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,........

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