A friend of mine told me that he was at a long-planned gathering of half Republicans and half Democrats for the aim of talking through partisan polarization. They watched the presidential debate together, and everybody was nervous that the respectful disagreements would devolve into the cheering and booing of team sports. He said it was actually probably the most unifying two hours of the complete meeting, because everyone was feeling the identical thing: embarrassment.
No matter whether Team Red or Team Blue, the viewers recognized that our presidents once said things like, “We don’t have anything to fear but fear itself” and “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” Two weeks ago, from two 80-year-old men, one in all whom is to guide the country for the following 4 years, we heard as an alternative such lines as “I didn’t have sex with a porn star” and “Anyway … we finally beat … Medicare.” That was before they incoherently bickered about their respective golf handicaps.
When we ask, “Is this the most effective we are able to do?” we actually all know the reply. But neither man will step away, and there are not any grownups that could make them.
This could be bad enough if it were only about which octogenarian can be occupying the one assisted living center on the planet with a press office and a Situation Room. But the indisputable fact that our elderly leaders—one struggling to place sentences together, the opposite ranting with insanities and profanities—won’t leave the scene is about greater than an election yr. It’s about what it means to live in an era of diminished expectations.
For years, sociologists and philosophers have warned us concerning the dangers of a cult of youth, that behind the entire Botox treatments and cosmetic Ozempic regimens, there’s a more fundamental denial of death. We wish to put aging out of sight because we don’t wish to be reminded that it’s the best way we’ll all in the future go. That that is, no less than relating to the presidency, no country for anything but old men, would appear to point that we’ve moved past that infatuation with youth. But the other is definitely the case.
We live in a moment of a paradoxical juvenile gerontocracy. Never have our leaders held on with such stubbornness to the hunt for power well after they’ve the cognitive or physical abilities to achieve this. And never have our leaders seemed so childish. How can each be true?
Communications theorist Neil Postman warned us that we were entering this era over 40 years ago. Children find their way on the planet, he said, through wonderment. Curiosity results in questions, and questions lead the hunt to seek out answers. “But wonderment happens largely in a situation where the kid’s world is separate from the adult world, where children must seek entry, through their questions, into the adult world,” Postman wrote. “As media merge the 2 worlds, as the stress created by secrets to be unraveled is diminished, the calculus of wonderment changes.”
“Curiosity is replaced by cynicism, and even worse, arrogance,” Postman continues. “We are left with children who rely not on authoritative adults but on news from nowhere. We are left with children who’re given answers to questions they never asked. We are left, briefly, without children.”
Keep in mind, Postman was fearful about television and was writing long before the web and social media era. At first glance, the digital era would appear to have given us the other problem. Jonathan Haidt, as an example, argues compellingly that one reason for the spike in anxiety amongst children and adolescents is the anxiety of their parents, an anxiety that results in a smothering, overly protective parenting.
In reality, though, the “helicopter parenting” that Haidt and others describe is precisely the issue about which Postman warned, just from the opposite end. Parents are anxious, no less than partly, because they feel scared and unequipped, with few models for to learn how to transition themselves into a distinct phase of life while preparing the following generation to take the helm.
The symbol of our age is less that of the sensible old leader, giving the offertory prayer on the Sunday morning service or presenting the trophy to the young winners of the Pinewood Derby, and more that of the Margaritaville-themed retirement home stuffed with oldsters pretending to be right back of their teenage years, complete with the newest gossip about who has a crush on whom.
Probably every one in all us knows the crushing feeling that comes with realizing that a mentor or a task model isn’t who we thought. Most of us have come close-up enough to appreciate that somebody we thought could guide us with wisdom and maturity is definitely a slave to temper, pride, ambition, lust, or greed. To a point, that’s all the time been the case. T. S. Eliot wrote in the course of the last century:
What was to be the worth of the long looked forward to,
Long hoped for calm, the autumnal serenity
And the wisdom of age? Had they deceived us
Or deceived themselves, the quiet-voiced elders,
Bequeathing us merely a receipt for deceit?
At this point, though, our culture seems especially riddled through with this realization that those we thought were grownups are old, exhausted, and childish. An obviously declining president refuses to live in a world where “Hail to the Chief” is played for a latest generation of leaders. The remainder of the country looks to a porn-star-chasing former reality television host who says he desires to terminate the Constitution and put his enemies through televised military tribunals—and the country just laughs and enjoys the show.
We can’t do much concerning the cultural situation of 2024. We can, though, resolve to see and to embody a distinct model. The Bible upends the mixture of childishness and age denial that we see throughout us. Instead, the Scriptures give us the mirror-image paradox: a people who find themselves each childlike and mature.
Jesus said that only those that develop into as little children will inherit the dominion of God (Matt. 18:3; Mark 10:15). This is just not, though, about childishness. Inheritance is just not a pile of stuff but a stewardship, a responsibility, a vocation for grownups who’ve learned from, as Paul put it, “guardians and managers” (Gal. 4:1–7, ESV throughout).
The Bible gives us a glimpse of the childlike maturity paradigm at the start of the lifetime of Solomon. The latest king asked God for wisdom, saying, “I’m but a bit of child. I have no idea learn how to exit or are available in” (1 Kings 3:7). He knew he was dependent. That wisdom manifested itself within the form of maturity that knew learn how to not please himself but to control a “great people” (v. 9). That didn’t last, after all. Solomon veered off to the immaturity of being governed by his appetites moderately than by wisdom, and his kingdom got here tumbling down.
We can thank God that Jesus tells us, “Behold, something greater than Solomon is here” (Matt. 12:42). We can walk in that way and embody it in our churches if we reject the form of childishness that adheres to power and the form of childishness that sees power itself as a game. We can model the type of maturity that cultivates character and equips the following generation with the hopes that they’ll outpace us after they do.
Our childish old-culture is embarrassing. We see it not only on a debate stage in our country but in church after church that’s segregated by age, pulpit by pulpit where the choices appear to be either staying too long or being replaced by youth for the sake of youth itself. There’s a distinct way. There are not any grownups coming to save lots of us. We were alleged to be them.
Russell Moore is the editor in chief at Christianity Today and leads its Public Theology Project.
