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.
Recent Comments