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What? Me Worry?
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© by John Fischer for CCM Magazine, April, 2000 issue. |
“It’s about your kids, Marty!” yells Doc Brown over the roar of his DeLorean time machine at the end of the first episode of Back to the Future. “We’ve got to do something about your kids!”
Well, from an ad I heard recently on Christian radio, something is being done about the kids. Christian music and Christian radio are doing it by providing a safe place for music, free from the blaring assault of unchecked rock and rap on commercial radio. The ad ran something like: “Music you don’t have to worry about your kids listening to.”
Couple that with another ad that ran on the same station claiming good music makes good people, which makes good citizens, which makes a better America, and you have new moral and social grounds for the existence of Christian music. Words like clean, safe and wholesome come to mind.
As popular culture grows more blatantly decadent, we undoubtedly will see this new justification for Christian music becoming more and more commonplace—music, not as a message-bearer to the world as much as a safe haven from it. This rationale represents a trend much wider than just music. In the last few years we have been experiencing a general exodus of Christians from the world’s culture and institutions to a safer alternative Christian culture sporting its own growing market and infrastructure.
I’ve been speaking regularly in Christian colleges across the country for more than 20 years, and I’ve noticed this trend manifested in the attitudes and habits of current students. It was not even five years ago that Christian colleges were struggling for new admissions. Not so now. Children who have been educated through the popular Christian and home school boom of the ’80s and ’90s are now reaching college age. It stands to reason that parents who have used the Christian school to protect their kids from the world would look to the Christian college as their last bastion of defense. As a result, Christian colleges have never enjoyed such success. Many have to turn away qualified students because of tapped space and resources. Every college I’ve visited in the last two years has an expansion building project going on, already funded, or close to it. Other institutions, that 10 years ago were on their last breath, are now thriving.
Many of the students I meet in these colleges listen to nothing but Christian music. These are the same kids that struggle with the required, college-level reading and the social and scientific theories they have to study in order to gain a liberal arts degree. Their former schools steered clear of controversial literature and modern theories due to the questionable content, language and unbiblical philosophies they contain. And yet even Christian colleges realize a transition to the wider world is imminent, and these cultural realities must be faced while the support of a Christian environment can guide the de-construction and reconstruction of faith that is necessary for personal ownership.
I consistently find the students of these colleges to be far more conservative in their cultural views than their teachers. Faculty members tell me they worry greatly over their students’ ability to carry a zealous, but untested faith into the larger, unforgiving culture. Would that there were a Christian world these students could graduate into, but there is not.
Maybe we should worry. I do. I worry about my kids and what they listen to, and what they see, and what they do. I worry because I can’t do anything about it. In reality even a Christian college can’t keep the world at bay. Every one of these colleges has its share of cynics and rebels, who, for all we know, might be using all their cynical energy to fight for the faith were they out in a non-Christian environment.
Ultimately, there’s only one thing that can keep me, and any Christian parent, from worrying about our kids. It’s the presence of the Holy Spirit in their lives, not a Christian radio station or a Christian college. Not that there aren’t good reasons for both. Just not this one.
In other words, there is reason to question the appeal of: “music you don’t have to worry about….” I worry that “not to worry” could be dangerous. Maybe it isn’t such a bad thing to worry about the music, if by worrying we mean to be aware of it and not just absorb it—to think about it, evaluate it, learn to understand its deeper messages and the philosophies of life out of which it speaks, and make conscious choices in relationship to it. (And, by the way, who’s to say Christian music is necessarily culturally and theologically worry-free?)
Children who have been protected from the world will sooner or later be defenseless in it. Those who have been grappling with the world and its ideas and developing a discriminating eye and ear may have a better chance of not only making it in the world with their faith whole, but of understanding that world, and having something to offer it once they get there.
“Music you don’t have to worry about your kids listening to?” I don’t know. I think I’d worry about that even more.
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