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.
Known as 
Well they need to convert to Christianity; really Catholicism, not Islam!
Punk rock? weird analogy...
Well, they did say WYD was a Catholic woodstock...
If rebellion is what it takes for the Gospel to advance, then so be it.
Well, I always knew we were countercultural...
It was this exact analogy, btw, that got my brother back to the Faith. A friend once told him, "You know, J***, if you want to be a radical, be Catholic. It's the most radical position in the world, and everyobdy will misunderstand you. You'd love it!"
"Someone asked me if I could imagine Christ walking down the street before a brass band. I said I could imagine it with the greatest ease; for Christ definitely approved a natural noisiness at a great moment."
[GKC, Tremendous Trifles 91]
And we offer young punks guitar-strumming and folkie-dokie crap? At our parish (with the indult mass) I routinely see young "punk" looking kids coming once, then twice, then regularly. If I go down the street to the Dick Vosko church, it is just aging boomers feeling good about themselves, which is not much of an attraction to young folks.
In my journey to Christ, Christian punk rock was one of the grandiose tools teaching me that God really did "Humble himself taking the form of a slave."Heb. Indeed God really did take part in the nitty-gritty parts of life.Punk means an inexperienced person.(check Webster) I for that choose to "Become a fool so as to become wise."God bless