YOUNG people have been culturally conditioned to read the Bible for moral lessons— “abstract ‘shoulds’ that strip stories of their theological depth and emotional power” — a new study reports.
The study, Troubling Jesus, the third part of Youthscape’s “Translating God” project, suggests that teenagers’ readings of scripture, including the extraction of “sanitised metaphors about mindset or personal improvement”, mean that Jesus can “fade into the background”.
“When Jesus identified as the light, was it energy-saving?”
Perceptions of Jesus as judgemental, gullible, or guilty of “mansplaining” should prompt the Church to reflect on what has been communicated to this generation “about God, the self and the world”, it says. Their candid reactions also “open a window into what God might already be doing in their world”.
The project, a collaboration with the Scripture Union and the Bible Society, was funded by the Sir Halley Stewart Trust. The new report draws on five reading groups, held in 2023. In them, 40 14- to 17-year-olds read and reacted to stories and passages of scripture which, youth workers suggest, could be viewed as “good news”.
Their reactions were “radically different” from what might traditionally have been expected, Youthscape reports. One young woman described God in the book of Jonah as “really violent and aggressive” and suggested that Christians’ relationship with God might be “built on fear”. It raised “concerns about consent and abuses of power”.
Jesus’s encounter with the woman at the well suggested an “unequal power dynamic” to one young man, who observed that Jesus “seems like he is mansplaining” and “has a God complex”.
For some of the young people, the report observes, “Jesus is not the liberator from judgement, he’s the subject of it. He is a troubling figure. Arrogant, powerful, religiously motivated and male.” Jesus “places into question the common cultural narrative that everyone has their own truth and can believe whatever they want to believe, as long as it isn’t harmful to others”.
One message taken from the story of the paralysed man lowered through the roof was “you should do what you have to do to make yourself better.” In this framing, “the man isn’t really paralysed. Instead, sin and physical affliction are metaphors for underlying issues with self-esteem, confidence and passivity.” The report observes that, for these young people, the healing that really matters is “the healing of your perspective”.
The report says that, in 21st-century Britain, the Church can no longer assume that young people have a framework for understanding the Christian faith. Among the “specific cultural biases” that they bring to scripture are concerns about consent, power, and accountability. Among the questions posed by the study are: “What does it mean to submit to God’s will when you are immersed in a culture of ‘you do you’?”
It refers to the Biblos project carried out in the 1990s, which concluded that the Bible was mostly being used to teach morals and abstract values in schools, but that these morals had been separated from Christian theology and secularised. This remains evident today, the study says.
Young people’s reactions could be “deeply uncomfortable” and seem “almost heretical”, the report says, “but this is where their experience of life intersects with the gospel. What happens in that space should matter to the Church,” it says. It warns against bringing “fixed ideas” of what young people should learn from scripture at the risk of failing to hear their “unique perspectives”. It recommends “allowing space for genuine encounter, and trusting that listening well might change us too. When we resist bringing the ‘right’ answers we trust the Spirit to show us something new. Because it’s not what we know that young people need, it’s who we know and He is pursuing them already.”
The report is dedicated to Dr Lucie Moore, Youthscape’s former director of research, “whose curiosity, empathy and intellect initiated, guided and delivered” the project until her sudden death in 2024.
