“While past generations may have described their developmental hopes for teenagers through words such as holiness, faithfulness, and maturity, there seems to be a contemporary preference for authenticity. We want teenagers to be real.”

Pizza Cheese and Christianity: Everybody Wants to be Real

In the 1980s Domino’s Pizza rose to national prominence based upon a combination of factors including the pledge of using “100% real cheese.” I have to admit that before Domino’s advertising campaign I had never stopped to consider whether the cheese at our town’s homegrown pizzeria was authentic, but Domino’s had convinced me in a 30-second ad spot that what I wanted was 100% real.

What is true for our pizza is true for the rest of our lives as well. We may have no idea what we mean by “authentic” or “authenticity” but we are convinced that, whatever it is, we want it. There simply are not many places in life where being the opposite is desirable. The possible antonyms of authentic — fake, pseudo, bogus, counterfeit, and phony — become public relations nightmares (and commercial failures) when applied to products. They become terrible insults when applied to people. Adolescents naturally have picked up on this, and modern epithets employed by teenagers reflect the trend. While the monikers with which teenagers commonly berate one another may sting (think: asshole, fucker, bitch, and bastard) these do not have nearly the emotional and psychological effects as other teenage favorites such as poser, two-faced, and phony. It is entirely conceivable for teenagers to joke with their friends using words that the larger society would consider vulgar; yet, it is almost inconceivable that teenagers would sling the word poser or phony at their friends without some kind of relational fallout.¹

Authenticity is one of those words that has such a hold on us that its application to everything from pizza cheese to Christian worship immediately creates what would be called in the discipline of logic a forced choice. If something is deemed “authentic” it becomes difficult, if not impossible, for us to defend that which is juxtaposed.

Real Aspirations: Authenticity as the Goal of Development

Children aspire to grow up to be firefighters, police officers, and doctors. No one aspires to grow up and be phony. In fact, the very idea of childhood play centers on the ideal of aspiring and growing to be authentic. Children “pretend” to be firefighters or doctors, but always with the ideal of someday becoming real and authentic. This childhood ideal of developing to become authentic was captured in Margery Williams’ 1922 classic The Velveteen Rabbit in which the toy rabbit aspires, not to grow up, but to become Real:

“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. . . .Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

The Rabbit sighed. He thought it would be a long time before this magic called Real happened to him. He longed to become Real, to know what it felt like.”²

Like the Velveteen Rabbit, we may not know for certain what Real is, but we want to know what it feels like.

In light of our cultural aspirations for Real, maybe it is not surprising that ministry which deals with developing adolescents is drenched in the word “authentic” and its various derivatives. It has become an adjective of choice sprinkled liberally like table salt across youth ministry conversation so that we now talk about authentic youth ministry, authentic followers of Christ, authentic community, authentic atmosphere, authentic Bible studies — and the list could go on.

But I want to suggest that authenticity is more than merely a buzzword in youth ministry. I want to suggest that it has become part of the developmental telos, not just of imaginary bunnies in books, but for the adolescents under our care. While past generations may have described their developmental hopes for teenagers through words such as holiness, faithfulness, and maturity, there seems to be a contemporary preference for authenticity. We want teenagers to be real.

Mike King holds up this developmental telos in his book Presence-Centered Youth Ministry where he describes his hopes that teenagers would become like the biblical hero David who was a “man after God’s own heart.” King’s take on David is intriguing:

David had an honest, intense relationship with God. The Bible calls him a man after God’s own heart even though he was a bloody soldier, a murderer, and an adulterer. What was it about David that made him a man after God’s own heart? He would come into the presence of God with no pretense. David conversed with God intimately, never masking his emotions or managing his image before God. David spoke passionately with God. ‘How long are you going to let this go on? Why are doing this?’ God never reprimands David for being authentic.³

In King’s interpretation, authenticity is what God desires for David, and by implication for all people—youth included. While it would be incorrect to say that authenticity has replaced holiness, faithfulness, and other developmental goals that we may have for youth, it is clear that authenticity has become a prominent hope for adolescent development.

However, just as the path to authenticity and the nature of Real is obscured for the Velveteen Rabbit, so in the church we do not have clearly formulated understandings of how adolescents develop toward authenticity—nor even what it is. We have our hunches and inklings, but as much as we want to talk about teenagers “being real” and becoming “authentic” no one seems to have laid out a clear model of how this comes about. Further, the implicit models we carry with us are hampered by assumptions that do not stand up to theological rigor.

(Part II of this article, “Made Real: Toward a Theological Model of Adolescent Authenticity” will be published on Monday, January 28.)

1. This was confirmed for me by an informal poll of more than a dozen teenagers and young adults conducted over Facebook and in a live video chat on Justin.tv. Respondents were asked the question, “What would be the most hurtful thing to be called by a friend?” Every respondent answered that “phony” would be a more disparaging name to be called than the other options supplied: fucker, bastard/bitch, or asshole. One young adult using the screen name error_nine said, “Girls can call me whatever they want it don’t mean nothing, but if a guy friend called me phony it would get to me.” Another respondent, audidave, agreed that phony was the worst moniker, “Guy pals call me all those except phony.” Finally, a respondent under the screenname Licks said, “I got to go with phony too. At least I’m an honest asshole!” [↩]
2. Margery Williams, The Velveteen Rabbit, 1922. [↩]
3. Mike King. Presence-Centered Youth Ministry: Guiding Students into Spiritual Formation. (Downers Grove, Ill: IVP Books, 2006), 72-73. [↩]