They say polite conversation avoids politics and religion. I will try to keep this post polite, but it’s going to come dangerously close to politics and religion.

Two headlines caught my attention last week. The first, from New York Magazine’s ‘The Intelligencer’ asked, “Do Young Voters Actually Prefer Trump to Biden?” The second from the New York Times told us, “Americans Under 30 Don’t Trust Religion – or Anything Else.”

There’s something wrong with the kids. In terms of polled preference for president a year out from the election, younger voters, those 18-34, the Gen Zers and younger Millennials, are roughly evenly split in their preference between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Multiple polls say so. And our columnist is dumbfounded. “There’s no world in which Donald Trump should be the preferred presidential candidate of young voters,” he fumes.  But apparently that world is our world.

There’s something wrong with the kids. The decline of the church in the west and the rise of the “nones,” especially among the young, has been well-documented. For those of us who mourn the loss of religious attachments among our kids, our misery has company. In the final installment of a six-part series exploring the issue, the writer tells us, “What distinguishes the under-30 set is a marked level of distrust in a variety of major institutions and leaders — not just religious ones.”

Not to create a false dichotomy – I know some progressives who are Christians and some Christians who are progressive, but the kids are disappointing all of us.  The culture has done all it can to make our young people progressive, and half of them may vote for Donald Trump.  By some estimates, the churches spend $6 billion each year on youth ministry, but 70% of our kids leave the church by the time they are 22 years old.

So, if they are not progressive and they are not Christian, what are they?  Distrustful.  “They don’t trust anything,” the New York Times says.

In some ways we might say that while the progressives and the Christians lost, the liberals won.  Classic liberalism, which has little to do with the Democrat party in the U.S. or center-left parties around the world, encourages individual autonomy and personal creativity.  Liberal parents may take their kids to Sunday School or talk about politics around the dining room table, but in the end they want their children to “decide for themselves.”  Wearing a MAGA hat or despising their parents’ faith? That’s fine so long as they are true to who they are, so long as they made the choice themselves.

I can’t speak for the progressives but as a Christian (who abhors MAGA hats) I can say that choice is not all it is cranked up to be.  Martin Luther writes of the bondage of the will. Bound to sin as who we are, our choices are not to be trusted.  Or read Romans 7.  We are captive to the law of sin, Paul says, and ends his comments, “Wretched man that I am.”

The churches spend $6 billion a year trying to persuade kids to be Christian.  Maybe we’d do better to spend less money on church programs and more time around the dining room table and in Bible study and serving the world learning what it means to have been chosen and loved by God – and what that love requires of us.

There’s something wrong with the kids.  It may be the adults around them.