Why should you, as a parent, invest in this training?

Because the operative word is “when,” not “if.”  Parents don’t have to wonder “if” their student will be challenged.  Their trust in the Lord will be challenged, especially given our current secular culture. 

These are challenges that typical church life and typical American parenting leaves them unprepared for.  According to a 2016 Pew study, most religious “nones” (those who do not identify as religious) no longer identified with any religious group due to religious skepticism.  When asked the question, answers such as “I learned about evolution when I went away to college,” or “rational thought makes religion go out the window,” or “I just realized somewhere along the line I didn’t really believe it” were common. 

Many other studies confirm this.  For instance, Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith found in his research on American young adults that those that left the faith most commonly did so due to intellectual doubt.  Most studies put the percentage between 60%-80% of young adults raised in a religious home will leave the faith soon after leaving home. 

Some might debate about what the exact percentage is or the details of the data, but the bottom line won’t change: in general, most American young adults are ill prepared for what awaits, and this often shakes their trust. 

They will be in a college class with a professor who is antagonistic to the Bible and the teachings of Jesus.  They will be living in a college culture where a sexual free-for-all attitude passes as enlightened thinking and morally progressive, while sexual restraint is seen as retrograde or even bigoted.  They will be thrown into an environment where they are assaulted with logical fallacies, including intense character attacks, rhetorical sleights of hand, and straw men masquerading as authentic Christianity. 

The assumption that enlightened and smart people throw off tradition, religion, and moral constraint as unduly binding will be presented as common sense.  The orthodoxy all around them will be that the autonomous individual, not a higher authority, ultimately determines truth.  A dogmatic relativism, where each individual does what is right in his or her own eyes, will be the moral zeitgeist of the day. 

This is the milieu in which they will be formed. 

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We could go on, but this very short partial list demonstrates the point.  This will be in the air they breathe, and to the unprepared, it will be intimidating and hard to stand against.  If they do not go to college, they will still face many of these challenges in their work lives, social media lives, and personal lives, for our culture is turning more secular. 

We live in a very tribal age, and the man or woman who wants to wisely navigate such a culture must have the tools to do so.  Overcoming all this and remaining faithful takes many things, but one essential is a strong Christian *mind.*  These tools do not grow naturally.  As mentioned before, the youth group culture that is focused more on “fun” than preparation, and the spiritual inheritance of American culture—what sociologist Christian Smith dubbed “Moral Therapeutic Deism”—is not much protection against such a culture. 

In surveys of youngsters who end up leaving the faith, the response “it just didn’t make sense to me anymore” features prominently in the overwhelming majority of times.  Young adults who went to church and youth group every week, came from solid Christian homes, and who were church youth leaders are not immune to this by any stretch. 

Something more is needed.