Joining us now is George Barna. This is a very familiar name to Christians.
He has been He's the founder of the Barne Group, a market research
firm that has specialized and looking at what is happening to our culture and to
Christians in general, the intersection of faith and culture. He's been doing this
for quite a while. He's written a lot of books, and he's got
a new book now talking about perhaps what we can do about some of the
worst problems and maybe they're really the core issue as to the direction that our
country has been going down. So I want to talk to him about that
book, but also kind of get an idea of what he has seen with
a front row seat since the nineteen eighties in our country. Thank you for
joining us, George Barner. Thank you for joining us. George. Yeah,
thanks for having me on, David. Let's talk a little bit about
that. Give people kind of we all see what is happening to our culture,
this detachment for reality, this postmodernism, and all the rest of this
stuff. But give us some metrics. Let's say that you would have seen
as part of the Barna Group over the last few decades. Yeah, there
have been a number of things that I've been tracking for about four decades.
You know, one of those has to do with people's perspectives on truth.
And what we've seen is a consistent deterioration of the notion that there is absolute
moral truth, that there can be such a thing as absolute moral truth.
So that's a big issue because when you take that out of the equation,
you've got to go somewhere to get your understanding of reality. And rather than
go and search for any kind of absolutes, what we do is we turn
inward. And that's what's happened in America is now rather than say that we
believe in God, basically what we do is we believe in ourselves. And
so that's that's a big game changer right there as well, where we've seen
a huge increase in the proportion of what I would call the don'ts, people
who don't believe God exists, don't know if he exists, don't care if
he exists. And you know, we're basically with our young adults, people
under fifty, they represent close to a third of the population now, so
that's a massive shift. We've seen a big shift in our morals, the
basis of our morals. Of course, if there's no absolute moral truth,
on what basis do we determine morality? Again, it's our feelings, And
so that's a big shift. And now we're at a place where most Americans
are confused about most major moral issues, whether we're talking about abortion, whether
we're talking about divorce, whether we're talking about homosexuality, transgenderism, basis of
personal identity, all of that has seen major shifts in the last ten to
fifteen years. I would say that we're a society now that really gears itself
towards trying to achieve happiness. And that's the major goal of most Americans.
We want to be happy. We do what we can to ensure that our
children will be happy. Like that, and then, of course you have
to ask, well, why did all of these shifts take place? And
so much of it is because of the influence and exposure to media, particularly
arts and entertainment media. And what I've found in the research that I've been
doing is that the greatest influence on our worldview the kinds of decisions that we
make comes from media influence. So whether it's movies or television, or social
media or video games or whatever, media you'd choose that's having more influence than
everything else combined in our lives as best I can tell, even education,
you would say, yeah, even more of the Well, yeah, well
it certainly is visceral. And if people are just going to turn inward to
their feelings, that's what they're going to pick up on. You know,
it's kind of interesting as we look at this detachment from any idea of objective
truth. It's gotten so bad that it reflects in our inability to even do
or care about math or anything else like that. And you know, even
our gender, our biological gender, we don't have anything that is objective.
Everything is subjective and whatever you want it to be. Even now we've got
kids who are seeing up as furries. I mean, it's getting to an
extreme that you know, all of my life I would have looked at this
and said, this is a parody. This can't be real. It is
like something out of Babylon Bee. But that's the reality that we live in
right now, isn't it. It really is. And so when you make
your feelings the basis of your reality, you know, the whole game changes,
And so trying to reason with people becomes exceedingly difficult because Americans are less
and less willing to consider, much less accept facts. An empirical argument doesn't
have much of a basis in America today. Yeah, and that's really going
to tear our society apart in every regard me, how do you even do
science or engineering? It really was the understanding that there is a discoverable reality,
a discoverable truth that came. We had a lot of foundational scientists who
were coming from that Christian perspective, Francis Bacon and many others, Isaac Newton,
we can discover God's truth. There is a reality here. Now we've
taken God out of the equation, and we've taken reality out of the equation.
And so it's going to affect everything. Even in our material society.
The things that people are looking at to make them happy and comfortable, those
things are going to disappear as well, because everything is hinged to that.
Tell us a little bit about you coined some words that some phrases in terms
of looking at this spirittainment that's entertainment based there as well as a spiritual I
guess tell us little bit about that and why you coined that word. Well,
there was a time a couple decades ago when there seemed to be a
movement to really try to integrate faith into entertainment, particularly the Christian faith into
entertainment. And so that term is blending of spirituality and entertainment, recognizing that
every entertainment vehicle conveys a worldview, and at that point in time, there
seemed to be some momentum growing for the Christian excuse me, the biblical worldview
being ingrained in more entertainment vehicles, particularly movies and television, but also an
increasing amount of online entertainment, streamed entertainment that seems now to have diminished over
the last decade or so. That momentum that had been building up seemed to
fall off. So that phrase never really picked up much momentum, just as
that approached entertainment development never picked up. It could be kind of applied to
what we see in some of the big megachurches that have fog machines everywhere.
I always thought that the fog machine with it all the contemporary worship was kind
of a metaphor of something that was that in those churches. But you know,
they tried to pursue that entertainment aspect of it and you know, it
didn't work out too well. I think it is. We've had a couple
of recent successes, and perhaps there will be some new movement. It's hard
to win a culture war if you don't have a culture, if you don't
engage to them in certain ways, and so, you know, we've had
some fairly successful movies in the last couple of months. I don't know if
that's going to be a trend or not. It's too soon to tell,
isn't it. I think it is. I think we'll probably always have one
or two current examples of Christian based entertainment that do well because there still remains
in our culture a pretty significant number people who really wrap their lives around their
Christian faith. And so when those kinds of media vehicles are released, yes
they'll find that audience. But in terms of building greater attentiveness and a greater
appetite for that kind of entertainment, I don't think that's been done effectively,
and we're not at a point where it appears that we can sustain that right
now. Yeah, it's going to be interesting because the other the standard Hollywood
stuff has gotten so dark and so nihilistic that it's kind of collapsing and of
itself. It's not really entertaining anymore. And you know, with what happened
with the shutdowns of movie theaters and everything, I think they've had a hard
time coming back, and it's just it's kind of just feeding on itself and
there's not really any creativity there. It seems like there's a real vacuum in
that area. But who knows what will happen with that, which brings us
to another one of the terms that you coined, sage cons. Tell us
a little bit about that. Yeah, that's an acronym for spiritually active governance.
Engaged conservative Christians. Age cons represent somewhere around eight nine, maybe ten
percent of the adult population in America. And these are individual rules whose lives
are driven by their Christian faith. And one of the unique characteristics about them
is that they're very tuned into politics, not because they care about it,
not because they have a natural inclination toward it, but because they recognize that
their faith in Christ calls them to be involved in every dimension of society and
to try to influence it for the cause of Christ. And so government is
just one of those arenas. But the result of that is that they not
only pay more attention to news and information about politics and government, but they
vote every chance they get, and they really try to understand the issues more
than the average American would. And you'd say that is that increasing or decreasing?
What you've seen lately, are getting more or less sage cons. Right,
it's been stable for the last five years years or so, But as
we look forward and project to what's going to happen in the population, we
expect that number to be on the decline unless there is some kind of an
awakening, spiritual awakening that's Bible base, that takes place in America in the
next decade or so. We don't see that on the horizon, but you
never know when the Holy Spirit's going to bring that kind of out pouring of
faith. That's right. Yeah, that's what it's dependent upon. Now.
So you're looking at you know, the sage cons. They are going to
be adults, probably a bit older. But as I said, you've been
doing this since the nineteen eighties and a couple of decades ago you kind of
had an epiphany about what was really missing in terms of turning towards focusing on
children. Tell us a little bit about that. Yeah, Well, I've
been doing a lot of research and continue to do a lot of research through
the Cultural Research Center on worldview and what's There are a number of startling things
I think about worldview in America, one of which is how few Americans have
a biblical worldview. It's four percent among adults right now, even less among
young people, in spite of the fact that sixty eight percent of Americans consider
themselves to be Christian. So there's a huge disconnect there. But a couple
decades ago, as we were looking at some of the details of this,
what we found is that a person's worldview begins developing between eight fifteen to eighteen
months of age and thirteen years of age. At the age of thirteen,
a person's worldview is almost fully developed. Tell us a little bit before we
go, tell us your definition of a worldview there so we I mean,
it's kind of self explanatory, but maybe got something more specific, And then
tell us what you would say a biblical worldview is? Sure, Yeah,
everybody has a worldview. You need one to get through the day. As
you make hundreds and hundreds of decisions every day, you need a basis on
which to make those decisions. And that's what your worldview is. It's the
intellectual, emotional, and spiritual filter through which you make every choice that you
make. It's the basis on which you make the decisions. So it's based
on your core beliefs about the world, about yourself, about life, and
all of your behaviors come from those beliefs. And so the idea here is
you do what you believe. So I do research, and a lot of
people tell me they believe a lot of things. But I've learned that I
can't just take that at face value. If you tell me you believe something,
then I have to find some behavioral evidence that you actually do believe that,
Because a lot of people say they believe a lot of things, but
there's no evidence that that's the truth. You know, they act in contrast
to what they say they believe. So your worldview is the conjunction of those
two things, what you say you believe and what you do to prove that
you believe it. And so there are dozens of worldviews that people can choose
from. One of those is what we call the biblical worldview. Now,
the biblical worldview is based on biblical principles and precepts, those kinds of teachings
that we get from Jesus, those kinds of principles that are laid out for
us in the scriptures. And when I say only four percent of adults have
a biblical worldview, that means that only four percent of adults consistently believe what
the Bible teaches and then display that in their lifestyle. Why does that matter
from a Christian point of view? It matters because we've been called to be
disciples of Jesus, and what that means is that we're going to be christ
Like. You demonstrate your Christ's likeness through your behavior, but you've got to
have Biblical beliefs in order to have those behaviors. So that's how all those
things fit together. What we find is that about ninety two percent of Americans
are syncretists, and what that means is that we've chosen not a single worldview,
whether it's the Biblical worldview, postmodernism, Eastern mysticism, nihilism. You
know, there are many different world views to choose from. But what we
do as a syncretist is we say, I don't buy any of those lockstock
and barrel. I'm just going to pick a few things that they believe that
I like, they make sense to me, and I'm going to combine them
with a few beliefs from other world views as well. So, in other
words, as a syncrety, you'll buy into postmodernism, you'll buy into secular
humanism, you'll buy into Marxism, you'll buy into Eastern mysticsm on and on
down the line, taking bits and pieces from each of those and crafting a
customized worldview that makes you happy, makes you comfortable, and gets you tracks
to run on. Yeah, I kind of do it o la carte,
right, very much. So, Yeah, that fits in with all the
postmodernism as well. So you were talking about children and you said they start
forming that worldview at what about fifteen months, just a little bit before Toddler,
and then it goes up to thirteen. That's kind of interesting because so
many societies have you know, looked at thirteen years old as the beginning of
manhood or womanhood, you know, barmits for whatever. And that's not just
in the Jewish society, it's in many many societies. At thirteen it's an
interesting, interesting age. But we see that over and over again. Yeah,
and of course over the court of decades, we've had a lot of
political leaders who, as they've been trying to figure out how can I stay
empower for a longer period of time, have made statements about give me a
child until they're seven and all rule of the world, you know, and
give me a young person until they're nine and they'll be mine for life,
you know. So you've had people from Aristotle on down to Hitler and Stalin
and Mao and Mussolini who have made those same kind of pronouncements for different purposes,
but they've recognized the importance of childhood. The Catholic Church over the course
of centuries has made similar kinds of pronouncements recognizing that importance. And that's why
you have, you know, Catholic education being such an important thing in the
Catholic world. And so we've really dropped the ball on Yeah, I think
we've really dropped the ball on that, you know, train up a child
and the way he should go when he's older. I'm not depart from it,
right, that's you know Hitler understood. Oh, it's that children don't
understand that, right, I mean Christians don't understand that certly. And you
go back to the early chapters of the Bible. You go back to Deteronomy
six, and you've got a classic teaching there to Jewish families about you know
what, it's your responsibility, parents, to take on the education of your
children. So talk to them when you have the opportunity, when you're out
on the road, when you're having dinner, when you're spending free time together.
You know, write these things on your foreheads, you know, post
them on your wrists, put them over your door, post the things that
matter. Make sure that you're always conversing to your children about these And I
would say, yeah, that's certainly something that we in the Christian community in
contemporary America have dropped. Yes, yes, yeah. When we homeschool our
kids, they required us to create a name for our school, and so
so, well, let's call it the Parapetus Academy, because we'll do it
parapetically. You know, we'll walk along with them in the way, in
the same way that Jesus would do his disciples, and we'll point out,
as we're going through a life with them, the good and the bad of
this and that, and try to put it in a perspective that understand as
Christians. Well, yeah, and you know, that's one of the beautiful
things about homeschooling is that you get to build that relationship with your children wherein
they come to trust you and you can have conversations on such a wide range
of activities that both relate to academic subjects and that don't relate to academic subjects
but relate to real life. And so, as we've done our research over
the past couple of years, in particular, we found that homeschool children are
the ones who are most likely to grow up to have a biblical worldview.
And it's precisely because parents have the luxury, if you will, of that
time spent with their children looking at every aspect of life, not just worrying
about addition and subtraction, but really trying to figure out what are the important
life principles that I can convey to my children, sometimes through an academic subject,
sometimes not. Yes, yes, and they have sacrificed to do that,
but it's that very interaction that they have with the kids that is the
true reward. So it is kind of an interesting way that this works itself
out if you've got your prioriti straight. So from fifteen months to thirteen years
they're establishing their worldview, and then what happens well during the teen years and
through maybe the mid twenties or so. What we find is that it's a
period of time where, now that the worldview has been developed, young people
are trying to figure out how to articulate it, how to implement it,
how to refine it so that it works most effectively for them in any given
situation. In the course of that period of time, that fifteen year period
or so, they're also sometimes changing some of their worldview, beliefs and behaviors
based on the ways that they're trying to articulate and implement it. But then
what we find is from the late twenties on through sometime in the sixties,
typically people just accept what they've developed during those earlier years and they actually become
evangelists. Most Americans, though, don't evangelize for Jesus. They evangelize for
themselves. What they're trying to do is to get other people to buy into
their beliefs and behaviors, because if somebody else embraces your worldviewer elements of it,
you feel better about yourself. You feel like you've proven that you got
it right. And then when we get into our mid to late sixties,
that then becomes the final worldview era of our life, when we sit back
and examine how we did We asked the question, gee, did we get
it right? Could we have done it better? And at that stage most
of us I'm in that stage. Now, you know, we're grandparents or
some of my you know peers are great grandparents, and so we're thinking about,
okay, with our grandchildren and great grandchildren, should we be teaching and
preaching and modeling something different than we had earlier in our life because now we
can see, yeah, we kind of blew it in this aspect of our
worldview, we still have a chance to get it right and to pass that
on. Yeah, that's a very interesting perspective. There's four stages there.
Now, your newest book, and you've written about fifty books. At your
newest one, which just came out Labor Day, is raising spiritual champions,
nurturing your child's heart, mind and spirit. Tell us a little bit about
the book and the message that it's giving people in terms of you know,
how do you do this? Everybody's looking for how to book, but bigger,
you know, a larger perspective I'm sure is what's involved in It's not
just a step by step program. But tell us a little bit about that
book. Well, the book is based on seven original research projects that we
did across the nation trying to understand parents and churches and adolescents and teenagers.
We even did a study, a content analysis study of the most popular media
that children are exposed to. The television programs they watch consistently, some of
the streaming programs they consistently are exposed to, those types of things. What
I was trying to do in the book was to give us an understanding of
what's happening in parenting today. What does the Bible exhort us to do as
parents, and how can we get closer to that biblical model of parenting given
the existing culture in which we're being called to raise our children. So it's
kind of a full orb of the approach to understanding all this why because as
parents, we have the primary responsibility to raise up our children and how are
we supposed to raise them. We're supposed to help them to become disciples of
Jesus Christ. So the book is geared toward helping parents understand what does it
mean to be a disciple. How do you disciple a young person? How
do we know if we're doing that well? What are churches that are doing
it well doing? Because I want to be part of that kind of church.
Most churches are not doing it well, as it turns out, but
we found out that there are some that are doing it properly, inappropriately and
effectively. What kind of church should you look for there? And you know,
ultimately, how do you know when you're hitting the ball out of the
park that's great? Give us an example of something that you see that is
in contrast to what is a good practice a biblical practice versus what is a
common practice with parenting well, a common parenting practice in America today I characterize
as outsourcing. And as I did the research, I discovered it's not with
mal and tend that parents are throwing up their hands and say, I don't
have the time and I don't have the expertise to do this. It's because
they love their children so much that they're saying, I don't have the time
and I don't have the expertise, So let me do the best thing I
can for them, which is hire experts that I'm that I want to bring
in and let them raise my child for me. And so what we do
is we bring in experts in education, tutors, we bring in experts in
athletics, coaches, we bring in experts and spirituality, children's pastors, we
bring in experts in various hobbies and extra curricular activities, you know, all
of these experts that we hire to do what we feel I'm really not sufficiently
first to know how to do it, and I'm working hard to make the
money to hire these people. So i don't have the time to do it.
And I've got other interests than my children that I feel I need to
engage in for some kind of self care, you know, get myself a
break, lower my anxiety levels. That's why I don't have the time.
So that's the way that parents are approaching it now. The biblical model is
actually quite different. The Biblical model says, when you have children under the
age of thirteen, this is a season of sacrifice for you. So get
used to maybe not working as many hours, get used to not doing everything
you can to get the promotion, to get the raise, you know,
to start your own company, to do whatever the things that are going to
take the most time and energy and effort on your part. This is the
time where you put most of your energy and effort and expertise into raising up
your child to be a follower of Jesus. And so your schedule is going
to look very different, and in fact, what you do during the day
is going to look different. Number One, you've got to have a plan
for how you spiritually develop your child. If that's your chief goal during these
years, don't go about it willy nilly, just haphazardly hoping that something good
is going to happen with their faith. And maybe if you just bring them
to church services often enough and church events, it's all going to work.
It's not the church's job, it's your job. The church is there to
support you as you do that, and that's the kind of church, by
the way, that you need to be looking for when you talk more about
that. But it's on your shoulders to be doing that task, and so
you've got to have a plan. It doesn't happen by default. People do
not become decipleples of Jesus by accident. And with your children during those first
thirteen years, the foundations that you put in place or don't put in place
are what's going to determine to the largest extent whether or not they ever become
disciples of Christ. Yeah, that's very true. You know, when I
have talked for a long time to people about homeschooling, what I frequently what
I hear from them is I just don't feel qualified enough, just as what
you're talking about. They're trying to outsource this to somebody else that they feel
is going to do a better job with math or this. And of course,
you know, you can pull in there's so many experts that are available
but have classes on this that you can pull that in and they can do
that, or you can set up some kind of a co op thing or
something like that. But it really is born out of this feeling that they're
not up to the task. And we would always tell people, you only
got to keep a couple of steps ahead of this kid, even if you
didn't do well in school, you just got to keep a couple of lessons
ahead of them, and you might learn some stuff that you never learned in
school because you didn't like school. And you know, but the key thing
is from a Christian perspective, is that God gave you these kids, and
so he also gave you the ability to do what is necessary, and I
think that's the key thing, and it's that that relationship that is there that
is lost. As you point out, that's a great term outsourcing it to
other people because you think other people can do a better job of this or
that, and then you miss that time with a kid. You spend all
your time doing shuffling them from one of these activities, from one expert to
another, and you know, you just become kind of a soccer mom type
of facilitator or chauffeur. You don't really ever have that time with them.
I've seen that as well as I've been growing up. That is an excellent
way to describe it, outsourcing. I think tell us I'm sorry, go
ahead, you know, and just to tag onto that one of the great
dangers of outsourcing is that often those people are in producing different worldview perspectives to
your children than you want them to have. So they might be a great
soccer coach, but there may be things about anger and about treating other people,
and thoughts about money, you know, growing up to be a professional
soccer. But I mean all these other ideas that are being introduced to your
children that are ones that the Bible might not agree with. And so when
you hand your children over to these other authority figures, you're handing over your
authority at the same time. And that's a great danger. Yes, that
is really true. Yeah you want it. That's how we get the the
Oli Kart syncretism right exactly, with all these different forces that are there.
You were talking about church, and so you know what, what kind of
church is a good church that's going to support the parents. So many times
I look at churches and they have so many activities that they've got set up.
And I often think about to a cruise that I went on with our
family. It was Karen's parents fiftieth anniversary and want to take everybody on a
cruise. It was a Disney cruise and we get on there and yeah,
this is a family cruise. So it's like, okay, what activities do
you have for the family. Well, we'll put a bracelet on the kids
and we'll take them over here, and we got all kinds of stuff and
then you know, you can do these things. And it's like, no,
no, what do you have for us to do together? They didn't
have anything for us to do together. They said well, nobody has asked
us about that before. Yeah, you take this family cruise and you could
outsoarche your kids over here to be entertained and babysit and whatever, and then
you could go do these other activities. And it's like, no, you
don't want to do that, but it tells it. And so when I
look at churches, many times I see that type of thing happening in the
churches. What is the kind of church that is most effective at supporting parents
and their task. Yeah, one of the things that I try to get
Christian parents to do, or any parents really if they're getting engaged with the
church, is they're recognuys you know what, the single most important ministry in
the entire church is the ministry to children. Because if what we're there to
do is to build up somebody's faith, develop that faith, reinforce that faith,
release that faith into the world. All of the foundations for that happened
before the age of thirteen, and so what's going on in the children's ministry
is the single most important ministry in the church. So when you go to
a church, don't go they're saying, Gee, I hope they make me
happy. You know, I mean, frankly, what our research has found
for the last forty years is that adults don't change. You know, so
you're going to go in believe in what you believe, You're going to come
out pretty much believe in the same thing. We did a longitudinal study track
people over thirty plus years and found that the worldview adults doesn't change. Most
Americans die with the same worldview that they had at the age of thirteen.
And so, you know, let's look at that children's ministry. What do
you want look at Number one, take a look at the children's pastor.
One of the pieces of research that we did for this book was with pastors
across the country. What we discovered is that seven out of every eight children's
pastors do not have a biblical worldview. You can't get what you don't have.
Yeah, and so when children are going to seven out of eight children's
ministries, they're not going to be taught biblical truth. They're going to be
taught stuff. What that satisfies the needs of the ministry. What are the
needs of that ministry? Well, parents are saying, you know what,
I want my child to be safe, I want my child to be happy,
I want my child to be around some good kids, and I want
them to be exposed to some kind of religious teaching. And that's about as
far as it goes. You know. We know when we talk with senior
pastors across the country again a majority of whom do not have a biblical worldview.
We asked them, how do you know if your church is healthy and
successful? They said, oh, we measure five things. How many people
show up, how much money's raised, how many programs we offer, how
many staff people we get to hire, how much square footage we've built out.
Look, I'm a measurement guy, so I'm glad they're measuring something.
But as a measurement guy, I know you get what you measure. Yeah,
So when those are your measures, what you're going to get is a
megachurch, a place that's well marketed. But keep in mind that Jesus didn't
die for any of those five things, so those shouldn't be the key measures
that we're looking at. So when you're looking for a children's ministry, look
for this stuff that matters to Jesus, Because if it matters to Jesus and
it matters to the church, that's what they're going to be sharing with your
child. Oh, that's great advice. So you know, it's time with
the kids. There is no there is no substitute, you know, quantity
with the kids. There's no subtitude in terms of quality, in terms of
outsourcing the kids. And it's very important that you understand who is going to
be holding their heart at various times, right, and and that that really
is the key thing. I think people need to think of it that way.
You know, if you think of somebody holding something as fragile as a
heart, and you don't realize that that is really what is happening at these
very tender ages, is very very malleable. And it's kind of interesting that
you point out that the worldview of adults really doesn't change. Of course,
we were told that, you know, I believe it because in the Bible,
and but your research has has borne that out. So it is interesting
because we do have people who've had some exceptions to that. I guess that
would be the exceptions that have had a very difficult upbringing and but God has
stepped into their life and worked in a way to radically change them. Right.
But that's that's really the accept would you say it is the exception,
and one of the interesting things I did, actually the biggest study I've ever
done, was on that very thing. And what I found is that there
are the way that people change is God allows them to go through a crisis.
You know, we tend to think of a crisis as something to avoid
at all costs. It's painful, we don't want to endure it. And
yet God uses crisis to get our attention and to shake us up enough to
reconsider some of the basic foundations of our worldview. And what I discovered is
that there tend to be six different crises that are most common that are effective
at shaking us up enough that yes, we can move more and more toward
having a biblical worldview. You know, an ugly divorce, the painful death
of someone who is close to you that you loved, contracting or a debilitating
illness or having some kind of debilitating injury, losing all of your possessions,
and a natural disaster, spending time in prison, and going through personal bankruptcy.
Those six things represent a majority of the crises that have enabled people to
get to a place where God could continue the transformational process in their life,
and they moved away from a secular mindset and heartset more toward a biblical mindset.
So yeah, it's possible, you know. And that's the hope that
parents need who blew it with their young kids, you know, because it's
never over. If you're just hearing this and you're saying, oh my gosh,
my child is fourteen, sixteen, and eighteen, you know, what
do I do now? It's like, okay, don't give up hope.
By the keep in mind that discipleship is a relationship. It's a relationship with
Jesus first, and it's a relationship with another disciple, somebody who wants to
bring you into that relationship with Christ. So it's all about relationship. What
do you do with that relationship? You invite that other person on the journey
with you. It's not somewhere you give them homework and simon to say,
go and learn these verses, go and figure out how to make this feel
in your life, or so like, hey, let's check this out.
Let's see how this works together. You know, we'll read the passages,
we'll talk about the passages, we'll go and we'll we'll exhibit the passages in
our lives. That's how discipleship works. How do we know that because that's
what Jesus did. Yes, yes, well that really is true. And
you know when you're talking about that through crisis and through pain, that's what
C. S. Lewis said. You know, God speaks to us through
our pain. And actually I think you use the analogy of you know,
the blows of a sculptor changing us in our life. Nobody wants to go
through that, but it is a really loving process. And I think we
go back and we look at the crises in our lives as I'm about your
age and we were in the review stage here, and we look at the
most difficult times in our life. That was the time when God spoke to
us and moved us in a different direction. Yeah, it is true.
And our tendency is to try to restore everything to quote unquote normal. Yeah
that's right. Well, often the reason that we're having the crisis is because
normal ain't working for us to be willing to say, Okay, this might
be a great opportunity for me to rethink this a little bit. That's the
direction God may be pushing us. That's true. And when I look at
the some of the discussion points here about your book, embrace an eternal perspective,
properly define what a successful life is. That's one of the key things.
You know. If God is going to you know, as you point
out, if the normal is not working for you, maybe He's got a
new normal for you. It's going to change what you really want and how
you define a success is not just simply being comfortable. Maybe it's something else,
isn't it? It is? And you know, for those parents who
are trying to get a handle on okay, okay, but where do I
start with all of this? I feel overwhelmed. I'm not of the elotionan
I don't know where to start. One of the greatest discoveries I feel that
I've ever made out of the data, you know, I feel like Isaac
Newton. Here is a really late one that is like one or two in
the morning. I'm playing with data. And one of the things I found
is there are seven particular beliefs that fit together and can serve as a great
biblical worldview foundation. What the data showed is if you embrace all seven of
these very simple biblical perspectives and you try to carry them out in your life,
you'll have an eighty three percent probability of going on to develop a complete
biblical worldview. If you reject any one, one or more of these seven
I'm calling them the the cornerstones of the biblical worldview. If you reject one
or more of the cornerstones, then you've got only a two percent probability,
wow, of a biblical worldview. That's how important these seven elements are.
And you know when people hear them, you know, devoted Christians laugh,
Come on, that's Sunday School one on one. Yeah, but apparently most
people didn't pay attention during Sunday School one on one. That's why he started
fifteen months. That's right, Tell it real quickly what they are. I'm
dying enough. Yeah, I mean number one is you not only believe that
God exists, but you know that in terms of his nature and character,
he's all, all knowing, all loving, you know, all powerful,
he's perfect, he's just he wants to be involved in your life because he
created you, because he wants to love you. He wants that relationship.
Okay, knowing there's that kind of God who's perfect and just holy and so
forth, that's great. But cornerstone number two, but recognize that we're born
as sinner, we sin throughout our lives. We're born into that approach,
and every choice we make has consequences, and our sins have eternal consequences.
And so Cornerstone number three is recognizing that the only real antidote to that consequence,
the negative consequence of our sins, is Jesus Christ. So what we
can do is acknowledge that we're sinners, you know, own up to it,
fess up to it, ask Him to forgive us for our sins,
and most importantly, truly repent, genuinely repent, which means that not just
I'm saying, yeah, give me, you know, eternal fire insurance,
but it's saying, I really feel remorse over the fact that these choices of
mind, these sins, break God's heart. I don't want to do that
anymore. So God give me the strength to fight back the temptation to keep
sinning. Cornerstone number four is is saying that you know what we know what
those sins are because God gave us his word, He gave us principles for
life. So he identifies sins, he identifies the right way to live,
He identifies what gives him and us joy. And Cornerstone Number five is saying
that, and the Bible, in the course of doing so, gives us
absolute moral truths. And so it's not based on our life conditions. It's
not based on our feelings, it's not based on our situation, it's not
based on what's most popular or most common. God has given us absolute moral
truths, and when we reject those, we will reap the consequences of what
we've sown through that rejection. Cornerstone number six goes to what you are saying,
recognizing what success in life is, and the Bible tells us that.
God makes it very clear that success is not about money. It's not about
cars, about the trophy, spouse, you know, any of that kind
of stuff, fame, et cetera. It's simply about being consistently obedient to
God. You can be a homeless person wearing rags, not knowing if you're
going to get another meal, but if you're consistently obedient to God, you
are a success in life, not in the world's eyes, but in God's
eyes. And then the final one is understanding that when God created you,
he loved you, and he gave you a purpose for life, and that
universal purpose that all of us share. There's a unique purpose He'll give to
each of those who are following Jesus. But that universal purpose each of us
has is very simply to know, love and serve God with all our heartlind,
strength, and soul. So when you put these seven things together,
it completely changes your understanding of how life works, who you are, why
you're here, how to live, how to gauge whether or not your life
is making the difference that God wants it to make. And yet those seven
things are very easy for us as parents to wrap our arms around and to
be able to share those with our children and to go on a journey with
our children pursuing those seven things. And as you were alluding to, you
know earlier, the way I say it to parents is, look, you
don't have to be a theologian. You only have to be ten seconds ahead
of your kids. And if you are, this is going to work.
It's going to work. Great. Invite them on the journey with you,
that's right. Yeah, Yeah, If you can outthink that fifteen month old
a few stuffs out of them, you got it made. And God will
give you what you need to do that. You know, He always does
equip us for the things that he assigns to us, and that's that's the
key thing, stepping out in faith. And we've had a lot of people
have to do that over the last couple of years when they were confronted with
things in their own life that we're going to be shut off to them if
they didn't violate their conscience. And so I think that may have been a
difficult time of training for many people in our society. And so that makes
me very optimistic about the future because we've had a lot of people who have
been under the sculptor's chisel over the last few years and came through from the
other side and to this new normal. They've got a very different perspective after
having gone through that. Well, that's certainly a sage advice and it looks
like an excellent book. Again, the book is and you pull the book
up, raising spiritual Champions, nurturing your child's heart, mind, and spirit,
and you can find that at I guess the best place Amazon? Is
that the best place to find that or do you sell it directly? It
is, yeah, and we've got it both in paperback and digital versions,
whichever you prefer. It's available. That's great and how can people keep up.
Whether you'd have a sub stack or anything like that, or a website
that you tell people that you publish on. Yeah, if they go to
Cultural Research Center dot com, they'll find all the research that we do.
We try to put as much of it on that website for free as possible
so people can take it, use it, share it. You know.
The whole idea is for us to keep growing as disciples of Jesus, So
every time we learn something, we want to be able to share it with
the public. That's great, that's great. Well, it certainly has great
advice. And you've been watching bigger trends in people's lives and you have seen
how this aligns with the Bible. So that's your biblical worldview. You have
seen it devalidated what the Bible says. You've seen that validated over a long
period of time, and you have a lot of very sage advice for people.
Thank you so much for joining us at George Barna appreciate it. Thank
you, Thank you. David. The David Knight Show is a critical thinking
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