Relocating To Elfland

I recently listened to an interview with Kenda Creasy Dean on the Mars Hill Audio Journal. Dean is a professor at Princeton Seminary, served as a researcher with the National Study of Youth and Religion, and has recently written a book (based on her work with the NSYR) titled Almost Christian: What the Faith of Our Teenagers is Telling the American Church. Here are her opening few lines from the interview: “I think one of the things that is really tricky, particularly to convey to parents, and to congregations as well, is that if you are trying to form your kids to be Christians, it’s not going to fit them very well for American culture. And actually, it’s probably going to deform them for some of the things that we value as a society. And nobody wants to deform their kids – everybody wants their kids to fit in, and to be able to do well.”

This is a call to discipleship that many Christian parents simply won’t embrace. They want their kids to have everything that’s valuable by the standards of North American culture – comfortable affluence, popularity, sex appeal, social experience, all the toys and perks and bells and whistles – and they hope their kids will somehow also want to be in church and keep their virginity as long as possible. The idea that following Jesus might deform their children from the standpoint of cultural values, that maybe their kids won’t fit right in and succeed in all the paths their peers are treading . . . it’s unthinkable. Jesus wouldn’t require such a thing.

Having grown up in separatist Christianity, I’m sensitive to the problem of Christians making themselves “weird” for weirdness’ sake. There’s no problem, for example, with Christians being comfortably affluent – for some, it’s their calling. For every one of us, not to work hard in order to have for purposes of enjoyment and generosity is simple disobedience. But anyone who thinks a life fully oriented to the glory of God won’t make you look weird by North American standards is asleep to the cost of Christian discipleship. Christian faithfulness doesn’t fit in. Get over it.