TRAIN UP A CHILD IN THE WAY THEY SHOULD GO

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“Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it.” Proverbs 22:6

This Biblical truth is supported by Daniel A. Cox, senior fellow in polling and public opinion at the American Enterprise Institute, who also serves as director of the Survey Center on American Life, notes that “for as long as we have been able to measure religious commitments, childhood religious experiences have strongly predicted adult religiosity.”

Sadly, for nearly 30 years, notes Cox, research shows the share of Americans who identify as religious has consistently declined with each new generation. “This pattern continues with Generation Z demonstrating less attachment to religion than the millennial generation did,” he said.

Generation Z, born in the late 1990s and early 2000s, is now the least religious generation yet, with 34% of them identifying as religiously unaffiliated. Among millennials, 29% identify as religiously unaffiliated, while Generation X stands at 25%. Only 18% of baby boomers and 9% of the silent generation identify as religiously unaffiliated.

Cox pointed to a number of factors that have impacted a diminished view of organized religion, including a breach of trust.

“Gallup has found that trust and confidence in organized religion have plummeted over the past two decades. In 2021, only 37% of the public reported having a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in religious institutions, a massive decline since 2001 when 60 percent reported feeling confident,” he said.

He further added that while only 35% of Americans overall believe religion causes more harm than good, among the disaffiliated who were raised in religious homes, 69% say religion causes problems more than it provides solutions. Some 63% of Americans who have always been religiously unaffiliated also believe religion causes more problems in society than it solves.

Only a little more than half of Americans say raising children with religion is a benefit. Of more concern, 82% of the growing number of religiously unaffiliated disagree and only 40% of Gen Z see raising children with religion as a good thing.

We are fast approaching the time Jesus spoke of that precedes His second coming.

“Then they will deliver you up to tribulation and put you to death, and you will be hated by all nations for my name’s sake. And then many will fall away and betray one another and hate one another. And many false prophets will arise and lead many astray. And because lawlessness will be increased, the love of many will grow cold. But the one who endures to the end will be saved. And this gospel of the kingdom will be proclaimed throughout the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come.” Matthew 24:9-14

IMPORTANCE TO COMMUNITIES OF STABLE, PRESENT DADS

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Writing in March 2018 and after much careful analysis, Professor Paul Kengor noted that, “what is clear is the vast majority of shooters came from broken families without a consistent biological father throughout their rearing and development. Very few had good, stable, present dads.”

Another shooting, another son of divorce, Adam Lanza, who killed 26 children and adults a year ago at Sandy Hook School in Newtown, Conn. Also, Karl Pierson, who shot a teenage girl and killed himself this past Friday at Arapahoe High in Centennial, Colo., one common and largely unremarked thread tying together most of the school shooters that have struck the nation in the last year is that they came from homes marked by divorce or an absent father. From shootings at MIT (i.e., the Tsarnaev brothers) to the University of Central Florida to the Ronald E. McNair Discovery Learning Academy in Decatur, Ga., nearly every shooting over the last year in Wikipedia’s “list of U.S. school attacks” involved a young man whose parents divorced or never married in the first place.

fatherlessness

The social scientific evidence about the connection between violence and broken homes could not be clearer. Dr Michael Brown research suggests that boys living in single mother homes are almost twice as likely to end up delinquent compared to boys who enjoy good relationships with their father.

Harvard sociologist Robert Sampson has written that “Family structure is one of the strongest, if not the strongest, predictor of variations in urban violence across cities in the United States.” His views are echoed by the eminent criminologists Michael Gottfredson and Travis Hirschi, who have written that “such family measures as the percentage of the population divorced, the percentage of households headed by women, and the percentage of unattached individuals in the community are among the most powerful predictors of crime rates.”

God established in Genesis the basis for a stable family: “Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined with his wife and they shall become one flesh.” Genesis 2:24 God made Eve from Adam to enforce the importance and binding nature of the marriage union. Marriage and families built on Biblical principles will produce stable loving communities.