What would cause a young adult who was raised in the church and professed Christ as Savior walk away from his faith? Increasingly, polling indicates young adults, at the least, are compartmentalizing life to such a degree that faith and day-to-day life do not intersect.

Collegiate ministers and others studied in the realities of spiritual life at home and on the university campus lay the responsibility squarely at the feet of the parents and, by extension, the church.

“I get asked this question all the time,” responded Vicki Courtney of Austin, a best-selling author and speaker whose ministry reaches preteen and teenage girls and their mothers across the country. What she has come to find in her conversations with moms is a profound lack of scriptural instruction in the home and efforts to put God’s directives into terms a teenager can assimilate.

Lance Crowell, SBTC church ministries associate, said that lack of spiritual guidance in the home is evident. “Students are not prepared for the next step,” he said.

Parents of teenagers and young adults, he added, have been parenting their children in spiritual matters much in the same way as their parents and their parents before them. He said for the past few generations’ parents often abdicated their role as spiritual leaders in their homes and left that task to “the experts”?the Sunday School teachers and youth pastors.

A generation or two ago, he said, that still produced teens and young adults who were grounded in biblical morality and good citizenship but not necessarily regenerate faith. Sixty years ago and earlier, American society was largely homogeneous?most people went to church, professed a belief in God, and held to a common moral code within society.

Essentially, Crowell said, what was taught in the church was upheld in society. If the neighbors, teachers and other authority figures could be counted on to keep little Johnny in line, there was no sense of urgency in the home to undergird the teachings of the church and Bible; it was Sunday School’s task to do the latter.

But Crowell and his peers in youth and collegiate ministry say such attitudes have created a profound spiritual lethargy and, in some instances, antipathy toward religion and, specifically, Christianity in young adults. As the role of spiritual training has remained practically unchanged in American homes, American society has been convulsing with fundamental social and spiritual shifts that have left a generation of young people with no firm ground on which to stand.

A college freshman may (or may not) be able to recite the story of Jonah. But can he explain to a secular humanist or a relativist why the story matters?

WHERE RUBBER MEETS ROAD

University of Texas at Austin professor J. Budziszewski said most cannot. He said it is all well and good that young children be taught the stories of the Bible, but if they are never taught the deeper spiritual significance of those stories, then they enter adulthood and an ever-increasingly skeptical world armed with little more than the ability to spin a good yarn.

Budziszewski, professor of philosophy and government, has written extensively on the tradition of natural law (“Written on the Heart: The Case for Natural Law”) and books like “How to Stay Christian in College,” a primer Courtney and her husband have studied with two of their children before they left home for college. Their lone high school student, Hayden, will soon begin the study, Courtney said.

Budziszewski said the atmosphere on university campuses is profoundly anti-Christian but with the exception of a few outspoken professors, not confrontational.

“It is usually much, much more subtle.”

He said what new students will find on the college campus is practical atheism as opposed to theoretical atheism. The reasoning goes like this: Because the existence of God cannot be theoretically proved or disproved, God is irrelevant and has nothing to do with the day-to-day lives of people. Students and professors steeped in such thought are then free to compartmentalize their lives, developing a moral code that does not hold them accountable to anything or anyone beyond themselves.

Christians not grounded in their faith, connected with a church, and meeting regularly with fellow believers on campus can fall into the same trap.

Evangelicals have teamed up with Catholic and Orthodox churches to declare the parameters of their relationship with an increasingly anti-Christian culture. The Manhattan Declaration states what the over 250,000 signers (between Nov. 20 and Dec. 4) consider to be a biblical interpretation of the sanctity of human life, the primacy of traditional marriage, and the inherency of religious liberty in our relationship with God. Most media outlets, including our own Dallas Morning News, totally ignored it. Some who did notice, the Los Angeles Times to name one, freaked out a bit, calling the declaration “dangerous.”

It is dangerous and the declaration’s critics are smart to notice; they are also tipping their hand. The most provocative aspect of the statement is the acknowledgement that our obligation to honor human government ends where it clashes with our obligation to obey God. Although the statement clearly and repeatedly asserts that such civil disobedience would be peaceful, with the disobedient ready to bear the legal consequences for their actions, this “threat” of forcing the state to arrest those whose consciences might be violated by our nation’s laws should be very frightening to those who believe they can pass any law they wish because they won an election. Imagine the picture of arresting 20,000 people, who’ve never before broken a law, for refusal to pay taxes that will be used for publicly funded abortions. Imagine arresting 5,000 preachers for teaching the clear message of Romans 1:26-27. Even MSNBC would have to notice that spectacle.

I say that some tip their hands when they call the declaration dangerous because this charge belies other claims that nothing that truly violates a Christian conscience would ever be forced on any American. If that is so, what is dangerous about a few paranoids saying that if such a thing ever happens, they’ll peacefully disobey? We live in a state where some parents have been handcuffed for homeschooling their children; a nation where some principals have forbidden high schoolers permission to stand around flag poles and pray before classes begin. Some Christian pharmacists, nurses, teachers, landlords, and employers, those who have already been fired, sued, or compelled, will laugh their heads off at the suggestion that it couldn’t happen here.

Those of us who have signed it have taken an intimidating step because we can easily imagine circumstances where we would have to disobey an unjust law. Such a commitment in this day is a foolish bluff. Our current congressional and executive leadership is the most extremely anti-life in the history of our country. That fact makes the clash of law and conviction likely if not also imminent.

Florida Baptist Witness Editor Jim Smith rightly notes the importance of prioritizing our convictions while we have the time to think it through. Referring to the public and theological issues that occasioned the declaration, he wrote, “These are matters eventually that no true Christian will be able to avoid. Therefore, we ought to resolve now how we will live and witness.”

On the other hand, a liberal Christian writer characterized the declaration as just another blast from the Religious Right, one that threatens civil discourse and freedom for those who hold differing opinions. I wonder if he read it or if he noticed that public discourse was never as considered and temperate as the status quo would suggest. The genuinely respectful and careful language of the statement threatens nothing but peaceful disobedience by those who can be physically confined but not spiritually compelled. No worries for those for whom only the New York Times is inerrant. They are at no risk whatever, for their gospel is rarely a stumbling block.

Saying: “Christians confess that God alone is the Lord of the conscience. Immunity from religious coercion is the cornerstone of an unconstrained conscience. No one should be compelled to embrace any religion against his will, nor should persons of faith be forbidden to worship God according to the dictates of conscience or to express freely and publicly their deeply held religious convictions. What is true for individuals applies to religious communities as well,” it is hard to seriously accuse the declaration’s signers of trying to curb the freedom of others. This appeal to religious liberty is the high point of the document.

The threat is that we might not go along quietly. When did unthinking compliance become a virtue in America? It must have happened since the civil rights movement. I’d guess it must have happened since the anti-war protests of the Bush era. Some of those protesters went to jail for what they said were their beliefs and neither the religious left nor the less religious left called them dangerous. And yet the paddy wagons of next year could be filled with church ladies, portly balding pastors in business suits, bespectacled academics, and homeschool moms in blue denim jumpers. These are people who don’t go to jail professionally. If I were a political leader, I’m not sure I’d want that on my resume.

And it’s fair to ask what alternative we who disagree might have. A half-million people, and the declaration will garner that many signatures, can’t elect a president or get the attention of the media, but it’s quite a large number of straight-laced, very solid citizens to say “We’ll go to jail if you accomplish what you’re attempting.” If 10 percent of us actually do keep the commitment we’ve made, it will be an amazing event. I first heard the prophecy of such a day while a