I wrote this post before Charlie Kirk was assassinated, but the principles apply there as well.
It seems my title has sadly turned into a pun. Death has once again, as we all know by now, come in another shooting at a school by a mentally ill person targeting kids. Our cultural elites have come to call people like this transgendered, a man who pretends he’s a woman, or a woman who pretends she’s a man. This specifically mentally deranged individual who targeted children at a Catholic Mass was allowed to “transition” by his parents when he was a teenager. It seems his mother has hired a powerful lawyer. Where dad is, I have no idea. In addition to such parents lacking wisdom and being morally obtuse, they have been indoctrinated by the secular leftist cultural machine and ended up destroying their son, and now devastating two families of dead children.
In biblical religion, a person can be guilty of their own sin while at the same time the parents be guilty of enabling their child’s sin. We’re all accountable for the responsibilities God has given each one of us. But this isn’t just about parents who enable their kids to become monsters, but about all of us, all those God has given the privilege and responsibility of becoming parents. For Christian parents this is built into the entire history of our faith. From the very beginning, literally the first chapter of our book from God, the story starts with the command for man and woman to be “fruitful and multiply.” When the story is interrupted by the little hiccup we call the fall, God tells us our salvation will come through the woman’s seed or offspring. In other words, the plan of God’s rescuing his creatures will be inextricably bound up in children and families. All the promises of this salvation to come include children and descendants of generations to come. In fact the morning I write these words I read Isaiah’s words written over 700 years before Christ was born (Is. 59):
21 “As for me, this is my covenant with them,” says the Lord. “My Spirit, who is on you, will not depart from you, and my words that I have put in your mouth will always be on your lips, on the lips of your children and on the lips of their descendants—from this time on and forever,” says the Lord.
Once the Lord has achieved salvation for us, it will be passed down to our descendants from generation to generation, even as we’re told in Deuteronomy 7:9, “to a thousand generations.”
Parenting is being part of God’s plan of bringing the blessings of generational salvation to the earth. We get to be intimately involved in living out what God promised to us and accomplished for us. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, as Jesus taught us to pray, largely comes through raising our children in the Lord. This puts a bit of a new spin on it, doesn’t it. That means we expect our faith to be generational, that our kids will carry on the faith we impart to them, the way of life that seeks first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, knowing everything else will follow. Unfortunately, as we know, that doesn’t always happen.
The Rise of the Nones
In 2014 and 15 we began to see a lot of stories in the media about something called “Nones,” not to be mistaken for Catholic nuns. These are young people who grow up in Christian homes, go off to college or life and abandon the faith. The term came from the wording on surveys where people are asked for their religious preference, and a growing number were picking, “None of the above.” The secular media was positively giddy about it, as anyone might predict, but in Christian circles there was only lament. Prodigals were leaving and nobody was sure if they’d ever come back. It does so happen that long term surveys discover that, as these kids become adults with families, having children often brings them back to the church. That is small comfort, however, for parents whose prodigal children are in a distant country.
Providentially in May of 2015 one of these nones would change the direction of my life. I read a piece online (sadly, the website is no longer available) about a young lady who grew up in strong Christian home, went off to college and promptly abandoned her faith. Here’s how this newly minted “None” starts her story:
I’m Lyndsay, and I’m an agnostic. I say this as if I have stepped into an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting because my transition from “believer” to “non‑believer” feels somewhat pathologic. The purpose of my story is not proselytism; I simply wish to articulate how difficult and consuming this transformation was for me, and in doing so, hopefully feel less alone.
At school, her doubts about Christianity mounted, but they had nothing to do with whether Christianity was true or not. Rather, she felt that everyone in high school had “put her in a box,” and she simply didn’t like being “stuffed in a box that could not contain” her. She felt liberated by the freedom she found at college:
Once I was given the opportunity to breathe a breath of fresh, secular air, I could more easily acknowledge that Christianity is a way of life, not the way of life. I desperately wanted a different way of life, but coming to terms with that flagrant fact was the hardest thing I have ever endured.
I do not mean to sound so dramatic, but the changes rousing inside of me truly shook me to my core. I was a Christian. This label was all‑encompassing—it felt completely impervious to change. If I abandoned God, I would be stuck starting from scratch, discarding my entire identity along with my Maker. More than just a loss of sense of self, I would be stripped of security, hope, and companionship. But I could not will myself to believe any longer
When I first read this it ticked me off. I thought to myself, how could this happen? I was convinced, and still am, that this would never happen to my children. They are now adults, 23, 30, and 33, and I’m blessed to report they are still followers of Jesus. I never once wondered if their faith would endure because that is exactly how we raised them, and me as their father most intentionally. Now I read this and it fascinates me. How could she miss the entire point of Christianity? That it is true! Not once in the article does it seem to occur to her that whether it is true or not is the issue, and that everything else is secondary.
Christianity is also not “a way of life,” as if all Christians fit into a mold and come out looking and acting the same way. There are no Stepford Christians, as in the movie when the wives of Stepford change from free-thinking, intelligent women into compliant wives dedicated solely to homemaking, basically robots. There is no such thing as robot Christianity, each of us being as unique as our fingerprints, and each of our children should feel free to be their own fingerprint. But for her Christianity was constricting, the exact opposite of what it in fact is. Sadly, it appears she didn’t feel like she could talk to her parents or any other Christian adult in her life. Did she feel like she couldn’t ask questions or express her doubts? Our teen years are complicated, so who knows, but all I will say is that this doesn’t have to happen. If we can’t sell our kids on Christianity being the truth, and nothing else is, something is wrong. My job was to persuade our children that the only explanation for reality giving our lives ultimate meaning, hope, and purpose is in Christ. It’s actually not difficult because secularism as an explanation for reality offers them nothing. It is bankrupt, poverty stricken, and the evidence is all around us. Ex-atheist C.S. Lewis, as usual, put it perfectly:
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.
The Persuasive Christian Parent
I mentioned how this young lady changed direction of my life. I was going to respond to her article with a blog post, but I decided I would write a book, something I’d never done before. God used her to turn me into an author! I’d always had a thought in the back of my mind that it would be cool to be an author, given I love reading books so much, but I never felt compelled to do so; now I did. I had no idea what I was doing, nor how hard it would be. I just started writing. I’ve always loved writing and words and ideas, and started my first official blog in 2004, but this was a whole different ballgame. It took me five years to get a publishable version, and it was a painful process, but a learning one. It’s a little rough, but not bad for a rookie effort. Now I’m in the process of finishing number five. So, thank you, Lindsay! I found my calling later in life because of her, and if I can bless and help a few people along the way, praise God. I pray she comes back to Christ.
When I started writing I decided I would title the first chapter, “It’s All About Truth,” because for whatever reason, Lindsay didn’t realize that’s really all that matters. Is Christianity true or not? If it’s true, then you don’t abandon it, and if it’s not, then you do. It’s very simple. C.S. Lewis, an ex-atheist, put it in his own brilliant way:
Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important.
It’s a binary choice, one or the other, true or not. What I realized as I was writing the book is that as Christian parents we need to raise our kids differently in a secular age. Thinking we can just take them to church and read the Bible and pray with them isn’t enough. Secularism assaults them every day, from every screen, in every place, and in every way. What is secularism? It’s life lived with God as persona non grata, an unwelcome presence. Whether He’s there or not, is irrelevant. What is relevant is that he’s not relevant to this life. Watch any movie or TV show and God is for the most part invisible, and Jesus mostly some kind of expletive. Our children pick up the alternative secular faith more from such entertainment than any agnostic or atheistic teacher at school. Life without God begins to seem like a plausible alternative to Christianity, as it did to Lindsay.
This desensitizing us to God, and disenchanting of life, as if matter really is all that exists, is the unseen cultural force against which we do battle. I say unseen because the enemies of God, the secularists, aren’t even thinking about God or what they are doing. A God-less universe is just how they see reality, and it is out of this worldview that they write and produce products that seduce our children away from their Christian faith.
One of the sections (two chapters per section) is called, “It’s All About Culture.” (I decided that each topic I covered was as important as the next, thus each as “All About.”). Christian parents tend to live in fear of the culture, as if it had some kind of power to drag their kids away from the faith like a demon in a horrible nightmare. On the contrary, I subtitled this section on culture, “Your Children’s Best Friend.” What do I mean by that?
The culture is a massive, ubiquitous, all present, messaging system. It works 24/7, never sleeps, never rests. The greatest dereliction of parental duty in our age is allowing the secular cultural messaging carte blanche, free rein into our children’s imagination and thinking. What happens is that slowly over time what is plausible to them, what makes sense, seems real, changes. I guarantee you this is what happened to Lindsay. She didn’t logically go through the evidence to see whether Christianity is true or not. After she got to college her “plausibility structure” was changed by the environment, and Christianity no longer seemed true to her, seemed like the way the world was supposed to be. Agnosticism became a better fit.
If we don’t want this to happen to our children, then we need to teach them to interrogate the culture, treat it as a prosecuting attorney treats a witness for the defense in a trial. No message gets by without a question, and as we do this with them consistently, they will develop the habit of doing it themselves. Thinking about the culture critically will become a habit.
In our house, TV shows and movies were a tool I used all the time with our kids. I still do it with my longsuffering wife. I am the master of the clicker in our house (i.e., remote control), and no show could run without me stopping it numerous times for questions or comments. Every one of them in some way highlighted the poverty of the secular worldview compared to the Christian worldview. This “strategy” of mine went far beyond critiquing the culture’s entertainment, the goal always being to argue for the truth of Christianity in contrast to the lies of secularism, or any kind of God-less or non-Christian view of reality.
“Daddy’s Always Teaching”
The Great Commission starts with children, if we have them, and only then to others. I’ve never been particularly “intentional” about discipling our kids as we traditionally think of it. I was never good about Bible reading and prayer with them, family devotionals and so on. I tried from time to time, but I let life get in the way. But what I was good at was teaching them that Christianity is true. That is the only reason I became a Christian, and the only reason I stay one. It was second nature to me that when we had children I would teach them the same thing. Not too many years ago I was telling my daughter how bummed out I was that I was a terrible “spiritual” leader in our home, and she said, “Well, at least you taught us Christianity is the truth.” Well, there is that, and if one has to choose, and of course one doesn’t, then truth is the more important in our age, by far. We can’t assume our children actually believe Christianity is true, and every other religion and worldview is a lie. We have to teach them that, all the time.
Which brings me back to my daughter, our oldest, and one of the great moments of my life. 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 nonplussed, surprised, taken aback, 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.
Remember, it is not enough to know what we believe, we must know why. I get the impression most Christian parents are better at teaching the what, while the why is too often assumed. Maybe they assume the truth, the realness of their Faith, is self‑evident to their children. Or they believe it, and take their children to church assuming they’ll believe it too. But we must understand that we live in a time where our Faith is called into question in countless ways, and therefore, it must be defended to and for our kids in the face of those questions.
Lastly, when I was looking to publish my book I got pushback from some people who thought I was claiming I could guarantee that our children would never abandon the faith. So as not to be misunderstood, we cannot guarantee anything, and are in control of nothing (which is why we are enjoined throughout Scripture to trust the Lord and pray). However there is much we can do, which you can find out by reading the book. But it does not follow that just because we are not ultimately responsible for the results we can’t have confidence that we can build into our children a lifelong and enduring faith. Ultimately, thankfully, our confidence is not in our performance as parents, but in God’s provision. We learn an important principle in spiritual growth and sanctification from the Apostle Paul in I Corinthians 3:
6 I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God has been making it grow. 7 So neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but only God, who makes things grow.
What happens with the seeds we plant in our children’s lives is up to God, but because of his covenant promises to us and our covenant children, our confidence is fully justified. However, He can’t do it without us. That’s the way farming works; no farmer, no farm, just weeds. But without God nothing grows.
Having said this, I understand the insecurity many Christian parents feel living in a dominant secular Western culture hostile to our Faith. But the conclusion I came to at the end of writing the book, is the conviction I started with at the beginning: Christianity is so powerfully credible that my kids should never want to leave it, or even be tempted to do so. God has revealed himself in so many compelling ways, and has provided us an over‑abundance of resources, that it is inconceivable that a secular Western culture would be more appealing to our children than Christianity.
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