Last November, CNN and a group calling itself “Rock the Vote” sponsored a debate for Democratic presidential candidates. During the debate, Brown University freshman Alexandra Trustman had something to ask the participants. “It’s not quite ‘boxers or briefs,’ ” she said (an allusion to the question that candidate Bill Clinton famously chose to answer). “But—Macs or PCs?”¹

You’re wondering how a student at an elite university comes to ask such a dumb question. That’s easy. An executive at CNN told her to. He thought the question would test whether the candidates could connect with today’s tech-savvy young people. In other words, the executive thought he understood college students better than college students do.

CNN later apologized, saying that the executive “clearly went too far.” Perhaps they also understood how ridiculous we old-timers look when we attempt to instruct our young people in the fine points of hipness.

As a professor, I spend my entire ministry these days with college students. And I’ve learned to distrust any statement that begins, “Young people today are . . . ” That’s especially true when the speaker comes from my own, arrested-development, Baby Boom generation, which can’t seem to understand that the world has changed since 1972.

The truth is that “young people today” are many things. Some come to Martin Luther College burning with intellectual curiosity. Some don’t. Some have already developed a real servant’s heart and a fine work ethic. For others, that takes time. Some distrust authority. Some trust certain kinds of authority—“the experts,” for example—far too much. And yes, some live for video games and VH1. But most do not. When their elders assume that they do, they rightly feel patronized and insulted.

It makes me especially uneasy when someone in our church body tells us that we need to change this or that “for the sake of our young people.” It happens, for instance, in discussions of worship style. Whenever it does, my mind goes back to 1987.

I was a vicar then, and one of my assignments was to tabulate the results of a survey we took after trying some new worship music in our congregation. The comments on one survey read, “I am sad and offended that you would change these songs that I have been singing since I was little. I was raised doing it the old way and it’s too late for me to change now.”

How old would you guess the author of those remarks was? Sixty-five? Seventy-five?

He was 18 years old.