Tag Archives: Happiness

Commentary

Are Christian churches and parents producing solid young Christians?

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Let’s look at the facts from a recent Pew Research survey.

Excerpt:

A recent report by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion and Public Life seems to validate concerns among Christian leaders that younger generations of Americans are losing the spiritual moorings that have helped keep their nation strong from its founding.

Analyzing the extent to which the religious views of America’s “millennials” — adults between the ages of 18 and 29 — differ from those of adults over 30, the Pew Forum’s “Religion Among the Millennials” report found that they are in general less affiliated with a particular religious faith than their over-30 counterparts, attend religious services less often, and say that religion is less important to them.

Here are some of the findings of the report:

  • Twenty five percent of 18-to-29-year-old adults say they are religiously unaffiliated, describing themselves variously as “atheist,” “agnostic,” or “nothing in particular.” By contrast, about 19 percent of adults in their 30s, 15 percent of those in their 40s, 14 percent of those in their 50s, and less than ten percent of those 60 and older identify themselves as unaffiliated.
  • Only 45 percent of adults under age 30 say that religion is important to them, compared with almost 60 percent of adults 30 and older.
  • Sixty-five percent of 18 to 29-year-olds say they are “absolutely” certain of the existence of God, compared with 73 percent of their 30-and-older counterparts.

What about surveys conducted by Christians?

The findings of the Pew report appear to reflect the results of similar surveys conducted by both Catholic and evangelical researchers. For example, a recent survey by the Marist College Institute for Public Opinion found that over 80 percent of Catholic adults aged 18 to 30 think that “morals are relative” and that “there is no definite right or wrong for everybody.”

Similarly, a 2008 study by evangelical pollster George Barna found that half of all adults in America say that Christianity is just one of many faith options… Barna found that unlike previous generations, over 70 percent of American adults today have jettisoned an organized approach to their faith and are more likely to come up with their own set of religious beliefs, with over 80 percent of young Americans under the age of 25 inclined to customize their faith.

And from Christian Newswire:

“In today’s world Christian children and teens are in serious crisis,” says Larry Fowler, Executive Director of Global Training for Awana and author of the new book Raising a Modern-Day Joseph: A Timeless Strategy for Growing Great Kids, (David C. Cook, January, 2009.) “What we see happening in the world is merely a reflection of what is happening in the church. Most Christian teens succumb to the world and fall away from the Lord by the time they leave home.” According to Josh McDowell Ministries, denominations are seeing anywhere from 69 to 94 percent of teens leave the church after high school.

[…]Statistics show that even children who grow up in Christian homes, go to church on a regular basis, and participate in youth group activities are abandoning their faith at an alarming rate.

Naturally, my approach to fixing this failure of churches and parents is to leverage philosophical theology to define Christian claims and then leverage apologetics to sustain those claims in the public square. I would emphasize mainstream science apologetics in order to do that. As for the problem of young people being uncomfortable with moral judgments, we need to do a better job of explaining to them WHY some things are wrong.

Here are some -isms that the church and parents may want to try to address:

  • postmodernism – the view that truth, especially religious and moral truth, cannot be known
  • relativism – the view that each person defines their own reality by personal preferences
  • pluralism – the view that all religions are basically the same – they make us act good
  • universalism – the view that all religions are valid ways of knowing ultimate reality
  • syncretism – the view that the truth claims of all religions do not conflict

Perhaps we should be focusing more time talking about truth and morality, using reason and evidence. I think that the critical mass of people in the church are against my plan – they have decided that the purpose of Christianity is to make people have happy feelings and to be part of an inclusive community. It’s not clear to me how happy feelings and an inclusive community are related to the goals of the Christian faith, but that’s what people seem to have decided on, anyway. They didn’t ask me, and they don’t ask me.

Apologetics advocacy

News

What does “the pursuit of happiness” really mean?

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From Muddling Towards Maturity. He quotes Chuck Colson on the pursuit of happiness.

Excerpt:

Our founding fathers understood the pursuit of happiness to mean the pursuit of a virtuous life. This concept of happiness comes from the Greek word eudaimonia—which refers to a life well-lived, a life rooted in truth. That is what happiness means, and that is what every man and woman has an inalienable right to pursue—a virtuous life.

And as I wrote in my book The Good Life, this is the definition of happiness that we need to reclaim in American life—especially within the Church. After all, a Barna survey revealed that more than half of evangelicals agreed with the statement: “The purpose of life is enjoyment and personal fulfillment.”

Come on. If the last 50 years have taught us anything, it’s that consumerism and hedonism (the pursuit of unbridled pleasure) do not lead to happiness, but instead to personal and societal misery.

[…]The goal is not pleasure; it is righteous living, decency, honor, doing good—in short, living a virtuous life.

I’ve heard J. P. Moreland write about this, too, in his book “Love Your God With All Your Mind”. (And again in “Kingdom Triangle”)

J.P. says in chapter 1 of LYGWYM that freedom is “the power to do what one ought to do”. he right to the pursuit of happiness means that no individual or government has the power to prevent you from living the virtuous life that God intended for you. That is why I come down so hard on the secular left. When they force Christians to deny their faith and act like atheists in public, (e.g. – to perform abortions or lose their jobs), then the government is thwarting the pursuit of happiness, rightly understood.

Mentoring

How and why to include Jesus in your relationships with others

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I was thinking recently about a number of platonic relationships that I had with women in the past, and I wanted to talk about something I learned in the school of soft knocks trying to be a Christian knight. (Note: this applies 100% in the opposite direction, though, and maybe even 200%, for women who are trying to choose men to relate to).

Basically, when I think about opposite-sex relationships, I think that it is very important to me that I be liked for the right reason. I do not want to be liked because I make her feel happy apart from God. I do not want to be liked because I help her to succeed apart from knowing God. I want to be liked for one reason and one reason only. I want to be liked because I am recognized as important for helping her to know God and to love God.

It’s not my job to help a woman to be happy apart from God or to help her to succeed apart from God in this world, based on worldly criteria. I am not interested in building sand castles in the here and now, even if society approves of those sand castles here and now. It’s not my job to help her to prove to herself (and to others) that she is a “good person” apart from Christ. No one can be good enough apart from Christ.

It’s not my job to help people to feel good about rejecting God. I should not expend my time or resources to comfort someone who is rejecting God. It’s disrespectful to God for that person to invent a new moral standard to follow for their own ends (self-esteem and respect from others), apart from a relationship with God. I can’t help a person who doesn’t want God in the way they really need to be helped.

What you find with some people is that they are very interested in glamorous causes like environmentalism and animal rights, but very dismissive about things like avoiding premarital sex and not killing unborn children. They want to feel good about themselves and to receive the esteem of others, but not in their personal lives. Think of how Bill Clinton committed adultery and how he insisted that his generosity to the poor (paid for by other people’s taxes!) made him a good person in spite of his adultery.

There are a lot of people in the world who do put God at the center and who need support. And it’s my job to make sure that when I choose a woman to work on, that I choose one of these women who gets her idea of “the good life” from her relationship with God through Christ. I want to be able to help someone who really cares about God. And if a person doesn’t want to look into these things, I can’t make them, even if I care about them.

What I have found is that there are women out there who are interested in learning more about God and in conforming their actions to what they find out about him. They read the Bible, they read theology, they read apologetics, and they are interested in assessing the evidence to confirm what they read about. They are not trying to be happy or popular, they are trying to know God and to be related to him. And those are the women that I should support.

For those who are feeling broken from having chosen a non-Christian person to invest in, I have some advice. Always remember that the person who rejected you has also rejected Jesus. You’re not better than Jesus. If a person doesn’t want to acknowledge Jesus and to follow him, then they sure aren’t going to acknowledge you when you try to get them to follow him. God has other ways to help that person if he wants to reach out to them. You’re not the only person he can send. If you’ve failed, move on to someone who welcomes you.

I always try to choose the person who has the most interest in knowing God in Christ and growing her closer to God. I know it’s hard to leave a person who you really love and have invested time in, but if they steadfastly refuse to let you even talk about God then my recommendation is that you move on to someone who will. Don’t leave God out, because relationships aren’t about just you.

Further study

I recommend reading this article by Dr. Michael Murray about the hiddenness of God. God gives people free will to either respond to him or to reject him. And we need to do the same – let people who don’t want us reject us, too. Let them go. Don’t think about them any more. God will go after that person some other way when that person is ready. In the meantime, choose someone to work on who wants God now, so you can have a real impact now.