Pruning the dried-up Foley-age

According to the much anticipated (in certain geekish circles) first post-Foley AP/Ispos poll, Democrats are beating or statistically tied with Republicans on ALL of the who-could-handle-this-issue better questions, including who could best protect the country from terrorism. Interestingly, "political corruption" had the lowest affirmative total out of ten issues – leading one to wonder, were people just waiting for an excuse?

The Foley fallout has also included a spate of delightfully schadenfreude-spawning news stories about how the religious right is losing its political motivation, its footing above moral sea level and its policy clout (I love how they still talk as if they ever actually had any, it's so cute) in the murk of scandal. There was also an interesting piece in Friday's New York Times about how evangelicals are concerned teenagers are fleeing the flock in a veritable exodus, endangering the entire movement's future.

Genuine alarm can be heard from Christian teenagers and youth pastors, who say they cannot compete against a pervasive culture of cynicism about religion, and the casual "hooking up" approach to sex so pervasive on MTV, on Web sites for teenagers and in hip-hop, rap and rock music.

Ah, yes: Sex, rock 'n' roll on the M-T-V and the post-modern pervert's playground that is the Internet – those have to be the culprits. More plausible contributing factors (that are actually age, era and situation-relevant) couldn't possibly be, oh, increased college attendance and prep work, meaning more young people have reason to entertain logical critiques of some of the spiritual dogma they've been fed and reject much of it as nonsensical.

Or the fact that today's teens have grown into political awareness in a climate punctuated, if you will, by religious violence and state responses to it, with such acts comprising their lives' "remember where you where when you heard" moments.

Or that they've witnessed firsthand the sorts of shoddy arguments and intrusive, ignorant and intolerant politics the faithful of their parents' generation have tried to advance in the name of "moral values" and divine direction.

Honestly, people, I was only on my first cup of coffee this morning when I thought up those – all of which would have made for more thought-provoking reading.

Oh, but it's not just the ubiquitous evil media and prurient primal urges contaminating our so-called impressionable youth – we're neglecting the primary corrupter of contemporary, '50s-retro innocence:

Divorced parents and dysfunctional families also lead some teenagers to avoid church entirely or to drift away.

And, you know, some third-graders are driven away when their church's priest delivers a thinly veiled custom sermon soon after their parents' split about how their mother is headed for Hell, seeing as how "divorce is a worse sin than murder because it kills an entire family." Not that I'd know from personal experience or anything.

Seriously, concerned parties, there is no more efficiently engineered on-ramp for the highways to agnosticism and atheism than being raised Catholic. But I digress.

It seems to me this whole "crisis" of teens deserting the chruch is not a crisis of morality or of filling the pews – after all, many of the especially fervent believers come to the fold on their own anyway by being "born again" at some later point – but yet another crisis of insecurity and sagging self-esteem.

Over and over in interviews, evangelical teenagers said they felt like a tiny, beleaguered minority in their schools and neighborhoods. They said they often felt alone in their struggles to live by their "Biblical values" by avoiding casual sex, risqué music and videos, Internet pornography, alcohol and drugs.

I want to know where these people went to high school where they had smut and illicit substances perpetually peddled upon them, because it sounds like I missed out on a fair spot of fun. And really, come on – who beyond bored, midlife-crisis suburbanites who watch too much television (and, you know, Congressmen) honestly wants to have sex with high school boys? Specimens above the age of consent don't tend to get much more mature, granted, but most of us can hold out with little difficulty until they at least start to look better and make some money.

Indeed,

Contradicting the sense of isolation expressed by some evangelical teenagers, Ms. Sandler said, "I met plenty of kids who told me over and over that if you're not Christian in your high school, you're not cool – kids with Mohawks, with indie rock bands who feel peer pressure to be Christian."

That sounds more like it, but it's not that you're afraid of being left out or labeled uncool – it's that you don't want to have to deal with being called out and forced to defend something that everyone around you doesn't have to defend; and be defined by all sorts of insulting assumptions that no one would ever float in polite, supposedly educated company about a different religious faith as opposed to the absence of religious faith.

And because you don't want to be patronized by a public school math teacher who says he feels sorry for you and what your life must be missing because you don't want to say the Pledge of Allegiance and recite the "god" reference. Or by teachers, family members and peers who think you're just going though a rebellious phase and trying to be trendy, when in fact you've probably thought more about your decision to step away from your faith than they ever have about why they hold onto theirs. Or by magpie classmates who brag about their church camp retreats like they were European vacations and seem to honestly believe one needs to be religious to be an ethical, respectable, decent human being.

All this latest crisis of branded faith is about is another manifestation of this culture's obsession with collective validation. So little any more is sound enough, strong enough or justified enough unless it's being done with the backing and direct, real-time accompaniment of as many other passably credible people as possible.

It's as though no matter how nonsensical the state of affairs becomes, it will all mean something if enough people can come together and wave their arms to affirm themselves and some version of agreed-upon truth.

But no matter how much you preach – or, in the best metaphor for the "war on terror" to come out of current events in recent memory, how many times you roll over $20 million in the federal budged earmarked for "commemorations of success" in Iraq and Afghanistan – individual events and individual actors have a way of driving things in entirely different directions.

And if not for those individuals cracking the doors of the echo chamber from time to time, nothing would ever change, much less progress.