...Nothing has a more profound impact on the future ideas and beliefs of a child than the example (or lack thereof) they witness in their parents. Which means if the world is our sovereign, we shouldn’t be surprised when it is to our children as well.
In his 2014 Erasmus Lecture, the Archbishop of Philadelphia, Charles J. Chaput said it bluntly: “The real problem in America today isn’t that we believers are foreigners. It’s that our children and grandchildren aren’t.”[i]
As much of a gut punch as that may be, it’s critical that we understand and accept it. Our children become intoxicated by the world because we haven’t done our work to show them the distinction between the lies it tells and the truth of God. As a consequence of this occurring for the last few generations, we have become so utterly confused as a society that we regard conformity as rebellion; we treat following the crowd as individuality. Look at college campuses these days. The mass of young people that go there speak in one voice, have one thought, fully embracing the spirit of the age. And yet you will not find a group of people more convinced of their individuality, uniqueness and distinctive originality. It’s embarrassing.
I teach in a rural, conservative community, and it half disheartens and half amuses me to watch kids leave our area, go to college and think they have become “rebels” when they eschew and renounce the values of their upbringing. So enamored they become with the siren song of licentiousness that their weak minds are seduced into somehow believing that a collegiate atmosphere far more rigidly dogmatic and doctrinaire than the one they left (it is far easier to be an atheist in rural Indiana than a Bible-believing Christian on campus) offers their overly sheltered souls liberty.
So strong is the indoctrination cult on campus that it doesn’t even dawn on their immature intellects that regurgitating the views of their professors and peers, embracing the hedonistic self-worship of pop culture, championing the values of the entertainment industry is not rebellion. It’s not authenticity. It’s conformity.
Even the much-celebrated “radical” Saul Alinsky (President Obama’s intellectual mentor) who authored the community agitator’s handbook “Rules for Radicals” is a complete and total fraud. As Chaput stated,
“His rules, pressure tactics, deceits, manipulations, and organizing skills are finally based on a fraud. They’re not ‘progressive’ at all. They’re the same tired grasping for power that made the world what it is.”[ii]
I so often want to shake these former students of mine who have become so enamored with their faux-rebellion and pretended progressivism. I want to shout into their souls, “This isn’t radical or different…you’ve become nothing but a conformist acting just like the pattern of this world!” Not that I think it would do much good, but it might make me feel better.
Something that is truly radical is something that goes against the grain of society, something that challenges and upsets the status quo, something that upends the cultural wisdom of the age. You know, something like…the Sermon on the Mount. Saul Alinsky was no radical. He was a conformist who found a way to further the already prevailing philosophies of the world. Jesus of Nazareth was a radical, countering those prevailing philosophies of self-indulgence and decadence with the message of service, self-sacrifice and moral purity.
People who follow Him and His teachings? They are different. They are unique. They are foreigners. They are strangers in a strange land.
In a culture of selfishness, they sacrifice for one another.
In a culture of utilitarianism, they defend the dignity of life made in God’s image.
In a culture of moral relativism, they bear witness to God’s eternal law.
And they do so in their personal testimony as well as their public action, no matter how much they are criticized, no matter how they are treated, no matter what it may cost them, no matter how strange it makes them.
