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.
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