Making Sense of Generation Y: The World View of 16- to 25- year-olds

By Sara Savage

For Generation Y, born after 1982, relationships happen over the Internet and music marks their territory. How does this generation think about the world? What does their spirituality look like? And what implications does this have for the Church? This book addresses the need for the Church to reconnect and communicate with young people.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Church House Publishing
• Release date: Dec 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9780715146705

Book preview

Acknowledgements

Our sincere thanks to all the young people involved in this project. They were the catalyst for the sheer fun of working together, interweaving our different disciplines: psychology, sociology, theology and youth work. The research emerged from and generated deep and real friendships.

Special thanks are due to Revd Professor Jeremy Begbie, Director of Theology through the Arts, for his oversight of the whole project, and his diplomatic and precise guidance. None of this would have been possible without the Mercers’ Company, who were kind enough to provide the funding to make this project a reality, and who have expressed a close and intense interest in the project from the beginning. Special thanks are due to the Master, Wing Commander Mike Dudgeon, and to David Vermont, Charles Parker and Pia Crowley.

We are also grateful to our editor Tracey Messenger, and to Liz Gulliford, Christine for her transcriptions, Jane Chevous, Jane Hildreth, Revd Dr Fraser Watts, Revd Mark Savage and Andy Lloyd for their help and support throughout the research and writing. We would also like to thank all those who read and commented on draft versions of the text, including Craig Abbott, Paul Bayes, Lynda Barley, Andy Poole and Mike Powis.

Contents

Title

Acknowledgements

Foreword by the Archbishop of York

Preface

Part One: The World View of Generation Y

1    Young people and the Church

2    Youth, religion and popular culture

3    Our findings: The Happy midi-narrative

Part Two: A Closer View

4    Story through soaps and films

5    Praxis through music and clubbing

6    Symbol through cultural icons and advertising images

Part Three: Implications for Youth Work and the Wider Church

7    The world view of Generation Y: Implications for Christian-based youth work

8    Making disturbing sense of Generation Y

9    Reconnecting with Generation Y – and all those like them

Appendix: Thumbnail sketch of the main EastEnders storylines at the time of interviewing

Bibliography

About the authors

Copyright

Foreword

The Church’s mission to young people is close to my heart. In my previous diocese, Birmingham, I set up a vibrant Bishop’s Youth Council to plan youth events. Their work on youth evangelism through the B-Cent, B-Sent and B-Scent Programme was breathtaking.¹

It is self-evident to me that in order to engage with young people, we must hear what they are saying. What matters to them? How do they shape their world? What does their spirituality look like?

This important book does us a great service in giving us an insight into the world view of ‘Generation Y’. What it reveals is the ‘large mismatch’ between the world view of those aged 15–25 and the Church. The research described in this book suggests that young people are happy with life as it is, that they have no felt need for a ‘transcendent something else’, and that they regard the Church as boring and irrelevant.

Thankfully, however, this book also provides some pointers as to how the Church might begin to address this situation. This book notes that ‘the Christian faith often has little relevance simply because it is largely unknown’. It stresses the need for investment in relationships with young people and for ‘patient sowing’ of the gospel story into our culture. There are no ‘instant solutions’, but there are things we, empowered by the Holy Spirit, can – and must – do.

The task is urgent. I commend this book as a starting point for those wanting to proclaim Christ afresh in this generation.

+ Sentamu Ebor

Note

1 More information can be found on: www.b-cent.com

Preface

For Generation Y, born after 1980, Margaret Thatcher is a piece of social history, relationships happen over the Internet and music marks their territory. How does this generation think about the world? What does their spirituality look like?

Given this generation’s unprecedented immersion in popular culture, we examined how young people make sense of the world and themselves through the popular arts. The disparity between the world views of young people and the Church is such that few doubt the urgent need for the Church to revive genuine communication with young people. This book represents our effort to help bridge this gap, based on a two-year research project.

Our aims were to discover:

•  the ways in which the popular arts are consumed, understood and interpreted by young people in their day-to-day living;

•  how the popular arts are being used by young people to shape a world view;

•  the nature of young people’s spirituality.

We spoke to 124 young people around England in youth clubs, colleges and universities. While we cannot claim our sample was representative of all young people, the sample did reflect some of the main demographic characteristics of English youth:

•  52% were female; 48% were male.

•  94% were White; 6% were Black or Asian.

•  60% defined themselves as non-Christian; 40% as Christian.

Our aim was to elucidate the world view of these young people by drawing out their relationship to the popular arts (soaps, film, music and clubbing, advertising and culturally iconic images). We asked for their views on the latest storyline in EastEnders, what they felt when they went clubbing on a Friday evening, what they thought of the latest Benetton adverts.

The results were not what we, or the Church, expected!

The shape of this book

Readers may want different things from this book. If you are in a hurry and want to come straight to the point – how young people make sense of the world via the popular arts – read Chapter 3. General principles for youth work based on our research are found in Chapter 7. We hope many readers will stay with us for the whole journey.

Part One

Chapters 1 and 2 give an overview of research carried out on youth, religion, spirituality, and popular culture. At the end of Chapter 2, we set out our research method in more detail. Chapter 3 provides a summary of our findings.

Part Two

Chapters 4, 5 and 6 immerse the reader in young people’s world view, and how this is sustained by the creative way young people use the popular arts. Chapter 4 explores the worlds of soaps and film, and the role story plays in how young people make sense of the world. Chapter 5 looks at how music spills into every area of young people’s lives. Chapter 6 unpacks the potential of symbol and image to engage young people’s spirituality.

Part Three

We discuss the implications of the research for youth work and youth ministry in Chapter 7, and Bishop Graham Cray unfolds the implications for the wider Church in Chapters 8 and 9.

Throughout the study we have tried to reproduce our interviewees’ own words so that their ‘voice’ may be heard. Names, however, have been changed to protect the identities of the young people.

PART ONE:

THE WORLD VIEW OF GENERATION Y

1

Young people and the Church

Take a walk down any high street and you will find the supernatural on sale. You can buy glow-in-the-dark crosses, Kabbalah bracelets, Harry Potter books. Read a newspaper for your daily horoscope; turn on the television for celebrity endorsements of yoga: popular culture is oozing with spirituality. Yet enter a church on an average Sunday and chances are it will be at least half empty. This is particularly so if the church lacks young people in their teens or early twenties.

Young people are a litmus test for a church’s viability. In 1998, only 7 per cent of 15- to 19-year-olds, and 5 per cent of 20- to 29-year-olds went to church on a Sunday.¹ Meanwhile, church decline continues. Does the spiritual sensibility of young people now lie outside the Church and inside the cinemas and nightclubs of popular culture?

Our task was to discover to what extent young people make sense of themselves and their world through the popular arts – that milieu in which youth live, move and have their being. We wondered what young people’s world view and spirituality look like. We wondered whether – a wild hope! – the popular arts could resource the Church to ‘do’ theology in meaningful ways.

To try to answer these questions we began a research project into the world view of Generation Y, those aged 15 to 25. Three researchers, a Christian psychologist (Sara Savage), a sociologist of religion (Sylvia Collins-Mayo) and a theologian and expert in youth and community work (Bob Mayo), together analysed young people’s conversations as they responded to music, clubbing, films, TV soaps and culturally iconic images.

The next chapters describe the socially shared world in which these young people are immersed, unveiling a large mismatch between the Church’s and young people’s world view. Our aim, from the outset, was to help the Church listen to young people in order to regain an authentic relationship with them.

This book presents the findings and conclusions of our study. In Part One we set out the broad picture of young people’s world view, the general significance of popular art and culture to them, and their religious and spiritual sensibility. We present our research method and an overview of our findings. In Part Two we look more closely at young people’s world view arising from their interaction with specific aspects of popular culture. In Part Three we discuss principles for youth work that emerge as a result of our research and Bishop Graham Cray reflects on the implications that the world view of Generation Y has for the Church.

We begin by setting out the background to our study and defining the terms we will be using.

Young people and generations

Let us clarify what we mean by ‘young people’ and ‘Generation Y’. The terms ‘youth’ and ‘young people’ conjure up many images. Young people are seen as creative, beautiful, enthusiastic, carefree, passionate, energetic, fun, full of potential and hope for the future. The Anglican Church’s report, Youth A Part reminds us of the way young people’s accomplishments contribute to society.² At the same time, young people are also seen as moody, rebellious, vulnerable, troubled, troublesome and dangerous. Newspaper headlines draw attention to the high rate of teenage pregnancies, young male suicides, teenage drug and alcohol problems, youth homelessness, and violence committed by and upon young people. All of these views are true of some young people, some of the time. The diversity of images indicates how difficult it is to pin down ‘young people’ as a single group.

Age as a marker of youth is itself subject to increasing flexibility. In our study we were primarily interested in young people in their late teens and early twenties. But if youth is regarded as a period of transition between dependent childhood and independent adulthood then, due to changes in social structures and attitudes, a person can be described as ‘young’ right up to their thirties. Traditional markers of adulthood such as entering the labour market, establishing a settled partnership or marriage, having children and setting up a home, are generally occurring later in life than they were 20 or 30 years ago. At the lower end of the age range, the ‘tweenage’ group (10- to 13-year-olds) seems to have much in common with older teens in terms of consumer interest and spending power. Young people can therefore be anything from 11 to 30 years old.

Given such social diversity, how can we talk about young people as a coherent social group? It is here that we find the idea of generations particularly helpful. Generations can be understood in a number of ways,³ but here we draw on Karl Mannheim’s⁴ view that a ‘generation’ refers to a group of people who experience and respond to specific socio-historical conditions in common ways, depending in part on age. In other words, people growing up, living through and responding to particular historical events, political structures, dominant ideologies and technical developments together form a generation with a shared world view that distinguishes them from other generations. For Mannheim, it is the events, ideas and experiences encountered by young people between the ages of 17 to 25 that particularly shape their generation. Writers differ in terms of the labels and birth year boundaries they apply to particular generations, but they are usually periods of about 20 years. For the twentieth century, Hilborn and Bird use the names and characteristics below.⁵

•  The World War Generation (also known as the GI Generation in the United States – born 1901–24). This generation’s self-understanding and view of the world was shaped by their experience of two world wars separated by a period of economic depression and reconstruction. It has been argued that the World War Generation was characterized by confidence, having witnessed advances in science, medicine and technology, but it was also essentially a conformist generation where young people joined movements such as the Boy Scouts and Girl Guides and traditional patterns of social order were preferred. Prominent ideologies for the World War Generation were ‘modernism, scientific progressivism, Marxism, socialism, Freudianism, existentialism and capitalism’.⁶

•  Builder Generation (also known as the Silent Generation – born 1925–45). Builders had much in common with their parents and in many ways consolidated their parents’ achievements and continued building the future after World War II. It has been suggested that Builders tended towards conservative tastes, but at the same time they were also the first generation to have a recognizable ‘teen age’, marked by the development of a youth market in the 1950s based on music, fashion and entertainment – a market that has grown into the popular arts and culture we are interested in today, and a market which has helped define ‘youth’ as a concept ever since. Post-war affluence was key to this development of youth consumerism. It enabled the rapid expansion of the popular music industry, the invention of ‘teenpics’ in cinemas and the development of youth-orientated television. Like the generation before, the prominent ideologies for the Builder Generation were ‘modernism, scientific progressivism, Marxism, socialism, Freudianism, existentialism and capitalism’.⁷

•  Boomer Generation (so called because the birth rate increased after World War II creating a ‘baby boom’ – born 1946–63). Boomers are usually characterized by the counter-culture of the 1960s. Disillusioned with traditional institutions and authorities (including the Church), young Boomers began to look for new, authentic ways of living. Their focus was on the immediacy of experiences, and the values of freedom, self-realization and autonomy. They were a liberal, idealistic and optimistic generation; politically active, looking forward to a future of peace, love and prosperity without the constraints society imposed on their parents. They were the first young people to have access to the contraceptive pill, and (the middle class at least) to benefit from the expansion of higher education. Later they would also make use of the relaxation of the divorce laws in the 1960s. It has been observed that the Boomers were the first to be generationally conscious and aware of a gap between their values and ways of living compared to that of their parents. This generation gap was primarily expressed through popular music. Prominent ideologies for the Boomer Generation included ‘modernism, scientific progressivism, Marxism, socialism, secularism, free-market capitalism, free expression, individualism, and DIY spirituality’.⁸

•  Generation X (sometimes called the Buster Generation because there was a small dip in the birth rate after the Boomers – born 1964–81). Generation X picked up the legacy of the Boomers and in some ways paid the price of their experimentation with the counter-culture. Generation X were the latchkey kids who saw the divorce rate rise among their parents and the AIDS epidemic spread among their peers. Generation X also grew up through an economic recession where unemployment was a reality faced by many young people. Consequently, Generation X lost much of the optimistic idealism of the Boomers and instead developed a more pragmatic approach to life. Popular art and culture has been a central factor in Generation X’s life, and advances in information and communications technology has contributed to the postmodern outlook that we are increasingly familiar with today. Prominent ideologies of Generation X include ‘postmodernism, free-market capitalism, consumerism, pluralism, tolerance, individualism, spiritual eclecticism and introversion, New Age, eco-awareness, communitarianism, globalism’.⁹

This takes us to Generation Y, today’s young people and the subject of this book:

•  Generation Y (also known as the Millennial Generation – born 1982 onwards). Generation Y has grown up in a globalized society where many of the limitations of time and space have been overcome by further advances in information and communications technology. In this respect Generation Y is a technological generation that takes computers, emailing, text messaging and the Internet for granted. This is particularly interesting from our point of view since the digital revolution has enabled the further expansion and diversification of popular culture. A young person living in Britain today can access hip hop in South Africa and a young person in India enjoy the latest American soap operas. Cultures from across the world are fragmented, appropriated and reinterpreted in other contexts to form new hybrid cultures – a process some theorists have called ‘glocalization’, meaning the ‘global production of the local and the localization of the global’.¹⁰ Under these circumstances there is a growing potential for cultural homogenization at a global level but also, conversely, the defence and re-entrenchment of traditional cultural identities at the local level. The events of 11 September 2001 emphasize the potential of the latter.

As well as creating new cultural resources, globalization and technology have altered the labour market for Generation Y young people in Britain. Manual, unskilled work which supported many working-class young people in previous generations has declined or been outsourced to other parts of the world. Young people are therefore encouraged to stay on in further and higher education to equip themselves for an economy that requires a skilled and flexible labour force. Consequently the numbers of young people who continue with post-compulsory education in Britain has increased over the last ten years, while those who choose to leave school at 16 often end up unemployed or in unstable jobs within the service industries.

But young people’s outlook on life does not appear to be bleak. Studies indicate that many young people accept the uncertainties of employment.¹¹ Indeed, they positively embrace them and say they would find a job for life boring. In this respect Generation Y appears to be quite a self-reliant, confident and upbeat generation. They also seem to be tolerant and community minded, a generation of young people who value their family and friends, and on the whole intend to marry and have a family of their own. Indeed, Generation Y appears to be quite traditional and conservative in a number of core areas of life,¹² as we shall see later on in our own exploration of Generation Y’s world view.

We hope it is clear from the above, that the idea of generations is a helpful way of mapping young people in society. However, as already mentioned, young people are not all the same, and within generations we can expect young people to understand and experience their society differently according to background and demographic characteristics such as gender, class, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and so on. With this in mind we found it appropriate to think in terms of generational units¹³ – subgroups within the wider generation. Thus, while a 16-year-old White working-class boy and an 18-year-old middle-class Asian girl might share some ideas in common by virtue of the fact that they have been subject to the same socio-historical period, and may even have lived as part of the same school community or neighbourhood, their outlook on life is likely to be different because they come from different subgroups within the generation.

In our study of Generation Y, our focus was on a particular unit within that generation: ‘socially included’, mainly White, young men and women. These young people have enough money to consume and participate in popular arts and culture; they have some connection with mainstream institutions such as youth clubs, colleges and universities. We believe these ‘included’ young people provide a good barometer of wider society, although youth research has sometimes neglected them in favour of the more marginal, excluded and problematic young people.

Popular culture and world views

Popular arts, popular culture and world views are flexible concepts which need some pinning down. Just how widespread an art form has to be in order to be regarded as popular is a moot point, but the relationship with the mass media is a close one. Popular culture can be contrasted with high culture,¹⁴ which is usually accessed by (and often only accessible to) a wealthy minority that on the whole excludes young people.¹⁵ For our purposes, popular culture includes all those art forms (such as music, dance, visual imagery,