Parents – including most Christian parents – no longer raise their children. Culture does, most significantly through the internet. One mother has made the comment “I didn't know that when I gave my 13 year-old daughter a mobile phone I might as well have given her an injection of heroin.” As a nation we have willingly submitted our minds to electronic devices that now shape our thinking and provide endless entertainment.
A 2004 Pew Research piece in the US showed that 60 percent of Americans were opposed to same-sex marriage. Today that number is in decline, with only 40 percent opposed. Why the change? Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman observed that the Apple iPhone was released in 2004, with social-media apps Facebook and Twitter also rolled out that year. Not long after that, Google bought YouTube and launched their Android operating system. While over at Amazon, they launched their Kindle e-reader in 2007. There were more than one billion people in the world accessing the internet. Consequently, many people were influenced by what they were reading and seeing on these new technologies that beamed not only into their lounge rooms, but everywhere they went. In short, technology has facilitated cultural change more quickly than anyone could have imagined.
The mobile phone in a teenager's hand is doing more to shape their world-view than one hour of Sunday School or the admonitions of parents. We are failing to pass our faith on to the next generation because they are captives to the culture – social media, their peers and the indoctrination by public schools. Parents clothe their children, feed them and send them to school, but the hearts of their kids are being stolen and moulded by a world that many of us don't understand. Parents are bewildered when their children come home from school saying they believe they are not the gender they were 'assigned' at birth. According to today's culture, you are whatever you feel you are. Some children go by a different gender at school than they do at home. A Christian teacher wondered how he could navigate his principal's orders that when parents came for their parent/teacher interview they shouldn't be told that their biologically male child was identifying as one of the opposite gender while at school. To the distress of parents, more and more children are now coming home and telling their parents that they are gay or transgender.
Nowhere do we see the work of Satan as clearly as we do in the sexualisation of children. It destroys their identity, confuses their gender and creates unresolved guilt and self-hatred. Jesus warned: ….whosoever shall receive one such little child in my name receives me: but whosoever shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea. (Matthew 18:5-6).
Peter Hitchens, in his book The Rage Against God, writes that the youth movement in Nazi Germany and Communist Russia were startlingly similar. Any ideological or revolutionary State must always alienate the young from their pre-revolutionary parents if it hopes to survive into future generations. Peter should know because as a correspondent in Moscow he saw firsthand how communism operated. As for Nazi Germany, Hitler was right: “He who owns the youth owns the future.” Through laws and coercion, the education of youth in many Western nations is gradually being taken out of the hands of parents and placed in the hands of secular educators. One comment pertaining to this is as follows: “We have to break through our private idea that kids belong to their parents or that kids belong to their families, and recognise that kids belong to whole communities. And in order for children to belong to whole communities it's necessary that they be indoctrinated with certain core beliefs about the world in general and sexuality in particular.”
The goal of the secularists is clear. “Attack any form of decency, sacredness or normal sexual relations, confuse the children by awakening sexual desires reserved for adults and utterly destroy any concept of the traditional family. Encourage the children to have multiple sexual experiences, and in the process reap the consequences: more abortions, more anti-religious bigotry and, more importantly, more broken homes. The more children born out of wedlock, the more susceptible they are to being shaped according to Marxist principles. Sell the new curriculum as 'seeking respect for all forms of sexuality'. Sell it as 'coming to full maturity in sexual matters'. Sell it as 'human flourishing' – not sexual oppression. Above all, sell it! Call all those who oppose these measures bigots, haters and right-wing religious fanatics.”
In Martin Luther's day schools were under the control of a Christian culture, but even in those times Luther feared for the children. “I am much afraid that the universities will prove to be the great gates of hell, unless they diligently labour in explaining the Holy Scriptures and engraving them in the hearts of youth.”
Consider this scenario. A teenage boy decides he is actually a girl and is given hormone therapy to make the transition, even going on to have body-altering surgery that can cost well over $100,000. This 'girl' grows up and is now a 'woman'. Suppose a man (perhaps your son) falls in love with this 'woman' who has the DNA of a man. Is your son attracted to a man or a woman? If they decide to marry they will not be able to have children together, and who will pay the rising costs of those hormones that artificially keep this biological male looking like a female? This is progress!? In 1958 Justice Earl Warren spoke of the evolving standards of decency. The implication is that when it comes to morality – including sexual matters – change is progress, but progress in the wrong direction is not something to celebrate when it goes against the natural order of creation, or even the well-established facts of science. Whoever would have imagined that to be truly “woke” one would have to believe that men give birth to babies, or that it is fair for a woman to be required to compete in sports with biological males who identify as females?
We must return to the Creation account to remind ourselves that God created only two genders: male and female. Without a belief in God as Creator, there is little hope in making sense of our lives and the roles we are intended to have in marriage and the family. The great enemy of the radical transgender movement is science. Biological realities are stubborn, and no amount of human tampering can change those realities. Do we have the courage to stand against this assault on our young people, or will the bullies win the battle for the next generation?