The essential issue

I just reread a series of posts I made over a year ago about gay rights in an attempt to plumb the depths of the Christian stance. It’s always interesting to read yourself from a long while back. Very insightful to read things I wouldn’t otherwise remember saying or thinking. (It also makes me think that I would have to clean this blog before I run for political office, heh.) I suppose I agree with much of what I said then: I still don’t believe gays should be allowed to marry, or that a gay lifestyle is okay. However, I do think that my perspective on how I should approach the issue of gay rights has changed significantly.

Essentially my feeling on the matter is that it’s not worth writing about anymore. Looking back at my posts, considering everything, I just don’t think it’s what I want to focus on. This doesn’t mean I’m changing my position; it just means that, as a believer, I need to play defense on this issue, or deal with it on a need-to-talk basis. This fascinating interview with Rosaria Champagne Butterfield drove home how much overlooking the issue is really the key to dealing with it. If someone brings up the topic, looking for a fight, I’ve got to be like Jesus and hold them off with evasive answers that point to the deeper issues. Often Jesus refused to fall into the traps of the Pharisees and Sadducees when they laid out a controversial catch-22 and held a mic eagerly in his face. He transcended the issues. Taxes to Caesar. Marriage in the afterlife. What authority he did his ministry under. He was a master at bypassing nonessential issues to get to essential ones, and I should have the same approach.

The essential issue that I should focus on as a Christian isn’t homosexuality vs. heterosexuality–in fact it’s not sexuality at all.

Reading St. Augustine’s confessions this year reminded me that sexuality is something to be entirely submitted to the Lord. His conversion experience brought a commitment to total continence and lifelong celibacy. Wow. That’s not something you hardly ever see, at least with express intention, in the evangelical church. Yet it was widely practiced and regarded as superior in the 395 AD church. Is the heart of the married believer any different? No. Being married this past year (since June 2012), I have learned that even in marriage God calls us to lay sexuality on the altar. Whether one partner thinks sex is god or the other thinks it’s gross, or worse if they both err in the same direction, it takes the grace of God to realize that sex is a gift from him, and to have the willpower to stamp it “GOD’S” and let go of our “rights” in the matter.

Reading Out of a Far Country by Christopher Yuan made the final connection between this and the gay issue. He came out as gay and lived that way for several years, getting involved in drugs and drug dealing too. When he did come to faith, it was through brokenness, in prison, through the prayers of his mother. It wasn’t an intellectual decision: he reports his conversion as happening first, then it sort of occurred to him that he should give up drugs, and lastly, his heart already awash with the holy spirit, it dawned on him that his lifestyle was also under God’s say. Yuan never says that he doesn’t feel gay impulses anymore or that he has heterosexual feelings. He isn’t “happily married now with five kids.” Although I haven’t read him further to check, it seems his natural sexual orientation hasn’t changed much. But the most powerful thing that he said in the final chapter was, “I realized God doesn’t call us to heterosexuality. He calls us to holy sexuality.”

Augustine and Yuan brought me to a new understanding of Jesus’ words in Matthew 19:10-12:

The disciples said to him, “If such is the case of a man with his wife, it is better not to marry.” But he said to them, “Not everyone can receive this saying, but only those to whom it is given. For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by men, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Let the one who is able to receive this receive it.”

Before I had eschewed the application of this passage to sexual orientation because I had heard it very poorly done by alleged Christians who used it as license for homosexual lifestyle. But that’s not the spirit. Eunuchs don’t have sex. The point is that people abstain from a sexually active lifestyle for various reasons. Perhaps Augustine is one who “made himself a eunuch for the sake of the kingdom of heaven.” Perhaps Yuan is one who has “been so from birth.” (Here I think it unnecessary to split hairs between nature and nurture. My doctor friend Paul assured me that there is no “gay gene” and actually laughed at me for asking. The point being that the feelings or orientation is not expressly willed. And we must agree that this is often the case with those who encounter sexual impulses.)

This passage, together with that confounding one in 1 Corinthians 7 in which Paul recommends celibacy to marriage, seem to make it clear that sexual activity should not control the Christian, or even be assumed as a right or taken for granted. It is granted only to those “to whom it is given”. Christianity doesn’t elevate those who are married (in fact, perhaps the opposite). God ordains marriage as a holy institution between a man and a woman, but there is nothing about marriage or even the orientation capacity to enter it that is of substance in the eternal kingdom. You are not less or more based on your marriage status or sexual orientation, as long as that sexuality is submitted to him and sanctified by him.

The issue with gay rights is the gay agenda, not the people, because the agenda is an ideology that elevates the right to a lifestyle over the message of Christ, that we must lose our life to find it again in him. Sexuality is a smokescreen. It just happens to be a huge part of how humans are wired, and thus a litmus to the heart, but like every single fiber of our heart and every synapse of our mind, it must be buried with Christ in death, until it is raised with him. What part of us will we withhold from God? We will always withhold when his spirit has not overcome us, and we will never withhold when it has.

Thus the essential issue worth chasing, the issue to which all issues return, is an issue of the heart, the love struggle between man and God, the Gospel. In short, I have decided to make my life’s voice more about the gospel and less about issues like gay rights. Of course there is a place for engagement with culture and for articulating the Christian response to things. Yet I am encouraged by the memory that we and our kingdom are not of this world, and that the way to make social change is to champion this one simple message, Christ crucified, and let it wreak havoc on every other sphere.

On the terms “Merry Christmas” and “Happy Holidays”

A lot of people in Christian circles, including me until two weeks ago, grumble about the fact that the term “Christmas” is disappearing from signs, ads, and cultural vernacular, being replaced with vague terms like “the holidays”. However, I recently had a thought that stopped my grumblings: We should appreciate it when people outside the Church replace “Christmas” with “holidays”. Let me explain.

The Christmas season is a Christian holy time remembered by those who follow Christ and honor his birth. However, as an American cultural entity it has increasingly been reduced to a generic holiday—reindeer, Santa, snowmen, snowflakes, Christmas cookies, mistletoe, sleigh bells jingling, Christmas trees, presents. If you’re lucky, some angels and shiny stars that vaguely resemble something from the Bible story. But when someone who is not a Christian celebrates this stuff, he is ripping off the holy, turning the temple of God into a den of “happy feelings”. I went to one of those drive-through Christmas lights shows with my in-laws last week, and there was a big lights display saying “Celebrate our Differences!” with Hanukah, Kwanza, and Christmas icons. Celebrating our differences is not celebrating Christmas. How many times do you see those signs that spell out “Peace on Earth” in ornate typography preceded by the words “Glory to God in the Highest”, which is part of the original quote? In separation, do they not become words of “‘peace, peace’, when there is no peace”? My point is that the secular version of Christmas isn’t of value to the kingdom of God, because generic tidings of comfort and joy do nothing but bolster man’s faith in his own goodness—it is THE tidings of comfort and joy, the message of which the Church is the steward, communicated in full, that are holy. Outside of that message, the aura of Christmas is a distraction at best.

You would rightly ask, doesn’t a cultural celebration of Christmas help weak or “cultural” Christians to get closer to God? Isn’t it better to have a culture where you can occasionally see nativities amidst the holiday gunk? Yes, but the celebration is good to the extent that it comes from the church, not from the culture. Let nativities be put in the front yards of Christians who are often afraid to be seen as Christians, as a step of faith aided and energized by the special gravity of the holy season, rather than as a way to be “traditional” or because it makes the rest of their Christmas lights feel somehow more righteous. And for the family whose minivan sees the nativity while driving around to look at Christmas lights, it is of spiritual value only inasmuch as Dad or Mom explains its real meaning and lifts it up as ultimate. To misunderstand the nativity, or to explain it only partially, lumping it in as just another icon of the “season of good will” alongside warm-hearted Scrooges and Grinches and miracles on 34^th Street, is to put a muzzle on the power of the nativity and the good news that it means. And we should not expect our “culture” to fully understand the message of the Incarnation nor preach it rightly—that is the job of the Church.

So let “Merry Christmas” be said by those who really mean it, and as for those who hesitate to say it, preferring “Happy Holidays”—those who do not identify with Christianity, or who lay claim to it in sentiment yet deny its power and render it neither exclusivity nor authority—let them be welcome to refer to their generic celebration of human virtue or family ties in generic terms. In fact, I regard it as a sign of respect for Christmas that people are no longer willing to refer to the generic celebration by that name. We who believe in the true meaning of Christmas must observe it in a sacred way that brings its full weight to our hearts and the hearts of those who watch us observe it, so that it will be made evidently more than and distinct from a winter break or time off or a time to see relatives or to give gifts and charity—as the holy day of the birth of Christ our Lord.

Marriage is a social institution

“What right do members of society have to enforce a particular view of marriage on other members of society?” This is one of the essential questions raised by Nate Dellinger in this thoughtful article. I’m going to write a post shortly to the gay community, apologizing for any miscommunicated hate. I don’t hate them, I love them with Christ’s love (or at least aspire to). However, in this post I will show that the thoughtful gay-community-loving Christian can still and should still simultaneously disagree with their being married under the laws of our country. If that’s impossible, tell me how after you’ve followed this train of thought:

The issue is the definition of marriage.

The role of government is to uphold the individual rights of citizens. If some members of society say, “Only we get cookies,” the Bill of Rights says, “No, we all share the cookies.” The homosexual community appeals to the government that they are being treated unfairly, and their right of equality is being violated. However, the homosexual marriage debate is not ultimately about rights—it is about the definition of marriage. Here’s why: if we assume that “marriage” is something that only characterizes the union of a man and a woman, then two men do not have the right of marriage, so no right is being withheld from them. However, if marriage happens between any two consenting adults, then I would be the first to say that their rights are being deprived. Thus the debate is one of definitions, not of rights, because our definitions define our rights.

At this point, Nate and many of my fellow Christians affirm that the Biblical God exists and that marriage is truly only the union between man and woman. However, they ask, “What right does the government have to enforce this view on others?” By way of clarification, the government is not the real issue, per se. The law of the land has neither authority nor ability to affect society’s presuppositions; it simply reflects them. Our democratic government was ingeniously designed to resist a “mind of its own”, an independent will—rather, it is just the mouth of the people to govern themselves. The U.S. government simply formalizes and protects the “marriage” that society recognizes. Therefore, the question quickly becomes “What right do members of society have to enforce a particular view of marriage on other members of society?” My answer is that members of society have not only the right, but the responsibility, to respectfully yet wholeheartedly advocate for the definition of marriage that they espouse, because marriage is a social matter, and they are members of society. I have four points.

1. Marriage is a social institution.

This foundational part of humanity is not just between the two individuals. As newlyweds admit when they say “you marry the family,” marriages are not made in vacuums. Marriage is a social construct in which two members of a society not only grant privileged status to each other, but are granted a privileged and protected status by their community. The benefits include laws protecting tax benefits, property rights, adoption and childrearing rights, medical decisions, legal action against adultery, etc. And above all these, they receive the dignity of public approval and affirmation. Is a marriage that is not recognized by anyone but the couple really a marriage? If you answer yes, I bet you are appealing to some sort of “in the eyes of God” argument (which is unavailable to a pro-gay perspective); otherwise, what is different from simply living together out of wedlock? There is a significant part of the essence of marriage that is intertwined with, defined by, and protected by the larger context of people surrounding that marriage, including you, me, and that guy over there.

It is these social facets of marriage that the gay community is asking for. Of course no one has the right to interfere with two people’s relationship, but they gay community is not asking to be allowed to have a relationship (they already have that)—they are asking for equal treatment in the public sphere, equal adoption laws, equal tax privileges, the dignity of society’s approval. All of those things are precisely the parts of marriage that have to do with society.

Nate compares withholding marriage from some individuals to making laws forbidding people to have extramarital sex, get drunk, etc., but that’s not the right comparison. The comparison would be granting tax breaks or special rights to people because they have had sex, or because they have gotten drunk a lot. I don’t believe we have such laws. It’s one thing to avoid taking legal action toward a potentially destructive private behavior; it’s another thing to recognize such a behavior as an institution which society honors with privileges and rights.

2. Marriage is human, not just Christian.

Nate draws a line between several of the Ten Commandments that seem to be a part of natural law (“You shall not kill” etc.) and those which seem to be only for Israel, therefore not necessarily for America (“You shall have no other gods before me”). He says that if we are not willing to force the Mosaic law onto our citizens, neither should we be willing to force a definition of marriage on them. However, how we treat marriage and how we treat the laws of the Old Testament are two different things.

Why? Marriage was created not under the Mosaic covenant, but under the perfect natural order of the Garden of Eden (Genesis 1-3). There are three things that God gives man before his Fall: life, language and marriage. Marriage is profoundly linked to what it means to be human. Marriage should be treated differently from later moral covenants because it, unlike them, has applied to all of us since the beginning. (Most Bible scholars release New Covenant believers from the laws of the Mosaic covenant anyway.) Romans 1 and Matthew 19 further support the point that the Bible regards marriage as a part of the God-created natural order.

If one doesn’t accept the Bible as authority, we can still tell from a brief glance at history that marriage is a core part of being human. Virtually every society, civilization, and people group that has ever existed has practiced marriage. Granted, there are some varying details, such as polygamy, but it’s clear that marriages are the core building blocks of human culture, both biologically (we all came from a man and a woman’s union) and culturally (we are all profoundly influenced by the home environment in which we were raised). Marriage is not a convention, it is a pervasive facet of humanity. Can you show me any culture that doesn’t have some form of marriage? (Odd short-lived commune experiments do not count.)

3. Society inevitably holds some definition of marriage.

Since marriage is social institution, society inevitably does enforce a view of it. Men cannot marry trees. Take a game of baseball for example: say the umpire yells “Strike!” on a high ball and the batter asks him, “Why did you give me a strike, Ump? It was too high.” The umpire replies, “Oh, I don’t look at whether the ball is inside the strike zone, I just shout out calls.” Is he really umpiring? Neither can society declare something to be a marriage without having some view of what that means. The question, therefore, is not “Does society have the right to enforce a view of marriage?” but “Since society by definition enforces a view of marriage, is this society enforcing a view of marriage in line with its true definition or not?” Is the cultural umpire of the United States calling marriage pitches accurately?

4 .We are (part of) society.

There is no neutral gear here—some set of standards will guide our country. We have the privilege and duty as members of society to take part in directing our course. The most beautiful truth of our free country is that, as citizen, I have a right and responsibility to speak up about what I think marriage should be. Society is the sum of its members. Society is not “them,” it’s “us.” We the people! Each person must contribute his/her voice and vote to shape the nation as he/she thinks it ought to be. Collectively, our voices become the will of the people. This is the beauty of America, the freedom that has been fought for since the Magna Carta. This means that gay rights activists are justified in calling all of us to the definition of marriage they think our society should have, and the same is true for heterosexual marriage activists.

There you have it. The train of thought in summary: The right for gays to marry is about the definition of marriage. The definition of marriage is the business of every member of society, because marriage is a social convention common to all humans. Society must have some definition of marriage because marriage is upheld and, in a sense, created by society’s consent. The definition that society has for marriage is the sum of the views of its members. And society’s members include you and me. Therefore, what right do we have to publicly fight for the definitions underlying the foundation of our society? I ask instead, what right do we have not to?

Gender in the Bible

What exactly defines one’s gender and sexuality? There are a lot of things I would consider masculine or feminine, that aren’t associated the same way in other cultures. More importantly, what is the part beneath the cultural variability that matters to God? How does one’s sexual orientation please or displease God? Here are a few scriptures that discuss them overtly, interestingly the same ones usually examined when studying marriage (I bet the passages below are the most quoted at weddings). These verses, however, show that God is quite invested in the distinction between male and female.

Genesis 1:27–28: “God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.”

Genesis 2:23–24. When the woman is created from his side, the man exclaims: “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.” Therefore, a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.”

Matthew 19:4-6: Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female and said, “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh”? So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.

Ephesians 5: 24-32: Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands. 25 Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her. . . . 31 “Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” 32 This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church.

We are made, male and female, “in God’s image.” We are designed to “become one flesh” and never separated. And this mystery, Paul says, has reflected Christ and the church since the beginning of Creation. In the mingling of a man and woman we get a picture of God’s relationship to us. What it means to be masculine, essentially, is to reflect the relationship that Christ has to the Church. Conversely, femininity is reflecting the role that the Church plays in its relationship to Christ. Gender roles are not about how much hair you have and where. They are not about whether women can wear pants or men can wear skirts (think of the Scots). We can’t hang our hat on any one cultural standard. Fulfilling these roles might look quite different between situations or cultures. (I take it the women chopped wood among the native Americans.) But there is something less specific, but much more profound, real, and significant to the male/female dichotomy. There is a duality at the core of the nature of humanity, and God says he created it so that we would get a clue about what it’s like to relate to him. From the beginning, God designed masculinity and femininity.

But we live in the aftermath of the Great Corruption that occurred after the divine definitions of gender given in Genesis 1 and 2. Our perceptions and intuitions of God’s order are distorted or forgotten (and where they are remembered, resented). Our hearts are governed by passions fixed on objects they were never intended for, because we have lost sight of the Great One who, in being our chief passion, aligns all the rest. Homosexuality is not disease, but a symptom. The disease is that the world groans in an unnatural state of rebellion against God. Our feelings deceive us. In this rebel state our hearts are drawn toward things they should not desire, and repulsed by things they should. To those who say that we should accept gays the way they are, I ask if they gave the same philosophy to the victims of Hurricane Katrina. “That’s just the way the weather cycles go. We have to embrace them.” If it is true that our world is not as it once was — as it should be — then could human sexuality not be part of that which was changed for the worse?

Am I willing to submit every aspect of my current natural self to Christ so that he could do in me a divine work of transformation? Do I cling to my passions and inclinations as my personal property? Am I willing to trust him that his plan for sexuality is the best? Or do I believe that, because I am one way now, that must God’s best for me? But God loves us too much to leave us as we are.

“Yet the call is not only to prostration and awe; it is to a reflection of the Divine life, a creaturely participation in the Divine attributes which is far beyond our present desires. We are bidden to ‘put on Christ,’ to become like God. That is, whether we like it or not, God intends to give us what we need, not what we now think we want. Once more, we are embarrassed by the intolerable compliment, by too much love, not too little.” — C.S. Lewis

Redemption by literature

The following is excerpted from Tony Rawson’s summary of a talk by Richard Rorty, which can be read here. Rorty, although unnecessarily being wary of redemptive truth, accurately identifies its distinct import into culture, and traces the movement whereby Modernist redemptive truth is giving way to the Postmodern disintegration of metanarrative into mere narrative, indeed, as many narratives as their are people.

[Redemptive Truth] brings a feeling of self-fulfilment. This is the sort of truth that Rorty regards as suspect and potentially harmful. He expresses it in this way “I shall use the term redemptive truth for a set of beliefs which would end, once and for all, the process of reflection on what to do with ourselves. Redemptive truth would not consist of theories about how things interact causally, but instead would fulfil the need that religion and philosophy has attempted to satisfy. This is the need to fit everything – every thing, person, event, idea and poem – into a single context that will somehow reveal itself as natural, destined and unique”…..

Rorty’s version of the history of Western philosophy he says that intellectuals in the West have, since the Renaissance, passed through three stages. In addition, that these three stages have been moving us ever closer to self-reliance.

Stage one: Redemption by Religion. The hope for redemption through entering into a new relation to a supremely powerful non-human person. Belief – as in belief in the articles of a creed – may be only incidental to such a relationship.

Rorty sees the transition from a religious culture to a philosophical culture beginning with, “the revival of Platonism in the renaissance, the period in which humanists began asking the same questions about Christian monotheism that Socrates had asked about Hesiod’s pantheon”. In other words, one should ask not whether one’s actions were pleasing to the Gods, but rather which gods held the correct views about what ought to be done.

Stage two: Redemption by Philosophy. This being through the acquisition of a set of beliefs that represent things as they really are. To agree with Socrates that there is a set of beliefs which is both susceptible of rational justification and such as to take rightful precedence over every other consideration in determining what to do with ones life.

Rorty would also claim that it is a mistake to look to science for redemption. That science has a function in improving our lives by providing us with better technology and that other than this, science books should be read as narrative along with all other works.

Stage three: Redemption by Literature. For members of the literary culture, redemption is to be achieved by getting in touch with the present limits of the human imagination. The literary culture is always in search of novelty rather than trying to escape from the temporal to the eternal.

In Rorty’s words, “the sort of person that I am calling a literary intellectual thinks that a life that is not lived close to the present limits of the human imagination is not worth living. For the Socratic idea of self-examination and self-knowledge, the literary intellectual substitutes the idea of enlarging the self by becoming acquainted with still more ways of being human.

For the religious idea that a certain book or tradition might connect you up with a supremely powerful or supremely loveable non-human person, the literary intellectual substitutes the Bloomian thought that the more books you read, the more ways of being human you have considered, the more human you become – the less tempted by dreams of an escape from time and chance, the more convinced that we humans have nothing to rely on save one another”.

What Redemption by Literature has right: It’s an epic story, not a scientific or philosophical “figuring out” of the world, that redeems us.
What Redemption by Literature needs: The right story.

Dear Katy Perry

Dear Katy Perry,

I really like your music. I mean the sound of it. It’s great for jumping around in one’s room or blasting in your car. It’s very catchy and it has good beats and good harmonies.

But. I cannot listen to most of your music because your are vulgar and indecent. Your lyrics are lamentably lascivious, lecherous, libertine, libidinous, licentious, loose, lustful, and lewd. You are always talking about having sex with guys and getting drunk and how they’re the best things ever.

I don’t agree – I’ve tried using sexual pleasure to satisfy me and it failed me and hurt me. I don’t appreciate you trying to get me to go back there and wallow in it again. It’s hard enough without your encouragement. So I am forced to change the station when I hear you come on the radio, and say goodbye to the awesome beat.

I’m told you started out as a Christian artist but went Pop because that’s where the money was. If that’s true, it’s quite a shame. (Check out Matthew 13, the Parable of the Sower, and put yourself in one of those categories.)

In any case, I will pray for you, because I know what does truly satisfy – a relationship with God through Jesus, the rescuer of your soul. I think it would be phenomenal if you turned to him and cast your hopes onto him – you’ve got a lot of reach and you could be a powerful influence for good. May the Lord grant your eyes to be opened to see him as the beautiful fountain he is.

Sincerely,

Ben Taylor

Love like battle armor

Here’s a wake-up call for me: I’m a humble grad student, but having kids is less than a decade away. In
In the car with my brother last week, I tried to argue why it would be okay to put my kids through public school, you know, do things the “normal way.” We didn’t reach a clean conclusion, and I’m not saying public schools are good or bad. But by the end of the conversation, I admit my bro had me convinced of one thing: I have to ensure that my children are influenced by Christians (including their parents) more than non-Christian friends, teachers, and role models. I don’t know exactly what that will look like, but it’s my responsibility to find out.

I want to redefine “sheltered.” The former generation often protected the upbringing of their children by cloistering them in Christian schools, churches, etc. I say the new generation can (and even should) be “in the world,” operating as salt and light in normal secular contexts. However, it’s simple fact: you become like those you spend time with and those you look up to. My kids will become like those who give them the most time, attention, and affirmation. If I’m not proactive about it, his friend Greg and the science teacher Mr. Kim will shape him the most.

I’m not a fan of being “sheltered,” at least in the way often associated with homeschoolers (you know, bare-footed spelling-bee champions who are downright weird). I suggest a new concept of “shelter” – not a cloister from culture, but bands of relationship that surround you. I want to give my children something more like battle armor than a fortress. Friends from church, a loving family, mentors and teachers, all who share in our beliefs. “Beliefs are based on relationships” (Josh McDowell). Wrapped in those caring relationships, like chain mail, my children will be better armed to withstand worldly influences.

We must be the primary influences on our children. Pre-school and day-care and babysitters and summer camps and “go-play-with-your-friends” won’t cut it these days. The challenge lies before us, and we must rise to meet it: we must be committed to love our children in the face of a hypercommitted society where sitting down for a family meal is a big event.

I’ve got to invest the time necessary to influence my children’s upbringing, to find out how to successfully “raise up my children in the way they should go” in a postmodern melting pot.

So to me and my young adult friends who are going to be parents sooner that we think: do we know what we believe, and what we want our children to believe? Are we ready? The next generation will soon be upon us.