Heaven Is A Place On Earth

One of the more interesting takes on GenX in the research comes in Virtual Faith: The Irreverent Spiritual Quest of Generation X by Tom Beaudoin. While some writers fretted over the lives of this generation, Beaudoin expressed concern for the afterlives of his fellow Xers.

"Many cultural critics look at GenX popular culture's deep immersion in sexuality and say, 'How far GenX has run from God!'" Beaudoin observed. "In contrast, I look at all the sexuality and think, 'How deeply GenX desires God!'" While Xers rejected organized religion, they did subscribe to what he termed a hodgepodge spirituality. Beaudoin ascribes much of this to his generation's rejection of the idealism and ideologies of the Boomers as well as the very public defrocking of the foremost religious figures of the 1980s, the televangelists. While churches seemed woefully clueless about how to impress or appeal to the younger set, pop culture served as a kind of "surrogate clergy" to a generation of latchkey kids who grew up having to depend mainly upon themselves (and their television babysitters) against a threatening outside world. As a result, Beaudoin noted, it is hardly surprising that his peers adopted "either playfully ironic or completely dismissive" stances on religion.

While surveys in the early 1990s found only half of Xers considered themselves religious, Beaudoin saw a riddle in how much popular culture was filled with religious imagery and meaning. The success of TV shows, movies and records with religious themes or subthemes showed that Generation X did not despise religion, but it seemed to reinforce the notion that they gravitated toward spiritual manifestations that did not demand too much from them. Gen Xers appeared perfectly comfortable sporting fragments of religious meanings — crucifix tattoos, a Notre Dame sweatshirt, or jewelry bearing religious symbols — as long as they were not required to make the full journey and commit to anything, he wrote.

Beaudoin suspects that conventional religion focuses too much on sin and not enough on the merits of passion. So while so many people blasted Madonna's "Like A Prayer" video for mixing religious and sexual imagery, Beaudoin interprets that as equating the search for spirituality as a generational pursuit as desired as the more common search for sensuality. The video, by Beaudoin's reading, also offered a call for racial tolerance, a demonstration that everyday milieu "can be a site of religious activity and experience," and "spirituality and sensuality need each other."

Beaudoin also wrote that a certain amount of suffering, much of its emotional or spiritual, punctuated GenX upbringings. He looked particularly at how this suffering became manifest in different fashions. The most common style attributed to Xers in the early 1990s, the unadorned flannel "grunge" look represented "an outward expression of an inner poverty that Xers discovered as teenagers and young adults," Beaudoin explained. "We feared that there was something poor at the heart of who we were, and we expressed that deficit in what we wore." He also found something spiritual in the so-called "Goth" style of dressing in black, sporting a pale or painted face, and otherwise living life while looking like a kind of walking dead. Those who wore the Gothic look sported "the most stark expression of GenX suffering," he wrote. "The style indulges in mourning and death, and imitation or even parody of what one would normally wear to a funeral."

For the intriguing nature of his thesis, Beaudoin's biggest weakness came from reading too much into the imagery of the music videos that he used to make points about Xer belief patterns. If Sigmund Freud once said that a cigar is just a cigar, Beaudoin should sometimes realize that a man mowing a lawn in a video is just … a man mowing a lawn, not necessarily a symbol of Christian regeneration. His overreaching in analyzing R.E.M.'s "Losing My Religion," for example, cast doubt on some of his other observations. While Beaudoin took full and literal meaning of the video as a chronicle of modern religious attitudes, "Losing My Religion" is about a failed romantic relationship, not about a man actually losing his faith in a higher power. Michael Stipe, lead singer of the band from Athens, Georgia, has often explained in interviews that "losing my religion" is a Southern expression referring to a person who has come to the end of his rope. By taking a song about someone seeing a romantic relationship fail and turning its video into an exhaustive parable of GenX religious attitudes, Beaudoin undercut many of his arguments.

Still, it's a novel take on the subject, and that he successfully pursued and published such a text further confirms how wide a net society would cast in trying to capture the essence of Generation X.