Christian Values Cannot Save Anyone
Tuesday, September 11, 2012
A recent
letter to columnist Carolyn Hax of The Washington Post seemed
straightforward enough. “I am a stay-at-home mother of four who has tried to
raise my family under the same strong Christian values that I grew up with,”
the woman writes. “Therefore I was shocked when my oldest daughter, ‘Emily,’
suddenly announced she had ‘given up believing in God’ and decided to ‘come
out’ as an atheist.”
The idea of a
16-year-old atheist in the house would be enough to alarm any Christian parent,
and rightly so. The thought that a secular advice columnist for The
Washington Post might be the source of help seems very odd, but
desperation can surely lead a parent to seek help almost anywhere.
You usually
get what you expect from an advice columnist like this — therapeutic counsel based
in a secular worldview and a deep commitment to personal autonomy. Carolyn Hax
responds to this mother with an admonition to respect the integrity of her
daughter’s declaration of non-belief. She adds, “Parents can and should teach
their beliefs and values, but when a would-be disciple stops believing, it’s
not a ‘decision’ or ‘choice’ to ‘reject’ church or family or tradition or
virtue or whatever else has hitched a cultural ride with faith.”
That is patent
nonsense, of course. Declarations of adolescent unbelief often are exactly what
Hax argues they are not: rejections of “church or family or tradition or
virtue.” Hax does offer some legitimate insights, suggesting that honesty is to
be preferred to dishonesty and that such adolescent statements are often
indications of a phase of intellectual questioning or just trying on a
personality for style.
Hax then tells
this distraught mother that she “didn’t throw out what my childhood, including
my church, taught me; I still apply what I believe in. I just apply it to a
secular life.” In other words, Hax asserts that she maintains many of the
values she learned as a child in church, and simply applies these values now to
a secular life.
“How can I
help my daughter see that she is making a serious mistake with her life if she
chooses to reject her God and her faith?,” the mother asks. Hax tells the
mother to accept the daughter’s atheism and get over her “disappointment that
she isn’t turning out just as you envisioned.”
What else
would you expect a secular columnist who operates from a secular worldview to
say?
The real
problem does not lie with Carolyn Hax’s answer, however, but with the mother’s
question. The problem appears at the onset, when the mother states that she has
“tried to raise my family under the same strong Christian values that I grew up
with.”
Christian
values are the problem. Hell will be filled with people who were avidly
committed to Christian values. Christian values cannot save anyone and never
will. The gospel of Jesus Christ is not a Christian value, and a comfortability
with Christian values can blind sinners to their need for the gospel.
This one
sentence may not accurately communicate this mother’s understanding, but it
appears to be perfectly consistent with the larger context of her question and
the source of the advice she sought.
Parents who
raise their children with nothing more than Christian values should not be
surprised when their children abandon those values. If the child or young
person does not have a firm commitment to Christ and to the truth of the
Christian faith, values will have no binding authority, and we should not
expect that they would. Most of our neighbors have some commitment to Christian
values, but what they desperately need is salvation from their sins. This does
not come by Christian values, no matter how fervently held. Salvation comes
only by the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Human beings
are natural-born moralists, and moralism is the most potent of all the false
gospels. The language of “values” is the language of moralism and cultural
Protestantism — what the Germans called Kulturprotestantismus. This is
the religion that produces cultural Christians, and cultural Christianity soon
dissipates into atheism, agnosticism, and other forms of non-belief. Cultural
Christianity is the great denomination of moralism, and far too many church
folk fail to recognize that their own religion is only cultural Christianity —
not the genuine Christian faith.
The language
of values is all that remains when the substance of belief disappears.
Tragically, many churches seem to perpetuate their existence by values, long
after they abandon the faith.
We should not
pray for Christian morality to disappear or for Christian values to evaporate.
We should not pray to live in Sodom or in Vanity Fair. But a culture marked
even by Christian values is in desperate need of evangelism, and that
evangelism requires the knowledge that Christian values and the gospel of Jesus
Christ are not the same thing.
I pray that
this young woman and her mother find common hope and confidence in the
salvation that comes only through Christ — not by Christian values. Otherwise,
we are facing far more than a young woman “making a serious mistake with her
life.” We are talking about what matters for eternity. Christian values cannot
save anyone.
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