In the halcyon days of five years ago, Time published an opinion article describing Millennials as the “Me Me Me Generation.” The writer cited a Reason-Rupe poll that found that 70 percent of American adults believed Millennials to be “selfish” and a further 60 percent believed them to be “entitled.”
I wish I could say things have abated in the time since a firestorm was created where Millennials were blamed for ruining everything from free speech, divorce and even something really important like casual, American dining. However, something I hear often as one of the few real, live Millennials actively participating in Church life without getting paid to be there, it’s that “entitlement,” “selfishness” and “a lack of commitment” are keeping young people from both physically engaging in, as well as financially supporting the work of the Church to the same degree as their generational forebears.
“Of course Millennials are entitled, because everyone is.”
Hundreds of migrant children are being caged like stray dogs at our borders. But please never forget that church softball leagues and Applebees restaurants are dying at the hands of 30 year olds who have no savings and refuse to spend their dwindling free time and meager wages on prayer-soaked recreational sports and riblets!
I admit, as a Millennial it’s almost impossible not to get swept up in the nationwide guttural moans anytime I happen upon the words “trigger warning” at the top of an article about maintaining a gluten free lifestyle while Crossfitting heavily. (This is a joke, but then I’m not really sure if anything is funny anymore.) I will also admit that fewer fruits hang as low and fewer dead horses have been beaten as severely as an article about Millennials, entitlement and Christianity.
So, I’d like to get out in front on this: Of course Millennials are entitled, because everyone is.
I’m entitled. You’re entitled. Your kid is entitled. All human beings are entitled. The question isn’t if we are entitled or how we become entitled, it’s what are we entitled to, and who owes us said entitlements. Here’s what I mean. As a psychotherapist rooted in a school of family therapy known as New Contextual Family Therapy, I was taught that all humans – regardless of cellular makeup, nationality or socio-economic status – aren’t just entitled to food, shelter and water, but also to what the fathers and mothers of this movement refer to as “love” and “trustworthiness.”
And, here’s the kicker: These psychiatrists and therapists even go so far as to say, unequivocally, that parents are to work to ensure the delivery of these two entitlements without expectation for repayment.
“I believe much of the genesis of family distress stems directly from what psychiatrist Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy refers to as ‘destructive entitlement.’”
According to New Contextual Family Therapy, children didn’t choose to enter the world; their forebears brought them into it (kicking and screaming, from what I remember), and as such, these children are owed a great debt from those doing the choosing and the raising. How parents are “repaid” is when their children choose to keep both love and trustworthiness in circulation by paying them forward, altruistically, to those coming after them. Which also means that when we see a spike in “selfishness” or “laziness” or “a lack of faith” in those coming after us, the ones we should be blaming probably aren’t those buckling under the weight of student loan debt and trying to find their footing in the gig economy without the aid of praise and worship on the weekends.
As a family therapist who has worked with low income, at-risk adolescents in an underfunded high school as well as high-income married couples from well-to-do families in private practice, I believe much of the genesis of family distress stems directly from what psychiatrist Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy refers to as “destructive entitlement.” Boszormenyi-Nagy argues that when there is a disruption in the flow of love and trustworthiness in generational family systems (or church systems, I would argue), parents, instead of giving love and trustworthiness sacrificially to their children, begin demanding love and trustworthiness from them instead. These parents do so, not because they are inherently evil, selfish or neglectful (although some may be), but simply because a dam developed upstream in the family tree that prevented the steady delivery of what they were entitled to from their own parents.
“Destructive entitlement is what I hear working its way through institutional church systems.”
Destructive entitlement is why your dad yelled at you in the van all the way home from tee-ball practice for not “hustling” as a five year old instead of just giving you space to be a kid who knew what was most important to his father. Destructive entitlement is why you spent so much of your adolescence worried about how to please your mom instead of just being a kid who knew where you stood with the woman who cared the most about you. Personally, destructive entitlement is why I went so far as to tether the whole of my early professional identity in a misguided attempt to please a God who remained both distant as well as constantly disappointed in my efforts.
Destructive entitlement is what I hear working its way through institutional church systems clamoring for children, youth and young folks to save them, return to them, tithe to them, honor and respect them – and, in the case of my young minority, immigrant and LGBTQ brothers and sisters – keep quiet or quietly leave because, and here’s the kicker, we somehow owe it to God and the Church to do so. I can safely say that whenever a church, family system or institution demands repayment and fidelity for giving you what you were owed when you needed them the most, these things and people may be a lot of things, but one word I would never use to describe them is “Christian.”
Indeed, it is in the Christian tradition that I have been made aware of a God who loves and dies for the world without expectation that the world will love and die for God in return. I’ve been taught that this Christian God isn’t terribly interested in being made famous (despite famous people telling me to help “make Him famous”), or in getting all the credit, or even in seeing God’s name written into prayers, songs, sermons, speeches, books and the granite porticos of private schools. Instead, this God would rather free captives, recover sight for blind folks, feed hungry folks, clothe naked folks and, when it comes to such things, have “His house” torn down for the salvation of everyone who is too unclean to enter it.
When a sacrifice is demanded, the Christian God ties himself to the altar, and in so doing embodies an inherent truth at the center of all this entitlement – namely that when you and I and even the Creator of the Universe give what we always needed to people who can never pay us back, we are participating in what my Jewish friends call tikkun olam, the repairing of the world through tiny acts of restorative justice.
“When a church serves individuals, families and whole communities with no expectation that they in turn will ensure the church’s ongoing survival, that church is, for perhaps the first time, repairing the world.”
When we make space for people who reject us, we are repairing the world. When we break bread and pour wine with people who sold us out for political reasons, we are repairing the world. When we welcome people unequivocally who have been alienated, slandered, abandoned and yelled at for not keeping their eyes on the ball, we are repairing the world not just for them, but for the rejected, slandered, abandoned and yelled-at tee-baller inside of all of us.
When a church serves individuals, families and whole communities with no expectation that they in turn will ensure the church’s ongoing survival, that church is, for perhaps the first time, repairing the world.
We have to live in the world we work to create. That means your church is entitled to keep existing, denominations are entitled to keep existing, Christianity is entitled to keep existing insofar as they selflessly pump love and trustworthiness into an atmosphere of anxiety, scarcity, pain and partisanship parading as truth.
These things don’t get to exist simply because they already exist and have buildings, bank accounts and founding documents. So did the Roman Empire, the Branch Davidians and Enron. When there are four year olds in jail at the border and the Arctic Circle hits 80 degrees, it’s time to find out why exactly the world needs the unending existence of our aging fellowship hall and sparsely-populated sanctuary. Because if we don’t know the answer, I’m not so sure tithes from 35 year olds are going to pull us out of that tailspin.
At the bottom of all this, the one thing remaining for me is the miracle of what happens when people – for no apparent good reason – return to the source of what they were owed from their parents, from life and from God, but never received, and instead of demanding repayment from everything and everyone around them, they give that which they were entitled to those most in need. When I meet these saints on the couch across from me in my office or in the pew just behind me in the sanctuary, I find that the ground shakes, stones roll away and tombs get emptied – for others, for them and for me.
Entitlement can destroy you. But it can also resurrect you.