Generational Change

Generations comprise people born within the same time period, who share similar formative experiences in adolescence and early adulthood. The concept of generations has been used to explain change and continuity in societies by social scientists and historians since the 18th century. Most recently, the concept of the generation has been used as a way to describe different groups in society, such as baby boomers or Generation X, and how their characteristics are somehow unique from other generational groupings.

The sociologist Karl Mannheim laid the groundwork for understanding the dynamics of how generations form and how social change takes place across different generations. For Mannheim, generations operate similarly to social class, with the crucial element being the common experience of the same historical problems and participation in the same social and intellectual movements that shape and transform the historical situation in which they grow up. Because of their common location in the historical process and their similar stage of personal development, those who experience and participate in similar historical and cultural events constitute a generation. All members of a particular generation, however, do not understand their common experiences in the same ways. Rather, they tend to differentiate into subgroups that express their common experiences in politically and culturally different ways.

If generational continuity takes place through the successful socialization of younger generations into the dominant societal system of values, norms, and beliefs, generational change takes place as younger generations come of age and experience tension or conflict with the values they have been taught and how those values relate to their own experiences. As these conflicting experiences are shared across a generation of people, generational consciousness emerges. As this new consciousness comes to constitute the outlook of a generation and is enacted through different generational subgroups coming into contact and conflict with each other and with previous generations, new ideas and values emerge, and social change takes place.

As applied to religion, as younger generations are socialized into religious beliefs, rituals, and practices, they interact with these in the context of their own experiences and expectations, from within their own particular sociohistorical situation. Thus, the particular experiences of younger generations that support or come into conflict with existing religious values and teachings drive the accommodation of religion to the needs and experiences of successive generations.

[Page 439]When assessing social and religious change, however, it is difficult to separate generation from other categories of analysis such as race and class. Using generation more as a descriptive category to delineate the differences between and within different generations, while focusing on how other variables influence how generations understand themselves and experience the world, is likely a more fruitful approach.