Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look, and an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth.

For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street.

According to an article by Patrick West and The Spectator, many young people find Jesus, well, annoying.

West pointed to a survey of the UK teens, age 14 to 17, that was entitled, Troubling Jesus.

This joint project of the Scripture Union and the Bible Society sought to understand how

non-Christian kids thought about Scripture.

According to the study's authors, and I quote here, what they shared was sometimes

deeply uncomfortable on settling interpretations we may be overly familiar with and offering

fresh perspectives on God and Jesus

that can sound almost heretical at first, end quote. And not just at first. These students had the

impressions that the God of the Bible was really violent and aggressive, that he practiced mansplaining

and had an unequal power dynamic. God the father came across to these young people as a bully.

God the son was, and I quote, arrogant, powerful, religiously motivated, and male. The most telling

claim was that Jesus had a God complex. Now, according to West, the reaction is understandable.

Quote, young people raised in a world without authority figures who command respect and a society bereft of

Didactism are naturally going to regard the teachings and the Bible as hostile and aggressive in a world where everyone's reduced to having their own truth

Many will find the idea of Christianity simply incomprehensible and quote well I'd say that's an understatement.

The dominance of the critical theory mood over the UK and many other Western nations

both invented and normalized new moral absolutes,

and a generation that's been fully catechized in these absolutes

will then turn and judge everything else by them,

especially anything that smacks

...