Joining us now is George Barna. This is a very familiar name to Christians. He has been He's the founder of the Barne Group, a market research firm that has specialized and looking at what is happening to our culture and to Christians in general, the intersection of faith and culture. He's been doing this
for quite a while. He's written a lot of books, and he's got a new book now talking about perhaps what we can do about some of the worst problems and maybe they're really the core issue as to the direction that our country has been going down. So I want to talk to him about that book, but also kind of get an idea of what he has seen with a front row seat since the nineteen eighties in our country. Thank you for joining us, George Barner. Thank you for joining us. George. Yeah,
thanks for having me on, David. Let's talk a little bit about that. Give people kind of we all see what is happening to our culture, this detachment for reality, this postmodernism, and all the rest of this stuff. But give us some metrics. Let's say that you would have seen as part of the Barna Group over the last few decades. Yeah, there have been a number of things that I've been tracking for about four decades. You know, one of those has to do with people's perspectives on truth.
And what we've seen is a consistent deterioration of the notion that there is absolute moral truth, that there can be such a thing as absolute moral truth. So that's a big issue because when you take that out of the equation, you've got to go somewhere to get your understanding of reality. And rather than go and search for any kind of absolutes, what we do is we turn inward. And that's what's happened in America is now rather than say that we
believe in God, basically what we do is we believe in ourselves. And so that's that's a big game changer right there as well, where we've seen a huge increase in the proportion of what I would call the don'ts, people who don't believe God exists, don't know if he exists, don't care if he exists. And you know, we're basically with our young adults, people under fifty, they represent close to a third of the population now, so that's a massive shift. We've seen a big shift in our morals, the
basis of our morals. Of course, if there's no absolute moral truth, on what basis do we determine morality? Again, it's our feelings, And so that's a big shift. And now we're at a place where most Americans are confused about most major moral issues, whether we're talking about abortion, whether we're talking about divorce, whether we're talking about homosexuality, transgenderism, basis of personal identity, all of that has seen major shifts in the last ten to
fifteen years. I would say that we're a society now that really gears itself towards trying to achieve happiness. And that's the major goal of most Americans. We want to be happy. We do what we can to ensure that our children will be happy. Like that, and then, of course you have to ask, well, why did all of these shifts take place? And so much of it is because of the influence and exposure to media, particularly
arts and entertainment media. And what I've found in the research that I've been doing is that the greatest influence on our worldview the kinds of decisions that we make comes from media influence. So whether it's movies or television, or social media or video games or whatever, media you'd choose that's having more influence than everything else combined in our lives as best I can tell, even education, you would say, yeah, even more of the Well, yeah, well
it certainly is visceral. And if people are just going to turn inward to their feelings, that's what they're going to pick up on. You know, it's kind of interesting as we look at this detachment from any idea of objective truth. It's gotten so bad that it reflects in our inability to even do or care about math or anything else like that. And you know, even our gender, our biological gender, we don't have anything that is objective.
Everything is subjective and whatever you want it to be. Even now we've got kids who are seeing up as furries. I mean, it's getting to an extreme that you know, all of my life I would have looked at this and said, this is a parody. This can't be real. It is like something out of Babylon Bee. But that's the reality that we live in
right now, isn't it. It really is. And so when you make your feelings the basis of your reality, you know, the whole game changes, And so trying to reason with people becomes exceedingly difficult because Americans are less and less willing to consider, much less accept facts. An empirical argument doesn't have much of a basis in America today. Yeah, and that's really going to tear our society apart in every regard me, how do you even do
science or engineering? It really was the understanding that there is a discoverable reality, a discoverable truth that came. We had a lot of foundational scientists who were coming from that Christian perspective, Francis Bacon and many others, Isaac Newton, we can discover God's truth. There is a reality here. Now we've taken God out of the equation, and we've taken reality out of the equation. And so it's going to affect everything. Even in our material society.
The things that people are looking at to make them happy and comfortable, those things are going to disappear as well, because everything is hinged to that. Tell us a little bit about you coined some words that some phrases in terms of looking at this spirittainment that's entertainment based there as well as a spiritual I
guess tell us little bit about that and why you coined that word. Well, there was a time a couple decades ago when there seemed to be a movement to really try to integrate faith into entertainment, particularly the Christian faith into
entertainment. And so that term is blending of spirituality and entertainment, recognizing that every entertainment vehicle conveys a worldview, and at that point in time, there seemed to be some momentum growing for the Christian excuse me, the biblical worldview being ingrained in more entertainment vehicles, particularly movies and television, but also an increasing amount of online entertainment, streamed entertainment that seems now to have diminished over
the last decade or so. That momentum that had been building up seemed to fall off. So that phrase never really picked up much momentum, just as that approached entertainment development never picked up. It could be kind of applied to what we see in some of the big megachurches that have fog machines everywhere. I always thought that the fog machine with it all the contemporary worship was kind
of a metaphor of something that was that in those churches. But you know, they tried to pursue that entertainment aspect of it and you know, it didn't work out too well. I think it is. We've had a couple of recent successes, and perhaps there will be some new movement. It's hard to win a culture war if you don't have a culture, if you don't engage to them in certain ways, and so, you know, we've had some fairly successful movies in the last couple of months. I don't know if
that's going to be a trend or not. It's too soon to tell, isn't it. I think it is. I think we'll probably always have one or two current examples of Christian based entertainment that do well because there still remains in our culture a pretty significant number people who really wrap their lives around their Christian faith. And so when those kinds of media vehicles are released, yes
they'll find that audience. But in terms of building greater attentiveness and a greater appetite for that kind of entertainment, I don't think that's been done effectively, and we're not at a point where it appears that we can sustain that right now. Yeah, it's going to be interesting because the other the standard Hollywood stuff has gotten so dark and so nihilistic that it's kind of collapsing and of
itself. It's not really entertaining anymore. And you know, with what happened with the shutdowns of movie theaters and everything, I think they've had a hard time coming back, and it's just it's kind of just feeding on itself and there's not really any creativity there. It seems like there's a real vacuum in that area. But who knows what will happen with that, which brings us to another one of the terms that you coined, sage cons. Tell us
a little bit about that. Yeah, that's an acronym for spiritually active governance. Engaged conservative Christians. Age cons represent somewhere around eight nine, maybe ten percent of the adult population in America. And these are individual rules whose lives
are driven by their Christian faith. And one of the unique characteristics about them is that they're very tuned into politics, not because they care about it, not because they have a natural inclination toward it, but because they recognize that their faith in Christ calls them to be involved in every dimension of society and to try to influence it for the cause of Christ. And so government is
just one of those arenas. But the result of that is that they not only pay more attention to news and information about politics and government, but they vote every chance they get, and they really try to understand the issues more than the average American would. And you'd say that is that increasing or decreasing?
What you've seen lately, are getting more or less sage cons. Right, it's been stable for the last five years years or so, But as we look forward and project to what's going to happen in the population, we expect that number to be on the decline unless there is some kind of an awakening, spiritual awakening that's Bible base, that takes place in America in the next decade or so. We don't see that on the horizon, but you never know when the Holy Spirit's going to bring that kind of out pouring of
faith. That's right. Yeah, that's what it's dependent upon. Now. So you're looking at you know, the sage cons. They are going to be adults, probably a bit older. But as I said, you've been doing this since the nineteen eighties and a couple of decades ago you kind of had an epiphany about what was really missing in terms of turning towards focusing on
children. Tell us a little bit about that. Yeah, Well, I've been doing a lot of research and continue to do a lot of research through the Cultural Research Center on worldview and what's There are a number of startling things I think about worldview in America, one of which is how few Americans have a biblical worldview. It's four percent among adults right now, even less among young people, in spite of the fact that sixty eight percent of Americans consider
themselves to be Christian. So there's a huge disconnect there. But a couple decades ago, as we were looking at some of the details of this, what we found is that a person's worldview begins developing between eight fifteen to eighteen months of age and thirteen years of age. At the age of thirteen,
a person's worldview is almost fully developed. Tell us a little bit before we go, tell us your definition of a worldview there so we I mean, it's kind of self explanatory, but maybe got something more specific, And then tell us what you would say a biblical worldview is? Sure, Yeah, everybody has a worldview. You need one to get through the day. As you make hundreds and hundreds of decisions every day, you need a basis on
which to make those decisions. And that's what your worldview is. It's the intellectual, emotional, and spiritual filter through which you make every choice that you make. It's the basis on which you make the decisions. So it's based on your core beliefs about the world, about yourself, about life, and all of your behaviors come from those beliefs. And so the idea here is you do what you believe. So I do research, and a lot of people tell me they believe a lot of things. But I've learned that I
can't just take that at face value. If you tell me you believe something, then I have to find some behavioral evidence that you actually do believe that, Because a lot of people say they believe a lot of things, but there's no evidence that that's the truth. You know, they act in contrast to what they say they believe. So your worldview is the conjunction of those two things, what you say you believe and what you do to prove that
you believe it. And so there are dozens of worldviews that people can choose from. One of those is what we call the biblical worldview. Now, the biblical worldview is based on biblical principles and precepts, those kinds of teachings that we get from Jesus, those kinds of principles that are laid out for us in the scriptures. And when I say only four percent of adults have a biblical worldview, that means that only four percent of adults consistently believe what
the Bible teaches and then display that in their lifestyle. Why does that matter from a Christian point of view? It matters because we've been called to be disciples of Jesus, and what that means is that we're going to be christ Like. You demonstrate your Christ's likeness through your behavior, but you've got to have Biblical beliefs in order to have those behaviors. So that's how all those
things fit together. What we find is that about ninety two percent of Americans are syncretists, and what that means is that we've chosen not a single worldview, whether it's the Biblical worldview, postmodernism, Eastern mysticism, nihilism. You know, there are many different world views to choose from. But what we do as a syncretist is we say, I don't buy any of those lockstock
and barrel. I'm just going to pick a few things that they believe that I like, they make sense to me, and I'm going to combine them
with a few beliefs from other world views as well. So, in other words, as a syncrety, you'll buy into postmodernism, you'll buy into secular humanism, you'll buy into Marxism, you'll buy into Eastern mysticsm on and on down the line, taking bits and pieces from each of those and crafting a customized worldview that makes you happy, makes you comfortable, and gets you tracks to run on. Yeah, I kind of do it o la carte, right, very much. So, Yeah, that fits in with all the
postmodernism as well. So you were talking about children and you said they start forming that worldview at what about fifteen months, just a little bit before Toddler, and then it goes up to thirteen. That's kind of interesting because so many societies have you know, looked at thirteen years old as the beginning of manhood or womanhood, you know, barmits for whatever. And that's not just in the Jewish society, it's in many many societies. At thirteen it's an
interesting, interesting age. But we see that over and over again. Yeah, and of course over the court of decades, we've had a lot of political leaders who, as they've been trying to figure out how can I stay empower for a longer period of time, have made statements about give me a child until they're seven and all rule of the world, you know, and give me a young person until they're nine and they'll be mine for life,
you know. So you've had people from Aristotle on down to Hitler and Stalin and Mao and Mussolini who have made those same kind of pronouncements for different purposes, but they've recognized the importance of childhood. The Catholic Church over the course of centuries has made similar kinds of pronouncements recognizing that importance. And that's why you have, you know, Catholic education being such an important thing in the
Catholic world. And so we've really dropped the ball on Yeah, I think we've really dropped the ball on that, you know, train up a child and the way he should go when he's older. I'm not depart from it, right, that's you know Hitler understood. Oh, it's that children don't understand that, right, I mean Christians don't understand that certly. And you
go back to the early chapters of the Bible. You go back to Deteronomy six, and you've got a classic teaching there to Jewish families about you know what, it's your responsibility, parents, to take on the education of your children. So talk to them when you have the opportunity, when you're out on the road, when you're having dinner, when you're spending free time together.
You know, write these things on your foreheads, you know, post them on your wrists, put them over your door, post the things that matter. Make sure that you're always conversing to your children about these And I would say, yeah, that's certainly something that we in the Christian community in contemporary America have dropped. Yes, yes, yeah. When we homeschool our kids, they required us to create a name for our school, and so so, well, let's call it the Parapetus Academy, because we'll do it
parapetically. You know, we'll walk along with them in the way, in the same way that Jesus would do his disciples, and we'll point out, as we're going through a life with them, the good and the bad of this and that, and try to put it in a perspective that understand as
Christians. Well, yeah, and you know, that's one of the beautiful things about homeschooling is that you get to build that relationship with your children wherein they come to trust you and you can have conversations on such a wide range of activities that both relate to academic subjects and that don't relate to academic subjects
but relate to real life. And so, as we've done our research over the past couple of years, in particular, we found that homeschool children are the ones who are most likely to grow up to have a biblical worldview.
And it's precisely because parents have the luxury, if you will, of that time spent with their children looking at every aspect of life, not just worrying about addition and subtraction, but really trying to figure out what are the important life principles that I can convey to my children, sometimes through an academic subject, sometimes not. Yes, yes, and they have sacrificed to do that, but it's that very interaction that they have with the kids that is the
true reward. So it is kind of an interesting way that this works itself out if you've got your prioriti straight. So from fifteen months to thirteen years they're establishing their worldview, and then what happens well during the teen years and
through maybe the mid twenties or so. What we find is that it's a period of time where, now that the worldview has been developed, young people are trying to figure out how to articulate it, how to implement it, how to refine it so that it works most effectively for them in any given situation. In the course of that period of time, that fifteen year period or so, they're also sometimes changing some of their worldview, beliefs and behaviors
based on the ways that they're trying to articulate and implement it. But then what we find is from the late twenties on through sometime in the sixties, typically people just accept what they've developed during those earlier years and they actually become evangelists. Most Americans, though, don't evangelize for Jesus. They evangelize for
themselves. What they're trying to do is to get other people to buy into their beliefs and behaviors, because if somebody else embraces your worldviewer elements of it, you feel better about yourself. You feel like you've proven that you got it right. And then when we get into our mid to late sixties, that then becomes the final worldview era of our life, when we sit back and examine how we did We asked the question, gee, did we get it right? Could we have done it better? And at that stage most
of us I'm in that stage. Now, you know, we're grandparents or some of my you know peers are great grandparents, and so we're thinking about, okay, with our grandchildren and great grandchildren, should we be teaching and preaching and modeling something different than we had earlier in our life because now we can see, yeah, we kind of blew it in this aspect of our worldview, we still have a chance to get it right and to pass that
on. Yeah, that's a very interesting perspective. There's four stages there. Now, your newest book, and you've written about fifty books. At your newest one, which just came out Labor Day, is raising spiritual champions, nurturing your child's heart, mind and spirit. Tell us a little bit about the book and the message that it's giving people in terms of you know,
how do you do this? Everybody's looking for how to book, but bigger, you know, a larger perspective I'm sure is what's involved in It's not just a step by step program. But tell us a little bit about that book. Well, the book is based on seven original research projects that we did across the nation trying to understand parents and churches and adolescents and teenagers. We even did a study, a content analysis study of the most popular media
that children are exposed to. The television programs they watch consistently, some of the streaming programs they consistently are exposed to, those types of things. What I was trying to do in the book was to give us an understanding of what's happening in parenting today. What does the Bible exhort us to do as parents, and how can we get closer to that biblical model of parenting given
the existing culture in which we're being called to raise our children. So it's kind of a full orb of the approach to understanding all this why because as parents, we have the primary responsibility to raise up our children and how are we supposed to raise them. We're supposed to help them to become disciples of Jesus Christ. So the book is geared toward helping parents understand what does it mean to be a disciple. How do you disciple a young person? How
do we know if we're doing that well? What are churches that are doing it well doing? Because I want to be part of that kind of church. Most churches are not doing it well, as it turns out, but we found out that there are some that are doing it properly, inappropriately and effectively. What kind of church should you look for there? And you know, ultimately, how do you know when you're hitting the ball out of the
park that's great? Give us an example of something that you see that is in contrast to what is a good practice a biblical practice versus what is a common practice with parenting well, a common parenting practice in America today I characterize as outsourcing. And as I did the research, I discovered it's not with mal and tend that parents are throwing up their hands and say, I don't
have the time and I don't have the expertise to do this. It's because they love their children so much that they're saying, I don't have the time and I don't have the expertise, So let me do the best thing I can for them, which is hire experts that I'm that I want to bring
in and let them raise my child for me. And so what we do is we bring in experts in education, tutors, we bring in experts in athletics, coaches, we bring in experts and spirituality, children's pastors, we bring in experts in various hobbies and extra curricular activities, you know, all of these experts that we hire to do what we feel I'm really not sufficiently first to know how to do it, and I'm working hard to make the money to hire these people. So i don't have the time to do it.
And I've got other interests than my children that I feel I need to engage in for some kind of self care, you know, get myself a break, lower my anxiety levels. That's why I don't have the time. So that's the way that parents are approaching it now. The biblical model is actually quite different. The Biblical model says, when you have children under the
age of thirteen, this is a season of sacrifice for you. So get used to maybe not working as many hours, get used to not doing everything you can to get the promotion, to get the raise, you know, to start your own company, to do whatever the things that are going to take the most time and energy and effort on your part. This is the time where you put most of your energy and effort and expertise into raising up
your child to be a follower of Jesus. And so your schedule is going to look very different, and in fact, what you do during the day is going to look different. Number One, you've got to have a plan for how you spiritually develop your child. If that's your chief goal during these years, don't go about it willy nilly, just haphazardly hoping that something good
is going to happen with their faith. And maybe if you just bring them to church services often enough and church events, it's all going to work. It's not the church's job, it's your job. The church is there to support you as you do that, and that's the kind of church, by the way, that you need to be looking for when you talk more about that. But it's on your shoulders to be doing that task, and so you've got to have a plan. It doesn't happen by default. People do
not become decipleples of Jesus by accident. And with your children during those first thirteen years, the foundations that you put in place or don't put in place are what's going to determine to the largest extent whether or not they ever become disciples of Christ. Yeah, that's very true. You know, when I have talked for a long time to people about homeschooling, what I frequently what I hear from them is I just don't feel qualified enough, just as what
you're talking about. They're trying to outsource this to somebody else that they feel is going to do a better job with math or this. And of course, you know, you can pull in there's so many experts that are available but have classes on this that you can pull that in and they can do that, or you can set up some kind of a co op thing or something like that. But it really is born out of this feeling that they're
not up to the task. And we would always tell people, you only got to keep a couple of steps ahead of this kid, even if you didn't do well in school, you just got to keep a couple of lessons ahead of them, and you might learn some stuff that you never learned in
school because you didn't like school. And you know, but the key thing is from a Christian perspective, is that God gave you these kids, and so he also gave you the ability to do what is necessary, and I think that's the key thing, and it's that that relationship that is there that is lost. As you point out, that's a great term outsourcing it to other people because you think other people can do a better job of this or
that, and then you miss that time with a kid. You spend all your time doing shuffling them from one of these activities, from one expert to another, and you know, you just become kind of a soccer mom type of facilitator or chauffeur. You don't really ever have that time with them. I've seen that as well as I've been growing up. That is an excellent
way to describe it, outsourcing. I think tell us I'm sorry, go ahead, you know, and just to tag onto that one of the great dangers of outsourcing is that often those people are in producing different worldview perspectives to your children than you want them to have. So they might be a great soccer coach, but there may be things about anger and about treating other people, and thoughts about money, you know, growing up to be a professional
soccer. But I mean all these other ideas that are being introduced to your children that are ones that the Bible might not agree with. And so when you hand your children over to these other authority figures, you're handing over your authority at the same time. And that's a great danger. Yes, that is really true. Yeah you want it. That's how we get the the Oli Kart syncretism right exactly, with all these different forces that are there.
You were talking about church, and so you know what, what kind of church is a good church that's going to support the parents. So many times I look at churches and they have so many activities that they've got set up. And I often think about to a cruise that I went on with our family. It was Karen's parents fiftieth anniversary and want to take everybody on a cruise. It was a Disney cruise and we get on there and yeah, this is a family cruise. So it's like, okay, what activities do
you have for the family. Well, we'll put a bracelet on the kids and we'll take them over here, and we got all kinds of stuff and then you know, you can do these things. And it's like, no, no, what do you have for us to do together? They didn't have anything for us to do together. They said well, nobody has asked us about that before. Yeah, you take this family cruise and you could outsoarche your kids over here to be entertained and babysit and whatever, and then
you could go do these other activities. And it's like, no, you don't want to do that, but it tells it. And so when I look at churches, many times I see that type of thing happening in the churches. What is the kind of church that is most effective at supporting parents and their task. Yeah, one of the things that I try to get Christian parents to do, or any parents really if they're getting engaged with the church, is they're recognuys you know what, the single most important ministry in
the entire church is the ministry to children. Because if what we're there to do is to build up somebody's faith, develop that faith, reinforce that faith, release that faith into the world. All of the foundations for that happened before the age of thirteen, and so what's going on in the children's ministry is the single most important ministry in the church. So when you go to a church, don't go they're saying, Gee, I hope they make me
happy. You know, I mean, frankly, what our research has found for the last forty years is that adults don't change. You know, so you're going to go in believe in what you believe, You're going to come out pretty much believe in the same thing. We did a longitudinal study track people over thirty plus years and found that the worldview adults doesn't change. Most Americans die with the same worldview that they had at the age of thirteen.
And so, you know, let's look at that children's ministry. What do you want look at Number one, take a look at the children's pastor. One of the pieces of research that we did for this book was with pastors across the country. What we discovered is that seven out of every eight children's pastors do not have a biblical worldview. You can't get what you don't have. Yeah, and so when children are going to seven out of eight children's
ministries, they're not going to be taught biblical truth. They're going to be taught stuff. What that satisfies the needs of the ministry. What are the needs of that ministry? Well, parents are saying, you know what, I want my child to be safe, I want my child to be happy, I want my child to be around some good kids, and I want them to be exposed to some kind of religious teaching. And that's about as
far as it goes. You know. We know when we talk with senior pastors across the country again a majority of whom do not have a biblical worldview. We asked them, how do you know if your church is healthy and successful? They said, oh, we measure five things. How many people show up, how much money's raised, how many programs we offer, how many staff people we get to hire, how much square footage we've built out. Look, I'm a measurement guy, so I'm glad they're measuring something.
But as a measurement guy, I know you get what you measure. Yeah, So when those are your measures, what you're going to get is a megachurch, a place that's well marketed. But keep in mind that Jesus didn't die for any of those five things, so those shouldn't be the key measures
that we're looking at. So when you're looking for a children's ministry, look for this stuff that matters to Jesus, Because if it matters to Jesus and it matters to the church, that's what they're going to be sharing with your child. Oh, that's great advice. So you know, it's time with the kids. There is no there is no substitute, you know, quantity with the kids. There's no subtitude in terms of quality, in terms of
outsourcing the kids. And it's very important that you understand who is going to be holding their heart at various times, right, and and that that really is the key thing. I think people need to think of it that way. You know, if you think of somebody holding something as fragile as a heart, and you don't realize that that is really what is happening at these very tender ages, is very very malleable. And it's kind of interesting that
you point out that the worldview of adults really doesn't change. Of course, we were told that, you know, I believe it because in the Bible, and but your research has has borne that out. So it is interesting because we do have people who've had some exceptions to that. I guess that would be the exceptions that have had a very difficult upbringing and but God has stepped into their life and worked in a way to radically change them. Right.
But that's that's really the accept would you say it is the exception, and one of the interesting things I did, actually the biggest study I've ever done, was on that very thing. And what I found is that there are the way that people change is God allows them to go through a crisis. You know, we tend to think of a crisis as something to avoid at all costs. It's painful, we don't want to endure it. And yet God uses crisis to get our attention and to shake us up enough to
reconsider some of the basic foundations of our worldview. And what I discovered is that there tend to be six different crises that are most common that are effective at shaking us up enough that yes, we can move more and more toward
having a biblical worldview. You know, an ugly divorce, the painful death of someone who is close to you that you loved, contracting or a debilitating illness or having some kind of debilitating injury, losing all of your possessions, and a natural disaster, spending time in prison, and going through personal bankruptcy.
Those six things represent a majority of the crises that have enabled people to get to a place where God could continue the transformational process in their life, and they moved away from a secular mindset and heartset more toward a biblical mindset. So yeah, it's possible, you know. And that's the hope that parents need who blew it with their young kids, you know, because it's
never over. If you're just hearing this and you're saying, oh my gosh, my child is fourteen, sixteen, and eighteen, you know, what do I do now? It's like, okay, don't give up hope. By the keep in mind that discipleship is a relationship. It's a relationship with Jesus first, and it's a relationship with another disciple, somebody who wants to bring you into that relationship with Christ. So it's all about relationship. What
do you do with that relationship? You invite that other person on the journey with you. It's not somewhere you give them homework and simon to say, go and learn these verses, go and figure out how to make this feel in your life, or so like, hey, let's check this out. Let's see how this works together. You know, we'll read the passages, we'll talk about the passages, we'll go and we'll we'll exhibit the passages in our lives. That's how discipleship works. How do we know that because that's
what Jesus did. Yes, yes, well that really is true. And you know when you're talking about that through crisis and through pain, that's what C. S. Lewis said. You know, God speaks to us through our pain. And actually I think you use the analogy of you know, the blows of a sculptor changing us in our life. Nobody wants to go
through that, but it is a really loving process. And I think we go back and we look at the crises in our lives as I'm about your age and we were in the review stage here, and we look at the most difficult times in our life. That was the time when God spoke to us and moved us in a different direction. Yeah, it is true. And our tendency is to try to restore everything to quote unquote normal. Yeah
that's right. Well, often the reason that we're having the crisis is because normal ain't working for us to be willing to say, Okay, this might be a great opportunity for me to rethink this a little bit. That's the direction God may be pushing us. That's true. And when I look at the some of the discussion points here about your book, embrace an eternal perspective, properly define what a successful life is. That's one of the key things.
You know. If God is going to you know, as you point out, if the normal is not working for you, maybe He's got a new normal for you. It's going to change what you really want and how you define a success is not just simply being comfortable. Maybe it's something else, isn't it? It is? And you know, for those parents who are trying to get a handle on okay, okay, but where do I start with all of this? I feel overwhelmed. I'm not of the elotionan
I don't know where to start. One of the greatest discoveries I feel that I've ever made out of the data, you know, I feel like Isaac Newton. Here is a really late one that is like one or two in the morning. I'm playing with data. And one of the things I found is there are seven particular beliefs that fit together and can serve as a great
biblical worldview foundation. What the data showed is if you embrace all seven of these very simple biblical perspectives and you try to carry them out in your life, you'll have an eighty three percent probability of going on to develop a complete biblical worldview. If you reject any one, one or more of these seven I'm calling them the the cornerstones of the biblical worldview. If you reject one or more of the cornerstones, then you've got only a two percent probability,
wow, of a biblical worldview. That's how important these seven elements are. And you know when people hear them, you know, devoted Christians laugh, Come on, that's Sunday School one on one. Yeah, but apparently most people didn't pay attention during Sunday School one on one. That's why he started fifteen months. That's right, Tell it real quickly what they are. I'm
dying enough. Yeah, I mean number one is you not only believe that God exists, but you know that in terms of his nature and character, he's all, all knowing, all loving, you know, all powerful, he's perfect, he's just he wants to be involved in your life because he created you, because he wants to love you. He wants that relationship. Okay, knowing there's that kind of God who's perfect and just holy and so forth, that's great. But cornerstone number two, but recognize that we're born
as sinner, we sin throughout our lives. We're born into that approach, and every choice we make has consequences, and our sins have eternal consequences. And so Cornerstone number three is recognizing that the only real antidote to that consequence,
the negative consequence of our sins, is Jesus Christ. So what we can do is acknowledge that we're sinners, you know, own up to it, fess up to it, ask Him to forgive us for our sins, and most importantly, truly repent, genuinely repent, which means that not just I'm saying, yeah, give me, you know, eternal fire insurance, but it's saying, I really feel remorse over the fact that these choices of mind, these sins, break God's heart. I don't want to do that
anymore. So God give me the strength to fight back the temptation to keep sinning. Cornerstone number four is is saying that you know what we know what those sins are because God gave us his word, He gave us principles for life. So he identifies sins, he identifies the right way to live, He identifies what gives him and us joy. And Cornerstone Number five is saying that, and the Bible, in the course of doing so, gives us
absolute moral truths. And so it's not based on our life conditions. It's not based on our feelings, it's not based on our situation, it's not based on what's most popular or most common. God has given us absolute moral truths, and when we reject those, we will reap the consequences of what we've sown through that rejection. Cornerstone number six goes to what you are saying, recognizing what success in life is, and the Bible tells us that.
God makes it very clear that success is not about money. It's not about cars, about the trophy, spouse, you know, any of that kind of stuff, fame, et cetera. It's simply about being consistently obedient to God. You can be a homeless person wearing rags, not knowing if you're going to get another meal, but if you're consistently obedient to God, you are a success in life, not in the world's eyes, but in God's
eyes. And then the final one is understanding that when God created you, he loved you, and he gave you a purpose for life, and that universal purpose that all of us share. There's a unique purpose He'll give to each of those who are following Jesus. But that universal purpose each of us has is very simply to know, love and serve God with all our heartlind,
strength, and soul. So when you put these seven things together, it completely changes your understanding of how life works, who you are, why you're here, how to live, how to gauge whether or not your life is making the difference that God wants it to make. And yet those seven things are very easy for us as parents to wrap our arms around and to be able to share those with our children and to go on a journey with
our children pursuing those seven things. And as you were alluding to, you know earlier, the way I say it to parents is, look, you don't have to be a theologian. You only have to be ten seconds ahead of your kids. And if you are, this is going to work. It's going to work. Great. Invite them on the journey with you, that's right. Yeah, Yeah, If you can outthink that fifteen month old a few stuffs out of them, you got it made. And God will
give you what you need to do that. You know, He always does equip us for the things that he assigns to us, and that's that's the key thing, stepping out in faith. And we've had a lot of people have to do that over the last couple of years when they were confronted with things in their own life that we're going to be shut off to them if they didn't violate their conscience. And so I think that may have been a
difficult time of training for many people in our society. And so that makes me very optimistic about the future because we've had a lot of people who have been under the sculptor's chisel over the last few years and came through from the other side and to this new normal. They've got a very different perspective after having gone through that. Well, that's certainly a sage advice and it looks
like an excellent book. Again, the book is and you pull the book up, raising spiritual Champions, nurturing your child's heart, mind, and spirit, and you can find that at I guess the best place Amazon? Is that the best place to find that or do you sell it directly? It is, yeah, and we've got it both in paperback and digital versions, whichever you prefer. It's available. That's great and how can people keep up. Whether you'd have a sub stack or anything like that, or a website
that you tell people that you publish on. Yeah, if they go to Cultural Research Center dot com, they'll find all the research that we do. We try to put as much of it on that website for free as possible so people can take it, use it, share it. You know. The whole idea is for us to keep growing as disciples of Jesus, So every time we learn something, we want to be able to share it with the public. That's great, that's great. Well, it certainly has great
advice. And you've been watching bigger trends in people's lives and you have seen how this aligns with the Bible. So that's your biblical worldview. You have seen it devalidated what the Bible says. You've seen that validated over a long period of time, and you have a lot of very sage advice for people. Thank you so much for joining us at George Barna appreciate it. Thank you, Thank you. David. The David Knight Show is a critical thinking
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