If We Were Doing Our Job in the Church
… then perhaps nobody could say this:
But if four years of college undo 18 years of parenting and religious affiliation, perhaps the faith community’s tenuous hold is the problem, not the particular place outside its bubble where that hold evaporates. Consider the believers we’ve seen in history. With all the persecution that Judaism and Christianity have survived over the centuries, an argument that sites America’s Top 310 Colleges as a first order adversary is hard to credit…. (Source: The Atlantic: Why College Students and Losing Their Religion)
I agree. We tend to blame society for the fact that our young people tend to leave the church around college age. I suspect we’d like to believe that because it means we’re not to blame. We’ve done our best, but it’s just the society. What can we do?
Well, we could try living our faith and inviting our kids to live it with us, rather than trying to work in just the right amount of indoctrination. We could try examining the kinds of ideas they’ll hear about in college, rather than repeating cliches and working our way through bland, unchallenging curriculum. (Can anyone say, “Bring your Bibles?”)
we probably do needto update our faith but there is a fairly aggressive anti traditonal religion bias at universities. science explains everything with no need for God watsoever. it’s understandable that students wishing to be integrated into that armosphere would feel some pressure t give up their faith. I did.
Christian scholars are slowly moving away from supernatural theism and into a more panentheism, God within nature and natural law kind of religion.
the church will probably follow this trend if we survive.
In my view we need to address and discuss those issues with high school age young people. Part of living my faith, for me, is being open about the difficulties and the reasons why I’m a believer in spite of (or because of) historical and scientific knowledge.
That children leave the faith of the parents when they go away to college is not, I do not believe, indicative of what happens in college. Rather, once they go to college, they are somewhat independent of their parents and thus able to do now what they probably wanted to do many years ago, that is, quit going to church.
What I have noticed also is that once a young person is confirmed, the odds are very likely that they will stop attending church unless they absolutely can’t get out of it. I don’t know if there are numbers to back this up but I am willing to bet that the parents feel that having reached confirmation all is complete as far as the church goes.
As you said, if we tried living our faith, they wouldn’t leave it or maybe not as quickly.
I doubt there’s any guarantee in any case, but living it and being honest sound like good ideas in any case.