If I Had It To Do Over Again
by Robert Benne
Director, Center for Religion and Society, Roanoke College
Salem, Virginia

Part of the Web companion guide to Our Calling in Education: A Lutheran Study

I. 

At the sixtieth wedding anniversary of my parents we children and grandchildren pulled out all the stops.  We wined and dined them at a nice restaurant and then regaled them with toasts, tributes and happy stories.  Glasses were raised as often as compliments were offered.  It was a grand occasion.  At the end of the festivities we looked expectantly to the parents to see what response they might have.  We no doubt secretly wanted to be complimented by them as lavishly as they had by us.  But we had overestimated our ability to make them respond as we wished.  They looked at each other and Dad—as usual—took the lead.  Yes, he said, things have worked out pretty well…”None of you are in jail!”  With that flash of Nebraska understatement attention was redirected to where it belonged—on them. 

To continue the understatement, things have worked out pretty well with our four children; none of them are in jail.  In fact, two of our children are married happily with homes and children of their own.  Both families participate in church life at what one could call a moderate level.  The appearance of children in their lives did the trick.  They began connecting with the church.

The two younger are repeating the trajectory of the older two.  They are not hostile to the church but they rarely go.  High holidays are sure things but ordinary Sundays are not their cup of tea.  Neither is married yet so the magic of marriage and family has not had its chance to work up to this point.

All of them are really nice kids.  They are affectionate and loyal.  Two have very solid marriages and are wonderful parents.  It is clear that our extended family life means a lot to them.  My three sons are avid athletes and sports fans, which leads me to the uneasy suspicion that those values were the really serious ones in my life and I communicated them particularly well.  But in spite of such misgivings, I think it safe to say that most of our cherished values have been transmitted at a fairly profound level.  The two younger sons are finding their way into the world with varying degrees of difficulty.  We are deeply grateful that things have turned out so well.

But I wonder about the depth of their religious values, which for my wife and me were the most important ones to communicate.  Their religious values seem to be somewhat peripheral to the “important” and “pressing” things in life.  Though brought up surrounded by a myriad of Christian practices—prayer, devotions, church-going, hospitality, symbols, “sacramental” meals, religious conversation—they do not seem to practice them themselves.  Christian faith and life seem like one more option or preference in their lives that they have not ranked all that highly.  I wonder if they are looking at the world through Christian eyes and I wonder if they are self-consciously living out the Christian virtues of faith, love and hope.

It could be, of course, that their faith is stronger and more central than I think.  It could be that as life unfolds their maturity in the faith will grow.  Their Christian faith may become more comprehensive, central and unsurpassable.  But I worry about both the present and the future.  And while I don’t accept full responsibility for the status of their religious convictions, I do accept some and often wonder what I would do differently if I had it to do over again.

II.

One thing I would do differently would be to adapt a more accurate—and disturbing—assessment of the power and pervasivity of the cultural changes that were going on in my children’s growing up years—the 70s and the 80s.  Of course I was aware of the wrenching nature of cultural change in the 60s.  As a young professor, I was an enthusiastic participant in those changes.  Later, I reached a much more ambivalent estimation of those times.  But the changes initiated by the 60s continued in the 70s and 80s.  Further, even deeper trends than the 60s—whose dynamics were in many cases only symptomatic of those deeper trends—continue to shape our society.  Those deeper changes are shaped by vast economic and political transitions that seem beyond the control of great nations, let alone ordinary citizens.

Without going into further detail about these vast changes, we can talk about some of their effects on the culture in which our children are growing up.  It was Daniel Bell who first noticed the division between the imperatives of the economic and social spheres.  In his Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism he argued that the economic sphere demanded disciplined utilitarian work while the social sphere encouraged hedonistic self-expression.  He thought these “cultures” were contradictory and would bring trouble in the years ahead.  Robert Bellah, in Habits of the Heart, picked up similar signals when he suggested that two new life-styles—utilitarian individualism and expressive individualism—were fast overtaking the older traditions of biblical and republican virtue.  The former was a calculating approach to life that instrumentalized all other values for the sake of personal success, particularly in the economic sphere.  The latter was something of a romantic revolt against the former.  Expressive individualism valued the spontaneous expression of internal states, the more individualized and intense the better.  In its milder forms expressive individualism encouraged people to “be who they are” and “to follow their bliss.”  More extreme versions enjoined them to “make their lives an artistic statement,” to become a roman candle shot off in the dark.

Bellah suggested that the “new” American culture actually combines the two.  People can be utilitarian individualists in their daytime or workaday lives and expressive individualists in their leisure.  A culture of affluence allows both to occur in the same people.  Further, Bellah argues, this new American culture enshrines “freedom” or “autonomy” as the primary regulative or formal value.  “Freedom” means the absence of any internal or external restraints on the choices one makes to realize one’s individual success or to express oneself.  This is a distinctly truncated version of freedom in comparison to the older traditions of biblical and republican virtue, which had substantive notions about what freedom was for.  Both forms of individualism are corrosive of traditions as well as the narratives and practices that constitute traditions.  In both sorts of individualism persons have weak connections to others and make up their own narratives, if they have any at all.

David Brooks carries this sort of analysis further in his Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There.  In that book Brooks argues that the emerging affluent classes combine a bohemian life style with the bourgeois values of discipline, achievement and common sense.  In other words, they express their “subversive and off-beat desires” within measured bounds and within a basically achievement-oriented way of life.  Bohemianism has been tempered by bourgeois imperatives but bourgeois values have been spiced with “counter-cultural” flavors.  In Bellah’s language, utilitarian individualism has combined with expressive individualism under the imperial sway of the individual’s free choice.

It seems to me that this is the cultural world into which our children are born and nurtured.  It envelopes them in the pop culture of the media, in school, in their peer culture and especially in the exploding electronic culture that will increasingly be the shaper of our young..  This culture is profoundly anti-traditional and anti-institutional.  It produces free, ”sovereign” individuals who make up their own identities and projects based upon self-generated choices.  For such persons strong commitments to demanding realities outside themselves are unlikely.  They make partial commitments limited by their own utilitarian or expressive choices.  Rigorous moral or religious duties are scarcely thinkable.  Such persons can easily say, as my daughter once told me:  “But, Dad, we’re very spiritual even though we aren’t religious.”

If this characterizes the emerging culture in which children are nurtured, the challenge before us as Christians is a serious one, far more serious than I thought when we were bringing up our children.  The pressures of this culture are toward forming unencumbered selves—free from strong connections to anything outside themselves, including the Christian community, its ethos and world-view.  Perhaps we see such masses of persons already appearing in the radically secularized countries of Europe.  We are shielded from such a scene for the moment by the extensive but rather superficial participation of most Americans in religious communities.

Thus, I do not think we were intentional and intensive enough in the Christian formation of our children, especially given the strength of the cultural challenge that surrounded them and us. If I had it to do over again I would try to give them a stronger formation in the faith.  I say “try” because I, too, am infected with the modern commitment to freedom from too strenuous commitments.  I enjoy my freedom to keep my evenings free.  Perhaps even now I wouldn’t be ready for the kind of training in Christian virtue that it would take to counteract the pushes and pulls of this culture.  To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, “Christianity would be fine but it leaves too few free evenings.”  (He said that about socialism.)

III.

One of the things that I would do—had I the chance to do things over—would indeed cut down on my free evenings.  I would engage my children in more intensive and extended conversation about the religious values we wanted to transmit.  In retrospect, we relied far too much on the power of example.  We both felt that if we modeled good religious values that our kids would emulate them.  So we engaged in many Christian practices in our home that we simply thought would catch on with them.  Prayer is a good example.  We prayed at meals and had daily devotions before dinner.  We would sing a hymn and end with prayer.  But we never talked about the meaning of prayer and the necessity for it in the Christian life.  Moreover, we never instructed them in how and what to pray.  We didn’t insist that they pray openly in the family rituals.  I could give many other examples, the most important of which is continuing conversations about the meaning and relevance of our Christian convictions.  We thought that all of this would simply be absorbed in their lives by osmosis.  But now we see that it didn’t work that way.  Much more time for intensive engagement has to be devoted in the formation of the young.

Another thing we would consider had we another chance would be getting rid of TV.  While we restricted the time and controlled the content of what our children could watch, there is little doubt that popular American culture became powerfully influential in their lives through TV.  We adults watched the news and high quality programs on public TV.  (To be honest, I must admit a passion for sports on TV!)  But again, except for sports, our example went nowhere.  The kids sneaked in MTV, as well as a lot of awful network TV, when we weren’t looking.  Moreover, three out of  four of our children took up the rock music fads of their day.  While we listened to fine music, the example didn’t take.  And we had constant debates—you might call them running skirmishes—about the loudness and content of what they were listening to.  By and large, then, TV and pop music did a lot to undermine what we were trying to instill.  One of our children, particularly, fell under the spell of a rock band that indirectly cost him many painful setbacks in life.  Banishing the TV would also have given much more time for the kind of intensive engagement I mentioned above.

Given another chance, I believe we would seek out serious Christian schools for the elementary and high school education of our kids.  In the 60s and 70s we were urban idealists committed to the public school system of Chicago and kept our kids in public schools while many of my colleagues headed for the privates.  We were also pressed enough economically to think twice about private schools.  But knowing what I do now, I would argue for sending them to nearby Catholic schools, or perhaps Lutheran or Christian Reformed schools farther away. What I would look for in those schools, besides compassionate and qualified teaching in a small scale, disciplined setting, would be serious attention to learning the Bible and basic Christian doctrine, to a Christian ethos supported by worship according to the Christian year, and to a public affirmation of Christian identity and mission in the world.  At the secondary level I would hope to see some critical grappling from a Christian point of view with secular claims to knowledge and with contemporary culture.

Coupled with Christian schools, we would seek out Lutheran churches with good youth ministry programs, no matter how far away they were.  (There go more free evenings!)  We were altogether too committed to joining our local parish, which, in our case, had virtually no youth ministry to speak of.  Indeed, it boasted of being an adult parish while it played down family and youth concerns.  At any rate, I am firmly convinced that in this challenging cultural situation, families need a lot of help from the local parish in the formation of the young.  Families can’t do it alone.  But neither can church or church school do it alone.  Formation must be a cooperative effort.  I would want a disciplined confirmation program and a supportive youth ministry.  The kids needed first-rate instruction in the faith and a Christian peer group to counter the view of the world they were getting in the media and the various pathologies they were encountering in their peer culture.  When we needed help the local parish couldn’t or wouldn’t give it.  If I had it to do over again, I would look beyond our local parish.

Perhaps with a stronger formation in the faith, our children might have gone to more intensively Christian colleges than they did.  Two went to a Lutheran college and two went to two different Methodist schools.  The Lutheran college was not a total wash; the kids at least had the opportunity to take courses in the Christian tradition and to participate in worship and devotional life.  They did little of that though they received a pretty decent liberal arts education in a supportive environment.  The Methodist schools were pretty much a total wash.  There was scarcely a whiff of Christianity in them, let alone of Wesleyanism.  That is not to say there weren’t serious Christians at those Methodist schools.  There indeed were, but they kept their convictions private.  The public face of the school was pervasively secular.  A straight course in Christian thought could not be found.  The chaplain would not utter the name of Christ at the school’s baccalaureate service because it wouldn’t be “inclusive.”

With a stronger formation perhaps they would have been more inclined to go to a Valparaiso or a St. Olaf, which are more forthrightly and aggressively Christian than the colleges they attended.  It would then have been far more likely that their faith would have been deepened and enriched.  That is, such might have happened if they would have already been predisposed to follow the Christian path.  If they would have gone to Valparaiso or St. Olaf with their relatively weak formation, they may well have fallen though the cracks as so many young people do.  But it would have been nice to have had them go to such schools.  It may have been even better to have gone to a Calvin or a Wheaton, where there is not so much chance of falling through the cracks.  But, at any rate, with another chance at forming our children, we might have made them more disposed to go to more full-blooded Christian schools than they did.

What conclusions to make of this intensely personal story?  First, do not think I have given up hope for my children or that they are hostile to the faith.  I pray daily that the Holy Spirit will enflame their faith even as I pray that it will enflame mine.  The Holy Spirit will work in its own time and place and manner.  It was and is not up to me to make my children Christian.  That gift comes from a power beyond me.

But this set of reflections does suggest that Christians must become a more distinct people again, a counter-cultural people that drinks from its own wells of biblical and traditional wisdom.  Our own culture no longer supports the Christian agenda; we cannot rely on it to do our work for us.  Christians must become more intense in their efforts at formation.  We must spend our free evenings to teach our young about the faith, about prayer and worship, about love and compassion, about obedience to the commands of God, about the Christian worldview, and thereby draw them into a grand moving train whose head is Christ.  In aiming for this, we do not reject nor deny the world.  Indeed, if we are formed properly as Christians we will add much salt and leaven to a world that needs those ingredients badly.