Well, not today. I just saw a CBN report on the latest crop of teens or "millennials" as the report grandiloquently called them. It turns out they're a pretty square bunch. Drug usage is down. Pregnancy is down. School violence is down. They're more likely to be religious than their parents. They wanted Clinton impeached. They don't believe in "Dawson's Creek" and Britney Spears. All in all, they could be destined to be the next "great generation."
As I watched this, I thought, "Am I supposed to forget the years spent by The 700 Club on scare tactics? Am I to forget how much hay they made out of Columbine? After his show broadcasted all those images of teens with black-dyed hair and pentagrams hanging around their necks, are we now going to see Pat Robertson embrace the young 'uns?" (Actually, Pat was nowhere to be seen. His son was hosting this episode)
I know that I shouldn't be surprised by this switcheroo. I definitely wouldn't be surprised if I learned that the Fox executives had sent a memo to The 700 Club warning that they were in danger of losing the youth market. However, perhaps I'm naive enough to still be surprised. How can you not be when you hear a "youth ministry leader" say that high school is important to evangelicals because "all the cultures have to meet there." This comes right after The 700 Club gives its usual boost to vouchers -- a plan specifically designed so cultures and students don't "have" to go to public high school.
As The 700 Club praised teens, it sneered at the decadent ways of baby-boomers. However, on one matter, The 700 Club is perfectly aligned with the sixties generation. After benefiting from a wide range of government programs, baby-boomers decided that those programs were "harmful" and worked to deny the same benefits to the next generation. As Mike Males argues convincingly in "The Scapegoat Generation," anti-teen rhetoric was an important weapon against welfare and educational funding.
He also argues well that "liberals" used this rhetoric as much as any bug-eyed fundamentalist, if not more so. Perhaps The 700 Club report is the signal to a new trend. Having robbed children of everything available, adults are now saying, "Hey, they're not so bad after all."
-- David