The Fading Christian: Part 2

This will be a difficult read for some parents and pastors, and perhaps even for some college students who identify as Christians. I have been involved in Christian education for many years, 19 to be specific. If I could rank the many lessons I've learned over these many years, the most important lesson would be the following:

All of the teaching in the world towards Christian truth is wholly futile if it is not brought into a larger network of redeemed Christian relationships, with books, art, committed Christian parents, community and all. In other words, the child must find his or her way into truly Christian community, but not just any community; he or she needs a community that is committed to the kind of Christianity that is richly grounded in the truth (Scripture) and imbues every aspect of life, from the mind down.

In other words, the Christian school may be crucial, perhaps even necessary in cases, but it is not sufficient by itself.

Think of it this way: A nominally Christian family sends their kid to the local Christian school because they believe the education will be better and because they don't like the alternatives and because of "the morals," whatever that means. The kid enters the school, but his attendance to the school does nothing to derail his runaway progression towards utter secularization (that is, a life that is practically without reference to Christian thought patterns). He goes to church here and there, but it is probably a church that is itself largely secularized. He attends his Christian school, but approaches it as most students do--that is, an obstacle to what he wants, which is what everyone else in his culture wants (that is, goals that are wholly without reference to Christian thought patterns). He jumps through the academic hoops, plays the game, cheats where he can, and learns precious little about a total Christian perspective on life, though he is probably daily exposed to such a thing.

Truthfully, there is nothing that presents a serious challenge to the prevailing secularization of this young man's life, except perhaps 5 hours each week; hours that are drowned out beneath the sound of his phone, iPad, computer, television, ear-buds and friends, who are themselves clones of their decidedly secular culture, and many of them claim to be Christians as well.

Perhaps the reason for this trajectory in his life, which got started when he was quite young, is that he saw nothing to compete with it, perhaps didn't even see an alternative at all. Perhaps he was never remotely exposed to a distinctively Christian community with a robust intellectual and cultural life. He didn't see it in his home or his church. He was perhaps exposed to many who felt Christianity, but none who allowed Christianity to orient the mind, the soul and the body in dynamic ways. What does Jesus have to say about the way I dress or the way I converse with people or the way I conduct my education? Such questions probably never even enter his neatly sub-divided mind, where Christianity is quarantined behind a safe partition, lest it endanger his commitment to the excellent life of, well, whatever his friends and music define "excellence" to be.

The timeline of this young man's life is such that there really is little hope for him, outside the grace of God. He grew up going to church, but these isolated hours were only brief interruptions in the process of his true habituation before the golden idol of entertainment. He was efficiently and completely programmed to think like everyone else around him, for homogenous thought is surely necessary for economic and cultural unity with the dominant secular culture. He went from watching to acting things out that he watched, and so did his friends. They rehearsed the thought patterns, content and manner of the things they watched on their endless screens and heard in their uninterupted music. That is why they are all materialists, relativists and worshippers of creation rather than creator. That is why they are conformed and not transformed. Then he went to the Christian school, where many of his teachers also act out the thought patterns of the secular world and the school itself does much to mimic the world, but this time in a "Christian way." Then he went to youth group at church, where the youth pastor works much harder to secularize the gospel than to bring the gospel to the secular. He comes away from youth group with the curious impression that the unpardonable sin is boredom, or perhaps uncoolness. Then he graduates from his Christian high school, and quickly learns that keggers are more fun than church--that is, he discovers that blatant secularism is really a form of refreshing honesty, and the fun really begins. He now seeks authenticity rather than holiness, and as such he hangs on to a Portlandia version of his former Christianity, but he is now so isolated, jaded and thoroughly cynical that he ends up worshipping his own critiques of Christianity rather than Christ himself.

By now he is twenty-five, has a job and a wife he found in the secularized culture. Like him, she has little time or interest in Christian thought patterns, though she still loves her Jesus. Her Jesus never judges! They are clinging to some vestige of their former Christian identity, but their whole life together is a daily microscopic fade away from the holy. Eventually they have kids, and because of his past he wants to bring his kids to church, but again he does little to interrupt the real, strong, unremitting secularization of his own kids. What he never suspects in the whole of the process is that he probably never was a Christian in the first place. He was a secularist all the way through, given enough of Christianity at a young age to thoroughly inoculate him against its influence. His Christian school and its attempt at putting up some dam in him against the current of cultural secularization was washed asunder by the torrent long ago. All that remains is a ruin that he refers to often as his Christian faith, and indeed he would be deeply offended if anyone ever suggested that he wasn't a Christian. Give him a few more years and perhaps he won't be concerned about that either.

Step back into his timeline for a moment again and consider the parents of this lost soul. His self-professed Christian parents and his Christian church don't know it, but they raised this secularist. They certainly would be offended at the suggestion, but look at the facts. What can define a secularist better than the neatly compartmentalized Christianity of this young man as he grew up, where it is his secular friends and secular entertainments that dictate the boundaries of his Christianity. These influences will be sovereign over Jesus and his role in life rather than the reverse, and he will never suspect that this entire perspective is antithetical to Jesus from the first.

His parents are perhaps only to be blamed in the way that a sheep is to be blamed for producing another sheep. Many of these parents are not likely to be people who see Christianity as a thing that threatens everything, that claims everything. They are likely people who merely "expose" their kids to Christianity while assuring all the life and leisure conditions that will teach them secularism with an efficacy that rivals any brainwashing or indoctrination that one could find in the history of the race.

And that is why I feel that my work as a Christian educator is often a journey into futility. Now all would be hopeless if not for grace. God breaks through in people's lives. He is raising a remnant of people who will receive his word as truth and live accordingly. It remains to see how great this remnant will be.