Make Patriarchy Great Again

Make Patriarchy Great Again

Jan 22, 2025 | Parents and Family, Western Civilization

I recently read Masculine Christianity by Zachary M. Garris, and in many ways it’s an eye opener, but in many other ways it’s stuff I’ve accepted all my life. Growing up in a traditional Italian family, masculinity was not a problem, but men abusing their masculinity sometimes was. My family, and extended family on both sides, was for the most part nominally Catholic, so the Christianity part never seemed to make much of a difference. I also met my wife to be at Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia, and we could not have been more on the same page in terms of masculine and feminine, and how that plays out in a marriage and family setting. So patriarchy was never something I felt the need to think about; it was invisible because I am a pretty patriarchal guy. Prior to getting married and having to live out patriarchy, I’d been a politically and culturally engaged conservatives for six or seven years, so my radar was up on the evils of feminism, but that obviously wasn’t an issue for my wife and I. Looking back over 37 years, however, I can see how feminism, like the secularism that birthed it, has influenced how we see things. I just didn’t realize how much.

In the late 1980s and 1990s, the term complementarianism started showing up in Christian circles, and I wasn’t sure what to make of it. Clearly, God created men and women to complement one another, but was this how we were to counter feminism? I’m not sure why their arguments didn’t impress me, but it was more confusing than anything. Ok, men and women complement one another. So what. What difference exactly does that make in a relationship? Who calls the shots? It seemed like complementarians didn’t want to deal with such an uncomfortable question in the modern world. When Paul commanded wives to submit to their husbands, what exactly does that mean? I’ve never really had to pull rank on my wife, so does this command have any real practical application unless I have to do that? And does this submission apply anywhere outside of the home? Like in the church? In society? And what does this all say about the nature of men and women, and how feminism has had an impact about how Christians think about and live lives as men and women? Garris answers these questions, and many more, in exhaustive detail.

So after we were married I went on my merry way not thinking about Patriarchy, and I can’t remember in over four decades as a Christian every hearing a sermon in church about it. Then when I embraced postmillennialism in August 2022, I discovered patriarchy was a big deal with this crowd. As in, if we’re going to re-Christianize America and Western culture in general, then patriarchy will be a critical component for that to happen. So in the now overused phraseology thanks to President Trump, we will need to Make Patriarchy Great Again. The question, though, is what exactly that means. There is of course a lot of disagreement among Christians about that, and if we can’t even agree on what it means, how are we to change cultural perceptions on the matter? This is really a question about living in a world that is a result of several hundred years of the Enlightenment and secularism, and what exactly that will all look like. Making it Christian again will not somehow turn the 21st century into the 16th century, any more than we can go back to the world before the industrial revolution. Yet I get the feeling from some of the patriarchy bros that it is exactly what they expect and are convinced needs to happen.

Before I move on, what exactly does patriarchy mean? Pater means father, and patriarchy father rule. Over time it came to mean male rule in general because in Christianity the family is the fundamental relationship in society.

Patriarchy and the Bible
One of the reasons I know Patriarchy is crucial for the re-Christianizing of America and the West is because the destruction of the family was one of the top priorities of Karl Marx; it needed to be abolished in the pursuit of a communist Utopia. What better way to do that than making men and women indistinguishable by destroying sex roles as created by God. Thankfully, the Marxist demons got carried away in the last ten years trying to turn men into women, and boys into girls, and vice versa; for normal people that was a bridge to far. Reality can only be distorted to a certain degree until it slaps the distorters back in the face. Feminism has distorted reality as well, albeit to a lesser and slower degree than wokeness, but the consequences are more widespread, long lasting, and horrific. I’ve known feminism was an enemy for decades, but Garris marshals the practical and biblical evidence like the lawyer he is. Something he does especially well is to allow his opposition to make the best case possible in their own words and arguments, so you won’t find any straw men in this book. It’s also a great reference work to have on your shelf. If you want to know his take on a certain issue or passage it’s in there.

The created nature of man, male and female God created them, is the fundamental issue at stake. Everything in this debate goes back to Genesis 1-3. Let’s see how Garris defines feminism:

Feminism minimizes sex distinctions, with an emphasis on pushing women away from the home and children and into careers just like men. Feminism is the belief that men and women are fundamentally the same and thus interchangeable. The feminist movements have been so successful over the years that Westerners live in a post-feminist society meaning most people today are feminists without the label.

That last point is an indisputable fact, and the salient question is, is this necessarily a bad thing? If you are a Christian committed to Scripture as God’s infallible revelation to man, then yes, it most definitely is a bad thing. That’s before we get to the evidence of the last two hundred years, which shows us without a doubt it is a bad, terrible, horrible thing. Unfortunately, the idea of equality is so rooted in the Western mind as an unqualified good, itself rooted in Christianity’s influence, that any hint men and women are not absolutely equal in every way is tantamount to heresy.

The Origins and Nature of Feminism
Most conservatives and Christians think of the first feminists as benign, what is called “first wave feminism.” These women were supposedly seeking to bring some balance to the distortions and abuse of the patriarchy at the time, but that is not the case. Garris titles his first chapter, “The Rise of Feminism and the Erosion of Masculinity.” The intention of the early feminists may not have been this specifically, but masculinity was the casualty. The two most popular of these early feminists, Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902) and Susan B. Anthony (1820-1906), were egalitarians who were driven by the growing secular progressivism of the 19th century. All of the Reform movements of that era were influenced to some degree by the Christian culture of the time, but they were in fact revolutionary and anti-biblical. Once Descartes and rationalism come to dominate Western intellectual history in the 18th century, secularism and it’s offshoot, feminism were inevitable. Once the Bible was discredited and no longer the center of Western civilization, the jig was up, and the dance really took off in the 19th century with the feminists leading the way.

To understand the pernicious nature of feminism, starting with the “first wave,” it is important to understand why egalitarianism is not only un-biblical, but anti-biblical. The Bible is clearly hierarchical, even if Christians disagree as to the extent. There are conservative Christian egalitarians, but they are a tiny minority. Liberal Christians in the late 19th and early 20th century no longer believed in the supernatural, but instead of just burning the Bible and moving on, decided to turn Christianity into something it is not, and feminism was part of that turning. Fundamental to the vision of feminism is ridding the family of male authority in the home. Take women’s suffrage, which took until 1920 to become law in the passage of the 19th amendment. Garris quotes B. B. Warfield who points out that giving women the right to vote changes the basic unit of society from the family to the individual. In Scripture, the individual is never the basic unit, least of all in the family. The federal headship of Adam representing the entire human race is central to God’s plan of redemption in Christ, and the husband and father representing his family is evident throughout redemptive history. The assumption of early feminists was that women could and should be independent of men, and at the time the Christian assumptions of society limited that; in due course all limits would be gone.

Which brings us to second-wave feminism and the sexual revolution. In this iteration women not only wanted to be independent of men, but to act like men, and technology in the form of a little pill would accommodate that desire. Now instead of being a servant of their God-given biology, women could now like men have consequence free sex, or so they thought. Sex, whether it results in a child or not, is never consequence free, and few people today would deny that, especially for women. Then a decade or so after the pill went mainstream in the early 60s, the Supreme Court decided women murdering their child in the womb was a “constitutional right.” If the pill didn’t work, just dismember the baby, suck it out, and get rid of it. “Problem” solved, but it isn’t. Women who get abortions are emotionally scarred for life, unless they find the mercy and grace of Jesus. But the sexual revolution was a means to the feminists’ real end of getting women out of the home so they would be more like men. Garris writes:

Feminism is the twisted idea that a woman is free when serving an employer but a slave when serving her family.

This was the basic idea of one of the seminal books of this wave of feminism, Betty Friedan’s 1963 book, The Feminine Mystique. To Friedan, women stuck in the home in American middle class suburbia was exactly another form slavery, and women would only be emancipated when they were emancipated from the home. There are further waves of feminism, but the damage had already been done. Feminism had done the bidding of Marx, and while not abolished, the family has been decimated with all its deleterious effects I don’t need to delineate here.

The Inadequate Complementarianism Response
At some point Christians were going to need to respond, and from the beginning they did, but not in any organized fashion. Since feminism had come to dominate liberal mainline denominations in the 20th century, and started making inroads into Evangelical churches, Christian leaders in the 1980s, among them John Piper and Wayne Grudem, felt compelled to respond. Complementarianism was the result. One of the most valuable contributions in the book for me, among many, is Garris’s chapter on this topic, which he titles, “Complementarianism’s Compromise.” That says it all.

I never quite got why I was always uncomfortable with the term, but the word compromise nails it. As a response to the growing influence of feminism not just in the culture, but in the church, it was actually weak. Why? The first problem is the word itself. All those syllables are unnecessary when what they are trying to defend describes the issue at stake, patriarchy. That compromise alone meant they lost the game before it started. Of course men and women are complimentary; even feminists believe that to one degree or another. That’s irrelevant to the real issue at stake: male authority. They emphasized two points: Husbands have the leadership role in the home, and only men can be pastors and elders. But that leaves a whole host of questions unanswered about where male authority begins and ends, which is exactly the issue: does it end? To complementarians it most definitely does, and there the battle is enjoined.

Feminists and egalitarians believe there is no such thing as male authority, in or outside the home, while complementarians believe male authority is reserved just for the home and the church, which some have called “narrow complementarianism.” Unfortunately, even at that they are uncomfortable with the idea of speaking specifically of male rule or authority in the home, preferring to use the word leadership. It’s less offensive. The problem with trying not to be offensive to modern sensibilities is that it’s counter productive. Those you’re trying not to offend won’t be satisfied anyway unless you completely agree with them. You may as well go all the way and proclaim you are defending patriarchy and male authority. At least you’ll get the respect of not being wishy washy or looking for a mollifying “third way,” which doesn’t exist anyway. The problem with this, Garris says, is that it “creates a dichotomy between the church and society at large.” Inside the home and church men and women are who God made them to be, outside they are something different. That’s the conclusion one has to come to.

The entire chapter is necessary reading for those struggling with these issues, but the bottom line is what God made man and woman to be. In other words, what is the nature of man and woman, and does that affect the gender roles they engage in, both inside the home and church, and in society? If the nature of man and woman are fundamentally different which affects their roles, how is limiting these differences to just the home and church not arbitrary? That’s the question I asked.

Rooting Gender Roles in Nature
I often utilize my old buddy Aristotle when discussing things like this because of his genius in discussing the concept of telos, which means purpose in Greek. He came up with four reasons for why things exist, which he called four causes. We can better understand why the nature of man and woman is important if we understand Aristotle’s four causes. In layman’s terms as I understand them:

  1. Formal Cause-The concept of the thing in the mind, say a table.
  2. Material Cause-The stuff out of which the table is made.
  3. Efficient Cause-The person making the table.
  4. Final Cause-The purpose, or telos, for which the table was made, e.g., to put things on.

In Genesis 1 we learn that God made each thing “according to their kind.” We use the phrase of comparison apples and oranges because those are two different kind of things, so it makes no sense to compare something if they are fundamentally different as if they were not. That is the issue biblically with men and women, they are of two fundamentally different kind of man, male and female. This means the nature of the differences are built into their being, so they are ontological differences. This is the rub, and something we can’t explain away if we’re Christians and we believe God made human beings with a final cause, a specific purpose consistent with their natures. As Garris puts it:

God’s laws regarding men and women reflect their natures, as He did not give divine commands detached from His design to their entire being. A man is to exercise authority because God wired him to exercise authority, and a woman is to submit because God wired her to submit.

For feminists and egalitarians them’s fightin’ words, while for complementarians them’s embarrassing words. They do generally believe this, albeit narrowly, but they aren’t up for the fight so they message with words like “leadership” in place of authority.

Given this is the case, it doesn’t surprise us that they limit the natures of men and women to family and church. Outside of that I guess their natures don’t apply. This I now realize is why I’ve always been uncomfortable or confused by complementarianism. Reality as God made it is hierarchical, and men were created and designed to exercise authority and rule, and women were not. If we are Christians and take the Bible seriously as God’s revelation, I don’t see how we come to any other conclusion. As I said above, though, we are not going back to the 16th century. The secular feminist cat has been let out of the bag for 200 years, and what this looks like going forward in a modern context is hard to predict. We obviously have to start with our own homes and churches, and these truths must be proclaimed and taught with boldness from pulpits throughout the land. God only blesses the nation when the four causes line up with his will, and right now the American family needs it desperately.

 

 

 

 

 

Should We Send Our Kids to Public Schools?

Should We Send Our Kids to Public Schools?

Dec 26, 2024 | Parents and Family

It has taken a while for Christians to see public schools in America as an existential threat to their children’s Christian faith. I saw one comment about this topic on Twitter which was the inspiration for this post. The guy said sending your kids to a public school is like playing Russian roulette with the school system. In other words, you’ll be lucky if your kids make it out as Christians. If there is a bullet in the chamber, they on their way to become heathens. I sympathize with this perspective, and agree the public schools are an indoctrination machine into secularism. I will further argue the idea of “public” schools is unbiblical because education is the responsibility of the parents and not the state. The latter idea goes back to something I call the conservative progressivism of the 19th century, which was progressive ideas promoting conservative ends. The Marxists would take over the progressive movement in the latter half of the 20th century, and in the 21st century bring to public education the reality of the Marxification of education, in the title of a book by James Lindsey.

Our children went to public schools because we didn’t know any better. Our youngest was able to start going to a classical Christian school in the 5th grade, which was an educational red pill experience for me. At the same time our daughter was attending Hillsdale College and fell in love with classical education, minoring in it and making it her career. But never when our kids where in public schools would I have for a minute considered it Russian roulette. The reason is because my wife and I saw their education as completely our responsibility. Never did I think it was the school’s responsibility to educate my children. Yes, the schools would teach them the “three Rs,” but it was up to my wife and I to inculcate that knowledge into a Christian worldview. Interrogating them about what they were learning at school, and exploring the hidden assumptions, was a common practice in our home. What they learned there was continually critiqued from the perspective of our Christian faith. They were raised from their earliest days learning that Christianity is ultimate truth about the nature of reality, and everything else is not. I wrote a book showing how I did that called, The Persuasive Christian Parent: Building an Enduring Faith in You and Your Children. Each of our children as adults are committed Christians. That was the plan all along, regardless of where they went to school

Our job as Christian parents is to teach them not only what we believe, but why we believe it. The latter is apologetics, or defending the veracity of the faith, and that is how we need to raise our children in a secular age. This is why I was always lecturing, teaching, and persuading them about why Christianity is true and why it is the only worldview that makes sense of all of reality. In my favorite quote from the ever quotable C.S. Lewis:

I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.

It is only the biggest of big pictures, God in Christ in Scripture, that makes sense of anything and everything. Every particular has meaning because of the universal, the puzzle pieces of life now fit because God is the author of the picture of life.

I say this to declare that a public school has no power over our children if we as parents do our job. That being said, a public school is the last place on earth you want to send you children! The rest of this piece explains why.

The Primacy of the Family in Education
I came across some quotes about the family from President Theodore Roosevelt that in our day would be considered “controversial,” but in the early twentieth century were common:

It is in the life of the family upon which in the last analysis the whole welfare of the Nation rests . . . . The nation is nothing but the aggregate of the families within its borders—Everything in the American civilization and nation rests upon the home—The family relation is the most fundamental, the most important of all relations.

His traditional conception of the family including the roles of men and women as husbands and wives would be positively shocking to our secular cultural elites, woke or not. R.J. Rushdoony states what Roosevelt observed as axiomatic for Christian Western civilization:

The family is, sociologically and religiously, the basic institution, man’s first and truest government, school, state, and church. Man’s basic emotional and psychic needs are met in terms of the family.

This was an inarguable statement of fact until the twentieth century and the rise of secularism, and with that rise the state slowly began to usurp the prerogatives of the family in education. J. Gresham Machen writing in 1925 argued it had already happened:

The most important Christian educational institution is not the pulpit or the school, as important as these institutions are; it is the Christian family. And that institution has to a very large extent ceased to do its work. . . . . The lamentable fact is that the Christian home, as an educational institution, has largely ceased to function.

Wherever as Christians we come down on the nature of education in America on which there will be disagreement, we must all agree with Machen, the education of children is the primary responsibility of the family. But Christian classical education was not yet on my radar.

Then in 2012 while my wife was working at the elementary school our youngest son attended, she was growing increasingly dismayed with what she was witnessing in public education. She insisted that he not attend our local public middle school; unfortunately, a private school was a pipe dream as far as I was concerned. There was no way we could afford it financially, and our other kids survived the public schools, faith intact, and so would he. It’s pathetic when surviving is the criteria by which I judged an education for our children, but we had no choice, I thought. Thankfully, my mother-in-law decided she would cover the tuition, and our son entered Covenant Classical School in Naperville, Illinois for the fifth grade. To say I was blown away by the education we encountered at this Christian classical school would be a massive understatement. But even with our son at a Christian classical school, in my mind the ideal along with home schooling, his education was still our responsibility.

Government and Education Need to Get a Divorce
America’s founders believed deeply in the importance of education, and to that end the Continental Congress in July 1787 passed The Northwest Ordinance in which they stated:

Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.

Religion to the Founders meant Christianity, and its morality and knowledge was necessary to good government and a happy populace. In other words, civilization depended on education. It didn’t follow, though, that encouragement meant government control of education given the Founders’ deep suspicion of human nature and government power. Yet, over time “public” education came to mean government education subsidized by taxpayers controlled by the government. In this sense, public education is an oxymoron. Machen put this presciently in 1934:

Every lover of human freedom ought to oppose with all his might the giving of federal aid to the schools of this country; for federal aid in the long run inevitably means federal control, and federal control means control by a centralized and irresponsible bureaucracy, and control by such a bureaucracy means the death of everything that might make this country great.

Who can argue with this after 90 years of hindsight. Rushdoony further makes our point, writing in 1961:

The public school is now unmistakably a state school, and its concept of education is inevitably statist. This is apparent in various ways. First of all, education has ceased to be a responsibility of the home and has become a responsibility of the state. . . . the state still claims sole right to determine the nature, extent, and time of education. Thus, a basic family right has been destroyed and the state’s control over the child asserted.

It cannot be both state and family, only either/or. And this is not just an argument for liberty over against government tyranny, but a fundamentally religious question. Secular neutrality is a myth, and American public schools are the establishment of a secular religion in the guise of religious neutrality. Joe Boot explains:

We can clearly see . . . that neither the structure within which we educate, nor the purpose for which we educate, nor the content by which we educate, can be neutral.

Doug Wilson states why this an indisputable fact:

Education is fundamentally religious. Consequently, there is no question about whether a morality will be imposed in that education, but rather which morality will be imposed. Christians and assorted traditionalists who want a secular school system to instill anything other than secular ethics are wanting something that has never happened and can never happen.

He further asserts that public or “common schools were going to be the means by which the entire progressive agenda was ushered in.” Progressive in the twenty-first century is nothing like the early progressives imagined, but in hindsight it’s easy to see how secular progressive education paved the way for a takeover of education by cultural Marxists.

Does this mean that what we know as public education needs to be “abolished,” to borrow from Marx? Yes! School choice may be a good stopgap measure to take away some of the monopoly power of the government, but it is only temporary. It follows from the biblical imperative of the familial responsibility of the educating children, that it must be completely private and divorced from government at any level. Government money always brings with it government influence. Education is a worldview enterprise, and in America parents should be free to decide in what worldview they want their children educated.

What that looks like and how we get there I don’t know. I only know this should be the objective of any Christian who understands the incompatibility of Christianity with any other worldview in the educating of children. In the meantime as we work toward this, I believe that charter classical schools are a critical means to challenging the secular progressive monopoly on education.

The Rise of Progressive Education in America
Having made the case for the complete familial responsibility of the education of children, let’s look at how modern education came to be so horribly modernly horrible.

Conservatives have been complaining about public education for a long time. In fact, a popular book called Why Johnny Can’t Read—And What You Can Do About It came out in 1955. Some people think the 1950s was the golden age of conservatism. It wasn’t. That decade continued the consequences of secular progressivism in American culture, even if the effects were masked by leftover conservative Christian cultural influence. Education was a fundamental part of the progressive vision of transforming America into a “modern” democracy based on “scientific” principles among other things, and progressives paved the way for what has become the Marxification of education in the 21st century.

Progressive education goes back well before there was a progressive movement in America to the influence of Horace Mann (1796-1859), considered the father of American public schools. As a reformer, he convinced Americans they should pay for public, or “common,” schools, and established the Massachusetts State Board of Education. According to Britannica, Mann “believed that, in a democratic society, education should be free and universal, nonsectarian, democratic in method, and reliant on well-trained professional teachers.” We can see immediately from a Christian perspective this is a non-starter, yet not only did it start, but in due course this perspective took over education in America. Nonsectarian eventually became in practice the progressive secular religion.

To reiterate, there can be no such thing as a “nonsectarian” education because education is fundamentally religious and always inculcates a worldview in the children being educated. Also, there is no such thing as free education. In practice, free always means someone else pays. There is no constitutional right in America to insist that other Americans pay for my children’s education, or that I pay for theirs. Yet by the twentieth century this became an unquestioned dogma, and if challenged, charges from the left erupted like a volcano, hot and fast.

Doug Wilson tells how these reformers were uniformly hostile to orthodox Christianity. Many were Unitarians, the number one Christian heresy of the day. As he points out, the local government schools were mostly run by Christians who had no idea the true intent of the reformers above them. If the communities were Evangelical, so were the schools, but the secular progressive die was cast. He writes of one nineteenth century Cassandra, R.L. Dabney (1820-1898), whose prophecies of the inevitable consequences proved true. Dabney wrote:

We have seen that their [the schools’] complete secularization is logically inevitable. Christians must prepare themselves then, for the following results: All prayer, catechisms, and Bibles will ultimately be driven out of the schools.

At the behest of radical atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair, the Supreme Court in 1962 basically outlawed prayer in public schools—nonsectarian indeed.

Arguably, the Olympic champion of progressive education was John Dewey (1859-1952) who was passionate about “democracy,” and education as the way to achieve it. Cultural transformation starts with education, and the torrent of secular, progressive ideas like a rushing river had a momentum by the late nineteenth century that would not be stopped. The basic outline of Dewey’s influence is found in the word progressive itself; it had to be different than whatever came before, and unfortunately it was. Prior to the progressive era, education in America was basically classical. Progressives believed “classical” was against “progress,” so it had to go. Here is a smattering of Dewey’s ideas:

  • Education should promote the practical over the abstract.
  • Experience was the great teacher, and the scientific method the primary source of knowledge.
  • The idea of “public” should replace the “individual.”
  • Traditional religion, i.e., Christianity, is an obstacle to true education and progress.
  • Human nature is not fixed but can be changed via education.
  • Traditional classrooms stifle a child’s curiosity, creativity, and excitement for learning.
  • Discipline or correction is not a teacher’s duty, but rather to understand and follow a student’s interest and impulses.
  • The utility of ideas is what makes them important.
  • Education is not primarily about academics or morality, but societal change.
  • Goals and standards are harmful to a child’s motivation.
  • Pedagogy must be a discipline apart from subject matter and methodology over content.

Henry T. Edmondson summarizes Dewey’s influence well:

Thanks in no small part to Dewey, much of what characterizes contemporary education is a revolt against various expressions of authority: a revolt against a canon of learning, a revolt against tradition, a revolt against religious values, a revolt against moral standards, a revolt against logic—even a revolt against grammar and spelling.

And a mighty successful revolt it has been! But now there is a counter revolt happening as the poverty of progressive education and its Marxist progeny becomes impossible to ignore. I mentioned James Lindsey and his book, The Marxification of Education above. If you want to see how Marxism in the guise of woke infiltrated K-12 public schools, and many private schools as well, I would highly suggest reading his book.

As with the Enlightenment and it’s offshoot, secularism in the form of progressive education and now Marxification, i.e. woke, took a long time, hundreds of years, to get us here. It will take a long time to turn around, but it’s starting and gaining momentum. When I was growing up, home schooling and classical education didn’t exist, now it’s everywhere. Christians are waking up to the realization that we can’t entrust our kids to the secular, woke indoctrination factories of so called public education. It will be hard for many Christian families to break out of “free” public schools, but the church needs to take seriously the need for that to happen. I trust that will become a more prevalent topic of conversation in the years to come.

The Therapeutic Nation: It’s All About Parents

The Therapeutic Nation: It’s All About Parents

Aug 21, 2024 | Parents and Family

I promote my books as much as I can because I’m a nobody with no platform to speak of, so if I don’t do it, no one else will. Yes, I know, ontologically before God I am not a “nobody,” but you know what I mean.  Getting attention without “a name” isn’t easy. I feel like the bum in front of the luxury hotel rattling a tin cup for pennies, while the Big Shot who everyone looks at pulls up in a Rolls Royce. And people are bombarded by a zillion things today that vie for their attention, and sadly fewer people read books than ever before. That alone makes me despair for civilization, but I also pray for a revival of book reading to add to a revival of the Holy Spirit transforming lives. If vinyl albums can make a comeback, so can books.

I say all that to plug my first book, The Persuasive Christian Parent. It wasn’t a terrible rookie contribution to the Christian book market, and the message is more relevant than ever. The subtitle makes the point of this post: How to build an enduring faith in you and your children. Christian parents think this is more difficult than ever given the state of our world and culture, but I disagree. The reason is because of Parents, both for good and bad. The first section of the book, the first two chapters, is the title of this post, it’s all about parents.

 

I was thinking of my book as I recently listened to this conversation of Al Mohler with Abigail Shrier about her new book, Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up. What Philip Reiff called The Triumph of the Therapeutic in 1966 has become a contagion in 2024. Navel gazing has turned into an art form, encouraging a search for the authentic self that destroys the self. We’ve reached the critical mass of this triumph because we’re living with the generational consequences of what Reiff wrote about almost 60 years ago. Parents who grew up in the 60s and 70s (boomers) raised therapeutic children, who in turn raised their children (generation X) the same way, who did the same with their children (Millennials), who have given us the basket case generation Z. As God said through Moses, God punishes “the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate” him. This isn’t God being a big meany; it’s just a generational sociological fact.

As I was listening to Mohler and Shrier, I couldn’t help thinking, how stupid are those parents! But as I said, this is the result of generations of children raised primarily by parents who swim in a secular irreligious therapeutic culture where self is God. Of course such parents will raise basket cases who find life inscrutable and impossible to deal with. With such raw material, the left has an easy job of brainwashing today’s college students; stupid parents raise stupid children. In biblical terms, fools raise fools.

Often when I encounter children or teenagers, or even adults, however they act, good or bad, I automatically think it is likely a reflection of their parents and how they were raised. Which always reminds me of something my mother told me when I was young. The simple folk wisdom of my Italian from‑the‑ old‑country grandfather. He used to tell my mother if she misbehaved when she went into town, people wouldn’t think she was a bad little girl; rather, they would think what rotten parents she has! This problem of raising therapeutic children is certainly a secular issue, prevalent in families in which God is invisible, but Christian parents are not immune. Culture’s influence, any culture, is impossible to escape, and unfortunately Christians are as susceptible to the therapeutic mindset as their irreligious neighbors. As my grandfather knew, it’s all about parents.

Having said that, not all children raised by fools will not end up living their entire life like fools. God is doing a great work in our time, and many of these will be saved and brought into their right mind. However this fundamental fact about the nature of reality, that parents have the greatest influence on their children’s development, means the most important cultural battle is in the home. Not only in how we raise the children God gives us, but in having more children. Secular people have fewer children than religious people, and Christian families should have more than they currently do. God’s command to be fruitful and multiply was never abrogated. We need to outbreed the enemy!

Do Parents Bear Ultimate Responsibility for their Children?
Given the insecurity many Christian parents feel about their own children and raising them successfully in the faith, this is a question that needs to be addressed. I found as I began promoting my book the contention, it’s “all about parents,” was for some “controversial.” Normally the knee jerk reaction was, “So you think you can guarantee how your children turn out?” The question reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of God’s created reality, fallen though it is, and our place in it.

First, the most obvious thing that needs to be said that shouldn’t need to be said: We can’t guarantee anything and are in control of nothing. And these facts of existence apply not only to raising children, but in all of life. That human beings have ever thought guarantees and control are possibilities is a reflection of sin and the distorted hubris that comes from it. Life, however, is not endless uncertainty because God decided we needed some semblance of predictability for healthy, flourishing lives. Raising children is like anything else in life

We live in a cause and effect universe; God made it that way. We can have a reasonable expectation that if we do X, then Y should result. This expectation can be in raising children in the faith, tending a garden, building a house, practice honing an art or craft, building a business, getting a degree, anything human beings do. Can we be absolutely certain of or guarantee results, or that we are in control of the results? Of course not! But to say that because of this it follows that we can’t then have a reasonable expectation of the results, or be confident that we can produce results is, well, unreasonable. And unbiblical.

In philosophical terms, God is the primary cause of all things, while human beings are the secondary cause. Both causes are required because that’s the way reality works. Man gets this backward when he thinks that secondary causes, us, don’t require a primary cause, God. It’s the same in the “natural” world, where people think trees, for example, grow because of dirt and air and water and sun. They do, of course, but without God as the primary cause of trees, there would be no trees! Yet the trees must be watered, and human decision and agency to make sure the watering gets done.

Back to children. When we hear statistics about children who abandon their faith, we tend to see parents as bystanders and victims of social forces beyond their control. That’s simply not true. Sociologist Christian Smith in his books Soul Searching and Souls in Transition found that the most important factor in a young person keeping their faith into adulthood was their parents. Peter Berger, writing 40 years before Smith, states that, “In the sphere of the family and of social relationships closely linked to it, religion continues to have considerable ‘reality potential,’ that is, continues to be relevant in terms of the motives and self‑interpretations of people in this sphere of everyday social activity.” Berger, a sociologist, knows what 19th century Princeton theologian Charles Hodge knew about the centrality of the family: “The character of the Church and of the state depends on the character of the family. If religion dies out in the family, it cannot elsewhere be maintained.” As important as extended family and the Church are to the faith of young people, nothing comes close to the influence of parents, for good or ill.

Parental influence is not only a sociological fact but a biblical reality. It is the way God made things. In the Old Testament we see that God’s calling is generational. In other words, when God called Abram, he promised that all the nations of the earth would be blessed through him. We live in a hyper‑individualized culture that sees people as autonomous, independent organisms with barely a connection to that which gave them life, as if tree branches have no connection to the tree. In Scripture, by contrast, the family is the central medium for the transmission of the Faith. Children are never treated as aliens to the covenant, but rather were bound up in it. Moses gets at the centrality of the family to Faith, and Faith to the family, in Deuteronomy. 29:29:

The secret things belong to the Lord our God; but the things revealed belong to us and our children forever, that we may follow all the words of this law.

We read of the familial nature of Faith in the New Testament as well. In Acts 16, Paul and Silas found themselves severely flogged and in prison for bringing the Kingdom of God to Philippi. At about midnight, they were praying and singing hymns to God (what else would you do if you were beaten, bleeding, in pain, feet in stocks, and in prison). When a violent earthquake shook the ground, all the prison doors flew open, and everybody’s chains came loose. The guard was ready to kill himself when Paul stopped him because no one had escaped. The man, trembling and in great fear, pleaded with Paul and Silas, “What must I do to be saved?” Notice:

31 They replied, “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved—you and your household.” 32 Then they spoke the word of the Lord to him and to all the others in his house. 33 At that hour of the night the jailer took them and washed their wounds; then immediately he and all his household were baptized. 34 The jailer brought them into his house and set a meal before them; he was filled with joy because he had come to believe in God—he and his whole household.

Children are assumed just by their birth to be part of God’s plan, and that did not change after the resurrection of Christ.

Lastly, Solomon in Psalm 127 famously says, “Unless the Lord builds the house, the builders labor in vain.” This is absolutely true. But, if we build a crappy house that is blown over at the mildest spring zephyr is that the Lord’s fault? Nobody would say it is. If our children turn out to be apostate heathens, do we as parents not bear some of the responsibility? Of course we do. The issue isn’t to rub it in and make those parents feel guilty, but we all in life have to take responsibility. And knowing what to do and not do helps Christian parents build solid houses that endure for generations.

Raising Children Differently in a Secular Age
This was the reason I wrote the book. Many Christian parents don’t understand that living in a secular age means we have to raise our children in the faith in light of that fact. Just taking our children to church and Sunday school, reading the Bible and praying with them is not enough. That is the reason the second section of the book is, It’s All About Truth. Because of where we were in our lives at the time when our kids were younger, I rarely did family devotions and Bible reading with them. I would pray with them before bed sometimes, but my wife did that more often than I did. I was just not very good at that, and looking back, it bums me out. I told that to my daughter one day, how bad I was at being spiritual leader dad, and her reply was, “Well, daddy, at least you taught us Christianity is the truth.” I guess there is that!

This relates to one of the great moments of my life, and in saying that I do not exaggerate. One Sunday on our way home from church, I was doing my typical lecturing on various and sundry topics. Our youngest, a son, maybe seven or eight at the time, said something with not a little annoyance like, “Why do you always have to lecture us, Dad?” I was taken aback a little when our daughter came to the rescue, “Because, Dominic, daddy is always teaching.” My heart melted—truly one of the great compliments of my life. After all, this is one of the primary reasons I exist: the profound responsibility to raise our children before God. And I would like to suggest this can be done well or done poorly. Who would disagree? The question is, what does raising our children well or poorly in our current historical and cultural context mean.

It starts with truth. I was motivated to write the book because of a young lady who grew up in a Christian home, very involved in her church, went away to college and promptly became an agnostic. It angered me because I thought that would never happen to my children. As I said, some people think that’s arrogant or naïve, but it is neither. As I also said, we live in a cause and effect universe, and we can have a reasonable expectation of results in light of our current cultural challenges. I taught my children from their earliest days that Christianity is the truth, and that is the only reason we believe it. The truth of Christianity, and the lies of every other view non-Christian view of reality did not seem to be part of this young woman’s upbringing because in her story of leaving the faith the truth of Christianity, or not, never seemed to be a consideration. That, I believe, is a parental dereliction of duty in the 21st century post-Christian secular West.

The reason this is so important should be self-evident. If our children believe, have been persuaded and taught, Christianity is the truth, and nothing else is, they are far less likely to abandon it. If they do, if they go through a period of rebellion, chances are they will know it’s rebellion and not believe Christianity has been discredited as a lie. This is simple logic. They must be taught and understand the law of non-contradiction, that A cannot be non-A, so only one faith, religion, worldview is true, and every other one is a lie. If we’ve taught them this, that Christianity is true, what we believe and why we believe it, doggedly, persistently, annoyingly if necessary, I am confident they will never abandon their faith. Who is going to reject what they believe in their hearts and minds is the truth? Nobody!

You can read my book to find out some of the ways I did that with our children.

 

 

Christianity and Our Generational Faith

Christianity and Our Generational Faith

May 8, 2024 | Parents and Family

Even as a young man without children at the time, one of the things that attracted me to Reformed theology was that it was specifically a generational faith. For the first five years of my Christian life I was by default a Baptist, as are most Evangelical or born-again Christians. When I was introduced to Calvinism at 24, the gentleman who did that also introduced me to infant baptism, something I couldn’t accept. I had been born and raised a Catholic, and after I prayed the sinners prayer, I soon rejected everything associated with my Catholic upbringing, including baptizing babies. As I learned about this new Presbyterian and Reformed understanding of how children fit into God’s covenant, I recoiled from it. I could accept predestination and the sovereignty of God over the salvation of His people, but each person having to make their own decision for Jesus, and then being baptized, seemed like the only logical way to look at baptism. And the New Testament seemed to affirm that. Then I went to a Reformed Baptist church service.

I’ll never forget that Sunday morning in 1985. I can see it like it was yesterday; apparently it was that momentous for me. As happens in thousands of churches around the country every Sunday morning, there was a baby dedication during the service. I have no idea why I responded like I did, or why a certain phrase came into my mind, but it did. I thought, “They are treating their children like strangers to the covenant!” I was actually offended, and I was instantly a paedobaptist.

That is an interesting phrase because even at that very early stage in my Reformed journey, I saw the Christian faith as fundamentally generational. It wasn’t just for me, an isolated individual who makes a decision for Jesus, and my children as their own isolated individuals who have to make their choices. I will discuss covenant theology below, but even before I knew the first thing about it, I intuitively knew my children were included in it. As my wife and I are Christians, we raised our children as Christians, not as little heathens who have to decide someday to become Christians. They will of course have to make their own decisions to follow Jesus, but as our children they receive the blessing of God’s covenant promises through us as their parents. The covenant is to them every bit as much as it is to us.

One verse that always comes to mind when I think of this is Deuteronomy 29:29:

The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may follow all the words of this law.

These things revealed do not belong to our children as a result of them making the right choice and a public profession of Christ. No, they belong to our children specifically because they are our children. We are Christians, we have children, and they are part of God’s covenant promises to us as His people, therefore we raise them as little Christians and not strangers to God’s covenant.

Here is another wonderful passage from Psalm 103:

17 But from everlasting to everlasting
the Lord’s love is with those who fear him,
and his righteousness with their children’s children—
18 with those who keep his covenant
and remember to obey his precepts. 

If you read these words carefully with no preconceived ideas, you can easily see in them the glorious gospel of Christ, that is, God’s love and righteousness given to His people. There is always a connection between God’s active relationship to His people, and their response. In other words, God doesn’t try to get a response from people out of loving them, but His loving activates an inevitable response in them toward Him. This can happen because in Christ He grants us His righteousness so we are no longer His enemies, but granted Sonship in the new birth. We have God’s promise here that His righteousness isn’t just for us, but for our children, and our children’s children—it is generational!

This isn’t just an Old Testament concept either. The first generation of Christians were all pious Jews, and what Peter declared in the first Christian sermon in Acts 2 would have made perfect sense to them, that “The promise is for you and your children.” Of course it is! I contend that if the Apostles had preached a New Covenant in which the children were not included, that would have been controversial to say the least. I can imagine the Jewish Christian families responding, that sure doesn’t sound like new and improved!

The Idea of Covenant in Redemptive History
Depending on your Christian or denominational environment, you are more or less familiar with the word covenant, and it’s importance or not for our faith. I don’t remember hearing it talked about at all during the first five plus years of my Christian journey, which is surprising given the centrality of the concept in Scripture. The word is used almost 300 times in the Old Testament, and almost 40 in the New. The reason the concept is almost invisible be can found in the history of fundamentalism, and especially the interpretive system known as dispensationalism, popularized in the 19th century. Biblical history, in this scheme, is God dealing with His people and the world in different ways in different ages, or dispensations. Thus there is little continuity in God’s dealings with humanity. Covenant theology, on the other hand, sees the unfolding of God’s covenant as the primary interpretive principle for all redemptive history. It is the universal in which all the particulars of redemptive history make sense, and unifies the teachings of the entire Bible.

The practice of covenants, usually by kings, was a common occurrence in the ancient Near East. Formal agreements between two parties, covenants brokered power and defined obligations. Covenants would have been as commonly understood as contracts are today. God’s covenant with His people had stipulations, specifically there were blessings for obedience, and curses for disobedience. Israel failed to succeed as the covenant representative for God’s people, so Jesus came to be the new Israel to fulfill all the stipulations of the covenant of redemption.

Reformed theologians typically argue that there are three biblical covenants: works, grace, and redemption. In the covenant of works God promised Adam and Eve the whole of creation if they would but obey the command to not eat from the tree. In the covenant of grace, God saves sinners by grace through faith in Christ (Old Testament saints were saved the same way, retro‑actively if you will). Daniel R. Hyde explains how the covenant of redemption is rooted in the relationship of the Triune God:

From all of eternity God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit covenanted to share their eternal love and fellowship with their creatures. In human terms, God the Father covenanted to create a people, whom He knew would sin; to choose from this fallen mass “a great multitude that no one could number” (Rev. 7:9); and to give them to Christ (John 17:24), whom He would “crush” on the cross according to His eternal will (Is. 53:10). The Son covenanted to accomplish their redemption: “I glorified you on earth, having accomplished the work you gave me to do” (John 17:4). The Holy Spirit covenanted to apply the work of the Son to those the Father chose, “until we acquire possession of it” (Eph. 1:14).

The covenant of redemption is the ultimate universal, which means everything in the Bible and in our lives needs to be seen in light of it, including baptism.

To understand generational faith, I need to go back to the Garden of Eden post Fall, and God’s promise that he would “put enmity between you (Satan) and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.” There we have the whole history of redemption in one verse. The promise of God is the foundation of our Faith. From Genesis 3 it is easy to trace the covenant throughout the Old Testament. In Genesis 6, God established his covenant with Noah to save him and his family from God’s judgment and wrath in the flood. Then when the Lord calls Abram (Gen. 12) to go to the land he would show him, he promises to make him into a great nation. He confirms the covenant with Abram in one of the most amazing scenes in the Bible (Gen. 15:8‑21). The Lord tells him a second time that he will have a son, promises that his offspring will be like the stars in the sky (and before electricity that must have been an awe‑inspiring site), and shows him the land he will one day possess. Abram asks how he can know all this will happen. Then something very strange to our modern sensibilities happens. The Lord tells him to get some animals, cut them in two, and line up the halves opposite each other. Then this:

17 When the sun had set and darkness had fallen, a smoking firepot with a blazing torch appeared and passed between the pieces. 18 On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram and said, “To your descendants I give this land . . . . 

What makes this covenant ceremony so strange is that normally both parties to the covenant would walk through the bloody sliced up animals, in effect saying if one of the parties doesn’t keep the covenant, they will end up like the animals. God was declaring to all of history that He would keep both sides of the covenant of redemption, His and ours. We can see here that the Old and New Covenant are intimately connected. Charles Hodge in his Systematic Theology tells us how:

It is plain that Christ came to execute a work, that He was sent of the Father to fulfill a plan, or preconceived design. It is no less plan that special promises were made by the Father to the Son, suspended upon the accomplishment of the work assigned to him.

As we saw in the above quote from Daniel Hyde, that Jesus accomplished the work the Father gave him to do, which is why he was given his name (Matt. 1:21), “because he will save his people from their sins.”

Our salvation, then, is rooted in something so much bigger and more profound than our decision, and making a good choice when presented with the case for heaven or hell. In fact our faith, and the faith of our children is rooted in God’s eternal covenant promise with Himself, the covenant of redemption. Paul in Ephesians 1 is clear Jesus didn’t come to redeem every human being, but specifically His people:

4 For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love 5 he predestined us for adoption to sonship through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will— 6 to the praise of his glorious grace, which he has freely given us in the One he loves.

We and our children are part of this amazing, eternal story worked out in history, in our lives, and in the lives of the generations to come from our bodies. It is an amazing, thrilling, wonderful faith that was once for all delivered to the saints (Jude 1:3).

Continuity versus Discontinuity in the Covenant
Here is where the covenantal rubber meets the road in the discussion of generational faith.  One of the reasons I am not a Baptist is because I am a Christian whose faith is a fulfillment of its Jewish heritage, not something completely different. Therefore, this means that my understanding of God’s covenant relationship to His people is one of continuity between Old and New, not discontinuity. Before we ever get to water, it is this question we must grapple with. Are children similarly part of the New Covenant as they were of the Old, and thus qualify for the sign of inclusion of the covenant: circumcision in the Old, baptism in the new?  My answer would be absolutely! Even Jeremiah, the prophet of the New Covenant agreed (Jeremiah 31:31-34). We read this is Jeremiah 32:38-40:

38 They will be my people, and I will be their God. 39 I will give them singleness of heart and action, so that they will always fear me and that all will then go well for them and for their children after them. 40 I will make an everlasting covenant with them: I will never stop doing good to them, and I will inspire them to fear me, so that they will never turn away from me. 41 I will rejoice in doing them good and will assuredly plant them in this land with all my heart and soul.

This was what Jewish people thought, not like individualistic post Enlightenment Westerners who default to thinking faith is primarily individual not familial. God’s covenant promises were always to them, and their children. The Lord through Isaiah 59:21 puts it bluntly:

“And as for me, this is my covenant with them,” says the Lord: “My Spirit that is upon you, and my words that I have put in your mouth, shall not depart out of your mouth, or out of the mouth of your offspring, or out of the mouth of your children’s offspring,” says the Lord, “from this time forth and forevermore.”

And not just our children, but our children’s children to get across the point.

 

Anti-Natalism, Secularism, and The New Definition of Dystopia

Anti-Natalism, Secularism, and The New Definition of Dystopia

Apr 17, 2024 | Parents and Family

Imagine a world without children. Now that would be a dystopia! It’s increasingly happening in countries throughout the world.

I wrote a piece recently about the demographic apocalypse currently enveloping the world and one British woman’s choice to wait too long before deciding to have children. I called it, Have More Babies! I discuss how we got to a point in Western history where having fewer children became a moral good. Environmental extremists based on their assumptions are nothing if not rational. They believe, a la Thomas Malthus, that the world’s resources are limited, and if people have too many children there eventually won’t be enough food to feed the world. That’s a blatant lie from the pit of hell, but if you believe it, you are obligated to be morally opposed to too many babies.

God, however, created a world plenty able to provide for his creatures, and to not believe that is a sin. If we have believed it, or do now, we must repent.

And before you go there, yes we are obligated to be good and faithful stewards of what God has blessed us with, but that’s not the point. What is, is a lie of the devil that destroys people and the possibility of blessing and true human flourishing—that is only possible in obedience to, “be fruitful and multiply.”

Before I address the sin/blessing aspect of our understanding of God’s very good creation, I will share the depressing inspiration for this piece, an article last year from First Things titled, “Anti-Natal Engineering.” That’s click bait for me, and I was not disappointed; depressed, but not disappointed. You should read it if you want to be depressed too. It’s one country’s story of secularism run amuck. Without obedience to God and his word, and the truth about reality revealed in it, this country took its unbiblical assumptions to their logical conclusion. They’ve realized now that it’s too late how terribly wrong they were. That country is South Korea. Other countries in the West fell for the same lie, but none with the commitment and rigor of South Korea.

South Korea’s Journey to an Anti-Natalist Dystopia
The concept of dystopia was bequeathed to us by the modern secular world. Everyone knows it means something like “a society characterized by human misery, as squalor, oppression, disease, and overcrowding.” In modern Latin Utopia means literally “nowhere.” It was coined by Thomas More and used as the   title of his 1516 book about an imaginary island enjoying perfection in legal, social, and political systems.

Dystopia was first used in 1844 by J. S. Mill, but started getting its negative connotation in the early 1950s. As science fiction in popular culture grew, and as secularism flattened life, sinful human imagination created dystopian worlds of unimaginable suffering and hopelessness. That in itself would be a fascinating study beyond the scope of this piece. The reason God commanded Adam and Eve, and us, to be fruitful and multiply, is because He knew without children Dystopia would be the result. Yet, that’s what so many secular people think they want. How did this happen in South Korea?

In the 1960s, the average South Korean women gave birth to six children—today it’s the lowest in the world at 0.79. To get there took a concerted effort on the part of their secular government in the early 1960s. The environmental movement got its start in the early ‘60s, and “overpopulation” became a mantra to shame people into having fewer children. The South Korean government developed this anti-natal mentality into a well-oiled machine through policy and propaganda. It worked exceptionally well, so well in fact, as they’ve tried to backtrack that isn’t working. Women still aren’t having babies. 

Ironically, the government did this because they thought by it the nation might thrive, but a nation can’t thrive without lots of babies. Demographers realized this a while ago, and now are sounding the alarm.

What’s fascinating about South Korea is that unlike the West, there was no sexual revolution. Throughout the decades the culture remained conservative, yet because of effective government and cultural propaganda, children became an optional part of family life, instead of the center of it. The First Things piece states:

South Korea’s public philosophy, not initially informed by the principles of modern feminism or the sexual revolution, emphasized the trials and costs of parenthood in order to encourage fewer people to become parents and people to become parents of fewer.

This worked on a material level. South Korea went from one of the poorest countries in the world to one of the richest. But wealth without children is poverty, especially the poverty of loneliness. This anti-natalist message and mentality has other unexpected consequences. For South Korea,

What began as an effort to achieve national greatness through population control has ended up promoting cultural conflict between men and women and threatening national suicide through population decline.

As demographers have increasingly realized, anti-natalism is a recipe for disaster of dystopian proportions. Imagine going by a playground on the way to work, and there never being any children there. That is dystopia; as the author says, national suicide. The Bible, by contrast, says a society or community having lots of children is a blessing, and a requirement for true human flourishing. From Psalm 127:

3 Behold, children are a heritage from the Lord,
    the fruit of the womb a reward.
4 Like arrows in the hand of a warrior
    are the children of one’s youth.
5 Blessed is the man
    who fills his quiver with them!
He shall not be put to shame
    when he speaks with his enemies in the gate.

Approximating Utopia on Earth
We know that this nowhere place actually does exist, just not on this fallen earth. For Christians heaven is that place, which in due course will be this earth renewed. Until then, on Christ’s own command in the Lord’s prayer, we are bringing some of that nowhere, heaven, God’s will be done, to this fallen earth. We can’t create heaven on earth, but we sure can approximate it. That is the Great Commission to disciple the nations, inaugurated at Pentecost by the power of the Holy Spirit, and God’s covenant promises in Christ. But does God really want this heaven on earth to grow slowly but very surely a la the parable of the mustard seed and leaven or yeast (Matt. 13:31-33)? Absolutely! The biblical case is easy to make, but that’s not the purpose of this post. Rather, it is how we overcome this anti-natalist Dystopia. I’ll start with the first book of the Bible. 

The foundational book of the Bible is about blessing. The word blessing is used upward of 70 times in Genesis. What does blessing mean? The Hebrew, Barak, doesn’t help much; it just means to kneel, bless. We know blessing is a good thing, to be blessed and to bless, but it’s helpful to explore its meaning more fully. 

Greek uses a couple words for bless implied by the Hebrew, eulogeó- εὐλογέω, to speak well of, praise, and makarios- μακάριος, happy, blessed, to be envied. Now we’re getting somewhere. It’s a state of existence where things are working, and it’s apparent not only to the person blessed, but to others. 

I came across a lecture by Dr. Mark Futato of Reformed Theological Seminary on Genesis, and he argues that the key theme of the book is “blessing for the nations.” He specifically took that from God’s covenant promises to Abraham. What struck me was his definition of blessing: empowerment. When God blesses people He empowers them to do a wide variety of things, as he puts it, “God empowers people to flourish.” I love that! Secularists paint Christianity as repressive and intolerant, but what it represses and doesn’t tolerate is sin! Sin destroys everything it touches and makes true flourishing impossible. It is by definition dis-empowering. Jumping forward two thousand years, Jesus says the same thing (John 10:10):

The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it abundantly.

The beauty of Christianity is that it isn’t just personally transformational but transformational in every way, societal, technological, relational, material, etc. It effects every single thing human beings put their minds and efforts to in the light of God’s word, the gospel, and His law, for our good and His glory. These blessings will eventually leak out from God’s people to bless society. And we are never under the illusion these blessings are solely due to us, but they can’t happen without us, Christ’s body.

The Path to Blessing is Through Having Lots of Babies!
In Genesis, God is specifically establishing his covenant with Abram so through him and his offspring the nations will be blessed. We see throughout Genesis and in God’s covenant promises to Abram that these blessings are to touch so many people they literally can’t be counted (sand of the seashore, stars in the sky, and dust of the earth). God is not miserly in spreading his blessings on earth, and because of his covenant promise immediately after the fall, we realize all of it is done in the face of a cosmic spiritual war to frustrate the devil’s plans. This means it will never be easy and will be done in the face of constant adversity and opposition, but through which we can rejoice in the victory already won by our risen Lord.

One primary way these blessings come is through having lots of babies, and raising them in the fear and admonition of the Lord. I’ve been bummed out in these four plus decades of going to church seeing how many Christian families have two children. Far be it from me to “judge” the parents, but I always wonder how many of them choose to just have two. I believe while maybe not sin, it is terribly sad they don’t realize the call of God on their lives to be fruitful and multiply is not an option.

One reason this should be obvious to Christians is that from the beginning, it is apparent that the faith of God’s people is multi-generational. The word children is used over 450 times in the Bible. Unlike the dominant secularism, Children in the Christian worldview are not a drain of resources, but a way to expand them. In the Bible, not having children was a sign of God’s curse, having many a sign of God’s blessing. That has not changed. Why would Christians want to have fewer blessings and not more?

If we really want to challenge the secularism of our time, and eventually defeat it, the way this will happen is to believe God about the blessings of children for our lives, and the eventual blessing of our society. If we really believe God, then Christian families will have a lot of children, far more than secular families. It is already true that religious families have more children than secular families, but if we are able, and married, we need to up our game. 

So I end with the solution to the anti-natalist dystopia: Have more babies!

 

Persuasive Christian Parent: Teach Your Children Christianity is True!

Persuasive Christian Parent: Teach Your Children Christianity is True!

Oct 19, 2023 | Parents and Family

If you want to be a persuasive Christian parent, and you want your children’s faith to endure for their entire lives, teach them Christianity is true. It’s pretty simple, actually, but it takes work. I’ll justify that briefly below, but having written a book about being a Persuasive Christian Parent, I am convinced parents’ influence on their children is the primary influence on whether they maintain their faith throughout their lives. I know many Christians don’t buy this. They’ve seen children grow up in perfectly fine Christian homes and abandon the faith to one degree or another. They conclude, not unreasonably, that while parents certainly have a significant influence on their children, it is ultimately limited. I reject that. I go into some detail about this in the book, so I can’t do it here. You’ll just have to trust me, or read the book (you’ll be able to listen to the audio book in the not too distant future).

For mom and dad this is going to take some work. If your child came up to you and asked: “Mom, Dad, why do you believe Christianity is true?” Could you give them a credible answer? Be honest. If you stammer, or give them a half-baked answer, you need to get to work. I would like to commission a study, and I suspect I know what the conclusion would be. The study would be of all the young people, says 20s and 30s, who have gone through what we now call “deconversion.” If they grew up in a Christian household, we would ask them a simple question: “Did your parents teach you that Christianity was true, and why it is?” I am convinced the overwhelming majority would answer, no. Or if they did, it wasn’t very persuasive. The reason is that most Christian parents know what they believe, basic gospel, but have very little understanding of why they believe it, why their faith is “justified true belief.” Not teaching our Children why Christianity is the truth about the ultimate nature of things in this secular age leaves them susceptible to the lies of secularism they swim in every day.

The reason I was prompted to write this was because of an Apologetics Canada podcast I recently listened to. It confirmed exactly what I’m saying. The guest was John Marriot who has written five books on people walking away from their faith. He’s interviewed many such people and read hundreds of accounts and found that people don’t walk away because they want to sin more, etc. They say it comes down to no longer believing Christianity is the truth. He tends to believe them. When I heard that I instantly thought of my book, especially the second section on, “It’s All About Truth.” I felt so strongly about the Truth of the matter that when I first started thinking about writing the book, I decided this would be the first chapter. It turned out being chapters 3 and 4 because I felt “It’s All About Parents” was more important to establish up front. To decrease the odds that our children will experience a deconversion as they grow up in a hostile secular culture, the most important thing we can do for them, by far, is to persuade them Christianity is the truth.

Secularism Is Dead
We are living in a secular culture that daily attempts to drown us in its godless worldview. It is critical to understand this is not a threat to our children’s faith. Most Christians will not agree with that assertion. The problem seeing secularism as a threat gives it far too much credit as a credible alternative to Christianity. It is not! In fact, secularism (life without God) is a pathetically weak alternatives that gives zero answers to life’s most pressing questions. Why is it in an utterly secular culture, in the most prosperous country in the history of the world, almost 50,000 people successfully killed themselves last year? Does a God-less worldview have any answers to this beside drugs and therapy? It does not. Secularism is an almost 400 year-long experiment in futility. Once reason usurped God’s throne he was slowly set aside as necessary to a functioning society. But something ironic happened on the way to the coronation of God-lessness. It completely failed. Secularism is dead. It has been weighed on the scales and found wanting.

Therefore, there is nothing to fear from it. As I say in the book, our secular culture is the best friend of our children’s faith. I’ve used the culture all their lives, and still do as they are adults, to defend and argue for the truth of Christianity. Bottom line: If our children are to not only have their faith survive but thrive, they must be convinced with every ounce of their being that Christianity is the ultimate truth about the nature reality. How do we do that? Well, you’ll have to read the book to see how I did it, and see if you think I make my case. For a short blog post I can only do so much, but if you are one of those Christians who realize you need to work on your apologetic chops hopefully this will wet your whistle enough to check out the book.

Think about it. If your children are convinced Christianity is true, could anything make them walk away from it? Most if not all those who walk away from the faith never study apologetics, history, philosophy, or theology in any depth. They don’t come to their rejection after a thorough examination of the evidence. I’m sure after whatever input they’ve received, Christianity is no longer plausible to them, it no longer seems true, or seems real. This brings up a concept called plausibility structures, or the framework in our minds that makes certain things seem true to us and other things not true. It isn’t that they are true or not true, but that they seem so. I address this in a couple chapters of the book, but for those who reject the Christianity they once believed in, it simply no longer seems true to them, is no longer plausible. They’ve lived in a secular plausibility structure for so long with no counter narrative that Christianity doesn’t really have a chance.

There is No Such Thing as an Unbeliever
(This is going to be the title of a book I want to write in the not too distant future, God willing. That’s how important this is.)

One the most pernicious of the many lies of secularism is that if you’re not a Christian or “religious” then you don’t need faith. The uncritically accepted assumption of almost all people in the West is that if you’re not “religious” then you don’t need to believe things. Only “religious” people believe things, only “religious” people need faith. So the person who decides to reject the Christianity they once believed in thinks they are going from faith to not-faith, from belief to-not belief. What they fail to realize, and what is likely never pointed out to them, is that they are going from one faith to another. After they no longer embrace Christianity they are every bit the “religious” believer as they were before. Only there is far less evidence and plausibility for the veracity of their new faith than Christianity—and it’s not even close!

The question is always what we believe or have faith in, and why we believe it, not whether or not we have faith. The people who turn away from Christianity can tell you plenty of reasons why they no longer believe in it, but zero reasons for their newfound faith. They are under impression they gave up “faith” when they gave up Christianity. In defending Christianity to such people, in what we call apologetics (see I Peter 3:15), they are very easy to deal with. Probably one in a million can give a coherent defense of their new worldview, their new faith. Just asking the rest what they now believe in and why they believe it will leave them dumbfounded. They’ll likely think it’s a meaningless question because they’re no longer “religious.” I’m confident you’ll get a strange look, but it’s a wonderful question to begin a conversation if they’re open to it. If this happens to be one of your children, it’s a good question to get them thinking they don’t exist in some faith-neutral place where they don’t have to make decisions about what they believe and why.

A great phrase to keep in mind when grappling with such things is “the consideration of the alternative.” If we don’t believe in one thing then we are forced to believe in the alternative. Agnosticism is not an alternative but a copout for not thinking seriously about serious things. We may encounter people who just have no desire to think about or discuss serious things, and we just love them and pray. It is all, of course, up to the Holy Spirit, so we pray. However, and this gets us to the work part, we work like it depends on us. The saying goes, we work like it depends on us, and pray because it depends on God. What work am I talking about? Our apologetics chops. Each of us must ask ourselves, how good are we are defending the veracity Christianity. If most Christians are honest, they will have to say . . . . terrible.

Get to Work
That was the word I used about myself back in 2009 (along with horrible and pathetic). I had an encounter with a co-worker and it was embarrassing. He wouldn’t have noticed, but I sure did. After that I committed myself to put in the work. I got a little MP3 player (I still use one!) and listened to everything I could find. I also read everything I could get my hands on. I was determined in Paul’s words to Timothy, to study to show myself to God as one approved (2 Tim. 2:15). The word study (KJV) or do your best in Greek means “(figuratively) to move speedily by showing full diligence (fully applying oneself).” This is not just for professional ministers as was Timothy, but to every single Christian. If we’re honest most of us are lazy. There are many things in life more important to us than our Christianity. This is, I know, tough love. Most Christians know far more about their careers or hobbies than they know about their Christianity, and that ought not to be.

Just going to church on Sunday and reading our Bibles is not enough. Per Peter’s command, if we’re always to be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks us to give the reason for the hope that that have, that is going to take time and effort. There really is no excuse nowadays with the Internet to not show ourselves as one approved when it comes to defending our faith, and that is first to ourselves. Once we are fully convinced and know why, we can share that with others. If we have children, we too can become persuasive Christian parents and have confidence our children will have a faith that endures for life. What we will realize the longer we study and the more we teach is what C.S. Lewis said was the reason he believed in Christianity:

 I believe in Christianity as I believe the sun has risen, not only because I see it but because by it I see everything else.

This is what we have to pass on to our children! Christianity, God in Christ, makes sense of literally every single thing of existence. When they are convinced of this any kind of secular alternative to Christianity will appear to them as the phony worthless alternative it is. God has seen to it by providing for us everything we need for building an enduring faith in both us and our children.