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Just about my favorite C.S. Lewis book is God in the Dock. It's a compilation of essays from different sources mainly on theology and ethics. I was reading one entitled "On the Transmission of Christianity" It is actually the reprint of a preface Lewis wrote to a book by B.G. Sandhurst called "How Heathen is Britain?" (London, 1946) but it sounds like it could be written today. The book is a study of a group of young men and their attitudes about God with emphasis on the impact the education system had on them.
The part that I thought was profound was this observation as to why young men of his time weren't inclined to be Christians:
If we had noticed that the young men of the present day found it harder and harder to get the right answers to sums, we should consider that this had been adequately explained the moment we discovered that schools had for some years ceased to teach arithmetic. After that discovery we should turn a deaf ear to people who offered explanations of a vaguer and larger kind - people who said that the influence of Einstein had sapped the ancestral belief in fixed numerical relations, or that gangster films had undermined the desire to get right answers, or that the evolution of consciousness was now entering on its post-arithmetical phase. When a clear and simple explanation completely covers the facts, no other explanation is in court. If the younger generation have never been told what the Christians say and never heard any arguments in defense of it, then their agnosticism or indifference is fully explained.
This simple logic cuts through all the palaver about what is wrong with the youth of today. There is no need to blame pop culture or video games for corrupting our youth if they have never been exposed to Christianity. Granted, kids should be protected from negative influences, but if they have no positive ones to begin with, then they haven't really gotten anywhere, have they? It's no wonder our society has taken the direction is has, with Christianity removed from most aspects of our public discourse and relegated to the four walls of the Church.
Our mission therefore to be salt and light requires us to be mixed up with the world, not piled up in the salt shaker.
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8 comments:
This is very interesting and so true. We risk becoming a totally
secular, non-Christian society in a couple of generations if we do not expose the children to the tenets of Christianity and somehow let them see from their parents' lives that it's a good life, worth living and worth fighting for.
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