{"id":6845,"date":"2019-07-07T15:25:00","date_gmt":"2019-07-07T15:25:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/infed.org\/mobi\/?p=6845"},"modified":"2025-08-22T16:40:46","modified_gmt":"2025-08-22T15:40:46","slug":"re-creating-america-youth-ministry-and-social-change-1930-1999","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/infed.org\/dir\/welcome\/re-creating-america-youth-ministry-and-social-change-1930-1999\/","title":{"rendered":"Re-creating America: Youth ministry and social change, 1930-1999"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jon Pahl explores the youth ministries of Walther Leaguers, Young Christian Workers, Youth for Christ members, and the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Baltimore and finds a nuanced history with complex interactions across American culture. The history of Christian youth ministry opens several windows onto key changes in the cultural history of the United States.<\/h2>\n

contents<\/strong>: introduction \u00b7 the walther league \u00b7 the young christian workers \u00b7 youth for christ \u00b7 african american youth ministries \u00b7 recreating america \u00b7 references \u00b7 how to cite this article<\/h6>\n
Photo by Tegan Mierle on Unsplash<\/h6>\n

__________<\/p>\n

In his ground-breaking 1977 book, Rites of Passage: Adolescence in <\/em>America, 1790 to the Present<\/em>, Joseph Kett accurately documented how Christians helped to \u201cinvent adolescence\u201d in the nineteenth century.\u00a0 With consistent disdain, however, Kett dismissed the Christian construction of adolescence as a \u201cself-contained world in which prolonged immaturity could sustain itself,\u201d where Christian leaders limited youthful choices and substituted \u201cadult-led training\u201d in place of voluntary associations of young people.\u00a0 Indeed, Kett argued, \u201cChristian youth organizations of the late nineteenth century downgraded not only voluntarism but intellectuality and spirituality as well.\u201d\u00a0 Youth ministries were \u201cvapid\u201d and\u00a0 \u201cnaive,\u201d by-products of the \u201cintellectual decadence\u201d of Victorian Protestantism.\u00a0 Surely they would soon fade away, for Christian youth ministry constituted \u201cthe final act of a melodrama which . . . had exhibited sundry attempts . . . to \u2018save\u2019 youth from cities, gambling dens, grog shops, and bawdy houses.\u201d[1]<\/a><\/p>\n

When he turned to the twentieth century, Kett saw the \u201cfortresses of morality\u201d that Protestants had built for youth come crumbling down. \u201cBetween 1920 and 1950,\u201d thought Kett, \u201cthe reformers and clergymen who comprised the original architects of adolescence passed the scene.\u201d\u00a0 A few vestigial pockets of Christians interested in \u201ctraining\u201d youth remained here and there, but they offered youth only \u201cconformity,\u201d \u201chostility to intellectuality,\u201d and \u201cpassivity.\u201d Indeed, Christian youth ministries were part of a by-gone age, through which young people were segregated into a \u201cseparate sphere\u201d that kept them ignorant of the complications of adult life, and that supposedly inculcated in them some mysterious qualities of \u201ccitizenship,\u201d \u201cleadership,\u201d or \u201ccharacter.\u201d\u00a0 Such \u201cyouth-training institutions\u201d were essentially \u201cnegative\u201d in their intentions, and were doomed to fail in their efforts to promote moral purity.[2]<\/a><\/p>\n

Now, on one level Kett was surely correct.\u00a0 As Sydney Ahlstrom pointed out, the Puritan age of American religious history has ended.[3]<\/a> \u00a0 And yet, on another level, Christian youth ministries have not only endured, they have in many cases flourished in the last half of the twentieth century.\u00a0 How they did so across several streams of denominational tradition is an important and largely untold aspect of American religious history.[4]<\/a>\u00a0 The history of Christian youth ministry, in fact, opens several windows onto key changes in the cultural history of the United States.\u00a0 More specifically, in sexuality and gender relations, in class awareness and economic status, in acceptance of popular culture and media, and in concern for racial equality and civil rights, youth ministries survived over the past seventy years not by holding to a negation-driven purity program, but by adapting a variety of practices to mobilize youth for various causes.\u00a0 That this mobilization brought its own ambivalent outcomes in American cultural history does not lessen the significance of the movement from purity to practices as a whole or of the agency and significance of youth ministers and young people in history.[5]<\/a> \u00a0\u00a0Youth ministries, at the least, have been telling sites where social change and intergenerational relations have been negotiated.[6]<\/a><\/p>\n

The Walther League: Lutheran Young People \u201cSinning Boldly\u201d in Gender Relations<\/h4>\n

Die Walther Liga <\/em>was founded in 1893 in Buffalo, New York as a Lutheran answer to the YMCA.[7]<\/a>\u00a0 Based in local congregations, and disseminated through a national publication, Der Vereinsbote<\/em> [The Society Messenger], the League grew dramatically after World War I when the official language of the organization changed from German to English (the publication then became The Walther League Messenger<\/em>).[8]<\/a>\u00a0 By 1930 the League was operating an office in downtown Chicago which connected nearly seventeen hundred congregational youth societies, a number which grew to over five thousand by 1965.\u00a0 The Chicago office produced four major publications, and coordinated a wide range of events, most notably an annual convention (modelled on political party conventions); a network of summer camps; oratory, choir, and sporting contests; a network of \u201chospices\u201d(boarding houses) for Lutheran youth; and a sanitarium for sufferers of tuberculosis.\u00a0 Eighteen regional districts also held rallies, published study programs and newsletters, and organized service projects.\u00a0 Many young people had contact only with the congregational societies of the Walther League, most of which were located in parishes of The Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod, but the complex negotiations across generations occurred throughout the organization, from the local to the national levels.<\/p>\n

For instance, Walther Leaguers often found issues related to sexuality and gender a source of intergenerational contention.[9]<\/a>\u00a0 As early as 1900, clerical officials of the Lutheran church had recommended that the League not allow women to vote or speak at annual conventions.[10]<\/a>\u00a0 The Leaguers rejected this recommendation, and women participated as speaking and voting members of the Walther League fully twenty years before they voted in U.S. Federal elections.[11]<\/a>\u00a0 By 1930, having lost badly to their youth on suffrage, Lutheran leaders concerned with preserving adolescent purity found a new gender issue around which to rally: the modern dance.\u00a0 For the most entertaining of many examples, we turn to Professor P. E. Kretzmann of Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, who made the circuit of Walther League Summer camps in the late thirties and early forties speaking on \u201cThat Vexing Question of Dancing.\u201d\u00a0 \u201cThe sex passions of the adolescent are easily aroused,\u201d Kretzmann grudgingly admitted.\u00a0 Consequently, \u201cThere is no essential difference between the embrace of \u2018petting\u2019 which is so generally indulged in by frivolous young people in our days, and the embrace of the modern dance.\u201d\u00a0 Indeed, Kretzmann continued, any \u201cgirl\u201d who permitted a man to dance with her, deserved to be called a \u201cdemi-vierge<\/em>, only half a virgin, because half of her virginity was gone.\u201d[12]<\/a>\u00a0 The virginity of the male was apparently not affected.<\/p>\n

Kretzmann clearly articulated the purity program which Kett saw at work in youth organizations.\u00a0 But what did the young people themselves think and do?\u00a0 Former Walther Leaguer Martha Smith recalled in a letter to me that she met her husband, Warren, at a Walther League play in Brooklyn, New York one night in the late thirties.\u00a0 The two were attracted to each other, arranged to meet at the Parkway Inn after the play, and during the evening \u201cthey danced and got better acquainted.\u201d[13]<\/a>\u00a0 Walther Leaguers told me many similar stories in the dozens of oral history interviews I completed with them.\u00a0 The young Lutherans knew that the Walther League was a \u201cmarriage bureau,\u201d and at least some of them felt free to reject the puritanical prohibitions of their elders and learn to foxtrot, waltz, and even swing, insofar as Lutherans could imagine what that meant.<\/p>\n

By the fifties, the young people of the Walther League were dancing in their church basements and fellowship halls, albeit in a carefully disguised form that they called \u201cplay-party games.\u201d\u00a0 A correspondent to the Walther League Messenger from Iowa explained: \u201c\u2018And promenade her home\u2019–These words certainly are well known to many an Iowa Walther Leaguer. Playparty games and squares are a common sight in our district.\u00a0 As informal mixers they are tops. . . .\u00a0 All you have to do is mention the word \u2018playparty\u2019 and the toes begin to twitch.\u201d[14]<\/a>\u00a0 The predictable objections came from some clerical leaders.\u00a0 Rev. T. J. Vogel of Amherst, Nebraska, for example, wrote in 1953 to Edgar Fritz, the Chairman of the Walther League Board of Directors to complain that:\u00a0 \u201cIn the home congregations the young people are warned against the sinful dances, [but] when they return from the [Walther League] conventions . . . they report what a wonderful time they had . . .\u2018dancing to beat the band.\u2019\u201d[15]<\/a><\/p>\n

Throughout its history, then, Walther League functioned as a place for young people to experiment in gender roles and relations.\u00a0 Young men and women mixed fairly freely at both local and national meetings, and young women, especially, benefitted from the opportunities to exercise leadership.\u00a0 For instance, Elizabeth Zoller, a seventeen-year old member of the Regina, Saskatchewan Walther League Society, delivered a homily at a Holy Week service at her church in the early fifties–over twenty years in advance of the ordination of women in any Lutheran church.[16]<\/a>\u00a0 Marilyn Rook Bernthal, active in the Frankenmuth, Michigan Walther League during the late fifties, recalled that \u201cthe home society was the place . . . we had the chance to lead, to figure out our own finances, and to [do things] ourselves.\u201d[17]<\/a><\/p>\n

Indeed, the Leaguers were doing all kinds of things themselves.\u00a0 One tormented adolescent wrote to the Walther League Messenger<\/em> in 1956 about a sexual behavior known to begin around puberty: \u201cI habitually commit one of the most horrid sins on earth,\u201d the Leaguer lamented.\u00a0 \u201cI have prayed and cried over it, but apparently the Lord hasn\u2019t seen my tears or heard my prayers.\u201d\u00a0 The Rev. Paul G. Hansen responded, not with moralistic prohibition, but with tact and more than a little gentle irony: \u201cThere is nothing in Scripture which forbids masturbation . . . [and] there is nothing physically harmful about masturbation. . . . \u2018[God] will not suffer you to be tempted above what you are able.\u2019\u201d[18]<\/a><\/p>\n

By the sixties and seventies, Walther League Executive Director Elmer Witt had published under the title \u201cLife Can Be Sexual–Now!,\u201d arguing among other things that \u201cGod created sexuality and calls us to live fully and freely as sexual beings.\u201d[19]<\/a>\u00a0 At least some of the Leaguers apparently needed little encouragement to embrace changing gender mores.\u00a0 Throughout the sixties women began writing more regularly for The Walther League Messenger<\/em>, which was incorporated into an ecumenical youth ministry publication, Arena<\/em>, in 1963, and whose name was changed to Edge<\/em> in 1967, and then again to Bridge<\/em> in 1969. \u00a0The latter featured a regular column, \u201cThe Sisters Speak,\u201d whose location in the publication was indicated with the circle-above-cross icon for the female gender, with a clenched fist at the center.\u00a0 Leaguer Kathy Morkert expressed the way \u201cthe sisters\u201d saw things:\u00a0 \u201cThe Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod joins the other institutions in our society that perpetuate the myths and role definitions that dehumanize and degrade women. . . .\u00a0 God\u2019s gifts have no sexual distinction.\u201d[20]<\/a><\/p>\n

Now, such sentiments did not sit well with some Lutheran authorities.\u00a0 Local parishes began to withdraw financial support from the increasingly youth-led League when The Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod as a whole went through a conservative take-over in the late sixties and early seventies, and by 1977 the Walther League had closed its offices.\u00a0 Many former Walther Leaguers left the Missouri Synod and eventually helped found the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, which ordains women, in 1988.[21]<\/a>\u00a0 The Missouri Synod, on the other hand, staked its market share as the Lutheran Church of the backlash; a development traceable in part to the dramatic changes in gender dynamics wrought a few decades before in the Walther League.[22]<\/a>\u00a0 Those changes had, however, been grounded in Lutheran theology, and especially in the Lutheran notion of Christian liberty.\u00a0 According to Luther, the very best things that a person could do (like falling in love) were invariably tinged with sinful self-interest.\u00a0 Luther\u2019s response to this dilemma was, however, neither to perpetuate the Catholic penitential system to mediate between the sinner and God, nor to flee from the self-interested world in sectarian isolation.\u00a0 Rather, Luther encouraged Christians to \u201csin boldly,\u201d that is, to trust in God\u2019s grace and forgiveness, and to act as boldly as he himself had acted as a once celibate monk who broke his vows to marry a nun.\u00a0 For several generations, at least, the Walther League assisted young Lutherans in coming to recognize that the Christian gospel was not synonymous with either the separate spheres mentality or the moralistic prohibitions of Victorian gender ideology.\u00a0 That its openness to experimentation both led to a schism that divided a church, and led to the formation of a new one, demonstrates some of the vitality in the movement.<\/p>\n

The Young Christian Workers: The \u201cNatural Grace\u201d of Upwardly Mobile Lay Apostles<\/h4>\n

If a plot of Christian history in nineteenth-century America was democratization through the revivals of the frontier, the twentieth-century saw the domestication of Christianity through the rise of the consuming and comfortable middle classes.[23]<\/a>\u00a0 Whatever one thinks of this development–and academics have a notoriously hard time admitting our own place within it–youth ministries played a significant role in socializing young people to become \u201cAmerican Christians.\u201d A telling example is the case of the Young Christian Workers (YCW).<\/p>\n

YCW had its roots in the larger Catholic Action movement, which sought to encourage lay people to make practical applications of Catholic faith in everyday life.[24]<\/a>\u00a0 Like its Catholic Action counterparts the Christian Family Movement (CFM, for married couples), and the Young Christian Students (YCS, for those in school at any level), YCW intended to apply the Catholic Action \u201cinquiry method\u201d of \u201cObserve, Judge, and Act,\u201d designed by Belgian Canon Joseph Cardijn, to the situations of young laborers and clerical workers.[25]<\/a>\u00a0 Never intended to be a mass movement, YCW nevertheless operated, at the numerical high-point of its history in 1958, fifty-two small-group sections across the city of Chicago alone.[26]<\/a>\u00a0 YCW drew on the Church\u2019s social teachings to develop an emerging theology of lay apostles, where ordinary men and women participated in what had once been seen as a clergy prerogative–as apostolic members of the Mystical Body of Christ.[27]<\/a><\/p>\n

The first \u201ccells\u201d–as they were called–of YCW were established in Brooklyn, New York, after a series of Catholic Action lectures in 1938 and 1939 sponsored by the Knights of Columbus.\u00a0\u00a0 Young lay workers organized a small group \u201ccell,\u201d where members met once a week under the supervision of a priest to \u201cobserve, judge, and act\u201d as young Catholic workers.\u00a0 A report on these early meetings indicates that typical topics discussed included:\u00a0 \u201cthe working environment, dancing, dress, dates and preparation for marriage, movies, family life.\u201d\u00a0 Each meeting began with the \u201cobservation:\u201d\u00a0 \u201cmembers were expected to bring in facts about a specific topic chosen ahead of time.\u201d\u00a0 After a discussion of these observed facts, and a search of the Scriptures and tradition of the Church for relevant information, \u201cthe group would make a judgment.\u00a0 Did the facts indicate a problem?\u00a0 Should something be done?\u00a0 What?\u201d\u00a0 The group then agreed upon actions.\u00a0 Early actions by the Brooklyn cells included campaigns for decent movies, getting fellow workers to return to the sacraments, and trying to create a more Christian celebration of Christmas by placing displays in stores and encouraging the use of religious cards.[28]<\/a><\/p>\n

As this range of topics and actions indicates, YCW even in its earliest American incarnations was not exactly a radical movement, and in fact worked within the emerging conventions and commodities of American middle-class markets–dancing, movies, clothes, and even Christmas cards.<\/p>\n

As the movement expanded across the U.S., \u201ccells\u201d developed which more or less followed the letter and spirit of Catholic Action support for labor.\u00a0 For one example, Wisconsin\u00a0 YCW member Dodie Marino penned two widely reprinted pieces on her involvement in labor disputes (including a strike), and which demonstrated the ability of YCW members to engage the most intractable problems of the market economy.[29]<\/a>\u00a0 For another, the YCW women\u2019s staff, under the title \u201cU.S. Girls\u2019 Biggest Problem–Loneliness,\u201d defined \u201cloneliness\u201d to include the fact that \u201calthough women workers are one third of the labor force, they get only one-fifth of the nation\u2019s wages and salaries.\u201d[30]<\/a><\/p>\n

Despite such forays into systemic analysis and action, however, YCW was far from the anarchism of Dorothy Day\u2019s Catholic Worker Movement, and most members would not have been mistaken for socialist fellow travelers.\u00a0 In fact, the movement was intended, and probably served, as a Catholic hedge against Communist influence among labor.[31]<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0 The U.S. version of YCW gradually stressed less the working class connections of Catholic Action than the benefits to individuals of participating in \u201csmall groups\u201d of like-to-like service.\u00a0 \u201cIn a small group the members gradually build a spirit of friendliness and common purpose,\u201d explained one U.S. YCW Manual.\u00a0 \u201cThey feel what psychologists call a \u2018sense of belonging,\u2019 since the small group belongs to its members–and they belong to it–in a way that rarely is possible in a larger organization.\u201d[32]<\/a>\u00a0 Unlike in Europe, where YCW leaders had to persuade a large, relatively permanent and alienated working class to return to an established Church, in U.S. Catholicism the boundaries and allegiances of the working class were fluid, and the Church was one more voluntary organization in the market economy.\u00a0 Over the course of its history, the focus on workers lessened within YCW, and being a lay apostle in the \u201cMystical Body of Christ\u201d became a metaphor for joining the American middle classes.<\/p>\n

A critique of this tendency appeared at the height of the movement in 1958, within one of YCW\u2019s own publications.\u00a0 The author, Fr. Keith Kennedy, was a YCW leader among Mexican workers in California.\u00a0 Kennedy appealed for YCW to throw off \u201cdilettante apostolicity,\u201d and truly focus on \u201cgenuine love and \u2018guts\u2019 Christianity.\u00a0 If [YCW] is merely to be a youth movement, even an apostolic youth movement, it is doomed, I fear, to superficiality.\u201d\u00a0 Rejecting the claim that there were not specific workers\u2019 problems in the U.S., Kennedy listed low-cost housing, insurance, workers compensation, right-to-work legislation, displacement of migrant workers, and materialism.\u00a0 These were problems that needed to be \u201cseen, and touched, and felt, and smelled in the individual lives of workers and their families–of human personalities made in the image and likeness of God.\u201d[33]<\/a>\u00a0 A dilettante apostolicity lacked depth.<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, for the young people in the local \u201ccells\u201d of YCW across the U.S., the issues they faced, touched, and felt had as much to do with movies and marriage as with migrancy.\u00a0 By 1957 fully seventy-seven percent of the youth involved in YCW were white-collar employees (like secretaries and store managers), while only fifteen percent were blue-collar workers.[34]<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0 By 1962, a survey of YCW chaplains in Chicago concluded that \u201cevery priest interviewed saw the YCW as a youth movement. . . .\u00a0 The priests did not consider YCW a \u2018workers\u2019 movement in the European sense of the phrase.\u201d[35]<\/a>\u00a0 By 1964 the class realities were made explicit when the name of the organization was changed to \u201cYoung Christian Movement,\u201d and by 1968 all of the Chicago cells had ceased operations.[36]<\/a><\/p>\n

What had happened?\u00a0 YCW was part of that process, as Andrew Greeley has observed with typical wit, by which the Catholic Church in America became \u201ca church for immigrants who are no longer immigrants, a church for the poor who are no longer poor, a church for the uneducated who are now well educated.\u201d[37]<\/a>\u00a0 Such changes were anything but inconsistent with Catholic theology, which since at least Aquinas has seen natural happiness and supernatural grace as part of a continuum.\u00a0 All of life has its source in God, and all living things find fulfillment in God, but God intends for humans to be happy and to enjoy the gifts of nature and society.\u00a0 Being a lay apostle in the Mystical Body of Christ was not incompatible with membership in the American middle classes.\u00a0 Indeed, as the history of YCW suggests, belonging to such a small group youth ministry was a helpful step for Catholic young people to take in that upwardly mobile direction.<\/p>\n

Youth for Christ: The \u201cOld Time Gospel\u201d in the Idioms of Popular Culture<\/h4>\n

Surely if any modern American youth ministry fits Joseph Kett\u2019s stereotype of moralistic, purity-driven \u201ctraining\u201d of youth, we will find it among evangelical Christians.\u00a0 The case of Youth for Christ, however, suggests that even among evangelicals the situation was more complex than Kett depicted it.<\/p>\n

Youth for Christ (YFC) was one of three evangelical, nondenominational youth organizations founded during World War II (the others were Young Life and Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship).\u00a0 Many others have followed since.\u00a0 YFC had roots on the East Coast, but it grew most rapidly in the Midwest.\u00a0 Organizer Torrey Johnson, pastor of the Midwest Bible Church, scheduled rallies at Chicago\u2019s Orchestra Hall for twenty-one consecutive Saturday nights in 1944, and booked half-hour spots on radio station WCFL to coincide.\u00a0 Billy Graham–at the time a twenty-five year old pastor in the Chicago suburb of Western Springs– preached the first sermon at the first rally, and in 1945 became YFC\u2019s first full-time staff person as traveling evangelist.\u00a0 Following these successful revivals, Chicago became the organizing center for Youth for Christ, and the pattern of radio-broadcast and rallies became Youth for Christ\u2019s signature.[38]<\/a><\/p>\n

YFC rallies followed a consistent pattern of\u00a0 \u201cSaturday night in a big auditorium, lively gospel music, personal testimonies from athletes, civic leaders or military heroes, and a brief sermon, climaxing with a gospel invitation to receive Jesus as personal Savior.\u201d[39]<\/a>\u00a0 Joel Carpenter develops the portrait further:<\/p>\n

Rally evangelists hammered at the sins of youthful desire, while creating an atmosphere of wholesome entertainment, patriotic affirmation, and religious commitment.\u00a0 [Early YFC] meetings featured carefully orchestrated visions of innocence, heroism, and loyalty . . . all wrapped in a contemporary idiom borrowed from radio variety shows and patriotic musical revues.[40]<\/a><\/p>\n

Over the decades, rallies gave way to local small group meetings of youth as the core ministry of Youth for Christ, but throughout its history YFC, like many evangelical youth ministries, has discovered that an effective way to reach young people has been to package \u201cthe old time gospel\u201d in the idioms of popular culture.<\/p>\n

Two developments within twentieth-century evangelicalism document this rapprochement between conservative Christian theology and American popular culture.\u00a0 The first is the trickiest.\u00a0 In gender politics, evangelicals would seem to be particularly old-school: the Promise Keepers came from somewhere.[41]<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0 Yet even among ardent evangelical advocates of the politics of gender separation one finds fissures and accommodations with popular culture.\u00a0 For instance, in a 1947 feature in Youth for Christ Magazine<\/em>, \u201cFor Girls Only,\u201d Dorothy Haskins argued that \u201cbecoming a Christian does place certain restrictions upon a girl\u2019s conduct. [A Christian girl] does not wear clothes obviously styled as \u2018man-bait.\u2019\u00a0 She conforms more closely to the rules of good conduct.\u201d Addressing the question of why \u201cChristian girls don\u2019t pet,\u201d Haskins concluded that \u201cGirls are like jewelry.\u00a0 Cheap, imitation jewelry in the dime story may be picked up and handled by anyone.\u00a0 At exclusive shops, however, the jewels are kept in a glass case.\u00a0 You may look, but only the owner may possess them.\u201d[42]<\/a>\u00a0 Now, on one level this analogy is about as blatant an endorsement of mid-century American patriarchy as one can find: a woman is \u201cowned\u201d by her partner.\u00a0 On another level, however, the analogy is consistent with the modern commodification of sexuality:\u00a0 girls are like jewelry.\u00a0 Thus, by 1997 one finds in Campus Life<\/em>–the successor to Youth for Christ<\/em> Magazine<\/em>, a regular feature column on \u201cLove, Sex, and the Whole Person,\u201d where evangelical youth write in with laments such as \u201cIm Addicted to Porn.\u201d[43]<\/a><\/p>\n

In short, although the intent<\/em> of YFC and similar evangelical youth organizations was to promote teenaged sexual \u201cpurity,\u201d the very structure of the organizations as intergendered groups created fissures in the ideology of the separate spheres.\u00a0 Thus in a counterpart to Haskins\u2019 1947 piece, Don Jacobs addressed \u201cBoys Only\u201d with some recommendations of his own.\u00a0 \u201cBe definite in your dating,\u201d Jacobs began.\u00a0 \u201cActive sports are good for dates.\u00a0 The more strenuous the better,\u201d he continued, \u201cas long as she can take it. . . .\u00a0 Be a committee of one to see to it that your relationship with the gals is going to be on the up and up always.\u201d\u00a0 On one level, again, Jacobs\u2019 advice for boys to \u201cbe on the up and up\u201d in their gender relations (all Freudian analysis aside) reinforced patriarchy and male control.\u00a0 On another level, though, by encouraging boys to include girls in active sports Jacobs in fact was (within the evangelical world) demonstrating a progressive intent, more in keeping with attitudes in popular culture than in traditional Victorian gender ideology.[44]<\/a>\u00a0 Girls could, one presume, play basketball or volleyball with the boys at a YFC meeting–as they now do regularly in similar groups across the country.[45]<\/a><\/p>\n

Countless other examples of evangelical embrace of popular culture exist–in education, in economics, and in politics, but the most dramatic example has been the rapprochement between evangelical youth ministry and popular culture in the area of music and entertainment.\u00a0 From the outset, YFC leaders sought to update evangelicalism, which had grown conventional since the decades of Billy Sunday\u2019s showmanship on the sawdust trail.[46]<\/a>\u00a0 Gospel music had always been tinged by the blues; in the forties, YFC infused it with the rhythms and instrumentation of swing.\u00a0 The old-time gospel, furthermore, was broadcast.\u00a0 Foreshadowing evangelical dominance of television decades later, YFC leaders routinely bought up air-time to broadcast their revivals on the radio.\u00a0 The revivals were tailored accordingly: they moved quickly, and entertained as well as uplifted.\u00a0 Preachers who spoke in the clipped cadences of radio newsmen were interspersed with magicians who performed their tricks.\u00a0 Former dance band leaders shared the stage with MacArthur the gospel horse, who \u201cmoved his jaws to show \u2018how the girls in the choir chew gum\u2019 and . . . [who tapped] his hoof three times when asked how many Persons are in the Trinity.\u2019\u201d[47]<\/a><\/p>\n

This accommodation of evangelical youth ministry to the styles and substance of popular culture has accelerated over the decades.\u00a0 For example, evangelical sociologist Tony Campolo reports on attending an evangelical youth rally in the late eighties: \u201cTaking the stage just before I spoke was a musical group called the Rez Band. . . .\u00a0 The punk-rock types in the crowd were gyrating to the band\u2019s drum beats. . . . [And] when the members of the band gave their testimonies of what the Holy Spirit was doing for them, the crowd cheered them with wild enthusiasm.\u201d[48]<\/a>\u00a0 A similar scene could have been witnessed at \u201cChristian contemporary music\u201d concerts or evangelical youth rallies over the past two decades, where numerous bands and artists have successfully woven the old-time gospel into the newest musical idioms, even if at times the tapestry is so subtle that to some the gospel seems to be lost.[49]<\/a><\/p>\n

In any event, as Joel Carpenter has recently argued, Youth for Christ (and evangelical youth ministry more broadly) represented the emergence in American history of a new evangelicalism:<\/p>\n

Youth for Christ wed born-again religion to the style as well as the media of the entertainment industry.\u00a0 From a fundamentalist perspective, the rally leaders were borrowing from the very dens of the devil–Hollywood and Radio City–to accomplish the Lord\u2019s purposes.\u00a0 Dressing revivalism in more fashionable attire and merging it with Americans\u2019 growing concern for their fate in a troubled world, Youth for Christ pioneered a new evangelical outreach.\u00a0 The rallies blended fundamentalists and other evangelicals into a broad coalition and showed how the movement might win a valued place once more in the public life of the nation.[50]<\/a><\/p>\n

Youth ministry, in short, re-created American evangelicalism.<\/p>\n

African American Youth Ministries: Forging Freedom<\/h4>\n

Youth ministry has also re-created U.S. political culture.\u00a0 Nowhere was the role of Christian young people in social change more dramatically evident than in the civil rights movement.\u00a0 Historian and sociologist Vincent Harding explains the well-known but still little appreciated dynamic:<\/p>\n

[Young people] were in Little Rock, Arkansas, entering the school under the protection of the National Guard–but with no protection at all in the classrooms, locker rooms, and lavatories. . . .\u00a0 They sat in at lunch counters, knelt-in at churches, waded-in at beaches, slept-in at motels. . . Suddenly it strikes us: It was a phalanx of children, teenagers, and young adults who did so much to break the back of the deadly, generations-old system of legal segregation. . . . Young people were the heart of the movement.[51]<\/a><\/p>\n

And most of these young people were Christian, with roots in youth ministries, where they were nurtured in practices of prophetic social critique and constructive political engagement.[52]<\/a> \u00a0Not all black churches had youth ministries with prophetic or political functions, but many did.[53]<\/a><\/p>\n

For instance, the history of Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Baltimore can demonstrate the ways in which African American youth ministries transgressed the boundaries between sacred and secular spheres to forge freedom for black youth not only during, but also prior to and after the civil rights movement.\u00a0 Bethel was founded in 1786, and has housed a congregation continuously since.\u00a0 In the twentieth-century, Bethel became the headquarters for Baltimore\u2019s\u00a0 \u201cCity-Wide Young People\u2019s Forum.\u201d\u00a0 This agency, led in the nineteen-thirties by Juanita Jackson–who eventually became youth director of the NAACP, sponsored programs to \u201cdevelop the intellectual and moral talents\u201d of young African Americans.\u00a0 The Forum also took direct action.\u00a0 Along with members of the National Urban League, Bethel\u2019s youth \u201cpicketed and boycotted the city\u2019s chain stores, which refused to hire Negro clerks.\u00a0 They also protested segregation at the Enoch Pratt Public Library, and held mass meetings to demonstrate against\u201d two Maryland lynchings in 1932 and 1933.[54]<\/a>\u00a0 By 1937, the congregation mobilized to get black police officers hired in the city of Baltimore.\u00a0 Meetings in the church\u2019s 1,600 seat sanctuary were held to discuss the issue of representation on the police force, along with other political matters troubling the community.[55]<\/a>\u00a0 Through such meetings, and through Sunday sermons and Scripture readings, young black Christians learned and practiced \u201cliberation theology\u201d at Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Baltimore well before it was given a name as a movement within Christian theology.[56]<\/a><\/p>\n

Of course, Bethel\u2019s young people from the thirties through the fifties were also involved in many traditional youth ministry activities, such as bible study, prayer, and song.\u00a0 But in the context of segregation, even the most apparently innocuous events held social significance.\u00a0 In 1956, for instance, Mayme Tilghman, president of Bethel\u2019s Laymens\u2019 League, involved many of the young African American women of Bethel as models in a fashion show.\u00a0 Over two hundred attended.\u00a0 Sociologist Lawrence Mamiya draws out the significance: \u201cLong before the black consciousness movement of the 1960s, these social affairs underscored the insight that black was indeed beautiful.\u201d[57]<\/a>\u00a0 For young people en route<\/em> from childhood to adulthood, affirmation of their body as beautiful was a significant theological and cultural affirmation.\u00a0 Another event in 1962, also led by Tilghman, demonstrated the creative way Bethel\u2019s youth were taught patterns of economic empowerment.\u00a0 Tilghman organized a Merchant Stamp collecting campaign, including a \u201clicking committee\u201d to paste loose stamps into books.\u00a0 The campaign raised enough money to buy a school bus for the Sunday School and youth programs.\u00a0 Through such social and economic activities, Bethel\u2019s youth learned that freedom meant both freedom from oppression and for social responsibility.\u00a0 As is well known, the \u201cchurch [has been] the most economically independent institutional sector in the black community.\u201d[58]<\/a><\/p>\n

During the civil rights movement, Bethel was a fixture in the struggle to desegregate Baltimore.\u00a0 Pastor Harrison J. Bryant involved youth in events such as the \u201cMarch for Baltimore\u201d on March 30, 1964, when 4,000 demonstrators, led by a young Dick Gregory, paraded throughout the city to signal their demand for equal access to fair housing and other benefits of life in modern America.\u00a0 Leaders of the national civil rights movement visited Bethel where young people could meet them and learn from them.\u00a0 Among them was the Honorable Thurgood Marshall, a Baltimore native who was prosecutor in the pivotal 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown vs. Board of Education<\/em> which paved the way for desegregation across the U.S..[59]<\/a>\u00a0 Through the welcome of prominent guests, the youth of Bethel were connected to \u201ckin\u201d with significant success in public life.[60]<\/a>\u00a0 Such figures demonstrated for black youth that Christian faith had practical as well as spiritual benefits.[61]<\/a><\/p>\n

Since the sixties, the challenges for youth ministry at Bethel changed, but a focus on bridging religion to practical problems continued.\u00a0 In a 1998 interview, the church\u2019s youth minister, Rev. David DeVaux, explained that \u201cthere\u2019s no separation of the secular and the sacred here.\u00a0 We try to teach youth about all of life, everything from Zechariah [a biblical book] to Puff Daddy [a contemporary hip-hop artist].\u201d[62]<\/a>\u00a0 The potential of the latter became apparent to me when I attended the worship services at Bethel on December 21, 1998.\u00a0 For the music before the sermon, the massive choir in the balcony at the back of the church began to sing Beethoven\u2019s Ode to Joy<\/em>, set to the lyrics of Henry van Dyke,\u00a0 Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee<\/em>.\u00a0 After two verses of precise, staccato pronunciation of the lyrics, the organ crescendoed, and then the piano, drum, bass, and guitars joined in a gentle gospel blues arrangement of Beethoven\u2019s beautiful melody.\u00a0 Two young women appeared at the front of the church, dancing classical ballet in blue jeans and red turtleneck sweatshirts.\u00a0 After a couple verses of gospel blues, the band took off on a driving hip-hop beat.\u00a0 Up the aisles came an army of youth, dozens of them of all ages dressed in jeans and red turtlenecks, stepping, jumping, sprinting, and dancing with abandon.\u00a0 Several did cart-wheels.\u00a0 The members of the congregation sprang to their feet, clapping hands and swaying to the music, joining in the exuberance.\u00a0 A young man took the microphone at the front of the church and began a theological-rap, as a choir of young people massed behind him, swaying and singing and shouting with adoration. The young man standing next to me turned my way as we shared in the beauty of the moment, and exclaimed, \u201cNow that\u2019s what I\u2019m talkin\u2019 about!\u201d<\/p>\n

DeVaux\u2019s reference to Puff-Daddy, then, was not accidental.\u00a0 Music has been a key bridge between the generations in African American churches.\u00a0 The lineage is long, deep, and direct (though not uncontested) from the early spirituals, through the \u201cfreedom songs\u201d of the civil rights movement, down to contemporary gospel.\u00a0 As Lincoln and Mamiya suggest, \u201cthe music performed in black churches is a major way of attracting members and sustaining their spiritual growth. . . .\u00a0 Among black young people . . . gospel music programs constitute the major drawing card\u201d determining their church membership.[63]<\/a>\u00a0 Members of Bethel\u2019s intergenerational choir, I learned, included the young people who also constituted a separate youth choir, \u201cJoshua Generation.\u201d The dancers formed the core of the church\u2019s step team.<\/p>\n

Bethel\u2019s ministry with young people in the 1990s went considerably beyond music.\u00a0 For instance, on the Sunday I attended Senior Pastor Frank M. Reid III–himself a son of the congregation–preached a sermon entitled \u201cGod Delivers us to Develop Us\u201d that was a virtual incantation of the challenge to African American youth ministry since the passing of civil rights legislation.\u00a0 Urged on by congregational responses of \u201cAmen,\u201d \u201cAlleluia,\u201d and intense spiritual experience (including speaking in tongues),[64]<\/a> Reid preached: \u201cThe church is still filled with spiritual babies because we got stuck in the sixties and seventies with deliverance, and forgot the development.\u00a0 But God wants us to develop into mature men and women.\u00a0 God wants to birth greatness, strength, and security.\u201d\u00a0 The reference to God giving birth was subtle, but unmistakable, and was an effective way to broaden youth (and adult) images of God beyond the traditionally masculine images of Christian history.\u00a0 In case his congregation missed it, Reid repeated the theme: \u201cGod is always a God of birth and giving.\u201d\u00a0 Quoting Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Luther King, Jr., Reid rang the changes on Christian freedom: \u201cOnly those who believe, obey; and only those who obey, believe.\u201d\u00a0 \u201cWith opportunity comes responsibility.\u201d\u00a0 \u201cGod delivers us, to develop us.\u201d\u00a0 It was a sermon that ranged across issues of gender, class, education, and economics.<\/p>\n

Youth ministry at Bethel in the 1990s was also not restricted to music and preaching on Sunday mornings.\u00a0 In the early \u201890s the church developed a\u00a0 \u201cRites of Passage program for youth between the ages of thirteen and eighteen, structured like a college course, complete with syllabus, tuition ($400 per student), and course requirements of reading assignments and community service projects.\u00a0 Topics discussed from a Christian perspective include guns and violence, money management and entrepreneurship, African American history, and selection of colleges.\u00a0 Bi-weekly\u00a0 meetings culminated in an Afrocentric Rites of Passage ceremony at the church on a Friday in Spring, followed by a Cotillion dinner at a nearby restaurant on Saturday.[65]<\/a>\u00a0 Mamiya summarizes the significance of these programs, \u201cBy creating its own rite[s] of passage based on African tradition, the congregation was again reasserting its resistance to mainstream American culture and returning to its African heritage.\u201d[66]<\/a><\/p>\n

Along with an emphasis on worship and rites of passage, Bethel established a scholarship program to assist youth who wished to attend college.\u00a0 Administered by the Daniel Payne Scholarship Committee (Payne was pastor of the church from 1845-1849), this program began in 1975 with $50 scholarships to High School graduates.\u00a0 By 1989, twenty-eight awards were given, totaling $28,000.[67]<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 By 1999, the total had jumped to over $60,000 annually in awards.[68]<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0 These scholarships indicated the long tradition of \u201cself-help\u201d within African American congregations–with \u201chelp\u201d understood not only spiritually, but politically and economically as well.<\/p>\n

Along with scholarships, which obviously assist upwardly mobile black youth, Bethel also developed Teen PEP (Pregnancy Education Program), to educate young women about motherhood and to encourage fathers to take responsibility for their children.\u00a0 Among Bethel\u2019s numerous ministries in the late 1990s were others that reached out specifically to teens.\u00a0\u00a0 \u201cEzekiel\u2019s Army\u201d was a juvenile justice ministry seeking to prevent crime among male adolescents.\u00a0 \u201cFreedom Now\u201d was a \u201cWord-based counseling ministry for substance abusers and their families and friends.\u201d\u00a0 The church also sponsored a prison ministry which reached out to many black youth incarcerated in Baltimore\u2019s penal facilities.[69]<\/a><\/p>\n

In places like Bethel, then, before, during, and after the civil rights movement African American church members assisted black youth as they have sought to find a life-path of freedom. Through its youth ministries, which are woven into the fabric of congregational life, young people learned not only to pray and study, but also to participate in protests, and to take an active role in political life.\u00a0 In the process, they re-created American culture–from its laws to its music, in ways that defy conventional stereotypes, and that pose a significant challenge to Joseph Kett\u2019s paradigm for understanding the history of adolescence.<\/p>\n

Re-creating America<\/h4>\n

All in all, then, a more nuanced picture of what has happened in the history of Christian youth ministry is emerging than the one offered by Joseph Kett.\u00a0 Youth ministries, at the least, have been a key location of social change in American culture, and especially within American religious history.\u00a0 Kett\u2019s sample was simply too small, and he was largely insensitive to the sometimes subtle motivations and activities of religious groups.\u00a0 All in all, youth ministries have proven quite creative and adaptable over the twentieth-century.\u00a0 Even if they have not mobilized all youth to march forward on the same causes (a pattern probably not desirable in any event), on some issues, in some communities, real change has occurred.<\/p>\n

Among confessional Protestants like the Lutheran Walther Leaguers, for instance, the example of sexuality and gender relations documents significant changes.\u00a0 Over the course of the twentieth-century, Lutheran youth learned to pick and choose which gender-related advice to accept from their spiritual authorities.\u00a0 Prohibitions against dancing were widely ignored, and eventually dropped completely.\u00a0 Sexual behaviors once simply taboo, such as masturbation, received, if not endorsement, acknowledgment as less-than-the-horrid-sin some youth constructed it to be.\u00a0 And by the 1960s, healthy sexuality was affirmed as a worthwhile goal, \u201cnow!,\u201d and feminism began to appear in the League publications.\u00a0 Such developments produced a backlash among some Lutherans, but also helped prepare the way for the ordination of women in the largest group of Lutherans in the U.S., The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, formed in 1988.<\/p>\n

Among Roman Catholics, the critical issue was class, rather than gender.\u00a0 The history of the Young Christian Workers in America documents how young Catholics in the U.S. increasingly identified themselves not as \u201cworkers,\u201d but as \u201cyouth,\u201d ostensibly to the chagrin of their spiritual authorities.\u00a0 And yet, links between economic well-being and spiritual destiny were firmly grounded in Catholic theology and natural law teaching, and were, furthermore, fostered by the very programs and foci of most of the YCW programs.\u00a0 Many of the market-friendly accommodations of YCW to American culture took on spiritual form in the embrace of voluntarism and cultural diversity that eventually became manifest in Vatican II, and (with some qualification) throughout the papacy of John Paul II.\u00a0 At the least, Catholics were well-prepared through groups such as YCW to be full participants in the American middle-classes.<\/p>\n

Even among evangelicals, Kett\u2019s one-sided dismissal of youth ministry deserves revision in light of the last half of the twentieth-century.\u00a0\u00a0 Groups like Youth for Christ did manifest many of the culturally-confirming conventions that Kett associated with adolescence, but YFC also moved young evangelicals forward into a more energetic embrace of American popular culture, as the example of music demonstrates.\u00a0 Indeed, if YFC recreated American evangelicalism, as Carpenter argues, it could also be argued that evangelicalism recreated American culture from the 1970s to the present.\u00a0 The Presidencies of Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush would thus become, not a discontinuity between parties, but a demonstration of the enduring influence of a revived evangelicalism in American public life.<\/p>\n

Finally, then, the example of African American youth ministry poses perhaps the most serious challenge to Kett\u2019s dismissive treatment of Christian adolescents in history.\u00a0 Among blacks, youth ministry has been anything but \u201cintellectually bankrupt\u201d or \u201cculturally confirming.\u201d\u00a0 As the examples of the civil rights movement and Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Baltimore demonstrate, youth ministries among African Americans could be not only prophetic, but politically and culturally potent.<\/p>\n

To be sure, many local youth ministries operated throughout the twentieth-century in ways that were banal, and that perpetuated the purity program Kett rightly criticized.\u00a0 But among some Walther Leaguers, Young Christian Workers, Youth for Christ members, and participants in the youth ministries of Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Baltimore, a more nuanced history appears, with complex interactions across American culture.\u00a0 If youth ministries and Christian young people did not re-create America, they surely played a role in negotiating its future.\u00a0 The details of that role are in need of on-going study, in diverse contexts, by historians attuned to the harmonies of theology and the rhythms of ritual, and attentive to the historical contributions and significance of children, youth, and the programs adults have created for them.[70]<\/a><\/p>\n

References<\/h4>\n

<\/a>[1] \u00a0Joseph Kett, Rites of Passage: Adolescence in America, 1790 to the Present<\/em> (NY: Basic Books, 1977), p. 210, 194, 190, 248.<\/p>\n

<\/a>[2] \u00a0Ibid., pp. 248, 243, 253.\u00a0 Many of these phrases Kett quotes approvingly from August de B. Hollingshead, Elmtown\u2019s Youth: The Impact of Social Class on Adolescents<\/em> (NY: J. Wiley, 1949), p. 149.<\/p>\n

<\/a>[3] \u00a0See Sydney Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People\u00a0 <\/em> (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), pp. 965ff.\u00a0\u00a0 I develop the significance of Ahlstrom\u2019s insight more fully in my Youth Ministry in Modern America:\u00a0 1930 to the present<\/em> (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 2000).<\/p>\n

<\/a>[4]\u00a0 I find particularly compelling the analysis of Edward Shils, Tradition<\/em> (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1976), as a way to theorize historical changes in tradition.\u00a0 See especially Chapters Six and Seven of Youth Ministry in Modern America<\/em>, where I utilize Shils\u2019 theoretical perspective to describe, set in context, and analyze the functions of four youth ministry subcultures–Lutheran, Roman Catholic, Evangelical Protestant, and African American.\u00a0 Within each, youth leaders communicated to young people theological language systems and ritually-inscribed social practices with centuries-old lineages, while also adapting these systems to the changing contours of American culture and to the demands of young people.\u00a0 The systems changed more or less constantly throughout the twentieth-century, through what Shils has called \u201cexogenous\u201d and \u201cendogenous\u201d catalysts of change. From without, Christian youth ministries were changed by U.S. global involvement (most notably in war and trade), and by increasingly centralized and rationalized Federal, state, and local bureaucracies.\u00a0 From within, Christians have corrected, rationalized, and imaginatively reconfigured their own traditions in dramatic ways in the late twentieth-century. Youth ministries were both affected by, and helped to create, these changes.<\/p>\n

<\/a>[5]\u00a0 On this topic, see the excellent dissertation by Thomas E. Bergler, \u201cWinning America: Christian Youth Groups and the Middle-Class Culture of Crisis, 1930-1965.\u201d \u00a0Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Notre Dame, 2001.<\/p>\n

<\/a>[6] This approach, which sees youth subcultures as venues for intergenerational negotiation, is also developed in Generations of Youth: Youth Cultures and History in Twentieth-Century America<\/em>.\u00a0 Ed. Joe Austin and Michael Nevin Willard (NY: NYU Press, 1998).\u00a0 See also Paula Fass, The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920s<\/em> (NY: Oxford University Press, 1977); James Gilbert, A Cycle of Outrage; America\u2019s Reaction to the Juvenile Delinquent in the 1950s<\/em> (NY: Oxford University Press, 1986); William Graebner, Coming of Age in Buffalo: Youth and Authority in the Postwar Era<\/em> (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990); Giovanni Levi and Jean-Claude Schmitt, eds., A History of Young People in the West.\u00a0 Volume 1: Ancient and Medieval Rites of Passage; Volume 2: Stormy Evolution to Modern Times<\/em>.\u00a0 Tr. Camille Naish (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997); Nina Mjagkij and Margaret Spratt, eds., Men and Women Adrift: The YMCA and the YWCA in the City<\/em> (NY: NYU Press, 1997); Grace Paladino, Teenagers: An American History<\/em> (NY: Basic Books, 1996); and Judith Weisenfeld, African American Women and Christian Activism: New York\u2019s Black YWCA, 1905-1945<\/em> (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997).\u00a0 On the matter of \u201cre-creating\u201d America through vernacular, as opposed to elite, histories, see John Bodnar, Remaking America:\u00a0 Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth-Century<\/em>\u00a0 (Princeton:\u00a0 Princeton University Press, 1992).<\/p>\n

<\/a>{7]\u00a0 I document the history in detail in Hopes and Dreams of All: The International Walther League, and Lutheran Youth in American Culture, 1893-1993<\/em> (Chicago: Wheat Ridge, 1993).\u00a0 The title is from a Lutheran eucharistic prayer: \u201cGather the hopes and dreams of all; unite them with the prayers we offer.\u00a0 Grace our table with your presence, Lord, and give us a foretaste of the feast to come.\u201d\u00a0 The commissioned work is based upon archival and oral history research, and is available from Wheat Ridge Ministries, 1 Pierce Place, Suite 250E, Itasca, IL 60413.\u00a0 Phone 1-800-762-6748. Online http:\/\/www\/wheatridge.org.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 .<\/p>\n

<\/a>[8] \u00a0For a history of the publication, see my \u201cWalther League Messenger,\u201d in Popular Religious Magazines of the United States<\/em>.\u00a0 Ed. P. Mark Fackler and Charles H. Lippy (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995): 494-500.<\/p>\n

<\/a>[9]\u00a0 For more general histories of some of the changes wrought through these negotiations, see Beth L. Bailey, From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America<\/em> (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989); and John Modell, Into One\u2019s Own: From Youth to Adulthood in the United States, 1920-1975<\/em> (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1989).<\/p>\n

<\/a>[10]\u00a0 “An der Verwaltungsrath der Walther-Liga, zu Haenden des Herrn Wilhelm L.[sic] Fritz, Secretaer\u201d<\/em> [\u201cTo the Walther League Board, into the hands of Dr. Wilhelm C. Fritz, Secretary,\u201d] n.d., [1900], typescript copy, Box 22, Concordia Historical Institute Walther League Collection, St. Louis, Missouri.\u00a0 90 linear feet of Walther League materials are available at the Institute.<\/p>\n

<\/a>[11]\u00a0 See Der Vereinsbote<\/em> 9(August-September, 1900): 10 for the precise wording of the resolutions from the convention.\u00a0 The Missouri Synod as a whole did not recognize the right of women to vote in congregations for another fifty years.<\/p>\n

<\/a>[12]\u00a0 P. E. Kretzmann, \u201cThat Vexing Question of Dancing and Related Subjects,\u201d n.d. [c. 1939], typescript mimeograph, Box 27, Concordia Historical Institute Walther League Collection.<\/p>\n

<\/a>[13]\u00a0 “Martha W. Smith to Jon Pahl,\u201d 21 November 1991.\u201d\u00a0 I distributed surveys to and requested correspondence from several hundred former Walther Leaguers between 1991 and 1993.\u00a0 Returned surveys and correspondence have been forwarded to the Concordia Historical Institute, Walther League Collection.<\/p>\n

<\/a>[14]\u00a0 John Fischer, \u201cIowa West Highspots,\u201d Walther League Messenger<\/em> 64(April 1956): 19.<\/p>\n

<\/a>[15]\u00a0 “T. J. Vogel to Edgar Fritz,\u201d 21 March 1953.\u00a0 Concordia Historical Institute, Box 43, Walther League Collection.<\/p>\n

<\/a>[16]\u00a0 Elizabeth Zoller to Jon Pahl,\u201d November 8, 1991, p. 7.\u00a0 Typescript of homily included.<\/p>\n

<\/a>[17]\u00a0 “Marilyn [Rook] Bernthal to Jon Pahl,\u201d September 23, 1991, p.\u00a0 3.<\/p>\n

<\/a>[18]\u00a0 Paul G. Hansen, \u201cIt\u2019s Your Problem,\u201d Walther League Messenger<\/em> 64(February 1956): 29.<\/p>\n

<\/a>[19]\u00a0 Elmer Witt, \u201cLife Can Be Sexual–Now,\u201d Arena One<\/em> (June 1967): 7-8.<\/p>\n

<\/a>[20]\u00a0 Kathy Morkert, \u201cThe LCMS and Women,\u201d Bridge<\/em> (April 1971): 6.<\/p>\n

<\/a>[21]\u00a0 See Todd Nichol, All These Lutherans: Three Paths to a New Lutheran Church<\/em> (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1988), and the ELCA web-page, http:\/\/www.elca.org.<\/p>\n

<\/a>[22]\u00a0 For an examination of this backlash at work in an earlier period, see Betty DeBerg, Ungodly Women: Gender and the First Wave of American Fundamentalism, 1875-1925<\/em> (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1989).\u00a0 For the definitive study of the present manifestation, see Susan Faludi, Backlash: The Undeclared War against American Women (<\/em>NY: Crown, 1991).\u00a0 For a historical study of the dynamics within the Missouri Synod, see Mary Todd, Authority Vested:\u00a0 A Story of Identity and Change in the Lutheran Church\u2014Missouri Synod<\/em>\u00a0 (Grand Rapids, MI:\u00a0 Eerdmans, 2000).<\/p>\n

<\/a>[23]\u00a0 This is the implicit plot (badly obscured by lack of editing) in Harvey Graff, Conflicting Paths: Growing Up in America<\/em> (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995).\u00a0 See also Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity<\/em> (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989) and Leigh Eric Schmidt, Consumer Rites: The Buying and Selling of American Holidays<\/em> (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).\u00a0 A. Gregory Schneider, The Way of the Cross Leads Home: The Domestication of American Methodism<\/em> (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993) dates this process too early, and defines it too narrowly, but clearly identifies the dynamics at work within one denomination.\u00a0 See also Colleen McDannell, \u201cHome Schooling,\u201d in American Sacred Space<\/em>.\u00a0 Ed. David Chidester and Edward T. Linenthal (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996).<\/p>\n

<\/a>[24]\u00a0 For general historical treatments of the Catholic Action movements, see Jay Dolan, The American Catholic Experience:\u00a0 A History from Colonial Times to the Present <\/em>\u00a0(Garden City, New York:\u00a0 Doubleday, 1985); Aaron I. Abell, American Catholicism and Social Action:\u00a0 A Search for Social Justice, 1865-1950<\/em>\u00a0 (Notre Dame:\u00a0 University of Notre Dame, 1963); Debra Campbell, \u201cReformers and Activists,\u201d in American Catholic Women:\u00a0 A Historical Exploration.<\/em>\u00a0 Ed. by Karen Kennelly, C.S.J\u00a0 (New York:\u00a0 Macmillan, 1989), pp. 152-181; and \u201cLabor and Lay Movements:\u00a0 Part One,\u201d U.S. Catholic Historian<\/em> 9(Summer, 1990):\u00a0 223-333, and especially \u201cLabor and Lay Movements:\u00a0 Part Two,\u201d in Ibid<\/em>.<\/u>, 9(Fall, 1990):\u00a0 335-467.<\/p>\n

<\/a>[25]\u00a0 See Michael de la Bedoyere, The Cardijn Story<\/em>\u00a0 (New York:\u00a0 Longmans, Green and Co., 1958).\u00a0 Among Cardijn\u2019s writings in translation, see Challenge to Action:\u00a0 Addresses of Monsignor Joseph Cardijn.<\/em>\u00a0 Ed. by Eugene Langdale\u00a0 (Chicago:\u00a0 Fides, 1955) and Laymen Into Action<\/em>.\u00a0 Tr. by Anne Heggie\u00a0 (London:\u00a0 Geoffrey Chapman, 1964).<\/p>\n

<\/a>[26]\u00a0 There is a monograph documenting the history of the group, written by a former member.\u00a0 See Mary Irene Zotti, A Time of Awakening: The Young Christian Worker Story in the United States, 1938 to 1970 <\/em>\u00a0(Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1991), p. 153.<\/p>\n

<\/a>[27]\u00a0 R. Scott Appleby, \u201cPresent to the People of God:\u00a0 The Transformation of the Roman Catholic Parish Priesthood,\u201d in Transforming Parish Ministry:\u00a0 The Changing Roles of Catholic Clergy, Laity, and Women Religion<\/em>\u00a0 Ed. by Jay P. Dolan, et al.\u00a0 (New York:\u00a0 Crossroad, 1990), p. 27.<\/p>\n

<\/a>[28]\u00a0 Zotti, Awakening<\/em>, p. 15.<\/p>\n

<\/a>[29]\u00a0 See Dodie Marino, \u201cYCW in Our Factory,\u201d in Apostolate<\/em> 2(Winter, 1954): 20-26; \u201cYCW Joins a Picket Line,\u201d in Apostolate<\/em> 4(Spring, 1957): 10-14.<\/p>\n

<\/a>[30]\u00a0 YCW [Women\u2019s] Staff, \u201cU.S. Girls\u2019 Biggest Problem: Loneliness,\u201d in AIM<\/em> 2(March, 1958):\u00a0 4.<\/p>\n

<\/a>[31]\u00a0 See for example, Jeremiah Newman, What is Catholic Action:\u00a0 An Introduction to the Lay Apostolate<\/em>\u00a0 (Westminster, Md:\u00a0 Newman Press, 1958), p. 23 who argues in typical fashion that the \u201calarming\u201d growth of Communism made Catholic action necessary.<\/p>\n

<\/a>[32]\u00a0 Bob Senser, Specialized Apostolates in Action<\/em>\u00a0 (Chicago:\u00a0 CFM\/YCW\/YCS, 1959), p. 5.<\/p>\n

<\/a>[33]\u00a0 Fr. Keith Kennedy, \u201cYCW: A Workers\u2019 Apostolate?,\u201d in Apostolate<\/em> 5(Spring, 1958): 15-20.<\/p>\n

<\/a>[34]\u00a0 Zotti, Awakening<\/em>,\u00a0 p. 139.<\/p>\n

<\/a>[35]\u00a0 “Two Reports on YCW City Chaplains,\u201d in Apostolate<\/em> 9(Fall, 1962): 5-6.<\/p>\n

<\/a>[36]\u00a0 See \u201cA Time To Begin: Introducing YCM,\u201d typed page proofs.\u00a0 (Chicago: YCM, 1967).\u00a0 University of Notre Dame Archives, CYCM Collection, Box 20.<\/p>\n

<\/a>[37]\u00a0 Andrew M. Greeley, \u201cThe Catholics in the World and in America,\u201d in World Religions in America: An Introduction <\/em>(Louisville, KY: Wesminster\/John Knox, 1994), p. 95.<\/p>\n

<\/a>[38]\u00a0 Bruce Shelley, \u201cThe Rise of Evangelical Youth Movements,\u201d in Fides et Historia<\/em> 18(1986): 49.\u00a0 The office moved to Wheaton, Illinois in 1953, and Denver, in 1990.<\/p>\n

<\/a>[39]\u00a0 Ibid..<\/p>\n

<\/a>[40]\u00a0 Joel A. Carpenter, \u201cYouth for Christ and the New Evangelicals,\u201d in Religion and the Life of the Nation: American Recoveries<\/em>, ed. Rowland A. Sherrill (Urbana: The University of Illinois Press, 1990), p. 140.<\/p>\n

<\/a>[41] For this movement, see the PK web-site, http:\/\/www.promisekeepers.org\/<\/a>, as cited 2\/04\/03, and Rhys H. Williams, ed., Promise Keepers and the New Masculinity:\u00a0 Private Lives and Public Morality<\/em>\u00a0 (Lanham, MD:\u00a0 Lexington Books\/The Association for the Sociology of Religion, 2001).<\/p>\n

<\/a>[42]\u00a0 Dorothy Haskins, \u201cFor Girls Only,\u201d in Youth for Christ Magazine<\/em> 5(February, 1947): 6, 28.<\/p>\n

<\/a>[43]\u00a0 Tim Stafford, \u201cLove, and Sex, and the Whole Person,\u201d regular feature, Campus Life<\/em> 56(July\/August, 1997): 42-44.<\/p>\n

<\/a>[44] Don Jacobs, \u201cFor Boys Only,\u201d Youth for Christ Magazine<\/em> 5(February, 1947): 7, 58-9.<\/p>\n

<\/a>[45] \u00a0Clifford Putney, Muscular Christianity:\u00a0 Christianity and Sports in America<\/em>\u00a0 (Cambridge, MA:\u00a0 Harvard University Press, 2001), isolates the dynamic for an earlier period, through a paradigm that largely perpetuate\u2019s Kett\u2019s.<\/p>\n

<\/a>[46]\u00a0 See my \u201cBilly Sunday,\u201d in Twentieth-Century Shapers of American Popular Religion<\/em>, ed. Charles H. Lippy (NY: Greenwood Press, 1989): 410-416.<\/p>\n

<\/a>[47]\u00a0 See Mel Larson, Young Man on Fire: The Story of Torrey Johnson and Youth for Christ<\/em> (Chicago: Youth for Christ Publications, 1945), p. 41, and Joel A. Carpenter, Revive Us Again: The Reawakening of American Fundamentalism (<\/em>N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 165.<\/p>\n

<\/a>[48]\u00a0 Tony Campolo, The Church and the American Teenager: What Works and What Doesn\u2019t Work in Youth Ministry<\/em> (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1989), p. 41.<\/p>\n

<\/a>[49]\u00a0 Quentin J. Schultze, et al., Dancing in the Dark: Youth, Popular Culture, and the Electronic Media <\/em>(Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1991) raises this possibility.<\/p>\n

<\/a>[50]\u00a0 Carpenter, Revive Us Again<\/em>, p. 162.<\/p>\n

<\/a>[51] Vincent Harding, Hope and History: Why We Must Share the Story of the Movement<\/em> (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1990), p. 59.<\/p>\n

<\/a>[52] \u00a0See for example, David Halberstam, The Children<\/em> (NY:\u00a0 Fawcett, 1998), who in somewhat breathless fashion narrates the story.<\/p>\n

<\/a>[53]\u00a0 See Peter J. Paris, \u201cThe Religious World of African Americans,\u201d in World Religions in America: An Introduction<\/em>, ed. Jacob Neusner (Louisville, KY: Westminster\/John Knox Press, 1994), pp. 83-89, who develops a helpful typology, based on his earlier The Social Teachings of the Black Churches<\/em>.\u00a0 (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985).<\/p>\n

<\/a>[54]\u00a0 Lawrence H. Mamiya, \u201cA Social History of the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Baltimore: The House of God and the Struggle for Freedom,\u201d in American Congregations: Volume I: Portraits of Twelve Religious Communities<\/em>.\u00a0 Ed. by James P. Wind and James W. Lewis (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994),\u00a0 p. 255.<\/p>\n

<\/a>[55]\u00a0 “By the Grace of God: A History of Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church,\u201d Homepage of Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church<\/em>, http:\/\/www.bethel1.org\/history.htm<\/a>, as cited 2\/03\/03.<\/p>\n

<\/a>[56]\u00a0 The rediscovery of this insight has been a chief feature of the past generation of scholarship on the African American Church.\u00a0 See among many James Cone, God of the Oppressed<\/em>\u00a0 (N.Y.:\u00a0 Seabury, 1976); Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll:\u00a0 The World the Slaves Made<\/em>\u00a0 (N.Y.:\u00a0 Vintage, 1976); Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness:\u00a0 Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom<\/em> \u00a0(N.Y.:\u00a0 Oxford University Press, 1977); Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion:\u00a0 The \u201cInvisible Institution\u201d in the Antebellum South<\/em>\u00a0 (N.Y.:\u00a0 Oxford University Press, 1978).<\/p>\n

<\/a>[57]\u00a0 Mamiya, \u201cA Social History of the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Baltimore: The House of God and the Struggle for Freedom,\u201d p. 257.<\/p>\n

<\/a>[58]\u00a0 C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya, The Black Church in the African American Experience <\/em>(Durham: Duke University Press, 1990), p. 241.<\/p>\n

<\/a>[59]\u00a0 Mamiya, p. 258-261.<\/p>\n

<\/a>[60]\u00a0 William R. Myers, Black and White Styles of Youth Ministry: Two Congregations in America<\/em> (NY: Pilgrim Press, 1991) takes this idea of \u201ckinship\u201d as the key to understanding African American youth ministry.<\/p>\n

<\/a>[61]\u00a0 On this theme of continuity, see Albert J. Raboteau, \u201cThe Black Church: Continuity within Change,\u201d in Altered Landscapes: Christianity in America, 1935-1985<\/em> Ed. David W. Lotz (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989): 77-91.\u00a0 On the role of churches in the civil rights movement, see among many Aldon D. Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change<\/em> (NY: Free Press, 1984); David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross:\u00a0 Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference<\/em>\u00a0 (N.Y.:\u00a0 Vintage Books, 1986); Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters:\u00a0 America in the King Years, 1954-1963<\/em>\u00a0 (N.Y.:\u00a0 Simon and Schuster, 1988); Adam Fairclough, \u201cThe Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Second Reconstruction, 1957-1973,\u201d in Modern American Protestantism and Its World, Vol. 9:\u00a0 Native American Protestantism and Black Protestantism<\/em> Ed. Martin E. Marty (Munich: K.G. Sauer, 1993): 188-205.<\/p>\n

<\/a>[62]\u00a0 Jon Pahl, \u201cInterview with David DeVaux,\u201d December 16, 1998.<\/p>\n

<\/a>[63]\u00a0 Lincoln and Mamiya, p. 380-381.\u00a0 See also James Cone, The Spirituals and the Blues:\u00a0 An Interpretation<\/em> (San Francisco:\u00a0 Harper and Row, 1972); Wyatt Tee Walker, \u201c<\/u>Somebody\u2019s Calling My Name:\u201d\u00a0 Black Sacred Music and Social Change<\/em>\u00a0 (Valley Forge, PA:\u00a0 Judson Press, 1979); and Michael W. Harris, The Rise of Gospel Blues:\u00a0 The Music of Andrew Dorsey in the Urban Church<\/em>\u00a0 (N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 1992).<\/p>\n

<\/a>[64]\u00a0 Bethel is one of the A.M.E. (and A.M.E. Zion and Baptist) churches to be involved since the seventies in the\u201cneo-Pentecostal\u201d movement.\u00a0 This movement, drawing on the dramatic growth of the Church of God in Christ in the U.S., has transformed many traditionally \u201cdecorous\u201d black churches into congregations featuring vibrant, spirit-infused worship.\u00a0 Speaking in tongues is not considered essential for membership in these churches, but it is welcomed as one of many spiritual gifts.\u00a0 See Lincoln and Mamiya, pp. 385-88.<\/p>\n

<\/a>[65]\u00a0 “Bethel AME Rites of Passage Syllabus,\u201d p. 8.\u00a0 In possession of the author, obtained from Rev. DeVaux.<\/p>\n

<\/a>[66]\u00a0 Mamiya, p. 269.<\/p>\n

<\/a>[67]\u00a0 Ibid.<\/p>\n

<\/a>[68]\u00a0 “Interview with David DeVaux,\u201d p. 3.<\/p>\n

<\/a>[69]\u00a0 “Ministries of Bethel,\u201d Bethel Home Page<\/em>, pp. 1-3.<\/p>\n

<\/a>[70] \u00a0The prospects for this research are good.\u00a0 The Society for the History of Childhood and Youth was formed in 1999, and holds bi-annual conferences.\u00a0\u00a0 Go to http:\/\/academic.mu.edu\/shcy\/<\/a> for the society\u2019s web-page.\u00a0 An H-Net on-line discussion of children and youth is also active, and sponsors a web-page for exchange of syllabi.\u00a0 See for the latter, http:\/\/www2.h-net.msu.edu\/~child\/syllabi\/<\/a>, as cited 2\/04\/03.<\/p>\n

How to cite this article<\/strong>: Pahl, J. (2003) ‘Re-creating America: Youth ministry and social change, 1930-1999’, the encylopedia of informal education<\/em>, www.infed.org\/christianyouthwork\/recreating_america.htm<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Dr. Jon Pahl<\/strong> is Associate Professor of Church History at The Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia (LTSP).<\/p>\n

\u00a9 Jon Pahl 2003<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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