Gen X, Diddy and the Devil

I turn fifty in a few months. It is hard to imagine how that has happened, and most days, with the exception of my knees, feel no proximity to that number. I was born in 1975 in the thick of the Generation X moment. My parents were normal Boomers. They loved Steely Dan and Dan Fogelberg, and we had a very average middle-class way of life. The first home that I remember was a bi-level house on a very American cul-de-sac in Colorado, in a very American neighborhood. My dad worked as a framer in a modular home factory, and my mom stayed home with me to raise my sister and me. We had a very wonderful life that was seemingly surrounded by the American dream.

My generation soon found out that the America their parents had been raised in was changing and changing fast. The 80s were a boom-filled landscape with rising stocks, cocaine, and increasing opulence. Both parents went to work, and the feral kids of my neighborhood were left for late nights on their BMX bikes and a “fend-for-yourself” attitude. I knew I lived in a different kind of world. My mom was home, and my dad’s distinct whistle was my indicator to “get home now.” I was the odd one out. My parents loved each other and never found themselves on the wrong side of an affair or the subsequent divorces that came with it. They were working hard to make my life better, and that seemed unique amongst my peers. It wasn’t uncommon to hear about divorces or new women for my friend’s dads. It was the first time in our culture that a mid-life crisis was a part of a normal psychosis for people in America.

When I entered high school in 1990, my civics teacher at the time believed, and proselytized to us as students, that this decade was going to be just like the 50s were in his childhood. Prosperity, good politics, and a booming America were the order of the day, and he was convinced that what had happened for his generation was about to happen again for mine.

I had grown up in a country that put on the airs of superiority in our economics, our sports, and our music, and we had a front row seat for the downfall of what we had been told was our competing ideology, the Soviet Union. It crumbled at the hands of tight-rolled jeans, sledgehammers, and leather jackets as the Berlin Wall fell. We heard rumors that U2 was there in East Berlin, recording their new music in a spirit of freedom that was certain to follow around the collapse of the Soviet Empire. America had won the Cold War, and the world was going to be filled with McDonald’s and Michael Jackson and not the breadlines of the communists.

Under all of it though, was an angst that my generation was feeling. Those feral cat-like creatures who didn’t come home to the proverbial whistle of their fathers were pretty frustrated by an America that was leaving them behind. My generation’s music of choice had a new flavor to it, reflective of kids who had been left to fend for themselves while their parents focused on serving themselves. Hip Hop and Rap were in everyone’s car stereo, and if it wasn’t Ice Cube or Biggie, it was Nine Inch Nails and Nirvana. All of the music was speaking, not of the hope and bright future that we were led to believe might be out there, but of shootings and solitude and gang life. “Jeremy” was a real person in the world we lived in, and the art that was getting played across our Pioneers and Blaupunkt speakers was telling a very dark story about the America we were coming of age in.

I was indulging in it too. While I never gravitated to the Hip Hop culture, I was learning to love Pearl Jam and the Beastie Boys. There was something resonant about the scream from Ad-Rock in Sabotage that captured the essence of Gen X. Our music was saying something much different about who we actually were. All the while, our parents were leaving the scolding to Tipper Gore and her graphically designed labels on the CD Jackets that became badges of honor to anyone wanting to express even the slightest disillusionment with their parents’ self-consuming economic and social myopia.

We were also told that the America that our parents were building was consequence-free. Sex and drugs were personal choices that society had no business judging or discussing. Live and let live. Church life and old-fashioned manners at the country club were for our grandparents. No one lived that way anymore. Life was what you made of it, and pleasure and consumption were the pinnacle of the American experience.

A Jesus Moment

Jesus answered, “Very truly I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless they are born of water and the Spirit.Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit. You should not be surprised at my saying, ‘You must be born again.’ The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.”

In the summer of 1989, I was introduced to Jesus. My family was not religious at all, and in fact, it was only on the odd occasion that one of my grandmothers might ask that we would attend church. I was asked by a few of my friends from school if I might be interested in attending a Young Life camp in Minnesota. It sounded like a lot of fun with games, parasailing, water skiing, and a week with a bunch of cool people from school. I found myself on a bus one August morning being dropped off in a place unfamiliar to me. Little did I know that this week of games and entertainment would also have a life-altering impact on my future.

My introduction came by way of a diminutive African American lady named Yvonne McCoy. Each night after we had waterskied or parasailed our way through the day, we would come to “Club” to hear some funny stories, sing a few songs like Brown Eyed Girl, or California Dreamin’ and listen to Ms. Yvonne talk about this character named Jesus. I was transfixed. I had no idea about any of it, and it was all wildly hopeful to me. There was a way to set myself right with the God who made me, and all I had to do was believe. There were no mandates on church attendance or reading a Bible, it was truly a free gift that the God who made the universe was willing to share with me. On the last night of the camp, Yvonne told us to head out onto the property and spend a few moments alone with God. She told us to challenge Him and ask the hard questions we had. She told us that belief wasn’t easy, but that it was good, and that God was going to meet us wherever we were at. I wandered off to a hill that was overlooking the lake, and I told Jesus I was willing to believe, and specifically, the story about the cross and resurrection. Just as I prayed of my belief, a gentle wind rustled the trees in what I took as an affirmation of my belief, and I knew that everything had changed for me.

When I got home, I told my mother what had happened, and it set her and my sister on their own journey to faith. Some years later, it would do the same for my dad. I had no idea that this simple prayer would change how I saw the world forever, but it did. When I returned to my life in Colorado, I was different. I didn’t know the extent of it, but I understood that belief in God would be a distinct dividing line in how I saw the world, and how the world saw me.

The 90s

Man is nothing else but what he purposes, he exists only in so far as he realizes himself, he is therefore nothing else but the sum of his actions, nothing else but what his life is. - Jean Paul Sartre

Meanwhile, in 90s America, things were changing in culture. The hairbands and tight white jeans were replaced with flannel shirts and baggy pants. Hip Hop deeply embedded itself into the minds of my generation. The opulence of gold chains, bouncing cars, and Yankees hats was popularizing the tough life of LA or New York. Rappers were making huge sums of money, and famous names were living lives that no one ever imagined possible. It came with a glorification of sex and violence, and the deep tracks of bass and fast, gangster tough lyrics, were soon in the Walkmans of every suburban kid from Keokuk to Boise. Gen X watched along as Tupac feuded with Biggie, then was killed mysteriously, with rumors of Biggie being the murderer. Then Notorious B.I.G. was shot in a drive-by, and the glamour of the fast life was romanticized in the furiously premature exits of the genre’s biggest names.

Maybe it was the leftover ideology of the Boomer generation, but all of that cultural chaos was accepted by my generation without correction. There were no cultural restraints placed upon the world of Hip Hop or Madonna, or the Grunge bands from Seattle. All of it, any behavior, any over sexualization of women, any celebration of gluttony, was not only looked past, but was venerated by my generation. Kurt Cobain was a strange kind of cultural saint; suicided into a modern-day deity by his depths of despair. Biggie and Tupac were dead, but their blazing lives were to be aspired to, not looked down upon. No one who was leading the culture or the music industry ever said that what was happening needed to be examined. This was the peak of American culture. Live hard and fast, and there might be consequences, but the ride would be unforgettable.

Girls in leopard print on top of yellow Lambos that left nothing to the imagination covered the screens of our televisions in Yo! MTV Raps. Entertainment Tonight and XXL Magazine showed the wealthy lives of Jay-Z, P-Diddy, and Ghostface Killah, and very few ever said that what was going on needed examination. There were rumors of things circling about it all, but it was dismissible for a multitude of reasons. Besides, in this new America, morality was passé. Only old people and curmudgeons ever said that living a life free of consequences was impossible. Anything and everything was ok. Fast cars, fast women, and fast highs were the rewards for a life of reckless abandon. Glorification of the deviant was the way the culture operated. Sex was the payoff, and money was easy to find for cover-ups or quiet disappearances. Anyone close to the entertainment industry knew the underlying darkness that had metastasized as a Stage 4 cancer, but the guild was shiny on the outside, and so everything was business as usual, and the usual was getting darker.

Those at the top supposed themselves to be Gods. The sum of their actions was ruinous for anyone in their way.

The Disappearing Restraint

My friends in school were mostly liberal politically. They saw the moral restraints of Focus on the Family and George H.W. Bush as too constrictive. When Al Gore came to our High School in 1992 during the Clinton campaign, my friends were all enthusiastic about his arrival. Even the bomb scare that a student at my school had put together was about celebrating Gore’s arrival, not threatening his life. They were attracted to the Democratic Party because of who Clinton was and because the Republicans seemed old and out of touch. They, overwhelmingly as a generation, voted to codify gay rights even though our state resoundingly defeated a referendum about it. My generation’s view of politics was that the Builder generation had run things too long. No one was interested in Ronald Reagan and those associated with him, they wanted the youth of Bill Clinton. They liked the rumors about Clinton’s love escapades. It wasn’t condemning or shameful to them because most of them had lived through something similar in their own homes. Sex was not a moral conversation to my friends. Most of them drank before they were 21, and the idea that restraining fun or temporary happiness for some altruistic reasoning was something they were not going to listen to. James Dobson and Pat Robertson were really the evil ones because they “hated the gays” and spoke about God as the judge. My generation rejected their moralism handily.

The culture around us seemed to be all in too. Clinton was elected, and our music got darker and more sexual. Hip Hop and pop music were a blend of heavy beats and big breasts. Drug culture was glorified, and “Just Say No”, the government program about illegal drug use from our youth, became “Just Do It” in our adulthood. Colorado was filled with Marijuana. Illicit drug use and copious amounts of alcohol were the vices of choice. The conversations surrounding sex were never about restraint, but instead about how fast the hook-up was happening. This was life in high school and college in the 90s. It was the fruition of the sexual revolution and “anything goes” philosophy of the 60s that our parents’ generation had indulged in.

Anyone who stood out in that space to proclaim that the life being lived was possibly self-harming or degrading the culture was laughed off. Everything was permissible and everything was beneficial.

As a believer in Jesus, I was an odd person out in my generation. I wanted to wait until marriage for sex. I didn’t drink alcohol before I was 21. I never tried drugs. While I loved the grunge scene of music, I gravitated toward the Beatles and Bob Dylan more than I did any pop music, especially as the music degraded further into a contest of debauchery. I moved to Canada to go to school for theology and left the American version of University for a deeper spiritual experience.

I had a professor once in a theology class give a lecture on Genesis 3 and the fall of mankind. He said that it defined every act of spirituality and theology within the Christian tradition. He said that if I understood the story of the fall, everything in culture, the church, and my own soul would fall into place. He described to the students in his class how the Genesis story was not about disobedience, but rather about a desire to be like God. Disobedience was the action, but the desire was the motivation.

Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?”

The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’”

“You will not certainly die,” the serpent said to the woman. “For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

The desire of mankind to be like God arrives within the first three chapters of the Bible. The serpent is able to get them to actuate upon his requests not because disobedience is tempting but because being like God is a core contradiction in the soul of all humans. I have always been comfortable theologically with Genesis being both literal and allegorical. Was there a man named Adam who ate fruit given by his wife, whom a serpent had tempted? Perhaps. Could this be a story of an ancient culture to explain the depravity of humanity and the evil actions that are visible to anyone who looks? Perhaps. Regardless of how it is interpreted, the story has heft and is deeply clarifying about the relationship of God to humanity.

If this were the real story of humanity and sin, and if our relationship to God was defined by our desire to be like him, then everything else in the world, in our politics, in our culture, made sense. Man, to my way of thinking, was a mess; inherently evil and stained by a separation. It made operating in a dark world tolerable. I could see the culture for what it was: self-made deities who masked over their depravity by living out godlike lifestyles. All desires were to be celebrated. All lifestyles were to be venerated. Hyper sexualization, escapism, materialism, and consumerism all were the temple robes that clothed the cultural Gods.

In scripture, once the pursuit of replacing God is normalized, the path for humanity is a dark one. Cain killed Abel, and by Genesis 6, God decided to start over on his relationship with humanity. He floods the earth and destroys every living creature, except for those who make it on the Ark. When angels visit Lot and the men of Sodom arrive at his door to sleep with the angels, God curses and destroys the city. In nearly every instance that humans decide to act as Gods, they are punished by destruction, pestilence, or plague. The act of replacing the real God with one of our own making has been the defining core of our relationship to the creator.

When Jesus arrives in the story of God, he offers the chance to redefine the relationship. Theologically, Jesus is tempted in every way that humanity is, and leads a sinless life. The story can be far-fetched to some. A man, born of a virgin, in order to retain his humanity but without the curse of the seed of man, arrives in a humble manger and lives a life that redefines how humans can interact with God.

One of the stories from the New Testament that profoundly solidified my understanding of the inherency of both mankind and Jesus was his temptation in the desert. The book of Matthew describes it this way:

Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. After fasting forty days and forty nights,he was hungry. The tempter came to him and said, “If you are the Son of God, tell these stones to become bread.”

Jesus answered, “It is written: ‘Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.’”

Then the devil took him to the holy city and had him stand on the highest point of the temple. “If you are the Son of God,” he said, “throw yourself down. For it is written:

“‘He will command his angels concerning you, and they will lift you up in their hands,
so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.’”

Jesus answered him, “It is also written: ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’”

Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor. “All this I will give you,” he said, “if you will bow down and worship me.”

Jesus said to him, “Away from me, Satan! For it is written: ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve him only.’”

Then the devil left him, and angels came and attended him.

Here was Jesus demonstrating that Satan had once again come, tempting humanity to fall for the same trappings of the past. Test God, see if he is real. You can be like God, filled with all the pleasures of the earth. Jesus, unlike Adam, passes the test and clears a path for redemption by his dismissal of earthly desires.

Jesus is answering the first temptation by his actions. He is redefining the relationship between Satan and man. His obedience to God during this temptation is the first sign that his arrival is about something more than being just another Jewish prophet or political leader. This is the complete restructuring of humanity’s relationship to God.

Cultural Rejection and Diddy Manifesting Himself as God

While I was off on my spiritual exploration in Canada, the culture of the West continued its rejection of restraint. With each new awards show or culturally iconic moment, the well-trodden paths of degradation that scriptures had warned humanity about were celebrated. Madonna and Britney kissing in lingerie, Janet Jackson’s nip-slip with Timberlake, and drag queen story hours were mile markers along the trail. The culture had rejected God and never looked back. We were told that there were no consequences for this win-win life. Pleasure and happiness were the imperatives, and restraint, particularly in the context of God or Jesus, was ancient foolishness. Television shows and movies were actively interested in promoting a culture that celebrated all of it. Whatever the lifestyle, the more it departed from the traditions of the nuclear family, the better it was. All ways of life had to be normalized in order to redefine morality. Relativism was the order in which the world operated, and the farther it could depart from what God or restraint had admonished, the better.

I had friends in Hollywood who were struggling actors who couldn’t land roles because they wouldn’t take their clothes off. They were sidelined for their prudish ways, and being a straight, relatively upstanding person was a curse in their profession. I knew it to be true of the music industry, too. My friends who had made it into the inner circle of fame were surrounded by temptations and opportunities to live a life of pleasure. Culture was on a warpath against behaviors and restraint. It wanted nothing more than to destroy the foundations of civilization. Calling upon a God or appealing to a moral authority beyond whatever MTV’s Real World or TMZ said was good, was for old-fashioned people who should have no say in how the world worked.

By the time Sean Combs was seen dragging a woman from an elevator at a fancy LA hotel in his towel, the sexual culture of “anything goes” was starting to lose its luster. Harvey Weinstein’s escapades and couch sessions were front-page news, and the temple built to “sex at all costs” was crumbling. The early angst that my generation expressed in its music was manifesting into a gravitation towards Donald Trump in the political world, and we were raising our children much differently than our early philosophies might have otherwise dictated. We saw the consequences of relativism, and we weren’t liking the results.

In the trail of destruction, however, were some very dark stories that were percolating to the surface of common knowledge. The security footage of Diddy was tame compared to the rumors. “There ain’t no party like a Diddy party,” was code for something much more nefarious than just the standard fare debauchery. The rejection of morality and, in particular, God had led our culture to a place of no return. Every new story from Hollywood was about someone else who had been assaulted or taken advantage of sexually. #Metoo was everywhere. The icons of our youth had lived as if there were no consequences, but their escapades were catching up to them. Bill Cosby was in court for a list of terribleness so long that few could keep up with it. The Epstein case was gathering steam. In almost any direction one looked culturally, the life of sex, drugs, and power that we were told was to be celebrated was shattering.

When the dam on Diddy finally broke, it wasn’t necessarily surprising, but the scale of what he was accused of was astronomical. Rape, sex trafficing, assault, racketeering all made up the rap sheet. It was as if he were the encapsulation of all the moral relativist philosophy of Gen X, and the walls were coming in on it. It could have been someone else, and perhaps in the days and months to come, there will be others, but Diddy was the icon of this strange sexual religion. He was above it all. He had embraced the temptations of the serpent.

“You will surely not die, you will be like God.”

The Rejected Cornerstone

For many in my generation, they cannot understand how intellectually curious people can believe in God. They find the entire story surreal and hokey. I understand that perspective, having grown up in the generational era that I did, God was easy to reject. I was there with a front row seat when the culture told us that ignoring morality would have no consequence upon our lives or culture. I was part of the MTV generation. I watched as fame and money changed Disney stars into pop icons. I saw their troubled lives play out in headlines and reality shows, and for years, most of the people my age dismissed each case as an aberration; one-off moments in lives that were otherwise to be envied.

As I aged and saw my children growing up, I wanted nothing to do with what I had been told was culturally the best life. I knew that the story of Jesus had wisdom for humanity, and I was interested in cultivating something better than the scorched earth culture my generation had embraced. There is a section from the first book of Peter that describes the tension that my generation has lived under.

“Therefore, rid yourselves of all malice and all deceit, hypocrisy, envy, and slander of every kind. Like newborn babies, crave pure spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow up in your salvation, now that you have tasted that the Lord is good. As you come to him, the living Stone—rejected by humans but chosen by God and precious to him— you also, like living stones, are being built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood, offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ…Dear friends, I urge you, as foreigners and exiles, to abstain from sinful desires, which wage war against your soul. Live such good lives among the pagans that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us. Live as free people, but do not use your freedom as a cover-up for evil.”

I find that an orientation that understands the propensity of humanity to want to be “like God” is the best one for my ability to recognize the troubles of the world. It gives me a depth of understanding as to why culture consistently wants the trappings of fame and fortune more than it wants a spiritually healthy life. I have maintained for some time that humans are not designed for fame. It corrupts the soul in a way that nothing else does. It is the widest gateway of the serpent’s temptations. You will be like God. You will live as a venerated icon. For most of my youth, their paths looked as if that were true, perhaps they had escaped the curse. But as I watch Britney dance with knives and Bieber eat his pizza under infrared camera lights, I realize the darkness that the icons embraced was as destructive as the men at Lot’s door, or the hatred in Cain’s heart. There is a reality to darkness and evil, and the ancient wisdom of our past has given us fair warning about all of it. There is no inconsequential choice. We interact within an interconnected world where darkness and good are in conflict. The episodes of Epstein or Diddy are just the sirens of warning about what darkness leads to.

“You will be like God…surely you will not die.”

The serpent is proving to be a liar again, and the evidence is everywhere.