Or perhaps they should try to keep the, you know, pedophiles out of the party. A lot of teens think creepy old men hitting on them over the IM system while standing up and singing with the Faithful on Sundays is, well, hypocritical. Music to my ears:

Despite their packed megachurches, their political clout and their increasing visibility on the national stage, evangelical Christian leaders are warning one another that their teenagers are abandoning the faith in droves.

At an unusual series of leadership meetings in 44 cities this fall, more than 6,000 pastors are hearing dire forecasts from some of the biggest names in the conservative evangelical movement.

Their alarm has been stoked by a highly suspect claim that if current trends continue, only 4 percent of teenagers will be “Bible-believing Christians” as adults. That would be a sharp decline compared with 35 percent of the current generation of baby boomers, and before that, 65 percent of the World War II generation.

While some critics say the statistics are greatly exaggerated (one evangelical magazine for youth ministers dubbed it “the 4 percent panic attack”), there is widespread consensus among evangelical leaders that they risk losing their teenagers.

“I’m looking at the data,” said Ron Luce, who organized the meetings and founded Teen Mania, a 20-year-old youth ministry, “and we’ve become post-Christian America, like post-Christian Europe. We’ve been working as hard as we know how to work — everyone in youth ministry is working hard — but we’re losing.”

The board of the National Association of Evangelicals, an umbrella group representing 60 denominations and dozens of ministries, passed a resolution this year deploring “the epidemic of young people leaving the evangelical church.”

Among the leaders speaking at the meetings are Ted Haggard, president of the evangelical association; the Rev. Jerry Falwell; and nationally known preachers like Jack Hayford and Tommy Barnett.

Genuine alarm can be heard from Christian teenagers and youth pastors, who say they cannot compete against a pervasive culture of cynicism about religion, and the casual “hooking up” approach to sex so pervasive on MTV, on Web sites for teenagers and in hip-hop, rap and rock music. Divorced parents and dysfunctional families also lead some teenagers to avoid church entirely or to drift away.

Over and over in interviews, evangelical teenagers said they felt like a tiny, beleaguered minority in their schools and neighborhoods. They said they often felt alone in their struggles to live by their “Biblical values” by avoiding casual sex, risqué music and videos, Internet pornography, alcohol and drugs.

When Eric Soto, 18, transferred from a small charter school to a large public high school in Chicago, he said he was disappointed to find that an extracurricular Bible study attracted only five to eight students. “When we brought food, we thought we could get a better turnout,” he said. They got 12.

Chelsea Dunford, a 17-year old from Canton, Conn., said, “At school I don’t have a lot of friends who are Christians.”

Ms. Dunford spoke late last month as she and her small church youth group were about to join more than 3,400 teenagers in a sports arena at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst for a Christian youth extravaganza and rock concert called Acquire the Fire.

“A lot of my friends are self-proclaimed agnostics or atheists,” said Ms. Dunford, who wears a bracelet with a heart-shaped charm engraved with “tlw,” for “true love waits,” to remind herself of her pledge not to have premarital sex.

She said her friends were more prone to use profanity and party than she was, and added: “It’s scary sometimes. You get made fun of.”

There are always going to be some teens who find evangelical religion comforting and a guiding force throughout their lives. In my day, before the theocrats had stifled good public education, we called those kids "losers." The evangelical movement has had a lot of success making fundie belief seem cool to a generation, beginning with Ronnie and just winding down now, and that generation is going to do a lot of damage as they come into social and political power.

Still, one side effect of dumbing down a nation's culture and overemphasizing the more boring aspects of "Christian" life means that eventually, lots of kids are going to well, get bored. And that's what these numbers suggest to me.

If you're an average teen in America, it's likely you've got a computer, a cell phone, cable TV and some brown friends. You may even know some gay people who are out and proud. Today's teens listen to a wider range of music via ipods, they get exposed to a greater range of ideas via the internet if they do so little as a google search, they can talk with other kids from all over the world (and Congress) via IM...the list goes on and on. Unless your family denies you these and other technologies, it's very hard to stay culturally isolated and clear of the Satanic infection of Free Thinking. Even if educational professionals despair at the subjects upon which teen thought is most commonly applied.

The short version of this would be that I suspect many a teen has had the following thought process:
Those Lord of the Rings movies are really cool! My evangelical pastor says Legolas is really a demon and I can't put up that cool poster of him in my room. Fuck that. Mom, I'm moving out. You can keep my copy of the Bible, I won't be needing it.