One of the more popular substitutes for an understanding of the Bible–a ouija board.
Consider this statement:
“Shockingly, just 4 percent of children surveyed in 2001 were considered familiar with the Bible, compared to 70 percent in 1950.”
It comes from How to Succeed in Hollywood (Without Losing Your Soul), a 2011 book by Ted Baehr, the founder and publisher of movieguide.org and chairman of the Christian Film & Television Commission, on page xxviii of the Introduction. Unfortunately, there’s so footnote, so I don’t know who did the survey or how they did it.
Near-total ignorance of the Bible would certainly explain most of the cultural trends afflicting us today, though.
This is what comes of farming out your children to strangers to be “educated.” And thinking you’ve seen to their religious education just by shipping them off to Sunday school for an hour a week–well, that doesn’t walk the dog, either.
I consider Ted Baehr a reliable source. And without a huge dose of Biblical illiteracy, I can’t even begin to explain our present cultural mish-mosh of sodomy and transgender-worship, Obamaism, the idolatry of Global Warming, Political Correctness, animal spirit guides, and all the rest.
It takes a family, not a village, to raise a child. It is up to the family–not only parents, but aunts and uncles and grandparents, too–to make a child familiar with the Bible, and to teach the child to resort to God’s Word as the ultimate authority. God is not a man, that He should lie. Without the family, there is no meaningful religious education.
Hey, our Western civilization is currently going round and round and round on its way down the drain. The Gospel can save it. Jesus Christ, the King of Kings and Lord of Lords, can save it.
But the catch is this: our civilization needs God, but God doesn’t need our civilization. He has seen them all come and go. Ours has no special dispensation. If we humble ourselves before Him, and hear Him, He will heal our land. If not…
Well, then we’ll wind up living in some other kind of civilization that maybe we won’t like so much.