In the last two weeks, I have been gathering information about the problem that Christians parents face when they send their Christian-raised kids to college. Specifically, I met some excellent Christian parents who seem to have done a great job of raising their kids in private Christian schools and had good consversations with them about policy and apologetics. Yet, these kids still dumped their faith and their conservatism in college. What to do?

Well, I can only go off of what I have seen from people in my workplace who were raised in red states, in intact married homes, in private Christian schools, and so on. And the problem seems to be twofold. 1) They don’t want to have any “the Bible says” moral limitations on their pursuit of pleasure. And 2) They don’t want to counter claims about the world that disagree with the Bible with “the Bible says”.

There are varying degrees of going along with the secular left. Some kids are just desperate to rebel either in moral issues or in claims about reality. Some kids just have honest intellectual doubts about the Bible’s teachings on moral issues or truth claims.

So, in this post, I thought it might be a good idea to look at three ways where kids have pressure placed on them at college, and how to counter it.

So, on moral issues, usually any sorts of limitations on the pursuit of pleasure are going to be seen as “mean”. Do you disagree with cohabitating before marriage? Oh, then you are mean. Do you disagree with same-sex marriage? Oh, then you are a bigot. Do you disagree with reckless sex leading to abortion? Oh, then you are anti-women.

How to deal with this? So, most students raised in the church either capitulate to this immediately, because that’s easier, or they just hide their Christian convictions, because “the Bible says” isn’t a good answer to “you’re a mean bigot”. So, in that case, it’s probably a good idea to teach your children early on that it’s possible for people to put pressure on you to agree with them about moral issues while still being wrong about those moral issues. For example, for abortion, you can defend your view using the science of embryology. For cohabitation, you should have a study or two showing that cohabitation has higher instability and worse outcomes for kids. For same-sex marriage, you can point out how removing marriage norms like gender complementarity impacts children.

But I also think that it’s important to prepare children for the challenges to truth claims. And what I was thinking for this is that children need to be given a “clear case” where the secular and leftist opinions that dominate on campus are proven to be factually incorrect.

Regular listeners to the Knight and Rose Show will know that we urge all Christian apologists to add economics to the list of topics that they study for apologetics. A good grasp of economics is useful for being able to see that the dominant opinions on campus (socialism, communism, etc.) produce BAD results in the real world. You can even compare countries that went from capitalist to communism (e.g. – Venezuela) to countries that went from communist to capitalist (e.g. – Chile).

And what this does is that it makes it crystal clear to your Christian kids that not everything they hear on a college campus is correct. E.g. – when their same-age peers call them “mean” for opposing minimum wage hikes, those peers could be wrong. And when their college professors call them “mean” for opposing replacing nuclear power with solar and wind, they could be wrong too. It’s possible that the people you meet on college campuses don’t know how reality works.

Here is a nice recent article by David Harsanyi in the New York Post that makes the case for this second type of college preparation.

In 2023, over 100 leading economists from around the world, including progressive darling Thomas Piketty, signed a letter warning that “far-right” Argentine presidential candidate Javier Milei’s policies, which were “rooted in laissez-faire economics,” would cause “devastation,” spike inflation, expand poverty and worsen unemployment.

Celebrated economists never penned any open letters warning that the preceding Peronists’ or Kirchnerists’ perverse blend of fascism, socialism and unionism would drive Argentina — once one of world’s wealthiest nations — into destitution, unemployment, soaring inflation and bankruptcy.

Under Milei, political scientist Ian Bremmer warned, “Economic collapse is coming imminently.”

Felix Salmon, then chief financial correspondent at Axios (now at Bloomberg), argued that Milei’s “wrecking ball” policies would plunge Argentina into “a deep recession.”

When the United States provided Argentina with a $20 billion currency swap line last year, former New York Times columnist and Milei critic Paul Krugman argued that there’s “no plausible scenario in which even $20 billion in US loans will save Javier Milei’s failing economic strategy.”

So, imagine your Christian student gets to campus, and the professors are telling them how wonderful socialism is and how well it works, and quoting all these famous leftist economists like Piketty and Krugman. It would really help them to know what these elites said about Argentina before Milei took over, because look at how wrong they were.

So here is what happened, starting with the $20 billion in US loans:

Argentina only tapped around $2.5 billion of that funding, and then fully repaid the loan in January with interest, far ahead of schedule.

Well, Argentina’s 2025 GDP also blew past expectations, growing 4.4%, the highest in years.

The International Monetary Fund expects the GDP will grow at similar rates in 2026 and 2027.

Since Milei’s party won power in 2023, inflation has dropped nearly 200 percentage points, plunging to the lowest level in eight years.

it had a fiscal surplus for the second consecutive year in 2025, marking the first time since 2008 that it accomplished that feat — and the poverty rate dropped significantly in 2025, reaching its lowest level since 2018.

The crisis Milei took on was stark: In the first half of 2024, around 52.9% of the population was living in poverty, with 18% in extreme poverty.

Poverty fell 14 percentage points, to 38%, last year. It is at 31% now.

Milei did all this the old-fashioned way.

He removed price controls, got rid of tariffs and opened trade, privatized a slew of government-run agencies, cut red tape, weakened union monopolies, made major cuts in spending and eliminated an array of needless state jobs.

In other words, all the usual stuff that free marketers preach will work — and experts warn us will bring on Armageddon.

Why is this important? Because this is an evidence-based refutation of economic views pushed by students and professors on campus. When your kids understand clearly their peers and professors are blabbing about things that are known to be false, they won’t feel so much pressure to agree with them on moral issues or other truth claims that contradict Christianity.

I talked to some Christians about my idea. Some liked it and some didn’t like it. The engineers all liked it. The ones who didn’t like it didn’t like the idea of treating Christianity as a knowledge tradition – a set of claims about the world that are true. They wanted to treat Christianity as something subjective – it’s about my feelings, or it’s about my family, or it’s about my community. They wanted to insulate it from logic and evidence. But this fails because feelings, family and community are not going with the kids to college.

So, I recommend taking the truth-focused approach. That’s why on the Knight and Rose Show, we cover topics like economics, energy policy, education policy, and so on. Our next show, which comes out this Saturday, is on health care policy. And in that one, we are again countering the teachings of the secular leftist elites by opposing government-run health care and promoting a free-market alternative. And we will do it with evidence.

By branching out into these other areas of knowledge, your children will understand that Christianity is seen by you as “knowledge”. And when they compare what you taught them with what their peers and professors believe, they will say “well, I have reasons to doubt these people on other topics, so why would I have trouble doubting them on Christian worldview topics?”. All the name-calling and peer pressure in the world isn’t going to convince anybody that communism worked in Venezuela and capitalism failed in Chile.

I also do something similar with people who hate America’s history when I bring up American’s noble wars against totalitarianism, e.g. – the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Marshall Plan, etc. Or our war against cruel Japanese imperialists and genocidal German socialists in WW2. That’s another way that you can insulate your kids – by teaching them about all the good things that America has done. Take them to the museums and show them what America has done for other countries.

The key point is that your kids need some area where they have worked through the facts themselves, so they will not be easily moved by shaming and rhetoric.

Just last week, a new large-scale study was published about what happens to the mental health of adolescents who get transgender treatments. It was published in the journal Acta Paediatrica. The data comes from gender identity clinics in Finland. I waited a few days to see what the response from critics would be and it’s been surprisingly muted. I always blog about studies that will help me to debate these issues, and I think this is a good one.

So, I looked at the Results section of the Abstract, and it says this:

Gender-referred adolescents showed significantly higher psychiatric morbidity than controls both before (45.7% vs. 15.0%) and ≥ 2 years after referral (61.7% vs. 14.6%). Those referred after 2010 had greater psychiatric needs than earlier cohorts, both before (47.9% vs. 15.3%) and ≥ 2 years after (61.3% vs. 14.2%) referral. Among adolescents who underwent medical gender reassignment, psychiatric morbidity increased markedly during follow-up—rising from 9.8% to 60.7% in feminising gender reassignment and from 21.6% to 54.5% in masculinising gender reassignment. After adjusting for prior psychiatric treatment, all gender-referred adolescents had similarly elevated risks of psychiatric morbidity, with hazard ratios approximately three times higher than female controls and five times higher than male controls.

I say large-scale, because the study compared 1) 2,083 people who were referred to gender identity clinics in Finland before age 23 to 2) a control group of several similar people in the general population. And this was over a long period of time – 1996 to 2019. I think the abstract explains the findings pretty well. People who got referred to gender identity clinics for treatment had MUCH higher mental health problems than the general population.

I asked a nice lady on Twitter who works for SEGM (the Society for Evidenced Based Gender Medicine) for a good write-up on this study, and she pointed me to a Substack article by Benjamin Ryan, who specializes in this area. He had some interesting context about the study.

He writes:

The Finnish study’s four coauthors have published some of the strongest scholarship challenging the assertion that providing them to adolescents improves their mental health and is life-saving. All of these Finnish investigators were also coauthors of a paper published in 2024 that found that there was no independent, statistically significant association between taking cross-sex hormones and the rate of suicide deaths among youths attending gender clinics.

The 2024 article that he’s talking about was in a different medical journal, BMJ Health. One of the four authors was actually one of the pioneers of gender transitioning treatment. She was all for it, until she got far enough into it that she realized that it wasn’t working out as expected.

Sometimes, you do see studies where people report that they feel better about getting transgender treatment in the short term. But what really matters is the long term. And also, it is important to measure outcomes using objective measurements, rather than self-reported “satisfaction”. Objective markers are things like doing well in school or holding a steady job.

The Ryan article has a nice summary of what we’ve found so far in the research:

Systematic literature reviews—the gold standard of scientific evidence—have all found that the research backing the use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to treat gender dysphoria in youths is weak and unreliable. It was due in part to Dr. Kaltiala’s influence that Finland conducted its own systematic literature review of pediatric gender medicine. Given the review’s findings, the nation has sharply restricted youths’ access to gender-transition interventions.

I’ve blogged before about several countries that are pulling back from transitioning children. But here in America, the left isn’t really driven by scientific studies. They are in some sort of mad rush to virtue signaling by celebrating actions that are not in the child’s best interest. They want to prove how moral they are by tolerating the maximum number of behaviors. But some behaviors are harmful and should not be tolerated.

And this was the interesting part:

The gender-dysphoric youths who did undergo gender-transition interventions arrived at the gender clinics with a much lower rate of previous use of specialist psychiatric care: 10 percent among natal males and 22 percent among natal females. But notably, two years or more after their first gender-clinic appointment, this group’s use of specialist psychiatric care shot up, to 61 percent among the natal males and 55 percent among the natal females.

So, if you go ahead with the transition treatments, it made your mental health worse than when you started.

I think this is a good study to keep around when you have to debate this issue. Please continue to debate this issue, because we want to save these children from doing anything that will cause them harm in the long term.