We were shaped by the horror of 9/11 — our attention fixed on homeland security and the War on Terror. But one social trend redefined the way we relate to one another, and for that reason I suggest the label, “Decade of Disclosure.”
After the 80s produced personal computing and the 90s delivered the Internet and e-mail, the noughties brought Facebook. And YouTube. And Twitter. And instant messaging. And, whereas a few writers through the years have been so prolific as to have earned the remark, “… never had an unpublished thought,” in the noughties, millions of us never had an unpublished thought.
Inspired by the frank banter on such hits as “Friends” and “Sex and the City,” where explicit felt innocent, and prodded by the constant call to come out of the closet, the emerging generation saw little reason to keep secrets. Facebook (with its 500 million members in 297 countries), Twitter, and IMing all provided vehicles for reporting to friends one’s breakfast selection, preference for briefs or boxers or thongs, and last night’s bout with intestinal flu — linked to video on YouTube. As Napster founder Shawn Fanning muses in The Social Network, “We lived on farms. Then we lived in cities. Now we’re going to live on the Internet.”
In our Internet residences we’ve traded pretense and hypocrisy for authenticity, transparency, and disclosure. Better never to have an unpublished thought.
Not all the disclosing came willingly. From Enron to Madoff, from Clemens to Favre, from governors’ mansions to parish rectories, disclosures of celebrities’ failings flooded us with shame – with the cover-ups proving most shameful. Yes, a few institutions, like the Department of Defense, arm-wrestled a small measure of news containment (embedded reporters during the Iraq War), but disclosure (Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo) gained the upper hand.
Of course, exposés were not invented with the turn of the millennium. But, the noughties leaked so many shenanigans – even Pluto got busted – that the truly righteous seemed more rare today than in ancient Sodom, and the lone good guy there had a scummy side, too.
All of which makes the twenty-teens a precarious place for doing mission. In the decade of disclosure, the young abandoned their illusions of others’ moral purity. But to them one behavior remains unforgiveable: the cover-up, especially when masked behind moralistic self-righteousness.
Believers invented moralistic self-righteousness. One church broadcasts an ideology of inclusion, until they encounter somebody who disagrees. Another promotes sexual standards, except behind their own closed doors. Another fights for nativist exceptionalism, that is, for landed European immigrants of three or more generations’ duration. One extends care to the poor, just let me keep my Lexus.
The watchful young just shrug.
No branch of Christianity – from hierarchical to non-denominational – has escaped the critical eye of the Decade of Disclosure. Every branch is stretching to reach the disappearing young, but most are investing more effort into “telling our story,” a euphemism for “spinning the news” and “reassuring contributors.” And most are misunderestimating (an apt Bushism) how those efforts are pushing the candor-seeking, transparency-living, truthiness-valuing children of the Decade of Disclosure out the door.
If you can name some simple solutions to all of this, you’re not getting it. We’re not going to eradicate all sinning. Neither can we just become more humbly confessional (“Do as I say, not as I did when I was your age”), and think that that will present a compelling gospel witness. The answers are not self-evident. But if we don’t apply ourselves to finding them, the twenty-teens may get dubbed the-decade-of-church-buildings-being-turned-into-restaurants or something like that.
—JHH
