The first chapter of Matthew’s Gospel opens the New Testament with a 
genealogy. It is a Christmas list—not a wish list, but a Providential list. It is 
the outworking of God’s Hand in the generations through history, culminating in the birth of Christ. 

  Matthew 1:17 summarizes the genealogy. “So all the generations from  Abraham to David are fourteen generations; and from David until the carrying away into Babylon are fourteen generations; and from the carrying away into
Babylon unto Christ are fourteen generations.” Fourteen is a Providential  number. 

  Today, two thousand years after the incarnation, we are no less a part of 
God’s great story than the Old Testament prophets and kings, or the New 
Testament disciples. What wonders might God have in store for America at 
the brink of 2006? Is there a Fourteenth Generation somewhere in the 
nation’s wings, ready to act upon some great plan of destiny? 

  Thirteen, of course, is known to the superstitious as the unlucky number. Generational scholars Neil Howe and William Strauss labeled the apathetic, bewildered, ambiguous Generation X the Thirteenth Generation for its 
strange place in history (born in the late 1960s and 1970s). “Counting back
to the peers of Benjamin Franklin,” they wrote, “this generation is, in point of
fact, the thirteenth to know the American nation, flag, and constitution.” After the Thirteenth Generation, Howe and Stauss  called the new youth the  Millennial Generation, but we might just as well be called the Fourteenth  Generation.

  Fourteen generations ago was the age of the men and women who first 
called themselves Americans. It was the elder generation of the Founding 
Fathers, the contemporaries of the Great Awakening: Jonathan Edwards, 
Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Adams. About fourteen generations before them
lived Christopher Columbus. 

  The early Americans, from the Puritans to the Founders, considered 
themselves the objects of God’s special favor and the tools of His service in 
this land. “We know the Race is not to the swift nor the Battle to the Strong,”
John Page wrote to Thomas Jefferson on July 20, 1776. “Do you not think
an Angel rides in the Whirlwind and directs this Storm?” To the American 
founders, the “Supreme Ruler of the Universe” and “Divine Providence” 
directed that storm. Patrick Henry wrote to Henry Lee in 1795, “The 
American Revolution was the grand operation, which seemed to be assigned
by the Deity to the men of this age in our country.” Dare we presume this 
generation not called to some task of equal measure in the course of human 
events, a task that will demand the same brand of highly cultivated courage 
and faith that attended the American founding? 

  We have little reason to think ourselves exempt from God’s plan, tempting
though the alternatives seem. The world promises a whole lot of stuff to those
who make the world’s investment. But it isn’t for the sake of our prosperity 
and physical satisfaction that God orders the world; that He does for some
higher reason that confounds even the most expert observers of hurricanes 
and earthquakes and of the rise and fall of nations. We are here, in our 
generation, in our little moment of time, to serve the King of Kings. Our task
is to be conformed to His plan, not He to ours. 

  America is unique in the world. We can view that uniqueness as a product 
of ourselves alone, or of something higher, something that in turn gives us 
meaning. To choose the second vantage would mean revival to a dying 
civilization. Such a revolution of intellect, morality, culture, and spirit would 
be the reversal of the prior revolution that even now attributes its aging 
breaths to retiring Baby Boomers on college campuses, in the old media, in
liberal churches, in public high schools. Slow fades the flicker on the 
marijuana joint; fast rises the Light of the World. 

  The emergence of a generation, like the incarnation, is a reminder that 
history is going somewhere. 

  The vanguard of the Fourteenth Generation is now graduating from high 
school, in college, entering the work world, and defending America in the 
Middle East. We were born and raised in prosperity. We are the chief 
recipients of the financial consumption that I witnessed in the parking lots and checkout lines of my local mall two days before Christmas. We are not  protestors or slobs like the Baby Boomers. We are not slackers or radical  individualists like the Xers. The leading edge of the generation is proving itself to value community institutions, personal connections, religious tradition,  respectful tolerance, self-government, and spiritual purpose. 

  In the Fourteenth Generation, drug use is down; teen pregnancy and teen  abortions are down; optimism is up; support of traditional moral values is up; “reality” is the big word because interest in absolute truth is up. A higher  percentage of young people are pro-life than of any other age group. It is a generation of whom liberalism was expected and conservatism is being  rebellious like our parents. We are now in the beginning stages of that  rebellion, and it is a rebellion against rebellion. 

  If, as President Bush said last year, it is to be “liberty’s century,” the  members of the Fourteenth Generation are the appointed guardians. 

  Hans Zeiger is a junior at Hillsdale College and author of Get Off My Honor: The Assault on the Boy Scouts of America (Broadman and Holman, 2005). He is also the author of a forthcoming book about the rise of young conservatives. www.hanszeiger.net

© January 2006 Hans Zeiger