This article is excerpted from the Russell Moore Newsletter. Subscribe here.
a A friend of mine told me that he had attended a long-planned gathering of half Republicans and half Democrats to discuss partisan polarization. They had watched a presidential debate together, but everyone was nervous that their respectful differences would devolve into cheering and booing at a team sport. He said that those two hours were actually the most unifying of the entire conference, because everyone was feeling the same thing: embarrassment.
Whether red or blue team, viewers have long recognized presidents saying things like, “The only thing we fear is fear itself” and “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” Two weeks ago, from two 80-year-old men, one of whom will lead the country for the next four years, we heard lines like, “I didn’t have sex with a porn star” and “Anyway…we finally won Medicare,” before they began rambling incoherently about their respective golf handicaps.
When we ask the question, “Is this the best we can do?”, we actually all know the answer, but neither man wants to run away, and there are no adults who can.
It would be bad enough if the only nursing home in the world with a press room and a situation room was populated by octogenarians, but the fact that our elderly leaders refuse to leave the stage — some struggling to form sentences, others yelling insane words and profanities — isn’t just about an election year. It’s about what it means to live in an age of diminished expectations.
For years, sociologists and philosophers have warned about the dangers of the cult of youth. Behind Botox and Ozempic cosmetic treatments lies a more fundamental denial of death. We want to make aging invisible, because we don’t want to be reminded that it’s a path we’ll all take eventually. That the country is unfit for anyone but old people, at least when it comes to the presidency, would seem to suggest that we’ve moved past our craze for youth. But in fact, the opposite is true.
We live in a paradoxical era of juvenile-gerontocracy. Never before have our leaders been so dogged in their pursuit of power, long after they had acquired cognitive and physical abilities. And never before have our leaders appeared so childlike. How can both be true?
Communications theorist Neil Postman warned more than 40 years ago that we were entering this era. Children, he said, find their way in the world through wonder. Curiosity leads to questions, and questions lead to quests to find answers. “But wonder arises primarily in situations where the child’s world is separated from the adult world, where the child must seek an entrance into the adult world through questions,” Postman wrote. “As media merge the two worlds, and the tension created by a secret to unravel is abated, the calculus of surprise changes.”
“Curiosity gives way to cynicism, or worse, arrogance,” Postman continues. “We are left with kids who rely on news that comes from nowhere, rather than on authoritative adults. We are left with kids who are given answers to questions they never asked. In short, we have lost our kids.”
Remember, the postman was worried. tv set He was writing long before the age of the internet and social media, and at first glance, the digital age seems to have given us the opposite problem: Jonathan Haidt, for example, has made a compelling case that one reason for the surge in anxiety among children and adolescents is parental anxiety, which in turn leads to overprotective and suffocating parenting.
But in reality, the “helicopter parenting” that Haidt and others refer to is the very problem Postman warned about, just from the other side: Parents feel anxious, at least in part, because they have few models for how to transition to another stage in life themselves while leaving the helm to the next generation, leaving them feeling scared and unprepared.
The symbol of our times is not a wise old leader offering a prayer of offerings at Sunday morning church services or presenting a trophy to the young winner of the Pinewood Derby, but a Margaritaville-themed retirement home full of old folks acting as if they were teenagers again, recounting the latest gossip about who’s in love with who.
We have probably all experienced the crushing feeling of realizing that a leader or role model is not who we thought he was. Most of us have been close enough to someone we thought would guide us with wisdom and maturity to realize that he is in fact a slave to temper, pride, ambition, desire and greed. To some extent, this has always been the case. As TS Eliot wrote in the middle of the last century:
What was the value that had been so long awaited?
The long-awaited calm of autumn
And the wisdom of age? Were they fooling us?
Or have the quiet elders deceived themselves?
Would they just leave us with a receipt for deception?
But at this point, our culture seems especially rife with the realization that people we thought were adults are now old, jaded and childish. A president in apparent decline refuses to live in a world where “Long Live the President” plays for a new generation of leaders. The rest of the country looks on as a former reality TV host who chases porn stars says he wants to abolish the Constitution and try his enemies in a televised military tribunal, and the country just laughes and enjoys the show.
There’s not much we can do about the cultural situation in 2024. But we can resolve to see a different model and embody it. The Bible turns the combination of childishness and age-denial we see all around us upside down. Instead, the Bible gives us a mirror-image paradox. Childish and mature.
Jesus said that only those who become like little children will inherit the kingdom of God (Matthew 18:3; Mark 10:15). But this is not about childishness. The inheritance is not a pile of material possessions but rather adult stewardship, responsibility, and mission, having learned from, as Paul puts it, “guardians and stewards” (Galatians 4:1–7, full ESV).
The Bible gives us a glimpse of a paradigm of childlike maturity early in Solomon’s life. The new king asked God for wisdom, saying, “I am but a child; I know not to go out nor to come in” (1 Kings 3:7). He knew he was dependent. That wisdom manifested itself as a maturity that knew how to govern “a great people” (verse 9) rather than satisfying himself. Of course, it did not last. Solomon turned to immaturity, ruled by lust rather than wisdom, and his kingdom fell apart.
We can thank God that Jesus said, “Behold, here is one greater than Solomon” (Matthew 12:42). We can walk that path and embody it in our churches if we reject the childishness of clinging to power and of thinking of power as a game in itself. We can be examples of maturity that nourish character and give the next generation hope that they will surpass us.
Our childish, old culture is embarrassing. Not only on the forums of this country, but in our age-segregated churches and pulpits, the choices seem to be either to stay or to be replaced by the young for the sake of youth itself. There is another way. No adults are coming to save us. We were supposed to take their place.
Russell Moore is Christianity Today He leads the Public Theology Project.
