Years ago I read a study asking people to list their earliest memories of world news. The results were fascinating, but I wanted to test them for myself. So I asked about a hundred people to think back to early childhood and then describe to me what they first remembered as “earthshattering” news.
Try it yourself. Jot down your earliest memories of significant world events, and try to recall where you were at the time. I wrote down:
- The assassination of John F. Kennedy. I was in my first-grade class at school.
- The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. I was about to eat dinner with my family.
- The landing on the moon. I was at home, watching it on TV with my grandfather.
My mother, and many of her friends, remembered the Depression, Pearl Harbor, and the day we beat Germany (VE day). I also asked a younger generation, and they remembered the crash of the Space Shuttle Challenger, the Desert Storm war, and the horrors of 9/11.
The study I read first asked people their earliest “world event” memories, and then asked each person to choose one word to describe the ideal outcome of a church’s teaching. They had to choose one of the following three words: Behave, Believe, or Belong.
In my own small study, 80% of my mother’s (WWII) generation preferred, Behave; about 65% of my (boomer) generation said, Believe; and all but one of the younger (millennial) generation chose, Belong.
The people I polled: (a) lived in the greater Ann Arbor, Michigan area, (b) were all middle class, and (c) all had similar spiritual leanings. It was not the most diverse group.
But that’s the point. The factor that determined values was generational history, not location, income, or theology.
It’s Not Just World News
I befriended two brothers born in the mid-fifties. One was a social worker who lived a Spartan lifestyle (despite living in Ann Arbor), drove a beat-up Chevy Cavalier, and invested in safe government bonds. The other brother was a business tycoon; he saved nothing, drove a Maserati, and spent his earnings on multiple annual trips to China, India, Africa, and Europe.
Their parents had lost the family farm in the depression, and both men attributed their money-habits to their childhood experiences. One of them remembered the pain of loss and saved every cent in sheltered investments to avoid a similar fate. The other remembered the pain of deprivation and spent every cent for lost pleasures.
Both agreed that their poor childhood fifty years ago controlled their spending habits today.
How Well Do We Know Ourselves?
If we don’t know our histories, we really don’t know ourselves The “modern” world was really birthed in the Middle Ages, and was nurtured and reared in the Enlightenment and Romantic eras, and it has come to full adulthood … Today.
- Our fixation on technology comes from the many inventions of medieval monks (yes!) who felt “work” was a gift of God, but “toil” was part of the curse;
- Romantic love as the basis of marriage was created by the culture of chivalrous knights;
- The market economy began around 1000 AD along with the rise of the feudal system.
All these ideas and practices—as well our legal systems, nation-states, and even fashion—seem second-nature to us. But in other cultures and times, they would be repulsive and abhorrent.
Why am I writing this article on this topic? I don’t know! (It probably has something to do with my parents.) But as I look at the cultural creep of the modern values into God’s people, I realize that many things which we consider completely spiritually normal are only “normal” for us. Past Christian cultures would find our rejection of God’s values as repulsive.
I don’t want to go back to arranged marriages (and my kids are glad of it), but I want (as much as I can) to examine my life in the light of past Christian thinkers.
I used to think cultural creep was mostly contemporary influences on behavior, like the sexual freedom of the sixties. Now I wonder if these modern practices are merely a leaf hanging onto the twigs, branches, trunks, and roots of our past. That the sixties wouldn’t have happened without the Enlightenment and Romantic eras.
The study I read said my mother’s generation worked hard to dig out of the depression and to sacrifice in WWII, so they valued, “Behave.” My generation saw the moon landing and great civil rights reforms (despite the assassinations) and we hoped in, “Believe.” The next generation felt the fruitless suffering of disasters, so they prioritized community and chose “Belong.”
Which simply says: We are controlled by our past until we examine it.
Sam
Chasing Lovers
Love how you pull historic developments into better understanding current experience. The Triple-B alliteration caught my attention because I have a standing sermon using those three words. It’s built around the passages in Matthew 22, Mark 12, and Luke 20 where religious leaders are tying to trap Jesus with trick questions. The first (should we pay taxes to Caesar?) is one I’ve identified as a question emphasizing BEHAVING. The second (whose wife will she be in heaven?), one of BELIEVING. Jesus deflects those and redirects them to what it means to be rightly BELONGING to God (the cross shaped key of loving God and loving your neighbor). Recently the idea of a fourth B has been presented to me. That would be a focus on BECOMING. My focus is shifting in that direction the more I interact with Jesus. I want to be more like Him – and then more like Him – and then more like Him – until I see Him face to face.
Hi Bob,
I LOVE it when God is saying the same stuff to us.
So encouraging.
Sam
Well thought out, perceptive and persuasive and i am led to think of Paul and Festus…….
While Paul was saying this in his defense, Festus *said in a loud voice, “Paul, you are out of your mind! Your great learning is driving you mad.”
Thanks again Sam for your insight,,,,,,, spot on I believe
tr
Thanks!
I REALLY love that Festus line. If we follow Christ most radically, we’ll all be accused of the same thing.
Thank you for your precision in writing.
I feel I’ve been through each of these “B’s”.
On the last one I’m just now learning – the only belonging that lasts is belonging to Jesus.
For too long I asked other humans for that belonging – something they can’t possibly do.
Maggie/ a one time arrogant atheist converted by unsought revelation
OH MY GOSH
I love your line, “the only belonging that lasts is belonging to Jesus.”
EXACTLY
Spot on, Sam. And sometimes we repress our memories, especially painful ones, so we can’t or don’t even examine our own past accurately, never mind work out how that past effects us now.
Working as a counsellor, I once had the unmitigated joy (for me) of sitting with an intelligent young man who had been systematically sexually abused as a teenager, and had repressed those memories. He genuinely could not understand why he behaved in ways that he knew were self-sabotaging. Because he was ready, he began to have dreams which allowed his abused past to surface. He then proceeded to relate these events to his current troublesome behaviours, and thus gain conscious control over his present. I say it was a joy for me to watch, because I had to take particular care to not implant or influence his emerging memories. I was any extremely passive counsellor with him; he was ready and willing to do the work himself. The process turned into a joy for me to watch. And I still believe that his dreams were given (in appropriate depth and sequence) by the Holy Spirit, even though he was not a Christian.
Sorry for the long windedness of this post, but I thought it a good illustration of the depth and impact of your theme in this article.
Blessings.
Hi Barry,
Your story is excellent and encouraging (and not long-winded in any sense 🙂 ).
Thanks for helping us all see how the past controls our future, without Christ.
Sam
Great article, Sam! We are so clueless about what really shapes our thinking and beliefs. Our prayer needs to be that the Holy Spirit enlighten our minds from His word. Our “sanctified mind” is not enough. We need supernatural insight, discernmant and faith.
Amen!
Trauma, shock and hardship have such an effect on us, even years later. Almost worse than trauma are good times, followed by hardship, that make us imagine that the good stuff was better than it was. When I’m tempted to look over my shoulder, I’m reminded of that old song, “So you wanna go back to Egypt?” Or Sarah Grove’s “Painting pictures of Egypt.” I felt that first hand the other day when I was feeling homesick and randomly looking at prices of houses in my hometown (I’ve been living abroad 12 years now) I browsed houses for a bit, then went back to a real estate site in my current country and I was shocked to feel, “This is right, this is what I need, not my hometown.” I broke down at that point, because I never thought I would reach that point of belonging in this country. I praise God for that affirmation of my call and place right here, and the realization that He wants to help me to stop romancing Egypt.
Havs,
I ALWAYS love it when you share, and this story was especially poignant.
And yet, our only real home is yet to come. We are all somewhere between Egypt and the Promised Land.
But home with Him.
Thanks
I was also thinking that there’s nothing new under the sun–that things seem to come back to where they started. The 60s with the sexual revolution is the same as ancient times when there were orgies etc. maybe not equality for women or people of color, but the cultural parallels seem to rotate/repeat through history with some variation, kind of like bell bottoms and other fashion.
Exactly,
The world is nothing new. It just dresses itself up with new “fashions.” But underneath, it is trying to keep us from Him.
Sam
Really good food for thought you’ve presented, Sam. We tend to think our biases and worldview are based primarily on experience, but some are undoubtedly unconsciously inherited from past generations.
Yeah, I think so too.