This is Part 1 of a series of posts on this topic.
All throughout the media, there are television shows, movies, and songs that are enjoyed by teens everywhere. Most of these things have a common moment, a keystone in anything these days, in some way, the character/singer is confessing their love for another. This is happening for characters as young as approximately 13 years old. This always disturbed me, because two thirteen-year olds were confessing their undying love for each other, in the halls of their middle school. But is it true love?
Are teens even capable of feeling love? Well, that depends on how you define it. If love is simply a feeling of strong affection towards another person, then yes, teens can quite obviously feel love. But if love is only affection, then to say that God is Love is a very boring statement. It has no meaning and is simply a mantra to repeat over and over, a feel-good device. This definition, though, is the one that much of the world today seems to be putting forth. Young people say “I love you” but really mean only “I feel affection towards you.” Maybe this is why among young people the idea of a God who is all love is so boring. If God is nothing more than a warm, fuzzy feeling, like many seem to believe, then that’s something I can live without.
Why then have so many people been willing to die for this God? Why is there “nothing so exciting as orthodoxy,” in the words of G.K. Chesterton? The only way for this to happen is if there is more to love than just that feeling. There is story after story of what happens when two people fall truly in love. What is it about this type of story that naturally draws young people? Why are they drawn to this exciting type of love, instead of the more modern idea of affection?
- True Love
The only explanation I can come up with is that the young people naturally have this sort of understanding that there is more to love. They know that love is more than just that fuzzy feeling. The problem, though, is that they don’t know what it actually is. When they go to look for it, all they find is the message that love isn’t real. It doesn’t exist. So young people find the next best option, which is the one put forth by the popular culture. Because of this, you’ll find teenage couples on the street, saying that they’re “so in love” after being together for a whole two weeks. But when this love fails, and the love after it, and the one after that, they become disillusioned and they believe that there is no such thing as love, and anybody trying to tell them otherwise is selling something.
When the youth have become so numb to love, it would make sense that a religion based on love would lose popularity. Love has no meaning to them. But there’s another phenomenon among the youth that adults don’t seem to be able to comprehend. There has been a noticeable shift towards orthodoxy, especially among the younger generation. As far as I’ve seen, though, no adult has been able to put forward a reason for this.
We’ll discuss both the reasoning for this and the answer to the previous question, whether teens are capable of feeling an "adult" version of love, next time.
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