You know, I feel myself to be in agreement with you. Whatever my daughter picked up from CCD was in an entirely different world from the one she would come to in the Bronx High School of Science, or even knew at the Computer School at IS 44. And of course there was no way she could talk about anything important with us.
The comparative innocence in which I grew up was not as bad as we sometimes assume.
(One fellow I knew in college admitted he was so innocent he thought a concubine was some sort of farme machine.)
:-) There you go. I can only hope that sexual language is so casual and familiar that the kids of the next generation with throw themselves into what's still forbidden and taboo: theology!
I do know that there was a girl thing at Bronx Science that they weren't going to get dragged into sexual activity of any sort until they were good and ready, and anybody who didn't like it could go f*ck himself. I get the impression that this was not a majority position, but a pretty substantial subculture, and not particularly religious. The promiscuity that the generation just after mine took for granted is out, and it's not just an AIDS thing. The Austin Powers movies make some jokes on the cultural revolution.
Is theology taboo, or just not there? Catholics in particular have made religion so much an affair of the heart that one just doesn't look to it for enlightenment. And (in my opinion) the homosexualization of the clergy had brought about a certain amount of more or less deliberate obfuscation.
Eh, a bit of both (theology being taboo and 'just not there'), I'd guess. The anti-intellectual general culture of the U.S., combined with a strong affective Protestant heritage gave a ground to a cultural antipathy to theology, I suspect (if I had to guess the causes without any further research). And then, that established, you don't have to worry anymore because it's "just not there" on the cognitive map anymore.
The overarching philosophy of secularism in the U.S. has a big role in this, too, both as cause and in maintaining this intellectual status quo. A very specific constitutional amendment to prevent Congress from establishing a specific national denomination has mutated to become the cultural warrant for editing out "religion" from all facets of national life, even becoming a cultural pressure to make that an illegitimate form of speech in the public sphere. And so, bizarrely, the only way to be "open-minded" about theological matters, the culture informs us, is to be absolutely ignorant of theological discourse: one must not learn to speak precisely on the matter, one must learn not to be able to speak of it at all. That's freedom, baby!
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The comparative innocence in which I grew up was not as bad as we sometimes assume.
(One fellow I knew in college admitted he was so innocent he thought a concubine was some sort of farme machine.)
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Is theology taboo, or just not there? Catholics in particular have made religion so much an affair of the heart that one just doesn't look to it for enlightenment. And (in my opinion) the homosexualization of the clergy had brought about a certain amount of more or less deliberate obfuscation.
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The overarching philosophy of secularism in the U.S. has a big role in this, too, both as cause and in maintaining this intellectual status quo. A very specific constitutional amendment to prevent Congress from establishing a specific national denomination has mutated to become the cultural warrant for editing out "religion" from all facets of national life, even becoming a cultural pressure to make that an illegitimate form of speech in the public sphere. And so, bizarrely, the only way to be "open-minded" about theological matters, the culture informs us, is to be absolutely ignorant of theological discourse: one must not learn to speak precisely on the matter, one must learn not to be able to speak of it at all. That's freedom, baby!