YOUNG people have been culturally conditioned to read the Bible for moral lessons— “abstract ‘shoulds’ that strip stories of their theological depth and emotional power” — a latest study reports.
The study, Troubling Jesus, the third a part of Youthscape’s “Translating God” project, suggests that teenagers’ readings of scripture, including the extraction of “sanitised metaphors about mindset or personal improvement”, mean that Jesus can “fade into the background”.
“When Jesus identified as the sunshine, was it energy-saving?”
Perceptions of Jesus as judgemental, gullible, or guilty of “mansplaining” should prompt the Church to reflect on what has been communicated to this generation “about God, the self and the world”, it says. Their candid reactions also “open a window into what God might already be doing of their world”.
The project, a collaboration with the Scripture Union and the Bible Society, was funded by the Sir Halley Stewart Trust. The latest report draws on five reading groups, held in 2023. In them, 40 14- to 17-year-olds read and reacted to stories and passages of scripture which, youth employees suggest, could possibly be viewed as “excellent news”.
Their reactions were “radically different” from what might traditionally have been expected, Youthscape reports. One young woman described God within the book of Jonah as “really violent and aggressive” and suggested that Christians’ relationship with God is likely to be “built on fear”. It raised “concerns about consent and abuses of power”.
Jesus’s encounter with the girl on the well suggested an “unequal power dynamic” to 1 young man, who observed that Jesus “looks as if he’s mansplaining” and “has a God complex”.
For a few of the young people, the report observes, “Jesus will not be the liberator from judgement, he’s the topic of it. He is a troubling figure. Arrogant, powerful, religiously motivated and male.” Jesus “places into query the common cultural narrative that everybody has their very own truth and may imagine whatever they wish to imagine, so long as it isn’t harmful to others”.
One message taken from the story of the paralysed man lowered through the roof was “it is best to do what you could have to do to make yourself higher.” In this framing, “the person isn’t really paralysed. Instead, sin and physical affliction are metaphors for underlying issues with self-esteem, confidence and passivity.” The report observes that, for these young people, the healing that basically matters is “the healing of your perspective”.
The report says that, in Twenty first-century Britain, the Church can now not assume that young people have a framework for understanding the Christian faith. Among the “specific cultural biases” that they convey to scripture are concerns about consent, power, and accountability. Among the questions posed by the study are: “What does it mean to undergo God’s will when you’re immersed in a culture of ‘you do you’?”
It refers back to the Biblos project carried out within the Nineties, which concluded that the Bible was mostly getting used to show morals and abstract values in schools, but that these morals had been separated from Christian theology and secularised. This stays evident today, the study says.
Young people’s reactions could possibly be “deeply uncomfortable” and appear “almost heretical”, the report says, “but that is where their experience of life intersects with the gospel. What happens in that space should matter to the Church,” it says. It warns against bringing “fixed ideas” of what young people should learn from scripture at the chance of failing to listen to their “unique perspectives”. It recommends “allowing space for real encounter, and trusting that listening well might change us too. When we resist bringing the ‘right’ answers we trust the Spirit to indicate us something latest. Because it’s not what we all know that young people need, it’s who we all know and He is pursuing them already.”
The report is devoted to Dr Lucie Moore, Youthscape’s former director of research, “whose curiosity, empathy and intellect initiated, guided and delivered” the project until her sudden death in 2024.
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