Parents ‘outsource’ children’s spiritual development to kids’ detriment, evangelical researcher says

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An evangelical Christian researcher says parents fail to transmit values to their children because busyness drives them to hire “experts” to do what Mom and Dad should.

As a result, many children miss out on developing a biblical worldview, said George Barna, who leads the Cultural Research Center at Arizona Christian University in Glendale, Arizona. A key marker of the deficit is that more than 90% of parents say they don’t have a plan for their child’s spiritual development.

“You can’t give what you don’t have,” Mr. Barna said in a telephone interview.

“We fooled around for the last four decades,” he said. “And now we’re doing what Galatians 6 tells us, we’re reaping what we’ve sown.”

He noted that children begin to develop a worldview — a way of making sense of life and its issues — between 15 and 18 months. By 13 years old, that perspective is largely in place, he said.

Mr. Barna summarized his observations to mark the release of a new book, “Raising Spiritual Champions: Nurturing Your Child’s Heart, Mind and Soul,” by Arizona Christian University Press with Fedd Books. He said his research revealed that a worldview locked in by age 13 generally stays with a person throughout their adult lives unless a major crisis triggers a reconsideration.

He said his research revealed that a mere 2% of parents with children under 13 possess a “biblical worldview,” defined as using principles and commands in the Bible to shape “ideas about all dimensions of life and eternity.” He said 94% of the parents he studied embraced “a disparate, irreconcilable collection of beliefs” he called syncretism.

“Worldview is the thing that determines every choice that every person makes every moment of every day,” Mr. Barna said. “When you look at all of those major socio-political issues, they’re the result of bad choices.”

He said a “worldview crisis” and not issues of crime, economics or immigration are at the heart of “the demise of American society.”

The question of why parents are willing to “outsource” such a key responsibility “goes back to the mindset of the parents,” the evangelical researcher said. “They’ve got limited time, limited resources, limited energy. So they prioritize and when they establish their priorities, spirituality is not among them.”

Mr. Barna said most adults do not attend church regularly, further fueling the problem.

“They’re not disciples. And therefore, they’re not willing to invest a lot in making sure that their children become disciples,” he said.

Due to the lack of proper spiritual shepherding, he said, “only 1% of preteen children possess a biblical worldview.” More than a third of those entering adolescence — 38% — believe there is a God who is “the all-knowing, all-powerful Creator.”

Nearly half of teens are what Mr. Barna called “don’ts,” people who don’t know if there is a God, don’t believe in His existence or “don’t care one way or the other.”

Despite New Testament accounts, 61% of the youngest teens either believe Jesus Christ sinned while he was on earth or “hold open the possibility” that he did, the research shows.

Mr. Barna’s research also revealed that 90% of teens believe moral truth “is always relative to the individual” and that there are no absolute, objective truths.

Amid these declines in biblical thinking, Mr. Barna said he’s optimistic that even a small percentage of “sold out” Christians can reverse the negative trends.

“When God dramatically transforms a culture, he does so through a remnant of His followers,” he said. “[God] only needs a few people who are sold out and are going to live fervently and energetically and with urgency to do his work. I have every confidence that he’ll do that in America as well.”