Faith is the new punk rock

Odd to think that some young people have better insight into faith than their parents do.

Think that’s too generalized? There are plenty of specifics to back it up. Let’s skip across the ocean first.

The Sunday Times reported last week that baby boomer parents in Great Britain are seeing more and more of their children converting to a faith, especially Christianity and Islam.

And some parents aren’t happy about it.

A British mother, who’s agnostic, conceded that her twentysomething son was "quite aimless" before he joined an evangelical church.

Today, she applauds his sense of purpose, but says, "It also makes me sad because none of the rest of the family shares his beliefs, and it excludes us from a massive part of his life."

Myfanwy Franks, an author quoted in the Times, has interviewed British converts to Islam (15,000 have claimed the faith in the past few years) and Christianity and sees a sociological angle to their decisions.

"More and more, it seems that becoming highly religious is the ultimate form of rebellion, because secularity is really our society’s main religion now," he said.

"A lot of people utterly despise religion, don’t they? To convert to Islam or Christianity is really the punk rock of the modern age."

…But is this generation of young people different from others? Will faith become an anchor for them throughout their lives or a line adrift?

"Faith rises and falls like the tides of an invisible sea," the Catholic writer Flannery O’Connor once said.