Teenagers need clear boundaries in society to rebel against

I had dinner with the religious affairs correspondent of The Telegraph last week.

Well, truth be told, he is the social and religious affairs correspondent, because these days the papers don’t think there is need for a full-time religious affairs reporter.

We were discussing how strange this is when you consider how many of the stories in the news at the moment are religious, or require some religious understanding.

But we have entered a new secular landscape where ‘religion’ feels foreign to us, something in need of translation.

My job, at the heart of a school, is often about translation.

I spend my day in the company of bright, articulate teenagers and my time outside school trying to explain their perspective on the world to adults.

The outside world’s shocked reaction to the story of the British girls who ran away to Syria said something about the inability of adults to understand teenagers and about society’s inability to understand religion.

An article in this week’s Spectator suggested that it was ‘sinister’ for teenagers to want boundaries instead of freedom.

In my small rural parish church it was the teenagers who argued most vociferously against the suggestion that we might replace the Victorian pews with chairs.

At school I had more comments than ever before when we bought new numbers for the hymn board – apparently the font had changed. It was an outrage.

When you can grow an inch in a few days, or your voice can move from solid ground to a squeak overnight, when your skin and hair seem to do entirely what they want to and not at all what you want them to it becomes important that some things are constant.

But post-modernism means that there are no constants any more.

There are no moral absolutes.

There is no such thing as God because nothing exists outside our own understanding of reality.

My experience tells me that teenagers are beginning to distrust this narrative.

They look around them and they know when the emperor has no clothes on. Post-modernism preaches freedom, but vilifies religion as irrelevant.

Faith is something which must be kept out of politics and yet politicians are slated for adultery or drunkenness?

There are no absolute moral values, but the press seems clear that paedophilia and rape and beheading are morally wrong.

Whose virtues? Which morality?

Teenagers need a clear, strong set of boundaries against which they can rebel. What the three girls from London have rebelled against is a freedom which is so vast that it has lost any meaning.

My own Christian perspective believes that human nature will always seek heroes and rules and community and purpose.

What are we offering our girls? Katie Price in the jungle, the moral rule that ‘anything goes’, a smartphone community where love is more about which way you swipe.

And purpose? Well, evolutionary psychology would tell us that the only purpose is procreation.

There is so much more to life than this and teenagers know it.

Post-modernism may suit the ageing hippies among us, but it does not suit the young.

They need the meta-narrative, the transcendent story.

And we are failing them.