The day care attitude of young adults

The modern American university model.

Last year a young couple left my church because, as they told me, "You are not making us happy every week." The "you must please me" attitude is so rampant that the president of Oklahoma Wesleyan University has responded. Sadly, I find the first paragraph completely credible and very sad. But it is indeed what pastors are facing more and more.

This is not day care! It's a university!

Dr. Everett Piper, President

Oklahoma Wesleyan University

This past week, I actually had a student come forward after a university chapel service and complain because he felt “victimized” by a sermon on the topic of 1 Corinthians 13. It appears this young scholar felt offended because a homily on love made him feel bad for not showing love. In his mind, the speaker was wrong for making him, and his peers, feel uncomfortable.

I’m not making this up. Our culture has actually taught our kids to be this self-absorbed and narcissistic. Any time their feelings are hurt, they are the victims. Anyone who dares challenge them and, thus, makes them “feel bad” about themselves, is a “hater,” a “bigot,” an “oppressor,” and a “victimizer.”

I have a message for this young man and all others who care to listen. That feeling of discomfort you have after listening to a sermon is called a conscience. An altar call is supposed to make you feel bad. It is supposed to make you feel guilty. The goal of many a good sermon is to get you to confess your sins—not coddle you in your selfishness. The primary objective of the Church and the Christian faith is your confession, not your self-actualization.

Read the whole thing.

As I wrote in, "The absolutism of feelings and the culture of victimhood," when assertions are based on feelings rather than verifiable truths, then all relationships ultimately and pretty quickly devolve into assertions of power. 

No wonder that college campuses have become the main place "where victimhood is the way you assert your will to power."

... our society is shot through with Nietzschean ressentiment. Today it is a great sin on college campuses — and elsewhere! — to make anyone other than the “privileged” feel uncomfortable, challenged, or otherwise psychologically threatened by the use of the wrong words or concepts.

It is becoming this way everywhere.