How Silly Youth Groups Create Calvinists

Jesse Johnson makes the case in his review of Colin Hansen's Young, Restless, and Reformed, available at the Shepherd's Fellowship blog.

According to Johnson, Hansen's argument is that . . .

cheesy youth groups realize very quickly that they do not have adequate answers to explain the basics of their faith, much less to stand up to their secular professors. When they reach the point of realizing they don’t have the answers, they generally find someone who does, and this person (or book, or CD) is usually unashamedly Reformed.

Here's Johnson's inference:

The more silly youth groups are, the more people will be driven to reformed circles upon graduation.

Of course that analysis is wildly optimistic. Anyone who's spent any substantial time around young people who grew up in silly youth groups knows that the number who are driven to reformed circles years later is a tiny sliver of the pie. The vast majority reach the conclusion (quite rationally) that the same tastes for entertainment, amusement, and shallow Christianity that were indulged in their youth groups should be similarly available in their churches. When they don't get what they want in the church where they grew up, they look for it elsewhere. And they find it. Or perhaps just as commonly, they stay home, where more professional entertainers deliver it to them via satellite or a DSL connection.