Send your kids to college and cancel out their faith?
In his book University of Destruction, David Wheaton cites research by Dr. Gary Railsback and the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA. Wheaton wrote, “Depending on the type of college attended, as many as 51% of students who claimed to be ‘born-again Christians’ as freshmen said they were no longer born-again Christians four years later.”
What is striking to me is not the presence of this article or the stats that it presents — it’s the solutions it offers: Just believe, don’t think about yourself as inferior and maybe read about your faith — but not too much — just enough so you know who to ask if you get into trouble…
Christianity is the most logically consistent and defensible faith in the world and the best advice that can be offered to students is to not think of themselves as second class students? How about sending students to read the collected works of the late Dr. Francis Schaeffer, Dr. James Sire and C.S. Lewis? (Or at least a somewhat lame compilation like Josh McDowell’s work, “Evidence that demands a verdict?”) How about teaching them how to take on a philosophy professor, to think beneath the arguments presented and attack the faulty thinking that allows philosophy professors to do the damage they do? How about, at the very least, getting these students to read Schaeffer’s work, “The God who is there?”
These students are victims because they do not know how to think. They fail to grasp basic logic and they lack the knowledge base to back any skills in logic anyway. Continuing to present hayseed-simple answers like this only serves to convince students that they really just believe old fairy tales. These schools are not stripping faith from our children — they are just exposing that we have so failed to love God with all of our minds that (In the absence of that foundation) the faith wasn’t really there to begin with.
November 11th, 2007 at 7:59 pm
We’ll need to start grounding the kids in some hard knowledge from an early age. The only question is, how early? What curriculum might we recommend?
November 12th, 2007 at 12:53 am
Simply, there isn’t one. There are a few that claim to do it for high school kids — but they are mostly just juvenile expressions of the wave of fundamentalism that is sweeping the world on levels far deeper then just religion.
At a college level, the Edge program (FOTF) isn’t bad — but I find that many of the students coming out of there come with just a far larger suite of preprogrammed answers. They really have not been taught to think though that may actually be in spite of the program’s best efforts. (Really, they are an awful lot safer with that programming anyway.)
Realistically, the problem may be at the local church level. It is the nature of fundamentalism to demand compliance — any purported attempts to cause someone to think usually are designed to make the person to think the church’s way rather then leading the student through an understanding of logic such that they arrive at an ability to think (Which would result in similar conclusions — if they could trust the process.)
This results in children actually being immunized against rational thought. It’s especially true when they have been subjected to programs that claim to allow them to question — but never do — and then tell children and teens that they have already questioned.
Doubt me? Just try throwing out a question like, “Can a believer sin?” or, “How can you be so sure you haven’t imagined Jesus and your entire existence,” before a church council and watch what happens… Those are just the mild questions.
There’s a fundamental shift that needs to take place at that Jr. high Sunday school level. You can’t get a grade 8 student to read Schaeffer — but you can begin to teach her/him concepts from it. You can teach them — but then you have to give up on just presenting a laundry list of WHAT to believe. You have to lead a student to truth through his/her own mind.
To draw teens to think about some of the fundamental questions of what is the nature of existence, to assess the validity of what science claims to know, to understand what truth is, to consider why God would have made people to begin with and how that demanded the incarnation, to understand what a world view is and to learn to apprehend and address inconsistencies in such. Anyone wanting to go there is going to have to write their own — to make a class of questions and then not throw out answers.
Why? You could never sell that curriculum because it demands you be OK with questioning all of the sacred cows of the church and finding some of them wanting — so no one is going to bother writing or publishing it. Any publishing house that tried would likely destroy their own core market.