Die, Boomer! Die! - American Reformer

Part of a Symposium on the Baby Boomer Generation

I’m chagrinned to admit it, but I’m a Boomer.

I’ve tried to weasel out of it over the years, but people won’t let me, and there’s no let-up. So, like a recovering alcoholic, I now identify: Hi, my name is Chris, and I’m a Boomer.

But I did come at the tail-end. I was born in 1962, just before the cutoff that would have made me one of those plucky Xers, the self-sufficient latch-key kids who essentially raised themselves while their Me-Generation mothers were breaking glass ceilings.

Been there, did that, but no t-shirt for me, I didn’t make the generational cut. (I was largely on my own since about 8 years of age.) My father was an academic back when we were still a family, and we lived near college campuses, so I remember the early Boomers. We called them hippies. Some of them even lived with us. One in particular that I liked was named Joel. He’d pick me up and hold me over his head upside-down so I could walk across the ceiling. Very cool for a four-year-old. But even then, I had my doubts about them. They were unkempt and talked about peace a lot; I liked John Wayne and played army with my friends.

As a cohort, the Boomers have largely had the world on their own terms simply because there are so many of them. They’re like a large lump passing through a snake. They’re nearing expulsion, but you’d never know it. Apparently, they’re not planning to retire or even die. Instead, they’re a gerontocracy in denial. They even hope to lengthen the snake, in some cases, like Ray Kurzweil, indefinitely.

Of course, no one wants to die, and the quest for Eldorado is an ancient one. But because of their extreme individualism, Boomers have even cut themselves off from the consolations of a legacy. For the most part, they don’t think intergenerationally. Like Hezekiah, it’s all about now. What happens when they’re gone isn’t of much concern. Sure, they can drone on about things like climate change, but it is all so self-serving and just another status marker. Go ahead, call me a cynic, but liberal Boomers aren’t genuinely interested in the future; they’re about maximizing choices in the here and now, and historically speaking, even conservative Boomers are pretty liberal.

Legacies are not sure things. And most of the time, they come with an expiration date. We see it in the history of the kings of Israel and Judah. It’s mostly a chronicle of failure. If they think about it at all, many Boomers point this out to justify their preoccupation with the present.

But let’s say we find a unicorn, or an Aragorn, who willingly submits to the inevitable and purposefully hands over the reins to a successor while he’s still of sound mind. How should he go about it?

I’ve been giving this a lot of thought because not only was I born in 62, I am 62. I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. I don’t think I have much to add to the great store of wisdom on the matter, but I am thinking about it. Hopefully, there’s something worth your time in what follows.

The Other Great Replacement

Scions who are mirror images of their benefactors aren’t what we need. We need men (yes, biological men) who know the season we’re in, and who can boldly act. We need guardians of the West, and the nations that comprise it. And they need to be for the West, not just against the movements and ideologies that threaten it. We need archeologists of culture, men adept at digging through the layers of libel and propaganda that have covered up the riches of our civilization and have impoverished us spiritually.

A thin gruel of globalism and deregulation and reducing everything to growing GDP isn’t what conservatism is or ever was. What do we need more of? Loyalty, devotion to duty, and the conviction that nature is more than playdough to mold as we please—that we live in a world of meaning and significance that is simply found in the nature of things. We need fighters because there is no way to wrap up what is needed in the robes of compromise. That’s a start.

But we need fighters who can sing, who can tell the stories of our people, because people are moved by stories, not statistics. And while we shouldn’t ignore the darker stains in our past, we should highlight the golden threads that run through them.

Unfortunately, many people my age are frightened by all this. They don’t understand the “disaffected” young men around them. They think rogue podcasters and social media influencers are to blame for making young men more conservative than they are, less confident in the libertarian bromides that have passed for conservatism since the 1950s and 60s. The idea that the West flourishes when the people in charge keep things light and value neutral fails to own up to the unrelenting decay of the West, even in periods when ostensibly conservative politicians and parties ran things—or at least appeared to. It is time for reality therapy.

The roots of the West run deeply into medieval Europe and Christendom. The Enlightenment and classical liberalism took those roots for granted, and those movements would have failed if not for the preconditions a Christian civilization already enjoyed. The old canard that religion had to be expunged from the West for it to flourish simply isn’t true. It’s time to say out loud what we all know in our hearts—secularism is death. We can’t live for the void and individualism that serves the public good is the product of the Christian faith. There is no getting back to even something as shallow as classical liberalism without nourishing the roots.

What Boomers Have to Give

Boomers are not empty cisterns; if I’ve given that impression, I apologize. There are two things they have—one is tangible, but the other is something less concrete, but more valuable.

The first thing is the institutions Boomers have built. In some cases, they received them from their elders and then refashioned them as they pursued their own goals. But more often they founded new institutions and built them (in many instances) to impressive size. It took work and sacrifice and creativity—often on a grand scale—to accomplish these things. The institutions they’ve built are valuable, and we shouldn’t devalue them.

But even more valuable is the hard-won wisdom that comes from building those things. Much of that wisdom can carry over to what is called for today. The day-in and day-out savvy and dogged dedication that built those institutions is what the rising generation needs. Boomers should remember the reluctance of their fathers to hand the steering wheel over to them some 40 years ago. Even though their predecessors were hesitant, they often did it sooner than the Boomers appear willing to today.

But should the Xers, Millennials, and Zoomers even seek to redirect the institutions so thoroughly molded in the Boomer image? Even conservative Boomers have worked within the Overton Window of respectable opinion that is responsible for the post-Christian West.

But unless the niceties are questioned, and in some cases jettisoned, the West will continue its slow collapse. And in the not-too-distant future, it will speed up. We’re seeing harbingers in places like New York City and Minneapolis. The barbarians are not just at the gates; they’re nearing city hall.

And here’s the conundrum: even when Boomers accept the inevitability of their demise, most live in denial of the major reassessment now needed. This is why I think it is inevitable that there will be a rift.

When I think of my own denomination—the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA)—no one in leadership appears to have a stomach for the fight ahead. The PCA seems to be made up of culture surfers and not the sort of men who make waves. They seem to even resent people who make waves—so long as they’re Christians, or conservatives. I can’t help thinking that many of them take their cues from the political left, from the people who would like Christianity to just go away. It’s the opinions of those people that matter to them. Disaffected young men ought to listen to them and not to people who talk about things like Christian Nationalism.

When it comes to our institutions, there will be exceptions. For every Christianity Today that we must kiss goodbye, there will be a First Things made up of men who know the times and know what must be done. Even so, new institutions like American Reformer are needed. It’s the wineskin problem, but with a twist. We need new skins for really old wine because all the old skins poured the old wine out, and they’re now full of new wine. And we know what happens after that.