Much has been said about the Millennial and Gen Z cohorts, roughly today’s 20 to 42 crowd, especially their hesitancy towards commitment. They marry later than previous generations – if they marry at all; have driven the U.S. birthrate to dangerously low levels; are more likely to change jobs; and less likely to own a home than their older counterparts.

And if we turn from sociology to faith, we find that this same hesitancy towards commitment is driving younger Americans away from religion. The most cited reasons for rejecting “organized” religion are doubts about religious teachings and about God, dislike of religious organizations, and poor experiences with religious people – all of which are often symptoms of a more basic unwillingness to give oneself to other persons or causes. We can trace this back further to a general lack of trust that fears uncertainty and brokenness. Younger Americans turn the old adage on its head: It is worse to love and lose, so let’s not love at all.

The desire for certainty is natural. Jesus Himself acknowledged it: “For which of you, desiring to build a tower, does not first sit down and count the cost, whether he has enough to complete it?” (Luke 14:28)

But commitment does not function on the level of technical knowledge, the kind of knowledge deemed most valid in the modern world. It cannot be calculated or manufactured because it belongs to another field of knowledge that the world and the educational establishment have ceased to nourish.

This other field where commitment functions is belief. Joseph Ratzinger articulates the essence of belief in modern terms in his magisterial Introduction to Christianity, which is the subject of TCT’s latest course, which begins this evening. The great theologian and pope makes clear that belief “is ordered not to the realm of what can be or has been made. . .but to the realm of basic decisions that man cannot avoid making.” Questions like: Whom I should marry, what I ought to do with my life, how many children should I have, where I should live, and what I should worship? The answers are fundamental decisions that defy mathematical certainty or scientific scrutiny.

Belief, Ratzinger continues, “is entrusting oneself to that which has not been made by oneself and never could be made and which precisely in this way supports and makes possible all our making.” That is, in order to do and understand anything, Ratzinger writes, we have to first take a stand on some ground, which is what the Hebrew word amen signifies.

Younger Americans today, deprived of a strong religious upbringing and formed by ideologies and technologies that marginalize questions of belief, fear commitment because they have no ground to stand on. Despite the illusion of control that their smartphones offer, they float without rudder or compass. Hence, they are less inclined to marry, to have children, to give themselves to work and to the community, or to go to church.

The modern world tries to lull us into believing that we can create our own meaning, our own ground to stand on. But Ratzinger’s caution from nearly fifty years ago has been proven correct by increases in drug addiction, suicides, and generational dissatisfaction. Surveys show that Americans are less happy than ever:

Man does not live on the bread of practicability alone; he lives as man, and, precisely in the intrinsically human part of his being, on the word, on love, on meaning. . . .But meaning is not derived from knowledge. . . .Meaning that is self-made is in the last analysis no meaning. Meaning, that is, the ground on which our existence as a totality can stand and live, cannot be made but only received.

Without the humility to admit that they are not their own gods, younger Americans demanding certainty will continue to drown in uncertainty. Without the courage to take a stand on a ground that is not of their own making, they will make nothing of themselves. Without the audacity to step outside the cave of technological knowledge, they will not know the love that God wishes to rain down on them.

“The tool with which man is equipped to deal with the truth of being is not knowledge but understanding: understanding of the meaning to which he has entrusted himself. And we must certainly add that ‘understanding’ only reveals itself in ‘standing,’ not apart from it.”

To believe in Jesus Christ and to stand on the rock that is the Church transforms commitment from something to be feared into an adventure to be embraced. “Christian belief is the option for the view that the receiving precedes the making,” Ratzinger observes. In embracing Christianity we are not receiving shackles on our freedom or personal fulfillment, as the world alleges. Rather, “Christian faith lives on the discovery that not only is there such a thing as objective meaning but that this meaning knows me and loves me, that I can entrust myself to it.”

Ratzinger acknowledges that the believer “will repeatedly experience the darkness in which the contradiction of unbelief surrounds him like a gloomy prison from which there is no escape.” But those fearing commitment should not see this as a ready excuse to remain in limbo. He assures us that we have no reason to doubt the ground on which we have chosen to stand. For in professing the Christian faith, we say, “I believe in you, Jesus of Nazareth, as the meaning (logos) of the world and of my life.”

If young people have the courage to make this commitment to Christ, all the other commitments they must make obtain meaning in the light of eternity. But this reality they will only understand if they first take a stand.

__________

You may also enjoy:

Pope Benedict XVI Not Knowing What We Do and the Cross

Eduardo J. Echeverria Ratzinger, Vatican II, and the Idea of Synodality