I recently had a conversation with some teenagers, and two of them caught my attention. Both had approached me for help with their moral goals.
I asked the first one some probing questions. I learned that he is Protestant and that his father is the pastor of their church, but he does not regularly attend. For him, religion is something he would rather explore later in life. He finds loud expressions of praise performative, and he struggles with the idea that doing good is connected to going to heaven. He feels that if the motivation for doing good is the reward of the afterlife, then he is being forced to be good.
He also struggles with the idea that someone could live badly for most of his life and still go to heaven by saying sorry and genuinely repenting, even near the end of his life.
The second teenager goes to church but stays at the back. His struggle is somewhat different. He cannot reconcile the fact that both good and bad people can be found inside the Church. He has seen people who seem religious but use Jesus as an excuse for bad behavior. He does not particularly want to be religious, but he does want to be good.
These are not uncommon struggles among young people who are trying to make sense of faith: Religion isn’t for the young. Can’t I just be good? Can I go to heaven simply by saying sorry? Why are there bad people in church? Why do I need to attend Mass if I can have a personal relationship with Christ?
Both, in different ways, seem to be asking the same question:
Can I be good without being religious?
And beneath that question is another one: What makes goodness authentic?
I did not directly rebut their arguments. I wanted to avoid turning the conversation into a debate. Instead, I tried to listen and offer a few thoughts for them to consider.
For the first teenager, I shared something I heard at Mass the day before, words quoted from Fulton Sheen. Since he said he wanted to be good, I asked him what makes someone a good member of a club. He answered that a good member attends meetings and participates.
I told him that the same principle can apply to belonging to a church. If we claim to be a member of a community, participation is at least part of what membership means.
I also wanted to address his struggle with what might be called transactional Christianity, the idea that we simply do good in exchange for the reward of heaven. I asked him to examine his motives: Am I doing this because it is genuinely good, or am I doing it because I expect something in return?
There is a difference between doing something good because we love the good and doing it merely because it benefits us.
I suggested that he read C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity as part of his moral goal. Reading the book will not automatically make him religious or pious. But it will expose him to arguments about objective moral truth and the claims of Christianity, and perhaps give him a framework for examining the questions he is already asking.
For the second teenager, I used an analogy from school.
A school is made up of many students. Some have excellent grades and character; others do not. If someone wants to understand what the school stands for, however, we would probably look at the students who actually embody its ideals rather than those who merely carry its name.
The same can be said of the Church. It is made up of people at different stages of faith and moral development. Some follow its teachings authentically; others fail to live up to them. The existence of people who behave badly does not necessarily tell us what the Church teaches. In fact, the teachings of the Church provide the standard by which the behavior of its members can be judged—including the behavior of those who claim to follow Christ.
And ultimately, we are not in the Church simply because of the people in it. We are there because of Christ.
He also mentioned that religious people sometimes use Jesus as an excuse for their bad behavior. I wish I had more time to probe what he meant by that. Perhaps he was referring to people who use forgiveness or grace to excuse their actions. Perhaps he has experienced people who invoke Christianity while behaving badly. I don’t want to speculate. I simply found the observation worth exploring further.
I also told him something about attending Mass: we should not expect Mass to give us a particular feeling every time. We do not come to Mass merely as consumers asking, “What am I going to get out of this?”
We come bringing something of our own: our whole selves—our gratitude, failures, worries, relationships, hopes, work, struggles, and intentions and offer them to God.
For both of them, I emphasized one thing: if you want to be good, you have to know what it is to be truly good.
Goodness cannot simply mean “doing what feels right to me.” If we are serious about becoming good, we have to search for the truth about goodness. And that means seeking out people, authors, thinkers, and personalities who have wrestled with these questions and, more importantly, tried to live what they believed was good.
That is why I recommended C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity and mentioned G.K. Chesterton, writers who take seriously the questions of truth, morality, human nature, and what it means to live well.
Our conversation ended, but perhaps another had just begun.
If you want to be good, you first have to discover what goodness truly is. But once you recognize it, another question follows:
Am I willing to follow it?
