Jesus Christ

Many teenagers today find Christianity off-putting because Jesus seems too fond of "mansplaining." He appears to have a "God complex," while the Almighty is alienating on account of being "really violent and aggressive." These are the findings in the report Troubling Jesus, the third part of Youthscape’s "Translating God" project, based on a recent survey of British 14- to 17-year-olds. Drawing on five reading groups, in which teenagers reacted to passages of scripture traditionally understood as conveying "good news," Youthscape faced reactions "radically different" from what it says might have been expected. While Jesus was not only seen as a condescending male chauvinist and God the Father as a bully, many youths discerned other issues in the readings.

We descended, one weary traveler at a time, down an ancient stone staircase that winds underneath one of the oldest churches in the world. When we arrive in the tiny grotto, we sing Silent Night, our faces dimly lit by the light of a single lantern. This is where many believe a peasant couple, traveling for the Roman census, gave birth to the baby Jesus as described in the second chapter of Luke’s gospel. The Church of the Nativity, commissioned around 330 AD by Constantine, was destroyed by an invading army in 529 AD and then rebuilt by Justinian. Situated in perhaps the most highly contested piece of real estate in the world, it hosts millions of pilgrims every year. This would have been a surprise to the Bethlehem of Jesus’s day.