How Do Our Kids Stay Christian?
I have a new article up on Mere Orthodoxy on how kids stay Christian. Much has been made of the great dechurching and how to evangelize people who left Christianity, but the real scandal is the volume of people who we failed to retain. This article is a summary of how I’ve tried to deal with this in our own church, based scripture and the best sociological data. Here’s the start of the article,
How do our kids stay Christian? Some version of this question has animated both scholarly and pastoral discussion over the last several years, especially as the great dechurching marches on unabated. This is not merely an academic question, but one that has kept younger parents anxious as they watch more and more of their peers turn away from the faith.
Of course, it is the Holy Spirit sovereignly acting as he wills that keeps people abiding in Christ. And of course, God who ordains the salvation of his children has also ordained the regular means of bringing about that salvation, specifically the word, sacraments, and prayer. But how should the church approach those gifts in regards to the discipleship of its children? And what steps can the church take to maintain its children’s faithfulness as they grow into adulthood?
Several recent works have provided invaluable insight into this dilemma, the most important of which is Handing Down the Faith: How Parents Pass Their Religion to the Next Generation (2021) by Amy Adamczyk and Christian Smith. Adamczyk and Smith looked at the religious landscape of North America over the last few decades and came to a simple conclusion: the communities that were most effective at handing down their religion were those that prioritized faith in the family home.
That might not sound earth-shattering, but it corroborated decades of sociological research showing that things like Sunday School, youth group, VBS, Christian camps, confirmation, and youth conferences are either minimally consequential to the maintenance of a child’s faith or in some cases actually counterproductive. Sociologists of religion have known for some time that these programs, while they feel nice, are led by earnest people, and have some anecdotal success stories, are ineffective for passing along the Christian faith…
Thoughts on Non-Western Liberalism
My friend Tracy Johnson passed along Paul Miller’s 2018 article “Non-‘Western’ Liberalism and the Resilience of the Liberal International Order”. Miller takes Donald Trump’s 2017 speech in Warsaw on the nature of liberalism’s relationship to Western civilization as his jumping off point. Miller argues that liberalism could have developed anywhere in the world, not just the West, and that the nature, origins, and failures of global liberalism and democracy demonstrate that liberalism does not need the civilizational features of the West (i.e., Christendom and its legacy) in order to flourish. It was a good read, and provoked a few thoughts from me. In no particular order,
1. Miller is working in the area of political science, not philosophy. Political science can be a helpful discipline (I did my undergraduate degree in it) to understand the quantifiable effects of policies, but it cannot determine whether policies are good. The good is a philosophical question; science, including political science, can only measure effects. But even the nature of the measuring rod used (e.g. the different ways Freedom House and the Center for Systemic Peace try to measure [quantify] freedom [qualitative]) is philosophically charged. Political science often makes the same mistake of the other sciences in thinking that the manner of measurement and the object being measured are objective and accessible, rather than subjective. This was one of the frequent critiques of Miller’s 2022 The Religion of American Greatness: What’s Wrong with Christian Nationalism. Miller in this article makes the same assumption: that the measure of freedom in a country is the same thing as its degree of liberality…
Are Evangelicals Presbyterian?
My four-point defining feature of confessionalists, in distinction from evangelicals and pietists, is that they are
- Church oriented, grounded in the Anglican, Lutheran, Presbyterian, or Reformed traditions arising from the Protestant Reformation in the 16th-17th centuries.
- Church forms matter and are central for spiritual life, especially liturgical and doctrinal formulations, along with polity.
- Spiritual practice orbits the public worship of the church, with emphasis on preaching, the sacraments, and prayer.
- Ordinary life in the world is good and welcome.
In Reformed and Evangelical Across Four Centuries: The Presbyterian Story in America (2022), historians from four different American Presbyterian churches wrote on the subject of the intersection between Presbyterians and evangelicals…
Gardening in the Negative World
Alan Jacobs has argued that parts of American culture and history have always been hostile to certain orthodox Christian beliefs. In this case, he points to the hostility shown to those who spoke out against racism, Jim Crow, and segregation. He is rejecting the premise of Aaron Renn’s Three Worlds Evangelicalism model: there never was truly a positive world and the negative world of today is not uniquely negative. Point taken. However, there are two key differences between the abolitionist and integrationist movements and our current situation. The first is that the church, particularly the Black church, was challenging an historically embedded establishment. Currently, the cultural establishment has shifted while the church has not…
Evangelicalism and Pietism versus Confessionalism
British historian David Bebbington famously provided his four-point sociological taxonomy of evangelicalism in 1989. While the edges and applications have been debated on and off, the framework of the Bebbington Quadraleteral still proves useful. Evangelicalism is characterized by,
- Biblicism: a particular regard for the Bible (e.g. all essential spiritual truth is to be found in its pages).
- Crucicentrism: a focus on the atoning work of Christ on the cross.
- Conversionism: the belief that human beings need to be converted.
- Activism: the belief that the gospel needs to be expressed in effort.
Wheaton professor Timothy Larsen similarly provided a five-point definition in his introduction to the 2007 Cambridge Companion to Evangelical Theology…
