Your Kids and Evolution

I’ve continued to receive interesting feedback on some of my columns recently. I want to comment on those to keep up the dialogue and I will do so in my next post later this week. After that, my family and I will be on a much needed vacation for ten days.

My latest “read” is Chuck Colson’s, “How Now Shall We Live?” an apologetic book that shows how Christians can stand up against opposing worldviews. In one of the early chapters, Colson uses a fictional story to tell how a daughter of church going parents has strayed from God, particularly because her head has been filled in school with the philosophy of naturalism, that the earth just happened, that nature has always been around and that humans are relegated to the level of animals because of evolutionary processes. Colson points out that this belief in evolution is all around us and begins its indoctrination process to even our smallest of children through displays at Disney World, science museums, movies, children’s books, and of course, the public school classroom starting, in my children’s experience, in third grade.

As I’m reading this chapter, my daughters are both at our church building preparing for their major roles in Vacation Bible School this week. They are young ladies who not only believe in Christ but contend for their faith. When they got home, I asked them to read this particular chapter, then I asked, “You’ve been exposed to this stuff too. What made you come out on the other side?” I guess I was fishing for, “What else besides your parents blowing gaskets on a regular basis about telltale lines in “Land Before Time” and in children’s museums influenced you to stick with a Christian worldview?”

One daughter’s answer hit me hard with its powerful message. “Before we were ever exposed to teaching about evolution, we were taught thoroughly that God and His creation are absolutely true.”

Her comment made me think of something I’d read years ago about how Christian parents in Communist Russia had to thoroughly ground their children in the foundations of Christianity before they ever hit first grade so that they could survive the indoctrination of the Communist run public schools. This is the tactic that we now must use in our postmodern society that espouses a hostile worldview to Christianity.

(Forgive me, I’m about to get strong here!) This is exactly why it is so utterly important for us to not lag in our Christian preschool programs. Preschool programs are not a babysitting time. We also need to be careful to not overbalance the life application section of the lesson as is the current trend. It’s not a waste to spend our teaching time telling children those bible stories over and over again about “God made the world” and “Jesus loves you.” When we do this we are laying down that critical foundation of truth that our kids will need to have before they are ever exposed to evolution thought in the elementary school.

And it can’t happen just in the Sunday School classroom once a week. Parents need to tell those bible stories over and over. Why? Not because they are stories of faith only. It is because they are truth and they establish God as the author of absolute truth.