—not least of which the urgency of prayer and of action.

Merton, as we might expect of a monk, saw prayer as the path to responsible action; “The man who prays,” he tells us, “stands receptive before the world. He no longer grabs but caresses, he no longer bites, but kisses.” Meanwhile Bonhoeffer sees action of the most profound sort as inherent to any conversation with God: “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.” Taken together, these patrons offer a path through our own confusing times, beyond the self-absorption that never ceases to tempt us into a discipleship that begins with our death and ends with the kiss of eternal life.