Mr. Crankypants loves Julius Lester. On his blog, he wrote this delightfully snarky post that sounds like it’s about politics, but is really about generational differences. Writing about Hillary Clinton, Lester points out that “her ideas are old.” In of itself this is not an original thought, but Lester goes on to add: “She’s 60, and she sounds like she hasn’t had a new thought in the past 40 years. I say this as someone who is 9 years older than she is, so I know an old idea when I hear it.”

Mr. Crankypants smells a new generation gap. The Baby Boom generation is so doggone big that they wind up spending most of their time talking to one another, not to younger people, and avoiding new ideas. And because they are such a big market, capitalist culture caters to their every whim to the point where they can pretty much insulate themselves from many new ideas in the world. As someone who lives at the tail end of the Baby Boom (being a few months older than Barack Obama), Mr. Crankypants knows this to be true — if he wanted to, he could spend all his time hanging out with people a few years older than himself and talking about the great music of the 1960s and the great literature of the 1960s and the great political movements of the 1960s, etc., none of which have ever been equaled, blah blah blah. (Actually, Mr. C. hates the 1960s, but you get the idea.) Baby Boomers tend to be full of old ideas, even when they think they are full of new ideas.

Not that anyone at this blog is much of a supporter of Barack Obama. It’s tough to get thrilled about a rhetorician who is further to the right than, and probably just as authoritarian as, Richard Nixon; and who doesn’t seem to understand what it means to be a member of a church to boot. But this isn’t a post about politics, this is a post that uses politics as an example of this new generation gap.

For another example of how how this new generation gap seems to work, we need look no further than racism. Julius Lester has this to say about Hillary Clinton: “Even worse, however, is her pandering to white racism has made us a far more racially divided nation than we were before her march to the White House was stopped by Barack Obama. I cannot ever forgive her for that.” But it’s not Hillary Clinton alone who tends to pander to racist tendencies — the Baby Boom generation as a whole tends to do the same thing. It seems to Mr. Crnakypants that many Baby Boomers (of all skin colors) believe that American racism got solved in the 1960s, between the Civil Rights movement (if they’re white) or the Black Power movement (if they’re black). Those old ideas tend to miss the fact that since 1980 racism has mutated and gotten more virulent, and it no longer responds to the old cures. Thus in Unitarian Universalism, Baby Boomers are still using second wave feminist techniques to try to fight racism, without seeing that second wave feminist techniques like consciousness-raising and identity groups were designed for a racism that no longer exists (nor do they see the class bias inherent in those techniques, but that’s another conversation).

And don’t assume this new generation gap (no capitals) is like the old Generation Gap of the 1960s, because they’re utterly different. The younger generations today aren’t bothering with open rebellion, as allegedly happened in the 1960s, they’re just creating new forms and ideas without bothering to talk much to the Baby Boomers.

So how is this new generation gap playing out in liberal churches? The Baby Boomers are in firm control of our local churches and our denomination, now that the GI Generation has started dying off. Baby Boomers are setting up the churches to suit their needs and their worldview, with the result that younger generations are staying away in droves. Our churches are starting to look like those over-55 communities where children and younger adults are allowed to visit but not stay for very long. This is perhaps most obviously manifested in the intensive efforts to create “young adult programming,” which sounds good on paper but in practice functions pretty much like those restrictive covenants in over-55 communities.

Mr. Crankypants is thinking about making stickers that say, “This Church Is An Over-55 Community,” the idea being that you could buy such a sticker and slap it on your church’s sign when no one is looking. Truth in advertising, don’t you know.