A prominent Christian researcher is urging parents to take an active role in combating the influence of the media on their children, which he believes has led Americans to embrace teachings that run contrary to the biblical worldview.
The Family Research Council Action’s Pray, Vote, Stand Summit was held recently at the Cornerstone Chapel in Leesburg, Virginia. The first panel of the day discussed the “crisis in the church” that has developed because “Christians don’t have a biblical worldview.”
Moderated by David Closson, the panel included George Barna, director of the Cultural Research Center at Arizona Christian University, Joseph Backholm of the Center for Biblical Worldview and Nancy Pearcey, professor and scholar in residence at Houston Baptist University.
The panelists provided advice to parents and faith leaders about how to instill a biblical worldview in their children.
“The most significant influence on the development of a worldview in America today is what we absorb from the media,” Barna contended. “And if that’s the case, then that says to me as a parent or a grandparent or somebody who cares about the development of the worldview of children that I’ve got to pay attention to what media is investing in those children’s minds and hearts.”
Barna then listed “four Ms” that parents should employ to combat the harmful influence of the media on their children.
He first advised parents to “monitor what these kids are being exposed to because our research shows that most parents are happy to buy their children every device the kids want, and then they leave the kids up to determine what they’re going to take in through all those devices. They don’t even know what their kids are being exposed to.”
Barna also suggested that parents “minimize it because our research also shows that in America, the biggest addiction in our country is media. We spend more time literally absorbing messages from media than anything else we do except for sleep.”
Illustrating the need to limit “the enormous exposure that we have to that kind of information,” Barna maintained that parents do not tell their children to “eat everything in the house,” but rather “eat a certain amount of things … three times a day.” He told parents that “we need to do the same kind of ingestion methods … with media.”
Introducing “mediate” as the third “M,” Barna called on parents to “serve as the mediator between what the media is trying to get you to believe and what we, as followers of Jesus, believe based on what the scriptures teach.” He remarked that if parents are watching a show with their children that exposes them to an idea that runs contrary to the biblical worldview, they should tell them: “We know that’s a lie … because the Scriptures teach us this.”
The final “M” Barna urged parents to rely on was “moralize.” In other words, “helping them to understand the difference between right and wrong.” He predicted that “if parents simply did that in the lives of their kids, it would revolutionize America today.”
Setting the stage for the conversation, Barna pointed to research that found only 19% of born-again Christians have a biblical worldview. Describing worldview as a “critical element,” he explained that “a person’s worldview begins forming at 15 to 18 months of age and is almost fully formed by the age of 13.”
The exposure to the media and internet alone are not the only factors causing many children to develop a non-biblical worldview: What you’re seeing now is a trend toward ‘I got it at school. And our kids are being expose to secular worldviews from a very young age from the Saturday morning cartoons.
Noting that “there are 16,000 hours between kindergarten and 12th grade,” Backholm proclaimed that “you cannot overcome the impact of those 16,000 hours by taking them to church on Sunday and maybe taking them to youth group on Wednesday night.” He also elaborated on the effects of what children learn at school on their worldview: “They’re cucumbers that are becoming pickles. And the brine that they soak in has a lot to say about what they become.”
Backholm warned that even if children are not introduced to “pagan lies” by their teachers, “They’re still soaking things in from the culture that’s around them that’s influencing what they love, which the research tells us, what they love determines what they ultimately believe is true.”
Barna added that children experience “32,000 hours during that same period of time of media exposure.” He accused schools of “laying a foundation that the media then supports,” exposing children to “48,000 hours’ worth of content” that runs contrary to the biblical worldview.