This is definitely Dale Carrico time at our blog.

(hint: we read about 60 blogs overall but only one per day, so that we read a whole bunch of one-blog-related items in a bunch; so if you want to be covered in our blog with a recent item, you have to email us to be sure we see it).

Dale quotes the New York Times, who recently examined the dire straits of youth evangelizing in the U.S.:

“Despite their packed megachurches, their political clout and their increasing visibility on the national stage, evangelical Christian leaders are warning one another that their teenagers are abandoning the faith in droves.

“I’m looking at the data,â€? said Ron Luce, who… founded Teen Mania, a 20-year-old youth ministry, “and we’ve become post-Christian America, like post-Christian Europe. We’ve been working as hard as we know how to work — everyone in youth ministry is working hard — but we’re losing…â€?

Genuine alarm can be heard from Christian teenagers and youth pastors, who say they cannot compete against a pervasive culture of cynicism about religion, and the casual “hooking upâ€? approach to sex so pervasive on MTV, on Web sites for teenagers and in hip-hop, rap and rock music. Divorced parents and dysfunctional families also lead some teenagers to avoid church entirely or to drift away…

Over and over in interviews, evangelical teenagers said they felt like a tiny, beleaguered minority in their schools and neighborhoods.”

Dale then comments:

“They “feel” that way, of course, because it is absolutely true.

Needless to say, there are many Americans who maintain some form of religious or spiritual practice or belief. But in a secular society such beliefs are personalized or even aestheticized, and even those for whom spirituality is central to their identification will strongly and cheerfully distinguish the work of Belief from the work of Citizenship in their lives. We are conversational beings, both within and without, and our political commitments will often reflect our moral, ethical, instrumental, spiritual, and aesthetic commitments. But these inter-resonances, too, will be personal, partial, unpredictable. Collaborators in secular cultures will generally resist any imposition of the standards of or reduction to the terms of any one indispensable mode of social practice of warranted belief — be it scientific, moral, ethical, esthetic, or political — on any of the others.”