Keith over at Sign of Jonah has a very intriguing article entitled Suffer The Little Children where he talks about why we shouldn’t send our children into spiritual warfare.
Keith raises genuine and legitimate concerns as he expresses his concern over places like Jesus Camp and hyper charismatic / dominionistic Christian schools that ‘train and send’ out children into warfare. Keith makes good sense when he talks about leaders and armies made up of adults and not children. I did not realize until I read his article that the Salem Witch Hunts “began from the spiritual experiences and accusations of girls who were nine and eleven.”
I’ll tell everyone why the emphasis is on the children today. The church has realized that they have ‘lost’ the ‘baby buster’ generation (PTL scandal, churches who spent money on big buildings but operated youth ministries on shoestring budgets, and other reasons) and therefore is going out in full-frontal assault to reach the children (whose parents are the Baby Busters). Also, there is this “christian conspiracy’ mindset that if Christian parents have lots of children and immerse them in the christian subculture, when these kids reach voting age, they will ‘vote out’ the evil liberal secular humanist ‘demoncrats’ and usher in the ‘Christian nation’ that was supposed to be forever lost on June 17, 1963 and eradicate ‘the big black cloud’ that is supposed to be over America.
Instead of fulfilling a Great Commission, instead of trusting in a sovereign and omnipotent God, and instead of relying on God’s divine providence, we pragmatically grab at formulamatic straws hoping that this will be the one that ’saves the masses’. In other words, we want a big bang evangelism where everyone gets saved at once.
The Bible states in Proverbs 22:6
to ‘Train up a child in the way he should go, And when he is old he will not depart from it”. When we expose a child to excessive Spiritual Warfare and tell them to go fight, are we really exploiting the children to do the stuff that adult parents are supposed to be responsible for anyhow? I really wonder?.
Also, there is this “christian conspiracy’ mindset that if Christian parents have lots of children and immerse them in the christian subculture, when these kids reach voting age, they will ‘vote out’ the evil liberal secular humanist ‘demoncrats’ and usher in the ‘Christian nation’ that was supposed to be forever lost on June 17, 1963 and eradicate ‘the big black cloud’ that is supposed to be over America.
Totem, isn’t that the same as the Eurabian Mullah who said “ISLAM WILL CONQUER EUROPE! OUR WEAPONS WILL BE OUR WOMBS!”?
And what is the significance of “June 17, 1963″? I’m pretty up on the First 1960s (”That Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow” we threw away to screw in the mud at Woodstock), and I don’t remember anything about that particular date. Most bloggers date “Sauron finally getting the Ring” — the counterculture reaching critical mass, replacing the First 1960s with THE SIXTIES (TM) — at around 1968.
Oh, and for “Ushering in a Christian Nation”, have you ever read the climax of Volume 12 of Left Behind? Where Christ has returned (more as a cosmic Kim Jong-Il than Aragorn Elessar), the cosmos is made new, Aslan’s land spreads out ever onward and upward (at least as far as L&J can imagine, which isn’t much), and the main character, in his perfected Resurrection body, can only think of “Now we can make America into a REAL Christian Nation”?
Excerpt at:
http://www.leftbehind.com/channelbooks.asp?pageid=1320
Full Slacktivist commentary and comment thread on the above excerpt at:
http://slacktivist.typepad.com/slacktivist/2007/03/lb_the_missing_.html
See if you can guess which comments are mine.
You are absolutely right. The article at Sign of Jonah is wodnerful. I urge everyone to read it. IN fact I am going to talk about it on my blog too I think.