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 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. One respondent found an ‘unequal power dynamic’ at play in the scriptures, while another had ‘concerns about consent and abuses of power’ she saw in the relationship between man and the divine. In the minds of some young people, the report concludes, Jesus ‘is a troubling figure. Arrogant, powerful, religiously motivated and male’.

The Church’s perennial trouble has been its grasping desire to be relevant and inclusive

These reactions may indeed be radically different to traditional interpretations, but they’re entirely in keeping with the mores of today. This report merely confirms how wokery has become embedded in the mindset of more than one generation of youngsters – teachers of today would have imbibed hyper-liberal ideology when they were at school or university ten years ago – and indicates how its doctrines and mantras are now repeated with all the due diligence of a new faith.

If an obsession with sexism is one chief preoccupation for generations Y and Z, so is the belief that all human relations can be understood in terms of power dynamics and the assumption that they’re all necessarily hostile. This belief has its origins in the teachings of Michel Foucault.

Yet even before hyper-liberalism arrived in earnest ten years ago, Western society was already beset with a gnawing and corrosive sense of self-doubt, manifest in cultural relativism and a general crisis of authority. What with the death of God and the failure of Humanism to provide a replacement source for morality and truth, we have been mired in an epistemological crisis, a state of affairs which Foucault both helped to diagnose and helped to aggravate.

We have for decades lacked the confidence to assert what is true and false or teach what is right and wrong. At its most basic level, this crisis of authority has been reflected in the transformation in the way children are taught at school. Notions of obedience, unquestioning authority and didactic instruction have long since fallen into disrepute, replaced by a belief in consensus and collaboration.

In this regard, this report’s findings seem entirely consonant. Young people raised in a world without authority figures who command respect, in a society bereft of didacticism, are naturally going to regard the teachings in the Bible as hostile and aggressive. In a world where everyone is reduced to having their ‘own truth’, many will find the idea of Christianity simply incomprehensible.

Objectivity and a belief in the universality of mankind – all of whose members have the same capacity for reason that can transcend culture – has gradually given way to subjectivity and narcissistic introspection. Thus it’s also no shock to discover that many teenagers interpret the scriptures from a therapeutic viewpoint, rather than a theological or spiritual one.

As the report concludes, one message taken from the story of the paralysed man lowered through the roof was ‘you should do what you have to do to make yourself better.’ In this understanding:

The man isn’t really paralysed. Instead, sin and physical affliction are metaphors for underlying issues with self-esteem, confidence and passivity.

For young people, the report continues, the healing that really matters is ‘the healing of your perspective’.

These findings, undertaken jointly by the Scripture Union and the Bible Society, both evangelical Christian bodies, are unlikely to be welcomed wholesale by the mainstream, liberal wing of the Church of England. They are suspicious of reading the Bible without approved guidance and are an institution which forever emphasises that the word of God must necessarily be read in a contemporary context.

Yet it, too, is part of the problem. The Church’s perennial trouble has been its grasping desire to be relevant, inclusive and non-judgemental. Its appetite for self-abasement and ostentatious self-flagellation, evidenced recently in its push for slavery reparations or the new Archbishop of Canterbury’s call for the organisation to purge itself of sexism, only mirrors today’s continuing crisis of authority.

Over the years, the Church of England and nearly all Christian denominations have merely gone with the flow of society and even helped to hasten Christianity’s descent into relativism and ignorance. I mean, to accuse the Jesus of the gospels of having a ‘God complex’ and being ‘religiously minded’? Wasn’t that kind of the point?