by Adi Schlebusch
The Son of Man indeed goes just as it is written of Him, but woe to that man by whom the Son of Man is betrayed! It would have been good for that man if he had never been born.
– Matthew 26:24
Jesus makes a fascinating claim in this passage. He not only prophecies that He will be betrayed by Judas, but adds that this sin is so immensely grievous that it would have been much better if Judas had never existed than to have to suffer the judgment awaiting him for handing over Christ to his murderers. What is often overlooked in terms of the ontological implications of what Jesus is saying, is that while everything in existence serves to glorify God and has a distinct purpose because “the Lord has made all for Himself” (Proverbs 16:4a), when it comes to those reprobates whom He predestined “for the day of doom” (Proverbs 16:4b), it would have been better for them personally to not have been born.
Scripture alludes to how heartbreaking it is when covenant children born in covenant families are caused to stumble (Matthew 18:6), and I can’t imagine that there could be many things more painful for a parent than to see their own children grow up to become apostate from the Christian faith. In a very real sense, it is better for our children not to be born than to end up suffering eternity in hell.
Thankfully, God is faithful in his promises. In Proverbs 22:6 we read: “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it.” God has providentially entrusted children to parents and designed the unique biological bond between parents and children to be the single most important attachment in all of human life. This is why psychologists have so often found that a lack of proper attachment to parents during infancy and early childhood, lie at the heart of ample psychological disorders. God’s covenantal order is so ingrained in our human nature that when the most basic covenantal human relationship—between parents and children—becomes dysfunctional, society itself starts to fall apart. God’s created order accords with his promises. As a general rule, if parents raise their children in the way of the Lord, they will remain faithful to the Lord throughout their lives. This rule is so universal, that Scripture even maintains that having faithful, Christian children is a prerequisite for becoming an elder in the church and that having an unbelieving child itself is sufficient cause for disqualifying a man from the office of elder (Titus 1:6). Being a parent is therefore not only one of the highest callings in life, but one we are to exercise in complete obedience to God, knowing that by the unmatched and unmeasurable power of the Holy Spirit working through us, Christ build his church and kingdom through our faithful and regenerate children and their children unto a thousand generations (Exodus 20:6).
Robert Lewis Dabney (1820—1898) hinted at the vitality of this most intimate covenantal relationship and the duties accompanied with it when he wrote that the education of children is
the most important business done on earth. It is the one business for which the earth exists. To it all politics, all war, all literature, all money making ought to be subordinated; and every parent especially ought to feel, every hour of the day, that next to making his own calling and election sure, this is the one end for which he is kept alive by God—this is his task on earth.[1]
One of the blessings bestowed upon us in the current age is that in no Western country, there are any legal restrictions for engaging in marriage, having children, and raising them in the ways of the Lord. Of course, this is not to say that our enemies haven't long been doing all within their power to make these covenantal duties as difficult as they possibly can by means of their oppressive taxations, usury, inflationary monetary policies, and of course by incentivizing parents to compete with the entertainment industry and the public schools. For example, in the book Thank God for Bitcoin: The Creation, Corruption and Redemption of Money (2020), the authors explain how sound money is vital to incentivizing large, healthy covenantal families:
The reason is because our society views people primarily as consumers or as problems to be solved rather than as problem solvers. This is why we may view children as liabilities who consume our wealth, rather than as assets and blessings. On a Bitcoin standard, this changes. Instead of thinking about the short-term pain of child rearing, Bitcoin frees people to have a more expansive view of time. This enables the long-term blessing of children to be more evident. A longer time horizon helps us to see children as essential contributors to the health and sustainability of the community and not as short-term financial liabilities. This will result in more stable marriages and more children.[1]
Children who become increasingly economically active within the context of the covenantal family life also tend to be less likely to become alienated from their family and upbringing as they grow up. They organically develop a love for their people, their trade, and their place.
The mainstream entertainment industry also poses a tremendous threat to the calling of covenant parents. Exposure to godless Disney and other cartoon productions means your children are being catechized by enemies of Christ who hate the Christian worldview. Even in your own living room children are alienated from the covenantal life of the family unit. Public schools effectuate the same destruction by means of not only the humanist education children receive, but by orientating children towards their peers rather than their parents, thereby disrupting the design of the familial covenantal unit.
The point is that people, never mind children, are not atomized individuals able to simply “choose their own path” as liberals and anabaptists would have us believe. While Christian parents follow their secular counterparts in repeating fatalistic mantras such as “oh, just wait until your kids get older, when they’ll be partying and being sexually active” or even seemingly innocent concepts such as the “terrible twos” or “threenagers,” the propagandists running the mainstream media and the entertainment industry certainly don’t doubt for a second that your children will end up following their ways all throughout their lives. They trust in the power of their propaganda far more than most Christians trust in God’s faithfulness to his covenantal promises through the power of his Holy Spirit.
People behave in accordance with their beliefs (James 2:14-26), and children believe what they are indoctrinated with. Now, indoctrination normally has a negative connotation in the public discourse. The contemporary Cypriot educational theorist Michalinos Zambylas, for example, defines indoctrination as “emotional coercion or manipulation [through] any form of education.”[1] But strictly speaking, indoctrination is not necessarily accompanied by manipulation, and the word itself is derived from the Latin words meaning nothing more than to teach an idea. Indoctrinating children means teaching them certain ideas and doctrines and cultivating an aversion to others as anathema. Everyone does this to children. While the mainstream media often laughably speak about “religious indoctrination” and “religious trauma” caused by indoctrination through catechism classes, nobody has put in more effort in the catechization of children through their media than the Leftists, which is really nothing but their Marxist religious institutions. It speaks volumes about the anti-Christian presuppositions of modern psychiatry that it spends so much ink on the symptoms of what is often called “religious trauma syndrome,” but completely and utterly fails to address the far greater psychological damage done by the overwhelming and never-ending propaganda and indoctrination apparatus of the government and globalist elites—something which has been greatly amplified by the lockdown fiascos of 2020 and 2021.
There is a battle raging for the hearts and minds of our covenantal children, and in this battle it is absolutely vital that we engage in active and effective indoctrination campaigns when we catechise our children in the ways of the Lord. Christians need to produce the best stories, curriculums, cartoons, films, music, and museums, all of which should serve to rhetorically appeal to our children to not only embrace, but actively live out and shamelessly promote our Christian worldview. In the process we should mock and humiliate Christ’s enemies harder than Hollywood aims to humiliate us. Following the example of David in Psalm 139, we must express not only or reverence and love for the Triune God but also our hatred of His enemies in music, art and stories that are highly entertaining to our children and also appeal to their sensibilities. One fine example of this is pastor Brian Suave’s catechism songs, which is still being produced as we speak, and which can certainly be most fruitfully employed in the righteous indoctrination of our children. The same can be said of the Christendom Homeschool Curriculum, which uses stories and narratives for the distinct purpose of cultivating a love of Christian culture and history among covenantal children. We need to actively cultivate a love and veneration for the Christian heroes of the past and the present among our children. Children are going to have role-models and idols, and if these are not going to be obedient and faithful Christian role models, they are going to be godless ones.
We must always engage in all of life—every single endeavor—with the purpose of glorifying God, and the distinct need of our time is a particular focus on reaching the hearts and minds of our children in dependence upon and in obedience to almighty God. We must use all the means at our disposal to indoctrinate our children with the idea that the true, historic Christian faith as summarized in our catechisms is far superior to whatever Leftist, Marxist, Liberal worldview with its degenerate and destructive licentiousness has to offer. Never let anything or anyone hinder you from doing all you can to indoctrinate your children harder than the Left seeks to indoctrinate them through all of their institutions and media. Indoctrinating your kids in the truth of the Christian faith is a righteous indoctrination, not only because your children have been providentially and biologically entrusted to you, but especially because unlike the indoctrination of our enemies, ours is an indoctrination in truth.
The time of simply surrendering our children to the evils of the sinful world is over. The power of all the Leftist Satanic forces combined is nothing compared to the promises of God and the power of the Holy Spirit. We are called to build a better, more glorious Christendom than our ancestors did. If we are faithful in the upbringing of our children, by not merely sheltering them from Hollywood propaganda, peer pressure, and government indoctrination, but by teaching them to be utterly disgusted by it, we can trust God to deliver on his promises. The New Christendom will be built by us and our progeny. In fact, we have every reason to expect that our children and grandchildren's generations will be more godly and more obedient to God’s Law than our own (Isaiah 2:2-4).
The author is a senior researcher at the Pactum Institute.
[1] Zembylas, M. 2021. “Rethinking political socialization in schools: The role of ‘affective indoctrination’”, Educational Philosophy and Theory 12, p. 2480.
[1] Waltchack, D. et al. 2020, Thank God for Bitcoin: The Creation, Corruption and Redemption of Money. Bitcoin and the Bible Group, 96.
[1] Robert Lewis Dabney, 1967 (1867), Discussions: Evangelical and Theological. Banner of Truth: Carlisle, PA, 691.