Many Christian parents worry about passing on the faith to their children. Sadly, statistics suggest they should. In 2020, the Cultural Research Center at Arizona Christian University found that just 2% of millennials, a generation now well into adulthood, have a biblical worldview. That is the lowest of any generation since surveys on the topic began. Lifeway Research reports that two-thirds of those who attend a youth group as teenagers will drop out of church as adults.
A significant aspect of the battle for the hearts and minds of the next generation has to do with ideas. Helping students think correctly about life and the world, God and themselves would be hard enough if they weren’t facing such strong cultural headwinds. But they are. And bad ideas are like viruses. They spread from the mind to the heart and from person to person, even infecting entire populations.
Many young people today leave the faith because they lack the necessary immunity from the bad ideas of our culture. Christian parents must not only present the truth to their kids, they must find ways to immunize them against lies. To do that, we need to know which teaching methods work and which don’t.
Dr. Jeff Myers of Summit Ministries points to the work of a Yale psychology professor from the 1950s. Dr. William McGuire suggested that bad ideas behave like viruses. Specifically, the more exposure one has to bad ideas in a controlled setting, the less likely they are to fall for those ideas later.
McGuire performed a series of experiments in which he tried to convince subjects of a lie, that brushing their teeth was actually bad for them. Those with no preparation for what they were about to hear were more easily convinced to stop brushing, and those who were warned against a specific bad argument that they would hear were harder to deceive. No real surprise.