I ended my last post claiming that secularism is no less a paper tiger than the Berlin Wall. That’s quite an assertion in the face of a secular cultural hegemony that seems to approach absolute. Everywhere we look, people who claim the name of Christ are on the defensive. Many (most?) Christian parents feel insecure against the onslaught. It seems for many (most?) Christian parents that keeping their kids Christians in the face of such hostility is a challenge they might not be up to. The goal of my book and this blog is to convince them that this is not the case, at all. That we can have confidence is what inspired me to write the book. I finished the book where I began:
The conclusion I come to at the end is the conviction I started with at the beginning: Christianity is so powerfully credible that my children should never ever want to leave it, or even be slightly tempted to do so. God has revealed himself in so many compelling ways that it is inconceivable that a secular Western culture would be more appealing to our children than Christianity. God has provided us an over-abundance of resources to make the Christian Faith winsome, appealing, attractive, and compelling to our children. Thus, we should have every confidence that we can keep our kids Christian.
Yet, the implication of the fear many Christian parents have, maybe not even for their own kids but Christian kids in general, is that the secular worldview has the potential to be appealing to their children. This is important, and itself has implications for how we should raise our children. The question to ask is this: what is the nature of this threat to our kid’s faith? Why is it appealing, and why would they be tempted to become “nones” (i.e., religiously unaffiliated, in effect agnostics), as a growing number of young people are becoming? And most “nones” are not rabid, atheist God-haters. They are mostly just apathetic toward the things of God, what the Bible calls fools.
First, why would secularism, a universe where God is irrelevant, be appealing to Christian young people? First, this is the culture they live in and through every day. Secularism is promoted and assumed at every level of the culture (education, media, entertainment, etc.). This has built in our society, and in us, a competing credible narrative or plausibility structure to Christianity. It seems possible now, or plausible, that meaning and significance can be had without a transcendent God. At the same time, the cultural apparatus paints a picture of religious people, and especially Christians, as more or less gullible rubes. The messaging: Those “religious” folk need something called “faith,” which is more or less defined as what you need to believe something when there is little or no evidence for it. The enlightened, on the other hand, live by the light of reason and science. What more does one need? Quite a bit as we’ll see.
It’s a little like high school. Would you rather have hung around with the cool kids, or the nerds? In our culture, the cool kids are secular, and the nerds are Christian. But one of the reasons that many young people who’ve walked away from their faith come back later in life, especially when they have families, is that they find out after living a bit that the cool kids aren’t so cool after all. But the power and appeal of cool is real, as it is of secularism. How could it not be given the “coolness” of secularism is the cultural air we breathe.
My point? It is not anything inherent in secularism that makes it more appealing than Christianity, but the cultural messaging machine that promotes it. This is what gives it the perception of being as impenetrable and eternal as the “Berlin Wall” and the Soviet Union appeared to those of us who lived through the Cold War. In fact, secularism is as woefully weak a worldview as was the atheistic communism of the USSR. Stay tuned as I explore the weakness of secularism as a worldview and “religion,” and why it need not appeal to our children in the least.
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