- Joined
- Oct 3, 2018
It's possible, the media certainly did quite a lot to make those folks look stupid all throughout the 80s Satanic Panic and the 90s moral crusades against video games and black trenchcoats. As annoying as those people could be at times, I'd take them any day over the Nu-Think Cult. When the Christian Right fell it left a massive void. I know quite a lot of people who entered that edgy "I'm not going to church anymore, dad, I'm an atheist and you can't make me!" euphoric atheist phase and never quite made it out. Hell, Reddit is crawling with that particular brand of stupid arrested development fucks.
The Christian Right is pretty much long gone, having aged mostly to irrelevancy, but a lot of these people still behave like it exists and they're still rebelling against people who don't give a shit anymore. The backlash against their parents in the 80s and 90s, even the early 2000s, has turned into the unbridled degeneracy we see today. Anything fucked up and taboo, they'll do it just to get back at people who either consider them a lost cause or might be long dead. And all because those people wanted them to go to church with the family.
The bulk of the "fuck you dad!" euphoric arrested development cases seem to be Gen-X'ers and Millennials with the trend tapering off among both first cohort X'ers and last cohort Millennials.
I'm among the latter group and I went through that phase as a teenager, but I eventually came back to my faith after seeing the godless hedonist hellscape that is popular culture in spite of my scientific education. Glad I did too, once I let Jesus back into my life I met my wife.
I expect a sizable cohort of Zoomers and the next generation to go through their own "fuck you dad!" phase and rebel against the leftist pablum they've been fed for all their lives.
This event and the pandemic may come to define Zoomers and the following generation like 9/11 did for Millennials and Gen X. What path they choose is up to them.