Michael Kruger: Answering Teens’ Tough Questions

So a term that's probably been around a long time, but I've just heard it articulated in the last four to five years. Deconstruction. Some of people that I've known are sort of celebrities and Christians are walking away from the faith. It's called they're deconstructing what they had previously constructed.

I don't know if it's a new term or not, but I've seen it more and more. It feels like a lot of people are deconstructing. I think for parents, that's really scary because I'm talking to so many parents that have adult children that are in college or beyond and they have stopped going to church. And so I think we don't know what to do as parents and we want to help our kids.

We're not sure how. Welcome to Family Life Today, where we want to help you pursue the relationships that matter most. I'm Ann Wilson and I'm Dave Wilson. And you can find us at familylifetoday.com or on our Family Life app.

This is Family Life Today. We got Dr. Mark Cucuga back in the studio and we had a great conversation about kids really walking away from the faith yesterday. Well, welcome back for day two. Well, thank you. Great to be here again. I mean, when you hear that term deconstruction, I know we've got your book sitting here, Surviving Religion 101, Letters to a Christian Student on Keeping the Faith in College.

And we talked yesterday about you writing letters to your own daughter and it's obviously brought her to college students about this topic really, deconstruction. It is. Is it a new term?

You know, it's funny now that I think about it. I don't know if I use the term in the book. I may use it once or twice. But certainly the book is about this whole idea of leaving the faith behind that some are tempted to do or what might be called deconverting is another term out there. But no, the term deconstruction is not new. Historically, it's been used by philosophers for generations. Jacques Derrida is probably the most famous person who coined the term or at least utilized the term.

And he didn't use it positively as it pertains to Christianity. He used it as a way of saying that when you deconstruct something, you break it down to its most constituent parts so that you can expose its flaws and see what's wrong with it. And a lot of people who use the term deconstruction today, that's exactly what they're doing. And we could talk about very famous deconstruction stories, right, where someone seemed to be a very famous Christian thinker, author, pastor, deconstructs their faith and realizes, I don't believe any of this anymore.

So that's very common. Deconstruction is all around us. And it seems like there's a whole industry built on it now, whereas if you leave the faith, you can become sort of famous for now not believing. Now, in theological parlance, there's a word for that that we don't use very often, but it captures it.

It's called apostasy, right, to be someone who's an apostate, to someone who was once in and now is out, once inside the fold, so to speak, and now has left and repudiates all that they used to believe. Now, to be fair, some people use the term deconstruction differently, and we should observe that. There's some that use the term deconstruction in, I might argue, a more positive way. And what that means is some say when you deconstruct your faith, you're looking to strip away accretions to the faith that aren't from the Bible. And so to deconstruct your faith is to say, what sort of things have I sort of let seep into my Christian thinking that are just cultural or external or man-made? And I'm going to strip those away so that what I'm left with is purely a biblical faith. Now, if you're going to use the term that way, I think we all want to say, well, that's good. We want the Christianity to be as biblical as possible and to strip away these bad things.

So, yeah, the term is used in different ways. But I think generally speaking, it's used negatively, and it's used as a synonym for basically leaving Christianity behind. So as the president of a seminary, Reformed Theological Seminary, are you seeing that prevalent where you're working?

Yeah, we are. I mean, I don't have any hard stats for it, but I think everybody in ministry today feels this sense that people are kind of hanging by a thread and that they're thinking in ways they've never thought about before in terms of whether they just think they're done with this Christianity thing. So pastors report to me that they have people leaving their church in sort of unprecedented numbers. You certainly have the high-profile deconstruction stories. It's hard to know if they're more numerous now or just that we know more about them now because of social media.

I don't know the answer to that. I do think the last two years of COVID haven't helped, where we all, you know, people already sort of have a rough go of it, and you put it in the sort of tough phase of COVID. Everyone's looking to rethink their life from top to bottom. So that's part of it. But yeah, this is a category of ministry that we just don't talk about. And this is part of the reason I wrote my book, Surviving Religion 101. I think the church needs to start adjusting to the challenge of deconstruction. And the other word we haven't mentioned yet is just the challenge of people's doubts. And how do we handle those doubts, people who are tempted to deconstruct their faith, and are we taking the right steps? I just think that's a thing we don't want to talk about, kind of like the crazy uncle in the attic that you just pretend isn't there, you know?

This doesn't happen. I know you're hearing thumps and noises up there. No, there's nobody up there. It's okay. All is perfect. And I'm like, no, it's not all perfect. Let's be honest.

Talk about the problem. It's interesting. We have a son that was in ministry and was at our church. He came in young, in his 20s, and he had this list of, these are the things my generation wants to talk about. Please address these topics, because everybody else is addressing it.

We need to know what the Bible says about it. And there was some pushback. Yeah, honestly, his idea was, and he was a co-pastor with me, so he was teaching on weekends, and he said, could we do a series on the big questions? Yeah. That if you go on Facebook or you go on Instagram, Twitter, there are battles back and forth. They're in your book. The chapters. I mean, literally, I was just going to say, they are what you wrote about.

Sure. And there was pushback from our leadership, like, you know, it's going to get dicey. People are going to be mad that we're taking a stand on any one of these issues rather than let's have a conversation. And he's like, yeah, they want to know what does God say about this? It was really interesting that our leadership was like, let's not do it.

And he was saying, Michael, do you agree? He was saying, my generation is not coming if you're not willing to talk about what we're wanting to talk about. There's another way to say that, which is that the church needs to make sure that it's not ducking the hard questions that people have. And honestly, people feel like it does. People feel like when you go to church, you get sometimes pat answers. You get tidied up, boxed up answers to your questions, and it's just the questions that are willing to answer, not the ones you really have. And the whole thing seems a little overly manufactured to people, like it's not really real.

And I think the church needs to rethink that. I think there needs to be a sense in which you're like, look, come one, come all with your questions. Let's get them on the table. Let's have an open, frank conversation about it. We're not going to pretend they're not there. We're not going to duck the hard stuff. We're going to tackle it head on. Maybe our answer won't be satisfying to you. Maybe we won't even have an answer to some of your questions, but at least we're honest that there's real questions and that we do recognize that you're not wrestling with myths and mysterious things that don't matter. These things matter, and we need to wrestle with them.

Why that posture isn't there, boy, that would be an interesting conversation to have. What is going on with the defensiveness of the church or the insecurity? This goes back to our prior episode on the bubble mentality of the church.

Okay, fair enough. But I hope we can get to a point where we can just get those doubts on the table. So I would encourage churches who are listening to this, look, find a space in your church to do this. It doesn't need to be from the pulpit necessarily, but that's fine if it can be that. Give your people a chance to ask the hard questions.

Don't act like you are afraid of it. You already mentioned it, doubts. I grew up with a single mom sort of dragging me to church when I was a kid, but one thing I do remember is you weren't allowed to doubt. Doubt was lack of faith. Doubt was almost equated to sin.

That was really hard for you to do. That was a struggle because I had questions, and I felt like I could ask them outside the church, but I couldn't ask them with Christian people. Help us understand, is doubt okay? Is it good?

Is it bad? One of the things I'm seeing out there are two extreme versions of approaching the doubt question, both of which are mistaken. I'll just tell you what they are. One extreme version that's mistaken is what I call doubt shaming. Doubt shaming is what you just described apparently in your own life.

By the way, when I talk about this to churches, I was given a Sunday school class at a church just recently. I mentioned the whole concept of doubt shaming. You're not allowed to have questions.

We won't take hard questions here. You're just going to have to just swallow it and pretend you don't have those things in your head. We're going to put this rosy face on as if none of those things exist. When I started talking about that, you could see everybody in the congregation pick their head up like, yes, that's the church I grew up in. I grew up in the doubt shaming church where someone would wag their finger at you and make you sound like you're on the verge of being an apostate for having a question, that you're half Christian or that you should be embarrassed.

I think that's fundamentally flawed. I think the Bible shows it is. God is extremely patient with our doubts. The Bible shows time and time again how gracious and compassionate God is towards doubters, how Jesus worked with even the most obvious story of Thomas with the, come here and put your hand in my side. He didn't shame Thomas. He didn't rebuke him as like, well, you're just a second-class Christian.

He just was patient with him. God is extremely patient with doubters. By the way, the other thing to note there is that it's also very common to doubt.

It's a very normal thing in the history of the church. Anybody who knows the history of the church knows that very famous people doubt it. The other side of the coin, though, that I think needs to be acknowledged is not the doubt chambers. The other extreme mistake is the doubt celebrators. This is those who think that doubt now is the greatest Christian virtue you can have, and they're going to make you doubt more, and they're going to say that if you're certain about anything, then the problem is your certainty. There was a book that came out a couple years ago called The Sin of Certainty that made you feel guilty as a Christian if you thought you were certain about something. The doubt celebrators are equally problematic.

Part of what I wanted to do with this book is say neither of those are the right options. Doubt, you should not think you're a bad Christian. It's very normal. God's patient. At the same time, you want to fight doubt and work your way towards assurance about what you believe. Have you ever asked your kids at the dinner table, or maybe anywhere, even going to bed, do you guys ever doubt? I think sometimes as parents we would be afraid to ask that.

Oh, that's interesting, isn't it? I don't know if I've ever asked it that way in a direct sense, but my kids have come to me with their doubts. Questions, you know, why doesn't God do something about this problem?

Why is the world this way? Does that mean God isn't really in control? I've had other family members come to me with significant doubts. They'll call me up at certain hours of the night struggling with what they believe. Which says a lot about you, that they feel safe enough that they could answer. And even in our first episode, you talked about Emma calling you from college with all of her friends, listening, wanting to know those answers. I think, you know, that's something that both Christian leaders and churches can ask themselves. Have we created a culture where people feel that comfort to come and ask the questions? And, you know, there's another conversation about how you create a culture like that.

Well, how do you? Because I'm thinking of a parent when their son or daughter, it could be teenage years, it could even be middle school, but definitely teenage, college, high school, starting to doubt, starting to voice either saying it out loud if they feel the freedom to do it, or just showing by their actions. They're not really believing what you've taught them your whole life. How does a parent respond?

That's David Ann Wilson with Dr. Michael Krueger on Family Life Today. Don't miss his response in just a second. But first, let's talk about life. It can feel isolating, right? Doing all the things in such a connected world, but we still feel so distanced from one another.

What do we do about it? One of our past guests, Jenny Allen, was on a mission to search for that same answer and wrote all her insights in a new book called Find Your People. And when you give today at Family Life, we'll send you a copy of Jenny's book as our thank you. You can give online at FamilyLifeToday.com or by calling 800-358-6329.

That's 1-800-F as in Family, L as in Life, and then the word Today. All right, now back to David Ann's conversation with Michael Krueger and how you can respond when your child starts to doubt God and His word. Michael Krueger on Family Life Today. Part of it, I think, would be helpful for kids to see in their parents is their own honesty about their own doubts. I think we feel obligated as parents to put up a front of Christian almost perfection so that we think that's the best way to model Christ to our kids. Like, I'm a good Christian young man, young woman. Just look at, you know, don't think there's anything wrong with me.

And we put up this front, and then they think that Christianity is this impossible ideal. Mom and Dad never doubt. Well, what if Mom and Dad did doubt? And what if you were honest about that? And what if you were honest not only about your doubts but how you resolve them? And then you gave them safe space to recognize it's, oh, if Mom and Dad can feel that way, then it's okay. I shouldn't feel ashamed to feel that way. Maybe I could bring my doubts to the table.

So I think that's one way. Here's another way I think parents and churches can create a culture where doubt is not ashamed is to rethink the levels of certainty they have about things. Let me explain what I mean by that. Sometimes when we talk about the certainty of the faith, we blur two things together we shouldn't blur. When we talk about the certainty of the faith, we're talking about the core doctrines of the faith, right? That Jesus is God, that He rose from the dead, that the Bible is true, that there's a gospel of grace and salvation. Can we be sure about those things? Absolutely bulletproof sure about those things.

We can go to our grave with those things. But realize being sure about the core truths of the faith doesn't mean that you should be equally sure about every doctrine you hold. And if you act like every doctrine you hold is equally sure of every other, your kid's going to see right through that because not every doctrine is as clear in the Bible as every others. So what if you drilled your kid over how you thought a certain mode of baptism had to be the right mode? And you're like, if you don't believe that, then there's something wrong with you.

And your child's like, well, okay. But then they realize there's this weird sense that you're putting an emphasis on something that doesn't deserve it. And that can make them actually doubt in ways you may not expect. So in other words, our assurance needs to be on the core things.

And we need to have grace and more flexibility around some of these non-core things. And that can really help create a culture where kids can bring that to the table. It's interesting, Mike, when you say that, you know, we wrote a book called No Perfect Parents. We asked our three sons, who are adults and married now, hey, we'd love you to write something in there. Our oldest son. Of things that we did right or things we could have done better.

Right, right or wrong. We figured parents will read what they say before they even read what we wrote. But our oldest son has been a questioner, engineering brain. I think he was seven, eight years old when he asked. He was four. He was four when he said, so the Ten Commandments say do not murder, and David murdered people. David cut off Goliath. You know, he just, right away, a four-year-old.

He's like, so how's that okay? I'm no biblical scholar here, but how are we going to resolve that? And remember, she goes, answer that one.

So she ran it to me. But the only reason I bring up CJ is, you know, we don't tell him what to write in this book. Write whatever you want. One of the things he wrote, which ended up being so beautiful, is exactly what he said. He said, I'm so glad that mom and dad let me question and find my faith on my own. And he adds this comment.

If they would have forced me to believe the earth is young, not old, I would have been out. And I'm like, all the things that came to his mind. And I remember that discussion when he was in college or high school.

I don't remember. I just remember going, oh, there's different opinions than that. I'm not going to land on one or the other. I do have a strong opinion, but you don't have to buy that. But here's the ones that are core, the ones you said.

But it's just what you said. Oh, it's so important for the health of the church. This ability to rank different doctrines so that you don't go to war over every disagreement. If every doctrine in your system is equally important as every other doctrine, that means the slightest disagreement with you is nuclear war. Because you just call, as I used to do the analogy from the 1980s, you'd pick up the red phone and call in the nukes, right? Because you just disagree with something in my system. But what if there's something in your system that's actually not really a core part of the system, but a peripheral thing?

Are you calling in the nukes for that? What happens in the Christian world is that we're so concerned with truth, and we should be, that we don't pause to think about those distinctions. And so we end up just fighting with everybody over everything. Do we tend to do that more when we're younger?

I think we do when we're younger. We don't have the maturity to distinguish between those things. And when we demonstrate that maturity to our kids and they realize, oh, so I can embrace Christianity even if I don't agree with mom and dad over some of these other little smaller things, or my other neighbor or my friend at college. Can you imagine sending a kid off to college, convincing him that every doctrine holds us equally certain as every other? Then he's just going to fight with all his college buddies all the time over everything, even if it's not core or central. And you realize that that's not what we're training you to do.

And I think that's a really healthy way to show the maturity of a Christian is the ability to make those distinctions. Yeah, and you mentioned earlier that high school is the new college. So are these questions starting earlier?

Yes. I think anybody listening to this will know, particularly if their kids are in public schools, that high school is the new college. What I'm seeing happen in public schools now in the high school years is what I faced in college. So the things I was introduced to in college when I was 19 to 22-ish in that range, now kids are getting at 14 to 17 or 14 to 18 and even younger. Is that in school curriculum?

Where are they getting that? Why are they questioning that? Yeah, I think it's an issue of school curriculum. I think it's an issue of access to information in unprecedented ways younger, which includes social media and the Internet. And everybody just seems to deal with heavier questions at younger ages. And that's a real concern. And so when I say high school is a new college, if we're already behind in preparing kids for college, we're probably really behind in preparing them for high school.

And so we need to really start thinking through that. And look, I'm not going to tell parents whether a public or private school is the right decision. Every parent needs to make that decision on their own. But the reality is these questions cannot wait until they're 18. We've got to deal with them when they're younger. Yeah, and I think a lot of parents would hear what you just said and think, well, you did answer the question for me.

I'm not sending my kid to a secular school. Yeah, fair enough. Although it could be, you've said earlier also as well, it could be something that would be really beneficial if you're willing to partner with them and walk beside them, right? Absolutely. And so this is where every parent needs to look at their child and assess their maturity and assess what they can handle. Some children can handle being in the throes of battle in a difficult situation.

Some can't handle it. And honestly, what you can handle at 14 is very different than what you can handle at 18. And so the younger you go, I would tell parents to be more cautious because their child is going to be more immature. And the older you go, I think you can start letting out the reins a little bit more.

But here's the point. Regardless of when it's right for your family to do that, it needs to be done. You can't protect your child forever from the challenges of the world. Eventually, you've got to get them exposed to these things and get answers in their head. Mike, how would you start? If there's a parent listening and they're thinking, we have never had this conversation, our kids go to church, and the average now is usually twice a month, we'll get to church.

They're not really talking about that in the church. And so we haven't done anything. Where do we start? Part of it I think we've sort of unpacked a little bit already, which is start by creating a culture in your home where your child feels safe to come with their questions. And part of that we discussed in terms of making sure the child knows that you've got questions and that you invite their questions and you tell them it's okay to have questions.

A second step I think you can do is to make sure you're beginning to think through what tools you can use to get those questions answered for your child. You wish. I know a good one.

Yeah, yeah. So not to state the obvious, but circling back around, my book was written for college students, obviously, but I really believe high school students could read it and benefit. So one idea if you have a high school student is you could just go through chapter by chapter through my book with your high school student and begin the conversation. I think if you go much younger than high school, it's probably not going to be as helpful. But there's other sources, though, for younger kids.

I don't have a list off the top of my head here, but I know that a parent who's eager to getting answers to that could find those sources, and I'm sure their pastor could help. Yeah, and in some ways, part of me wants to look through the microphone to a dad or a mom and say, have the courage, because I know it's scary. It is scary. But it's a faith step, I think, for us as parents to say, you know what, I'm going to have the courage to step into my son or daughter's journey, especially where we started. If I'm sensing that they're starting to deconstruct, which you said, Mike, could be the thing that brings them to a solid faith.

Maybe it wasn't really solid until they started to pull it apart and look at the studs behind the wall and go, what's real, what's not real? That happened to me my first year in ministry. I woke up one morning, Ann knows this, and said, did we just fall for a lie? How do we even know any of it's true? He has his Bible on his lap, and we're getting ready to go to the campus and sharing our faith. And I'm like, are you ready? He goes, I don't even know if any of this is true. We all have a moment like that. And I was like, oh, no, but I was glad that he said it.

I was scared that he said it. What I think the point is, is that when you want to be honest about that, yourself and with your kids, that is when people grow. They now have a chance to seriously ask, why am I believing this? And that's when I think you see exponential growth. You don't see exponential growth by pretending those things aren't there, covering it up and just convincing yourself everything's fine, then have it all explode your sophomore year in college. No, have those conversations now. And I'm telling you, kids want to have these conversations.

They do. And our kids talked more even when their friends were over. Sure. So you bring up the topic, and I'm telling you it's like wildfire because they want to talk about it. They're all talking about it anyway. So if we're in the room, it could be a small group that could be started, you know, of like, hey, we're going to talk about this stuff. You guys want to talk about it at our house? You don't call it a small group. You just say, let's get together and talk about it.

What a great way to start. The Doubters Forum. There's a lot of great curriculum out there for doubters. When I was in the UK in Edinburgh, we did a thing called Open to Question was the title of it. And that's exactly what you're describing, a forum for doubters, open to question, call it what you want.

But just the title alone gives this invitation that, hey, this can be asked, come ask it. You've been listening to Dave and Anne Wilson with Michael Krueger on Family Life Today. His book is called Surviving Religion 101, and you can get a copy at familylifetoday.com. You can listen in on an extended conversation with Michael Krueger on dealing with more sensitive topics. You can get the link at familylifetoday.com. If you know anyone who needs to hear conversations just like this, we'd love it if you'd tell them about this station.

And you could share today's specific conversation from wherever you get your podcasts. And while you're there, a simple way you can help more people discover God's plan for families is by leaving a rating and review for Family Life Today. As the new school year starts, it's a great time to be looking for small group studies that help your group feel connected and known and help you love and know God more. So check out the small group studies available at familylifetoday.com and use the code 25OFF, that's 250FF, to save on all leader materials. You can find that at familylifetoday.com. And tomorrow, Dave and Anne Wilson will be talking with Terrence Chapman about helping build up your child so they're prepared to defend their faith. On behalf of Dave and Anne Wilson, I'm Shelby Abbott. We'll see you back next time for another edition of Family Life Today. .