A version of this story appeared in the Higher Ground newsletter from The Washington Times. Click here to receive Higher Ground delivered directly to your inbox each Sunday.
A veteran evangelical researcher said he would give American Christians a “C-” grade at best for promoting their faith, and urged parents to prioritize raising their children as disciples of Jesus, screening their social media use and engaging them in serious conversations about faith.
Arts and media entertainment influence the worldview of children more strongly than parents and teachers, said pollster George Barna, who has tracked religious trends in the U.S. for decades.
“Every day, [children are] absorbing messages based on Marxism, postmodernism, secular humanism, moralistic therapeutic Deism, Eastern mysticism,” he said.
“When I talk about mediating or moralizing the media, what that means is you need to know what they’re being exposed to … so that you can then discuss it with them,” Mr. Barna told Washington Times and Higher Ground columnist Billy Hallowell in a wide-ranging video interview.
Mr. Barna, an evangelical pastor who heads the Cultural Research Center at Arizona Christian University, said that the percentage of U.S. adults identifying as Christian has dropped from about 90% half a century ago to “the mid-60s” in recent years.
Church attendance has fallen by more than half over the same period, from 80% attending at least one service monthly to less than a third today, and he noted that the number of Americans who don’t believe or know that God exists has risen.
“They’re not connecting with God, they’re not connecting with churches, they’re not connecting with the Scriptures — so it’s like, where’d the class go?” Mr. Barna added.
Mr. Barna attributed that to an uptick in Christian parents “outsourcing” their roles to tutors, coaches, pastors and other adults.
“I think a large part of it goes back to the fact that parents got really busy,” Mr. Barna said, noting that children form their worldview by age 13.
Mr. Hallowell, a digital TV host and interviewer for additional outlets such as Faithwire and CBN News, suggested that parents have been too quick to trust others to form their children’s beliefs.
“We’re in such a chaotic culture, you don’t even know who you can really trust anymore — even in terms of certain youth groups and organizations that, you know, are no longer maybe where they should be on a lot of the key issues that are important to helping build this sort of worldview up,” Mr. Hallowell said.
The nearly 30-minute conversation included questions from Christian parents that Mr. Hallowell shared.
In response to one parent who asked what to do to raise children “loving God and loving others” in a hostile culture, Mr. Barna said there was nothing they could do to guarantee that.
According to the pollster, Christian parents hoping to pass on their faith should model the social media use they expect of their children, and discuss what they’re consuming.
Building a solid relationship with children requires parents to invest “a lot of time and energy [in] constant conversation,” he said.
He said that conversation should be a dialogue “where you’re not telling a child what to believe all the time, but you’re asking them their ideas, their thoughts.”
In his final question, Mr. Hallowell asked Mr. Barna what keeps him from getting discouraged by recent trends.
Mr. Barna said God had told him, “it’s not in your hands … Just do what I’ve asked you to do.”
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