God is Love

This is Part 2 in a series. Part one can be found here.

Last time, I ended on discussing the new, strange shift among young people towards orthodoxy. What is this shift and why are so many people moving towards it? Orthodox Catholicism is very different from the shallow “God is love” theology that has been taught for the last forty years.

A few weeks ago, I wandered into a generic Christian bookstore just to see what they have to parallel the great authors of Catholic history. I was sorely disappointed. Half of the store was made up of Bibles and Bible studies. The remainder of the store was made up of prayer books and books under the category of “Christian living.” Looking through some of these books, I realized just why mainline Protestantism has fallen. It’s a shallow and empty Faith, based entirely upon emotion. "If you don’t feel like you’re connecting with God, that’s okay," they say. "Just move on to the next church down the street and find God there."

Here we find the reason so many young people can’t take God seriously. They learn that God is just a feeling. “Just keep moving around until you’ve found God. I can’t tell you what He feels like, but you’ll know Him when you’ve found Him.”

This attitude is reflected in the way the culture goes about with love. “Just keep dating around until you find ‘the one.’ I can’t tell you when you’ve found him or her, but you’ll know them when you find them.” People try this and have their hearts broken time and time again. When human love has failed time and time again and young people can no longer feel it, what makes this divine love different? Either way, the person is numb to the love. No matter where he goes, he won’t feel the love.

Catholicism, though, is so much deeper. Unfortunately, nobody has gotten around to telling the young people this. The Catholicism taught in the general parish CCD classes revolves around the same “God is love” theology that American Protestantism brought to the world. Teachers are telling the children that God is merely an emotion that they may be able to find in other places. The children grow up in households with parents who have also been taught this theology, and at home, the feelings are just reinforced. The children learn from an early age that Catholicism is nothing special, we just have more boring services than the Methodists down the street.

Young people today are beginning to discover that this is false, though. There has been a small but growing trend of young people going out and claiming their faith as their own. They have decided to reject this shallow Christianity of Protestantism and are turning to embrace the richness of Catholic history. It has been noticed that young people are showing up in greater and greater numbers to the Latin Masses. I can say that as a Catholic young person, orthodoxy is becoming more and more popular. I have watched my friends grow to love the Catholic faith. Apologetics has become more and more popular among them. At the same time, a trend I have noticed among people more serious about their faith is the decreasing number of high school relationships. These young people are putting their faith into action. As they are taught that God is truly love, they begin to almost embrace the cliché. They learn to put their trust in the love of God rather than in the temporary feelings of relationships.

This is just the beginning of the trends among young people that I’ll be discussing next time.