Alan Jacobs

What Jacobs doesn’t happen to mention, however, is the attitude of most Baby Boomers toward Christianity as One of the Things We Definitely Aren’t. That whole generation has defined themselves against their parents, and most of their parents were at least nominally Christian. So who wants to hear more from that quarter? Everybody knows what Christianity is, and says, and does. It’s boring and outmoded at best; oppressive and retrograde at worst. Buddhism or Hinduism? Exotically interesting.  Judaism? Well, if it’s Kabbalah, at least, it’s cool. Islam? Dangerous, and so it leads the evening news. Christianity, though? Yesterday’s news and good riddance.

Cal Newport, a professor of computer science at Georgetown and author of the book How to Win at College, has interviewed hundreds of students about their college experience. Based those interviews and observation of his own students, Newport believes that those who chose majors simply to please their parents are more likely to give up or burn out. ‘It’s just harder to weather the hard times if you don’t have the intrinsic motivation,’ he said. You might not expect college freshmen to understand that careers don’t proceed in straight lines, but surely their parents ought to. In the real world, most physics majors don’t become physicists, most psychology majors don’t become psychologists, and most English majors don’t become writers or teachers. You’ll find a surprising number of philosophy majors at hedge funds and lots of political-science majors at law firms. I was an American studies major. Among chief executives of the largest corporations, there are roughly as many engineers and liberal arts majors, in total, as there are undergraduate majors in business, accounting and economics combined. Indeed, one study found that only 27 percent of people have jobs that are substantially related to their college majors — a reality that applies even to the STEM fields. 'Choosing a major is not choosing a career,’ says Jeff Selingo, author of There Is Life After College.

Me: ‘Hey, Siri, find me a Catholic Mass to go to.’

My phone: ‘I don’t know how to respond to that.’

Me: ‘Okay then, take me to a strip club.’

My phone: 'Which strip club? Tap the one you want.’

Kaepernick’s decision to sit for the anthem did not rely on disruption. In fact, it was so unobtrusive that it wasn’t even noticed the first time he did it. It relied on a symbolic act, one with enough room for interpretation that Kaepernick needed to spell out its meaning. His protest was a piece of performance art, and in staging it he blurred the line between art and protest. Kaepernick isn’t just a part of the long line of black athletes who have used their platforms to speak out about political issues; he (unintentionally) inserted himself into the rich tradition of black artists who have invoked the American flag in political protest.

Selfie Takers are not snobs, at least as far as I can see. In fact, they seem pretty indiscriminate in their appreciation of works of art. And their way of appreciating art is to approach it aggressively. I mean aggressive in a physical sense. They lurch toward a painting, register its existence, and then, by way of appreciation, turn their backs on it. They raise their cellphones aloft and adjust the camera’s position to take in themselves and the painting. They mince, they pout, they grin, they tilt their heads and part their lips in a way that is meant (I’m guessing) to be seductive. The photo is snapped and the Selfie Taker lurches forward without a backward glance, to further appreciate man’s deepest yearnings as expressed through art. Civilization is really terrific.

Onward we went, asking people everywhere we stopped about the Flushing Remonstrance. None of them knew anything about it. We ended up at the Macedonia AME Church, the third-oldest religious organization in Flushing, a block west of Bowne House, on Union Street, another ‘God’s Row.’ Partway through the service, we managed to wrest ourselves from the centripetal pull of the funky organ. On our way out we encountered a deacon who not only knew about the Remonstrance, but regaled us with reminiscences about growing up in Flushing with close friends whose surnames included Lum, Vargas, O’Neal, and DiVecchio. He saw in himself—part African American, part Native American—the story of the place. He told us that John Bowne had been an abolitionist, as were many of his descendants. For the deacon, the significance of the Remonstrance wasn’t whether it had bequeathed the diversity he celebrated. It was in providing a model for how that diversity could be preserved: A group of men stood up to defend the religious freedom of people with whom they disagreed, refusing to demonize them. They stood up for unity as well as diversity, just like the Chinese and Italian friends who’d come to his defense as a kid, when they would travel together to parts of Brooklyn and Staten Island where his skin color wasn’t welcome.

Garnette elegantly links the story of the Flushing Remonstrance to recent controversies in the city, for instance the whoile “Ground Zero mosque” kerfuffle of a few years back. When that was fresh I wrote a post about tolerance — and why George Washington didn’t like that word. I think it’s still relevant.

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The Christian intellectual tradition is alive and well

Fusion’s Patrick Hogan counted 47 institutions and industries that millennials have been accused of destroying so far, including credit, car culture, the American Dream, relationships, and golf. Of course, in each of these cases, there is a real story to be told: Yes, young people are buying less on credit; yes, car sales are down; and, not surprisingly, 48 percent of economically squeezed under-30s don’t buy into the uplift of the American Dream, according to one poll. But the language of these articles tells another story on top of those, one that isn’t backed up by any evidence at all: that millennials are ‘killing’ those things, choosing to eliminate them from our shared life. That’s a deeply frustrating story to keep reading, when headlines of 'Millennials are killing the X industry’ could just as easily read 'Millennials are locked out of the X industry.’ There’s nothing like being told precarity is actually your cool lifestyle choice.

However: I want to say something about that last sentence I quote. I know dozens and dozens of young people who could have boring 9-5 jobs in their home towns, or in other places lacking evident cultural amenities, but who have decided instead to live in New York or Austin or Chicago or L.A. in order to pursue certain intellectual and artistic aspirations which they believe they can only seriously pursue in such environments. To seek the way of life they want, they piece together temporary and poorly-paying work in the gig economy, they live in sketchy or downright dangerous neighborhoods, and they typically do without health insurance.

You can argue that the decision to live this way is a reasonable one, given these young people’s temnperaments and hopes. You can argue that in a well-ordered society people wouldn’t have to make choices like that. But you can’t say that these particular people haven’t made choices. They could have social and financial stability, or at least a lot more of it than they currently have, because in the places they come from they’re among the best and brightest; they’re desirable commodities. But they’ve chosen the risks of precarity because there are certain goods they believe they can only get access to by doing so.

The question I want to ask is: Do they really have to make that trade-off? Is it really impossible to pursue their aspirations in towns and cities other than the handful that seem, to them, to burn always with a gem-like flame?

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Marklin building set