Growing up, our automotive radio was all the time tuned to 90.7, American Family Radio. We lived about quarter-hour from the closest town, so we spent a number of time driving. If we were lucky, Mr. Whittaker’s warm, grandfatherly voice invited us to affix him for Adventures in Odyssey. But more often, we’d take heed to alarmed (and alarming) talks from Tim Wildmon, president of the American Family Association, or Focus on the Family’s James Dobson, each warning my parents of all of the ways the world was coming for us.
Their message was convincing, and never just for my parents. I’d plug my ears when Ms. Barbie, my warm-hearted school bus driver who wore denim cutoffs and had brightly lacquered nails, sometimes tuned her portable radio to 96.9 KISS FM, “Amarillo’s #1 Hit Music Station,” and began singing along to secular music on the 45-minute ride to high school. I felt palpable relief after I as a substitute climbed aboard to the sound of Garth Brooks crooning about his friends in low places. After all, everyone in Texas knows God has a soft spot for country.
One of the strangest things about being raised in that embattled mindset was how my side seemed embarrassed of what we had to supply the broader world. We said we knew the reality about God and humanity, but I got the distinct impression that we were removed from confident that the reality could hold its own on the market.
My elders and the voices they heeded on the radio appeared to take a defensive posture, self-conscious about our intractable fuddy-duddy-ness and anxious that these commitments would cost us. It felt like they weren’t sure we could ever compete on a level field. We had God on our side, but they’d MTV. Our only option was to circle the wagons and pray we could outlast the storm.
Seeing this attitude within the adults in my life wasn’t reassuring. Instead, it made me wonder: If we knew the reality, why were we so afraid? Now I see the youthful ignorance in that sort of binary query, but I earnestly wrestled with it in those days, and as I entered maturity, I sought to grow to be a Christian who didn’t meet the world with fear, defensiveness, and accusations.
Perhaps it’s this history that leaves me fascinated each time I encounter individuals who aren’t Christians and yet independently arrive at truths Christians know—especially truths about easy methods to order healthy, secure families for the flourishing and well-being of youngsters. It helps me do not forget that although Christians have at times advanced these principles poorly, sometimes doing more harm than good each inside and outdoors the church, the principles are true. We do have something to supply the world. And relatively than circling up in fear or anger, we should always make that offering in love, showing how an actual and living God changes hearts, heals relationships, and restores lives.
I’ve most recently had such an encounter while reading Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class by Rob Henderson, released last month. Born to a drug-addicted mother and passed through ten different foster families before finally being adopted, Henderson chronicles a lifetime of chaos. Reading about his movement from a childhood of upheaval to a distinguished military profession, undergraduate education at Yale, and a PhD from Cambridge feels a bit like riding river rapids on a flimsy inner tube.
Rather than simply recounting his tragic and shocking experiences, though, Henderson moves from the actual to the universal with an expertise few memoirists have. With his own life for example, he invites readers—especially those that dismiss traditional family systems as outdated, unnecessary, or worse—to show a critical eye on their very own assumptions. Upward mobility (together with trappings like elite education) shouldn’t be a goal in and of itself, he argues. But it may be a byproduct of the pursuit of more vital things: “family, stability, and emotional security for youngsters.”
Though he’s not making this argument in the identical way Dobson or former US vp Dan Quayle did within the Nineteen Nineties, Henderson arrives at a really similar conclusion: that a stable, nurturing, two-parent family confers considerable advantage to children. He also argues that the progressive elite’s public dismissal of traditional family values doesn’t reflect the fact of their personal lives, and he has the information to back it up. By 2005, Henderson writes, “85 percent of affluent families were still intact, but for working-class families the figure had plummeted to 30 percent.” Similarly, just 10 percent of scholars at Cornell University were raised by divorced parents, compared with a national divorce rate of 40 percent.
Henderson calls the claim that marriage doesn’t matter a “luxury belief,” a term he coined and defines in Troubled as “ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class at little cost, while often inflicting costs on the lower classes.” If you’re like me, once Henderson helps you see one luxury belief, you begin to see them in all places: “Defund the police” is a slogan which may earn you some street cred as a student at an Ivy League protest, nevertheless it’s not a policymany residents of fragile communities want. Arguing that monogamy is passé might get you on the New York Times bestseller list, nevertheless it’s not the way you get a table filled with generations of family on Thanksgiving Day.
Henderson doesn’t root his arguments in a non secular framework, nevertheless it’s easy to see the connection to a Christian ethos. While making a secular case for the importance of healthy families, his story and research also illustrate one other value that finds ample expression in our faith: the transformative and redemptive power of community.
For Henderson, much of that community got here outside the context of family, although not through a church. And though he doesn’t follow that trail far, it seems obvious that our culture needs these other sources for social stability and support. This is where the local church can shine—if we elect to open our circle of wagons.
Churches could be a profound force for good in families each in ministry and in mission. While there are obviously broken families each inside and outdoors the church, research shows regular churchgoers “marry more and divorce less” than their peers, and an “energetic faith appears to be connected in a roundabout way with more stable marriages.” And local churches are well positioned to care for teenagers living within the rubble of broken families and the fallout of others’ destructive decisions. God still places the lonely in families (Ps. 68:6), in spite of everything, and sometimes that appears like showing up for Grandparents’ Day or the father-daughter dance for a baby who sits within the pew in front of you.
Another latest memoir, Between Two Trailers, by J. Dana Trent, gestures at that latter sense. Trent tells stories from a childhood with drug-dealing, mentally ailing parents. The book reads like a fever dream—fantastical and outlandish, yet heartbreakingly vivid and real. Between Two Trailers never makes clear how Trent got here out on the opposite side, but little moments of grounding offer at the very least among the answer: summers along with her paternal grandparents and clan, and Wednesday night dinners and youth group at a church that became Trent’s refuge. The church was, she reflects, “an environment where people were required by sacred law to be nice to me.”
My childhood was marked by chaos and instability too. But unlike the memoirists’ families, my parents remained plugged into churches, and after I reflect on those years, I feel of all of the people in those faithful Christian communities who looked past the drama and difficulties that got here with my family and welcomed us.
Pastor Mike, Ms. Katy, Rex, the Longs, the Browns—not to say myriad aunts, uncles, grandparents, and teachers. The list of names, too long for me to finish, points to the grace of God who all the time kept my head above turbulent waters. His people—among the exact same individuals who were nervous about all of the ways the world was coming for us children—were my life raft.
These days, my very own children have a decidedly more mundane life. There’s not a number of drama or chaos, apart from after I attempt to get them off the bed and right into a pew on a sleepy Sunday morning. But once we get to church, I do know they’re seen and known and loved. They are enveloped in a community of caring, by secure adults who fill within the gaps left by the inevitable fallibility and shortcomings my husband and I even have as parents. Even within the absence of capital-T traumas, as researchers at Harvard have found, grounding our kids in a faith community offers a “protective factor for a variety of health and well-being outcomes in early maturity.”
I feel it—and the remainder of a growing body of independent evidence that faith and the form of life it demands is tangibly good for youngsters. And why wouldn’t or not it’s if we’re following our creator? Why would we be surprised to search out an indelible connection between God and the great life?
Henderson’s book, while at times troubling, offered me an unexpected gift. Reading it helped me have a look at my messy, confusing, evangelical childhood a bit more charitably. I had way back rejected the shrill and scolding voices of conservative evangelicals shrieking in regards to the decline of family values as unhelpful and obnoxious. As it seems, they got rather a lot right, even when I still think their delivery got rather a lot incorrect (and even contributed to the coarsening and hardening of our culture).
Stories like Henderson’s and Trent’s—and even my very own—also remind me of how badly the world needs a healthy church. Amid all of the talk of deconstruction and dechurching, abuse of authority and political polarization, these stories refocus my gaze from the church within the abstract to the church where I take my children every week. They remind me of atypical, imperfect congregations of kindhearted Sunday school teachers and long-suffering children’s choir directors and patient youth volunteers.
When I listen to what’s right in front of me, I see the best way so a lot of my brothers and sisters in Christ steadily pull the awkward, the outcast, the uncomfortable, the uncertain, and the troubled into the fold.
For all of the church’s flawed messengers, the message continues to be there. It continues to be true. Despite all of the fear and outrage, the local church continues to be offering atypical faithfulness to salve the injuries of a troubled world. We still have excellent news to inform.
Carrie McKean is a West Texas–based author whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Texas Monthly magazine. Find her at carriemckean.com.
