In addition to battling the usual array of human failings, evangelical Christian leaders are now coping with a new problem: Teenagers en masse are turning their backs on the faith. “I’m looking at the data,” Ron Luce (OPM 29, 2000) told the New York Times (October 6, 2006), “and we’ve become post–Christian America, like post–Christian Europe.” Added Luce, founder of Teen Mania, a 20-year-old youth ministry, “We’ve been working as hard as we know how to work — everyone in youth ministry is working hard — but we’re losing.”

Over the last fifteen years, however, Teen Mania events featuring music and evangelical exercises have attracted some 2 million young people, “more than Paul McCartney has pulled in,” Luce said. At one such recent gathering, Luce exhorted his audience to write down on pieces of paper all the negative societal and materialistic influences — “cultural garbage” — they wished to be rid of. As the teens deposited their notes in trash bins (along with CDs, T-shirts, and cigarette lighters), Luce prayed before the crowd into an onstage microphone, “Lord Jesus, I strip off the identity of the world, and this morning I clothe myself with Christ, with his lifestyle. That’s what I want to be known for.”

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