Excerpt
Oregon Trail Theology
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An excerpt from Oregon Trail Theology: The Frontier Millennial Christians Face — And How We’re Ready
My eyes cast over our refinancing options. I see a lot of numbers with commas separating them every third number. Even though we are talking about buying a house in addition to refinancing my wife’s medical school debt, I am not accustomed to computing household budgetary matters that have that many zeroes, especially on the negative side of the ledger.
The surprise and dismay on my face must register to my wife, because she pipes in helpfully, “Look, I know you’re not familiar with just how expensive medical school really is. I’ve been living with these student loans for years now. I’m used to it. I know you’re not. But you’ll get there.”
You could skate across the look I give over my eyeglasses and the papers in my hands. Despite her words of reassurance, I am not convinced. Between student loans, a car loan, and a potential mortgage, I am terrified that we are going to have to auction off the naming rights for our firstborn child just to keep the lights on.
Appealing to our shared goofy sense of humor, my wife tries again. “This amount of student debt is like a big, smelly walrus that I’ve just gotten accustomed to living with. I call him Clyde. Clyde’s smelliness is just now hitting you. But you’ll get used to living with his stink too. And when all our debt is paid off, we will throw a huge ‘Clyde is dead!’ party.”
A loud guffaw escapes from my previously clenched jaws, momentarily easing my worries—and startling our two dogs, Sir Henry and Dame Frida. But with student and car loans plus the mortgage on the house that we are about to buy, the amount of money we owe seems a more suitable figure for describing the national debt.
We are not alone in that regard when it comes to our generation. Our finances are no longer just a statement of values; they are a statement of inhibitions and obstacles as well.
As the American Church faces down an existential and financial crisis on a par with the economic collapse that brought about the Great Recession that my generation faced as we completed college, many of the young families and households that are seen as highly valuable in church planting and recruitment literature are facing similar financial crises, but on a more microcosmic scale. We lack assets. Cash is spent as quickly as it is brought in. In order to maintain any semblance of a quality of life, or to attempt any real furthering of our circumstances in life, we often must take on substantial debt.
One would think, then, given the financial similarities between so many churches and so many millennial-aged households, that the former would have a more apparent understanding of the latter, even if begrudgingly so. After all, we millennials may be the generation of fidget spinners, smartphones, and avocado toast, but we also have a deep and abiding need to make a difference in our world, just as churches feel called to build the realm of God where they are. In spite of the financial chains which hamper millennials, we remain determined to make a difference in the world. Jacques Berlinerblau, a professor at Georgetown University, says of us:
My [students’] career plans are a peculiar mix of naked ambition and hair-shirt altruism. If they pursue investment banking, they do so not merely to make money. Rather, they wish to use their eventual wealth to distribute solar light bulbs to every resident of a developing nation. They’ll apply to the finest law schools in hopes of someday judging war criminals at The Hague.
Ideally, those needs—or callings—would have intersected more than they have so far in the emergence of millennials as fully formed adults. Yet they have not. Between 2010 and 2015, the percentage of millennials who said that the Church has a positive effect on the way things are going in the United States today plummeted from 73 percent to 55 percent.
The reasons for this precipitous drop in my generation’s approval of the Church are manifold, and as an increasingly homogenous church looks down on increasingly diverse generations of young people, I would be surprised if that figure were not already lower.
The antipathy towards the Church from younger generations is real, and in many cases, reciprocated. Yet many millennials have resolutely remained within the realm of spirituality, hoping, praying, and striving to change it from within rather than taking our cards and going home. We millennial Christians have not given up on the Body of Christ, and we are determined to find our own communities within it, even if it means migrating away from the brick-and-mortar communities in which we were raised, and that our elders keep impressing upon us is our sacred duty to save.
In order to both explore and affirm that perseverance of my generation, I want to turn to another name by which we are sometimes called: the Oregon Trail Generation, a term that was coined in 2015 by entrepreneur Anna Garvey.
It serves as a moniker more precisely applied to the older millennials (in addition to some very young Generation X-ers) who were raised on a steady diet of MECC’s Oregon Trail
video game series in which players led a fictitious covered wagon party to Oregon. Oregon Trail
as a game and a cultural phenomenon has so deeply penetrated our pop culture that video parodies, card games, and “You have died of dysentery” memes have all been byproducts of the original game’s massive popularity. In other words, Oregon Trail
is something whose presence eclipses more than just one generation, or one subset of a generation, and is instead a more widely, if not universally, understood and shared phenomenon.
It is precisely because we millennials—and younger Gen X-ers—played so much Oregon Trail
that it is useful in describing our generation’s sojourn through faith. From beginning the trail after already being loaded up with so much baggage that we need a team of half a dozen oxen just to make some forward progress, to having to bargain our way through the grief and consternation of things breaking down and going wrong, the mechanics of Oregon Trail
gameplay offer an apt springboard to not only explore how millennials have come to live out their faith, but to celebrate it, affirm it, and offer ways to dive deeper into it as well. Let us begin, then, with an honest look at how many of us have begun these adult journeys of the soul.
How We Got Here
In the original Oregon Trail
games, you could choose not only your occupation, but the riches with which you began the game. You could choose to be a farmer from Illinois with a very small savings account, a carpenter from Ohio with savings double that of the farmer, or a banker from Boston who was absolutely loaded. The object of the choice was to inject a variable degree of difficulty into the game. If you were a beginner, you could choose to be the banker with their vast reserves of cash, and if you wanted a challenge, you could elect to be the cash-poor farmer.
Whatever your occupation, you began the trail itself at the same place: Matt’s General Store in Independence, Missouri, where you had to outfit your wagon party with oxen, sets of clothes, spare parts, food, and boxes of bullets. Matt would helpfully chime in with advice, but beyond buying at least a yoke of oxen to slowly haul you off to Oregon, you could buy as much or as little as you wanted—or that you could afford. If you did not buy all you could at Matt’s General Store, prices got progressively—and prohibitively—more expensive along the trail. It was the economy that we millennials walked into after college, but written into a computer game decades beforehand: limited cash to invest into our livelihood at the start, which has meant paying a higher and higher price as time has elapsed. Starting conditions were, and are, everything.
I graduated from college a scant eight months after the collapse of the investment firm Bear Stearns set off the Great Recession. I already knew that I would be going to graduate school—seminary—for at least three more years, so I had somewhere to wait out the immediate devastating effects of the crash. However, as I would quickly learn, the market was still suffering in the spring of 2011, when I earned my master of divinity in May, was ordained in June, and began my first day at my new church in Longview, Washington, in September. I was profoundly fortunate, though. I had classmates who waited years for their first calls out of seminary. My friends in other fields, from law to teaching to healthcare, for which they had invested vast sums into their education, likewise suffered. They went months, even years, either unemployed or underemployed as jobs were eliminated via attrition and older employees delayed their hard-earned retirements because of the deleterious effect the recession had on their retirement investments.
All of these factors, as well as many others, also affected congregations through decreased giving, and congregations were forced to quickly adapt to such scarcity. There was one church that interviewed me for an associate pastor position. On paper, it looked healthy and was looking to expand its staff. But at the interview, they admitted that they could only guarantee the position for a two-year period; after that, its existence would largely depend on whether congregational giving had begun to improve.
For some millennials, the variability and mobility that comes from changing jobs may be welcome, even sought after, especially since so many of us cannot even afford mortgages, much less are looking for one that would tie us to a particular city or town for several years. But as we will see in chapter three, the leaps of faith that millennials have taken in response to such variability aren’t always for a job. And for other millennials, especially those emerging from expensive degree programs with hefty debts to repay, a relatively low-paying job that may not be around in a year or two has the potential to become a real obstacle, not a help, to paying the bills—especially if it is a job we relocate for.
Now, take such a socio-economic circumstance and throw a congregation that is continually preaching tithing into the mix. Theologically, there is nothing wrong with the practice of tithing. I do it myself as a pastor because in part, as my seminary field education supervisor told me, “Never ask your congregation to do something that you are not willing to do yourself.” But I am also a part of a two-income household that is essentially fiscally solvent despite juggling the debt of student loans, car loans, and a mortgage. Such solvency has become a luxury rather than a necessity for our up-and-coming generations. When you have student loans to pay off and car payments to make, there is often precious little left for tithing to a church, much less any charitable giving at all. What little giving can be done, ironically, sometimes goes towards the GoFundMe campaigns
of our friends and relatives who, faced with unexpected expenses of their own, are forced to ask their loved ones for cash to repair their financial breaches. Setting up a GoFundMe may be seen as more respectable than panhandling because it does not take place on a street corner, but the circumstances that necessitate it are sometimes no less dire or dramatic, precisely because there is so little opportunity to create any sort of safety net in our unforgiving economy that has yet to bear the occupational fruit that was promised. That lack of forgiveness extends to church, where millennials are often seen as takers rather than as givers in part because of our relative lack of financial security.
Preoccupied with Our Occupation
What we do for a living, and how we make ends meet, remains a foundational source of identity in American culture. Think of how many times you meet someone new and, perhaps without even thinking about it, ask them, “What do you do?” As much as millennials are made out to be artistic and sensitive snowflakes in perpetual search of safe spaces to create whatever their art happens to be, the jobs that have opened up for our generation frequently do not allow for such creative expression unless we force the issue. Having been raised on an educational curriculum that emphasized the creation of one’s own voice not only in the traditional venues like English class, speech, and the debate team, but also in a bevy of extracurricular activities, millennials have come of age in a world that wants us to continue being children, or even pets: to be seen and not heard; to simply be grateful for the crumbs that fall to us from the adult’s table.
Think of the Syrophoenician woman in Mark 7, who begs Jesus to heal her stricken daughter. After Jesus cuts her down with the withering comment, “It isn’t right to take the children’s bread and toss it to the dogs,” she maintains her dignity and responds, “Lord, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.”
I have seen many pastors and writers assuage their discomfort with what is pretty clearly an ethnic slur from an Israelite towards a Syrophoenician by saying that Jesus was satirizing such attitudes, but there is no indication in the text of mirth or parody on his part, just as there is no indication that she took Jesus’s comment in jest. It seems accurate—albeit ghastly—to view Jesus’s comment, then, not as some joking commentary but as an insult.
Here is where Jesus returns to the role of teacher, role model and, indeed, Messiah. Having conceded the rightness of the woman’s response by saying, “Good answer,” he assures her that her daughter has been healed. The woman’s response to Jesus makes it clear that she is not content with the crumbs that fall from the adults’ table; she wants to be treated as an equal at that table. Jesus, in turn, grants to her the miracle that she was seeking. Her daughter is made well.
Millennials realize that the dignity that comes from our occupations is innately valuable. We do not demand economic or financial miracles. We have been conditioned to accept our position beneath the table, and the pitiful few crumbs that fall our way, as though some kind, benevolent soul at the table were surreptitiously slipping us sustenance the way I “accidentally” drop scraps on the kitchen floor for my own dogs. Being endlessly reminded that “the world does not owe you a living” is among the least nutritious of those crumbs, and one that is typically reserved for us. But if that line of reasoning is an inadequate word of comfort to an older manufacturing worker whose job has been outsourced despite their skill and dedication, then why is it of value when said to someone younger than that worker?
Younger generations are not stupid. That sounds self-evident to the point of being borderline ludicrous, but I will double down on it because of how urgently it needs to be said: Younger. Generations. Are. Not. Stupid. We know when we are being talked down to, we know how to recognize doublespeak and passive-aggressive mockery, and we know that if we are to make a living off of our passions we must find people, companies, and entrepreneurs who are willing to pay us to pursue those passions.
As the cultural landscape has dramatically changed over the past ten to fifteen years with the arrival of social media and digital apps, new needs have emerged, and for those of us whose passion involves meeting those needs, there is no better time to be alive. Those occupations may not be the same as being a farmer, or a carpenter, or a banker, but what they offer us is not all that much different than what the Oregon Trail offered its own wayfarers: a chance to start something new out of the sheer will to bring about a new thing, whatever it might be.
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