You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.—Our Lord Jesus Christ in Saint Matthew 5:14-16.
Young Christians today claim they want an “aura” that “goes hard.” That’s good, but then why do boomer Catholic influencers still insist on being relevant? Older Catholic influencers may claim their “humanity is a bridge to Christ” yet their goofy “New Evangelization” is frequently just a lame attempt at being funny and relatable. They justify expensive colognes, off-color jokes and a constant attitude of people-pleasing in order to gain more followers.
Perhaps these older Catholic influencers do this to win Protestants to Catholicism. But they just end up looking like their tight-jeaned “emergent Church” counterparts who have aspired to be nothing more than junior-pastors with laser-beams and smoke machines. Sadly, some of the younger Catholics are also making this “relevance” mistake in their attempts at evangelization.
The ironic thing is that many decent evangelicals are done with the whole game of relevance. Like Protestant praise and worship, conservative Catholics are yet again twenty years behind the curve of general Christianity in America. In the early 2000s, Catholics learned praise and worship to win Protestants to Mass. But Life Teen just ended up playing Hillsong‘s overdone “Mighty to Save” in a manner much more slow and sloppy than any local evangelical community’s band was capable of doing. Again, I’m talking about conservative Catholics, not leftists or traditional Catholics.
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