The title for this post might seem naively optimistic, but if that’s true, that’s precisely my point. We no longer seem to expect maturity. A whole generation of millennials are frequently (and unfairly) criticized as immature and not necessarily maturing. We don’t seem to expect maturity from politicians or even church leaders anymore.

This led me to wonder whether we’ve been failing to normalize maturity. Consider the big potential advantage of planning for maturity: if we truly expect our young people to mature, perhaps we could choose to introduce them to a worldview that was big enough to mature into?

I think we’ve been doing the opposite. At the risk of some oversimplification, let me sketch what seem to be the two most prominent worldviews in North America lately: a consumeristic and competitive materialism on the one hand, and a narrowly conservative form of watered-down Christianity on the other. Of course, in spite of the paradox, many people manage to hold both of these small worldviews, with worn-out patches of faith slapped onto the emptiness of the rat race or a home full of stuff.  But the key is that both worldviews are small. Neither lends itself to a maturity in which we relate to the world in an open, gracious and compassionate way.

I think many teachers in public schools try hard to awaken compassion, but they are stuck in a system that discourages straying outside of materialistic ways of seeing the world. Students are taught the authority of science, but not the open-ended mystery that good science can inspire. Has anyone learned  about the mystical thinking of leading physicists and geneticists in high school? Instead, students subtly learn that if you trust science, which you should in the 21^st century, there is nothing else.

In churches, and the families that support them, many learn a kind of faith that has been hardened through decades of defensiveness. A huge effort is made at creating a culture bubble in which they feel safe because they are on God’s side. And they don’t seem to notice that these bubbles contain little of the lifestyle challenge and outward compassion of the Jesus to which their gathering is meant to be dedicated.

Of course, thank goodness, there are many, many exceptions in the marketplace and in the churches. But we make it way too easy to stay immature: never to think a complex thought, never to wonder what it takes to risk welcoming a stranger, never to imagine that God is way bigger (and better and more mysterious) than imagined, never to question whether a good many of our present understandings are incorrect or incomplete.

The humanities are one place in which maturity should be expected, but fewer students are spending much time there these days. One way of normalizing maturity would be expecting educated leaders to give some serious attention to the humanities. Is that true of your leaders? If we really thought that maturity is where we would end up, we would be inviting people, right from childhood, into a bigger and more nuanced world.