Last week, an article in Christianity Today posited that “Gen Z Isn’t Asking Why Bad Things Happen to Good People.” The author, Jared Dodson, argued that the question he’s hearing is closer to “Why don’t bad things happen to bad people?” He’s onto something, but I’m not sure if limiting the observation to a single generation is the right move.
Is your 70-year-old boomer uncle who spends all day on Facebook, eBay, and political news sites really all that different from your 15-year-old zoomer neighbor who spends all his time watching TikTok and YouTube Shorts? I doubt it. To me, generational stereotypes are only slightly more helpful than horoscopes. I’m with Louis Zorich’s character, Pete, in The Muppets Take Manhattan: “Peoples is peoples.”
Dodson writes that the main way Gen Z differs from past generations is “in how digital media exposes young people to suffering, oppression, and violence against others en masse.” That Gen Z’s “interest in imprecation and justice comes not only from their personal experiences but also from their daily witness of the harm done to others around the world.”
Of course, on one level, he’s right. Digital media has replaced carefully chosen images in newspapers and professionally edited TV news segments with a constant barrage of raw depictions sent straight to the device pinging in our pocket. But I suspect the impulse toward fairness and justice over mercy is, overall, the default human position and therefore our natural starting point when we’re young. Before we’re made fully aware of our limitations and culpability, before we’ve had it revealed to us that mercy or grace in one form or another is the true agent behind all the best things in our lives, how could it really be otherwise? If we check back in on Gen Z in 15–25 years, I have a feeling (maybe also a hope) that this propensity will have slackened.
Douglas John Hall’s God & Human Suffering, a wonderful 40-year-old book of theology, sheds some light on all of this by digging into what C. S. Lewis (45 years earlier) called the problem of pain.
One argument he makes is that there are two kinds of suffering: suffering that leads to integration and suffering that only serves to further disintegrate. The difference between the two is “the criterion of life.” Hall is careful here, though. He notes that “while there are numerous criteria for what the Judeo-Christian tradition understands by life and the fullness of life, there is no fixed enunciation of the types of human suffering that can contribute to the life-giving process or, conversely, of those that cannot.” Meaning, we can’t generalize. A form of suffering that might be ultimately beneficial to me could completely wreck you, and vice versa.
Hall also engages with Harold Kushner’s perennially popular When Bad Things Happen to Good People, which Kushner wrote on the heels of losing his fourteen-year-old son to a rare genetic disorder that caused premature aging. Hall acknowledges that much of what draws readers to the book is the immediacy of a writer wrestling not with theoretical pain but an actual recent situation. There is no doubt that Kushner takes human suffering very seriously. Where Hall pushes back is Kushner’s reading of Job, in which he argues against God’s omnipotence, writing that “God would like people to get what they deserve in life, but He cannot always arrange it.”
Hall doesn’t think that is a satisfying answer. God’s problem is not powerlessness, it’s that God loves. That’s why words like “good” fail to capture the reality. God is good, but not in the way that we usually conceive of it. Moralistic goodness is largely beside the point because of how it devolves into “deserving,” into quid pro quo, which is not what God is ultimately interested in. Instead, Hall points us to a God whose power expresses itself not in rewarding the deserving but in the weakness of love. And this more complex, truer God is also more accessible to us because “every one of us knows, if we’ve lived and loved at all, something of the meaning of that yearning, that weak power, that powerful weakness.”
Gen Z is not a monolith, and plenty of people two or three times their age are asking the same questions. As a group, however, their lives have been saturated with disintegrative suffering, and many of them haven’t yet experienced a lot of love. They haven’t yet had enough experience with integrative suffering and all that comes with it. This is not a reason to wring our hands. It takes life experience, including experiences of suffering and love, to break any of us free from the rigidity of good and bad, deserving and undeserving, and to receive what has always been true, that mercy undergirds everything.
