Changing the Culture
How the younger generation is making a difference.
A new generation is coming into its own, poised to make a huge difference on the political landscape. The Millennials, those between 16 and 29 years old, are making their mark in the public square. By the 2020 presidential election, Millennials will account for almost 40 percent of eligible voters.
As this generation continues to grow in numbers and influence, organizations on both sides of the political aisle are working to reach out to it. Focus on the Family Action unveiled its outreach to Millennials at the CPAC and XPAC conferences in February. As first-time co-sponsors, Focus Action was present at both the Conservative Political Action Conference — which attracts nearly 10,000 attendees each year — and the first-ever Xtreme Politically Active Conservatives event, which is geared toward 20-somethings. Focus Action hosted a space in the XPAC lounge, where young people could converse and network — and pick up free water bottles and stickers promoting the new Web site RisingVoice.com.
More than anything, Millennials are passionate about making a difference. The following pages contain profiles of several young people who are taking a stand.
Doors of opportunity
Youngest member of the U.S. House is marked for leadership.
Someday, Aaron Schock could carry the banner for Lincoln’s party on the nation’s biggest stage. And this congressional Republican hails from a part of southern Illinois that Abraham Lincoln represented.
Rep. Schock, a 28-year-old from Peoria, Ill., is part of the cream of his generation of conservative politicians. Elected to the House in 2008 as its youngest member, Schock already has three committee assignments and also has been appointed a deputy minority whip, which marks him for potential leadership of the GOP on Capitol Hill.
“Aaron Schock has a huge future ahead of him in American politics,” says House Minority Whip Eric Cantor, a Virginia Republican. “His age, drive and commitment to common-sense solutions make him an important voice in the Republican Party’s effort to reach out to younger voters on college campuses and in communities across America.”
Schock was elected without much support from the national Republican Party — and on the same day that Barack Obama easily took Illinois’ electoral votes.
His immediate goal is to help return the House to Republican hands, so Schock has become unusually active for a first-termer in partywide election efforts.
For his part, Schock appreciates recognition of his accomplishments and his potential, but dispels any notion that he has designs on any higher office than the one he occupies right now.
“People look at me and say I’ve had this plan all along,” he says. “But I’m more of an entrepreneur at heart; I have no political bloodline. It’s divine intervention. I can honestly say I didn’t create these doors of opportunity. But I’m a big believer in being prepared.”
In any event, Schock has been on a steep trajectory of accomplishment since his family moved to Peoria from Morris, Minn., when he was 10. Schock’s father is a physician, but he settled the family on a farm, where Aaron and his three older siblings learned a work ethic tending a three-acre strawberry patch all summer.
By fifth grade, Schock had demonstrated a technological bent, running data programs for a local chain of Christian bookstores. By seventh grade, he was an online stock investor. In eighth grade, he was scheduling all the deliveries for a local gravel pit, and by high school he was the company’s accountant.
His political career began after an unsuccessful petition to the Peoria school board to allow him to graduate early. Schock became a write-in candidate and, at age 19, unseated the board’s president, becoming the state’s youngest-ever school board member.
Schock’s accelerated timetable continued when, at 23, the Bradley University graduate defeated another incumbent, a Democrat, to become Illinois’ youngest state representative.
At that point, Schock was willing to pause, working for a hotel-development company while serving in Illinois’ part-time Legislature. But the state GOP apparatus had spied him and selected Schock as the conservative heir apparent to moderate Republican U.S. Rep. Ray LaHood, who quit the House and later joined the Obama administration as secretary of Transportation.
As a businessperson who understands the pulse of Middle America, Schock has the ear of important corporate leaders such as Jim Owens, CEO of Caterpillar, which is headquartered in Peoria. Owens says he has “great respect for (Schock’s) work ethic and his commitment to serving constituents.”
On social issues, Schock, a Baptist, has a 100 percent pro-life and pro-family voting record. “For us to become the majority party again, we have to have a tone and demeanor that’s inviting,” he says.
FOR MORE INFORMATION
Visit Schock.House.gov.
— Dale Buss
Paid for by Focus on the Family Action.
A student for life
She has helped establish more than 500 pro-life campus chapters.
Having temporarily beaten back ObamaCare earlier this year, some pro-lifers took a breather. But not Kristan Hawkins.
The 24-year-old executive director of Students for Life of America can’t afford to stop at this point. She’s too busy expanding the organization, coping with the demands of her regular job commute of nearly two hours each way, and raising her 1-year-old son, Gunner, who has the special needs that come with cystic fibrosis.
And, oh, yes — Hawkins and her school-teacher husband, Jonathan, were expecting child No. 2 in April.
“There’s been a lot of balancing,” says Hawkins, who lives in Martinsburg, W.Va., and rises at 3 a.m. about three days a week in order to beat Washington, D.C., traffic to her office in Arlington, Va.
Charmaine Yoest calls Hawkins “indefatigable and a coalition builder.” “She is constantly looking over the horizon to find new ways to move the pro-life agenda forward,” says the president of Americans United for Life.
Just as important, Yoest says, is that Hawkins quickly has come to focus on a crucial priority for the pro-life movement: on-campus mobilization. “It proves the point that pro-life is for young people,” Yoest says.
In fact, Hawkins already has helped establish more than 500 on-campus chapters across the country as she pushes toward the organizational goal of more than 1,000.
“You have to make things as easy as possible for today’s students — take their motivation and passion for the pro-life movement and allow them to do great things on campus,” Hawkins says. “You can’t just start the group; you also have to develop training and work with them to keep them alive.”
These student activists form an ever-larger critical mass when they get together, such as at the Students for Life national convention that was held in Washington in January, drawing about 1,000 attendees. Hawkins also is continually training student leaders at their campuses around the country.
Fortunately, Hawkins says, pro-life convictions seem to come easier to today’s college students than to their parents. A handful of factors contribute, Hawkins believes. One is the striking clarity of today’s fetal ultrasound images — and, also thanks to technology, their accessibility online.
Another huge factor is that Millennials take social-justice issues very seriously and, unlike many of their parents, easily embrace protection of the preborn as one of them. “They ask, ‘How can you be against genocide in Darfur when you’re for abortion in America?’ ” Hawkins says.
Hawkins doesn’t rest because she views her work as a calling that began at the age of 15 with counseling fellow teens at a pregnancy center in her hometown of Wellsburg, W.Va. Hawkins majored in political science at Bethany College in West Virginia. She worked for the Bush administration for a while.
In 2006, she found the perfect vocational fit when, at the age of 21, Hawkins was hired as executive director of Students for Life (formerly known as American Collegians for Life), which had received a start-up grant from the Gerard Health Foundation.
Hawkins believes “it’s pretty ironic” that her first child bears a birth defect because of which many mothers have aborted their babies. “One of the first things I thought of is that, because of what I’m doing, God was testing me,” she says. “It was like, ‘Here you go — I’m going to give you a hard one.’ But we were given Gunner because we can give him the care he needs.”
FOR MORE INFORMATION
Visit StudentsForLife.org.
— Dale Buss
A reason to care
Twins set a high standard for their generation.
In an era when most of their peers are lulled into conformity by a numbing culture and allowed complacency by a society that isn’t counting on them for much that matters, Alex and Brett Harris have been waking young Christians like a jangling late-morning alarm.
The 21-year-old twins from Portland, Ore., have just published their second book and are continually blogging and speaking around the world about “The Rebelution” — their “teenage rebellion against the low expectations of an ungodly culture.”
They’re having a big impact. Consider just two instances where other Christian teens have responded powerfully to the twins’ message.
After reading the Harrises’ book, Do Hard Things, two years ago, one 16-year-old launched a not-for-profit organization whose mission is to build wells in Darfur. And late last year, also motivated by the Harrises’ book, three teenaged siblings in Houston founded a group that is raising money and awareness about sex trafficking.
The Harris brothers are finding time to build their own lives as well as build up their peers’. Alex got married in January. And now, amid everything else, the Harrises attend a high-achieving Christian school, Patrick Henry College in Purcellville, Va., where they’re both majoring in international relations.
“That choice of major isn’t informed so much by anything we’re planning to do right after graduation,” Brett says, “but by a long-term investment in whatever we need to do to walk through whatever doors God opens for us.”
The twins are younger brothers of Joshua Harris, whose book I Kissed Dating Goodbye is a Christian best-seller. Home-schooling also created high expectations and uncommon opportunities for them. Alex and Brett pushed the envelope from an early age, striving to become models for the message they’re now spreading worldwide.
For example, when they were 16, they blogged about some decisions by Tom Parker, a state supreme court judge in Alabama. Soon, the judge offered them summer internships.
“We started small, taking out trash and doing photocopies,” Alex recalls. “But by the end, we were editing opinions and contributing final text to them and drafting legal memoranda.”
The brothers published Do Hard Things two years ago at the age of 19. And Multnomah published their second title, Start Here: Doing Hard Things Right Where You Are, in the spring. In between, they worked hard on behalf of the 2008 Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee.
The breadth and pace of their activities have given the Harris brothers unique exposure to a variety of young people around the world, many of whom, Brett says, are “being swept along by the cultural current. They haven’t been taught to stand up against it or to do it in the right way,” he says.
And the brothers are uncommonly equipped to respond to the need they see, says Chris Leland, vice president of college-student ministries at Focus on the Family. “‘Let’s care, and there is a reason to care,’” he says. “That’s a unique message coming from two guys so young.”
While Darfur, global hunger, sex trafficking and other issues have merited the concern of “rebelutonaries,” Alex and Brett also spend a lot of time helping their generation cope with long-standing Christian concerns about abortion and other social issues.
Pro-life convictions are consistent with a “whole life” stance, so young Americans embrace them more easily than many of their parents did, Alex says.
FOR MORE INFORMATION
Visit TheRebelution.com.
— Dale Buss
Paid for by Focus on the Family Action.
Lived to tell about it
Abortion survivor takes pro-life battles personally.
Gianna Jessen has caused abortion activists nothing but headaches since she was born alive after an abortion attempt 33 years ago.
Today, Jessen is thriving, applying her message of no-compromise Christianity to abortion, politics, the culture and to her search for a husband. She moves the thousands who hear her speak and is always seeking larger platforms; now she wants to write a book.
The activist, singer, speaker and writer from Nashville, Tenn., even uses her mild case of cerebral palsy — effected during the botched saline-abortion procedure in her mother’s eighth month of pregnancy — as a way to give tribute to God’s intentions on her life.
“I have the gift of cerebral palsy,” she says in her speeches. “Because I should be blind, burned and obviously dead — and yet, here I am.”
Jessen’s grandmother adopted her from her 17-year-old parents and helped her overcome a variety of handicaps from the abortion attempt — both physical and emotional. Fully apprised of her background, by age 14 Jessen was speaking at Operation Rescue rallies. She was the subject of a 1999 book published by Focus on the Family, Gianna: Aborted … and Lived to Tell About It. Jessen was not expected to be able to walk, yet she has completed marathons.
The California native has been willing to leverage her rare status as an abortion survivor in a variety of ways to support the pro-life movement. In 2006, she was party to a stunt in which a pro-life legislator arranged for her, as a cerebral-palsy advocate, to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the opening of the Colorado Legislature — then revealed to his colleagues that he actually had invited Jessen “to put a face to what we are celebrating today,” as the chamber passed a resolution honoring an anniversary of a local branch of Planned Parenthood.
And in September 2008, Jessen reached the zenith of her visibility, as a guest on Fox News’ “Hannity & Colmes” show, criticizing presidential candidate Barack Obama for his opposition to legislation in Illinois to protect infants born alive after botched abortion attempts. “If Barack Obama had his way,” Jessen said on the air, unapologetically, “I wouldn’t be here.”
Wendy Wright, president of Concerned Women for America, says Jessen “doesn’t live as a victim.” And she’s in the vanguard of a new generation of pro-life advocates, Wright says, “who have been personally affected by abortion and so can humanize the unborn child. Gianna’s body exhibits her wounds.”
But not all of them.
Jessen is wary, for example, of discussing the “horrendous” day three years ago when her birth mother showed up unannounced at one of her speeches. She also admits she has grown frustrated with potential suitors who reject her because of her physical handicap. In fact, the book she plans to write will have a lot to do with her often-vexing, sometimes-humorous quest for a husband.
“I’m waiting for a Braveheart,” Jessen says. “I will not marry a weasel. And I don’t like the way we’ve emasculated so many men in this culture. I don’t want someone I have to mother or tell him how to be a man.”
It’s difficult to calculate Jessen’s impact, but not hard to see it. At the end of her speech to about 200 members of the regional pro-life group in Kelowna, British Columbia, in February, a woman hobbled up to her on crutches: She, too, had survived an abortion attempt.
“Pro-life work is difficult,” Jessen says, “yet the burden is light.”
FOR MORE INFORMATION
Visit GiannaJessen.com.
Gianna: Aborted … and Lived to Tell About It is available from Focus on the Family. Visit FocusOnTheFamily.com/Resources.
— Dale Buss
Standing on principle
Ohio state representative has served his country and his district.
Hanging behind Republican state Rep. Josh Mandel’s desk in Columbus, you won’t find a framed print, or even a portrait of his beloved Ohio State Stadium.
You’ll find a pair of worn-out shoes — from his many campaign trips through the streets of his district. They serve as a reminder of what got him here: hard work.
“I decided (I’m not) in Columbus to keep my mouth shut or to bide my time,” Mandel told the Conservative Political Action Conference in February. “I’m (here) to stand on principle. I’m proud to move our state and our country forward, and to do it with a lot of young people on our side.”
Mandel, 32, is a Marine veteran who has served two tours in Iraq and currently serves the 17th Ohio House district. He was first elected state representative in 2006, knocking on 19,679 doors and wearing out three pairs of shoes — in a district that is 2-1 Democrat and represented in part by the liberal U.S. Rep. Dennis Kucinich.
In 2008, he was re-elected to a second term, with 70 percent of the vote. He currently serves as the ranking member of the Financial Institutions, Real Estate and Securities Committee. He’s seeking the state treasurer post this fall.
During his third year at Case Western Reserve University School of Law, Mandel decided to run for the Lyndhurst City Council. “I was told, ‘Listen, kid. You’re too young. Wait your turn,’ ” he says.
Instead, he went out and knocked on every door in the community. “I stood on their doorstep, and stood on principle, and was elected to the City Council,” Mandel says.
As a councilman, he led the fight for the first property tax rollback in Lyndhurst history. In a town where “the same eight people show up every week” for council meetings, Mandel made a few phone calls — 1,000, to be exact — and drew 300 people to the meeting to testify in favor of his tax cuts.
Mandel says his generation is the key to the future.
“What we need to do as a movement is spend a lot of time on college campuses,” he says, “spend a lot of time with young professionals, engaging and motivating them to get active and get involved.”
He has two charges for his generation: “Stand on principle. No matter what group in which you’re involved, don’t blindly follow the leaders. The second charge: Don’t be out-worked.”
Phil Burress, president of Ohio’s Citizens for Community Values — which is associated with Focus on the Family — calls Mandel a “100 percenter.”
“Young people today have to understand they have a responsibility to be involved,” Burress says. “Josh Mandel has not only served his country in the military, but also as an elected official. He’s exactly what this country needs.
“Josh Mandel is a cultural hero. I don’t mean that lightly. He is showing other young people who believe in life and marriage and our Christian heritage how they can make a difference.”
FOR MORE INFORMATION
Visit JoshMandel.com.
— Jennifer Mesko
Paid for by Focus on the Family Action.
Singled out
Enemies of the faith seem determined to sack him.
Tim Tebow already is one of the National Football League’s highest-profile committed Christians — and he hasn’t even played a single down as a professional yet.
Thanks to his willingness to star in a pro-life Focus on the Family TV advertisement during February’s Super Bowl — added to four years of welcomed attention to his faith while Tebow won the Heisman Trophy and quarterbacked the University of Florida Gators — the 22-year-old rookie has put a big bull’s-eye on his back.
And opposing NFL defensive linemen may be the least of Tebow’s problems. Enemies of the faith will be even more determined to sack him.
“I know some people won’t agree with it, but I think they can at least respect that I stand up for what I believe, and I’m never shy about that,” Tebow said before the Super Bowl. “I don’t feel like I’m very preachy about it, but I do stand up for what I believe.”
The Focus on the Family advertisement was apolitical, a celebration of Pam Tebow’s decision against aborting Tim in 1987 when she contracted amoebic dysentery in the Philippines and doctors advised her to end Tim’s life.
But pro-abortion groups criticized the 30-second commercial before they even saw it. Football, marketing and media mavens speculated about the harm that Tebow already had done to his draft prospects and endorsement potential.
Of course, Tebow was no stranger to this sort of resistance. Coming from a big family of home-schooled siblings, he was a major curiosity the moment he set foot on the Gainesville, Fla., campus.
Then Tebow began demonstrating his Christian devotion and high personal standards. He became an Academic All-American. He was a virgin, stayed that way, and openly talked about why. Tebow wrote references to Bible verses in the black under his eyes every football Saturday.
And he went out of his way to show Christ to people. One of the many was Kelly Faughnan. The 20-year-old fan from Clifton, Va., was recovering from the removal of a brain tumor, and her family was vacationing in Disney World last December. They went to a restaurant to catch a glimpse of him, and Tebow not only talked with Faughnan for some time — he also asked her to accompany him the next evening to an awards banquet.
He has taken missions trips to Croatia and Thailand and, of course, to his father’s orphanage in the Philippines. In the spring of 2008, he visited schools and marketplaces in General Santos City in that country, sharing his faith, and assisting with medical procedures. “Doing those things, taking my platform as a football player and using it for good, using it to be an influence and change people’s lives, that’s more important than football to me,” Tebow told The Associated Press.
Oh, yes — along the way, Tebow also won the Heisman Trophy, the first player to do so as a sophomore, and led the Gators to the 2008-09 national championship.
There are doubts about how Tebow’s throwing motion will serve him in the NFL, but there are no doubts about his leadership capabilities. “Tebow will wow everyone he meets,” wrote Peter King, Sports Illustrated’s NFL columnist, “with his poise, presence and humility.”
And whatever he accomplishes, there may be just a preamble to another important personal goal for Tebow: establishing orphanages and missions to children, just as his family has always done.
FOR MORE INFORMATION
Visit TimTebowFoundation.org.
— Dale Buss
Flying high
Oklahoma leader finds purpose in God’s plan.
Sam Bradford’s faith was tested after the high-flying University of Oklahoma quarterback was sidelined early in the 2009 football season with recurring shoulder injuries that eventually required surgery, ending his season.
There, also, went his hopes of repeating as Heisman Trophy winner, along with any likelihood that the Oklahoma Sooners could win the national championship.
“Everything that God does, He’s doing for a reason,” Bradford had said in an interview about a year earlier. “He has a purpose, and we need to trust Him and know that His plan is the right way.”
Among the ways Bradford stayed true to his faith was to get involved in charity work and in the campus chapter of Fellowship of Christian Athletes. He also reads the story of David and Goliath before every game.
“When you go in His name, He’s going to take care of you,” Bradford explains.
In any event, the Cherokee phenom from Oklahoma City had been soaring until his disastrous 2009 season. In 2007, when he became the Sooners’ starting quarterback, Bradford threw for a collegiate-record 36 touchdown passes, most ever by a freshman.
The next season, Bradford won the Heisman Trophy, only the second sophomore — after Tim Tebow, the previous year — to do so. He led the team to its third straight conference championship. But in a big January 2009 showdown of Christian quarterbacks, Bradford’s Sooners lost to Tebow’s Gators, 24-14, in the national championship game.
Still, Bradford’s professional stock was climbing again as April’s National Football League draft neared. God, Bradford has said, has “always got my back.”
— Dale Buss
Standing on the Rock
Longhorns star shows true character.
If a moment truly can define a man, 23-year-old Colt McCoy may already have experienced his.
It came on Jan. 7, immediately after the No. 1 Alabama Crimson Tide had defeated the No. 2 Texas Longhorns in the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, Calif., for the 2009-10 football championship.
McCoy, the Longhorns’ star senior quarterback, had positioned his team — and himself — for glory. But he suffered an injury to his right shoulder, his throwing arm, early in the game, and McCoy had to stay on the sidelines while watching his team let the game slip away.
Seconds after the end of the game, McCoy fought back tears and communicated perspective: “I always give God the glory,” he said. “I never question why things happen the way they do. God is in control of my life, and I know that if nothing else, I am standing on the Rock.”
Daniel “Colt” McCoy is a Texan whose high-school coach was his father, Brad McCoy. Football is a near-religion in Texas, but Colt McCoy made clear where his priorities lay when he accepted Christ at age 14.
That approach continued when he arrived on the University of Texas campus, in Austin, in 2005. “The No. 1 reason” for his accomplishments on the gridiron, McCoy wrote in 2008, “is God has blessed me.”
Outside observers concurred. “I think Colt wants to give back because he is blessed,” wrote Suzanne Halliburton, a Texas football beat writer for the Austin American-Statesman. “He’s probably done more community service work than any quarterback I’ve covered.”
Among McCoy’s work: mission trips to Peru in 2008 and 2009, which his father said have grounded his son in dramatic ways. Halliburton agreed. “He didn’t do it for the publicity or a Heisman hook,” she wrote. “He just signed up for it and did it. Then he quietly went back” to school — and football.
— Dale Buss
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