Michael Kruger: Surviving Religion 101

So I did, you know, the Google thing last night. Oh no, that doesn't sound good. No, this is, you know, I was thinking I want to get current research on the number of Christian kids that walk away from the faith after college. What did you find?

According to Barna, 70% of high school students who enter college as professing Christians will leave with little to no faith. It's so scary as parents. 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. You know, as a parent in a Christian home, in some ways we feel like our job is to prepare our kids to have a vibrant faith after they leave our home. And that's like, wow, that's not working. So we need help.

Yeah, we need some answers on what could it look like for us to prepare our kids and is there anything we can do that they don't walk away? Yeah, and I can't think of anybody better to come in the studio and give us some help. We've got Dr. Michael Krueger, president of Reformed Theological Seminar in Charlotte in the studio of Family Life Today. Welcome. Thank you. It's so fun to be here and talk about this subject. Yeah, I know it's a passion of yours. Obviously you've written a book called Surviving Religion 101. The subtitle is just exactly what we're talking about, Letters to a Christian Student on Keeping the Faith in College.

Why did you write this? This book has got its own little story to it, and it's really different than other books I've written because it's so much more personal. And it's personal actually in a couple of ways. One way it's personal is it's a little bit of my own story. In the introduction of the book, I tell how I ended up as a Christian at a university setting where I was in a classroom and was bombarded by claims from a professor that I didn't have answers for. And it sent me down a whole new journey, figuring out whether I really believe what I thought I believed. So I remember that vividly. And ever since that day, I thought, you know, someone ought to write a book like this.

And so it's sort of funny to think that I'm the one doing it. But then that book has been percolating in the back of my mind for years. And then finally, my own daughter, Emma, heads off to college. And where does she go?

My alma mater, UNC Chapel Hill, which is exactly where I experienced that. And as she got prepared to go off to college, I said, you know, this is the time. So the book is part autobiographical and obviously part about my daughter's own departure. And so it's very personal to me.

And it's a subject near and dear to my heart. Well, you're just sharing that sometimes you'll get a late night call. Yes. And you wonder, like, oh, is that Emma? Uh-huh.

Oh, those are really fun. So, yeah, usually it's about the time my eyes are shut late at night and I'm getting ready to go to bed. Of course, no college student is getting ready to go to bed when I'm going to bed. Phone rings and I'll see it's on my screen. I'll see that it's Emma. And she wants to FaceTime with me. And so she'll pop on the screen.

And sure enough, behind her on the screen are like eight of her friends, all crowded into the video screen. And she's like, Dad, are you awake? And I'm like, yeah, what's going on? She goes, I got a question for you. And so for the next 45 minutes, when I'm half asleep, we're down the rabbit trail of, you know, does God predestinate people? Or what do we do about speaking in tongues?

Or what do we do when my Bible professor says that the Gospels are made up fables or stories? And so whatever the issue of the day is, we're down it. And, you know, they're all throwing in their questions. And it's a lot of fun.

I love it. How much of your time, even with Emma and her friends, and again, that could be expanded to all kinds, hundreds of thousands of college kids, and not just college kids. We all have these questions. How much of your answer is, I know you're a scholar on the canon.

You know, I've watched you. And I mean, I don't think I'd want to go to anybody else in terms of, you know, the original manuscripts and what we have in our word, which is the canon, which is where we get our truth from. But as you think about answering Emma or people in that age or any age, how much of it is intellectual? How much of it do you think is emotional or just the current world circumstances or a college prof saying things that just target our faith?

Where do you answer those questions? Do you go right to the mind or do you go broader than that? Yeah, well, I think it's fair to say that any question has multi-dimensions to it in terms of its origins, right? So some genuinely have intellectual questions. I mean, one of the things I've learned over the years is there's a lot of people who've never heard a good answer to the question they have. And as soon as they hear a good answer, they kind of have that shocked moment like, oh, I didn't realize there was a good reason to believe that Jesus actually rose from the dead.

And there's this sort of sense of epiphany. So some people do have genuinely intellectual questions and they never heard a good answer. I think that says a lot about our current state of the church probably. But then there's others who it's not just intellectual. It's maybe they had a bad experience in church or maybe they had parents who went to church and abused them and were hypocrites.

Or maybe there's something that really bad happened in their life and they can't get over the problem of evil thinking that God doesn't really exist or couldn't exist. We all know that what we believe is not just intellectual. It's jumbled up together with our emotions, our experience and our background. And one of the things I love about this book that I tried to do is to make it personal. You know, I wrote it as letters to my daughter. So it's not just here's the intellectual data.

That's not that hard to do, actually, to give people data. What is harder to do is to give it to them in a framework they want to receive it. And so I tried to write this very personally as a father to daughter. And I hope that comes across to the reader.

Obviously, they're not my daughter, but they can get the sense that I really care about the person, not just the ideas. What was your experience? You said you went to college, made you really start questioning. What happened from there? Yeah, so my story is obviously a key part of why I wrote the book. So I arrived at UNC Chapel Hill as an undergrad in 1989. I soon found myself in a religion class called Introduction to the New Testament. And there I was, committed Christian, loved Jesus, grew up in a Bible-believing home with believing parents, taught the gospel at a young age, and I thought, oh, I'm fine here. I had a good youth group.

What more do you want, right? I had a youth pastor that was great, so therefore all the world's fine. So I got into his class, and of course the professor was funny, smart, bright, witty, brilliant. And he just started to just pick apart the New Testament in ways I'd never seen before. Showing me what he thought proved contradiction, showing me how it was historically unreliable, telling me how it's been changed over time by scribes throughout the generations.

And there I was, 18, 19 years old, I haven't any answers at all. What I didn't realize at the time is that the professor I was hearing all that from would eventually become famous. And his name is Bart Ehrman, if you know Bart Ehrman's name. Bart Ehrman has written over 30 books now and is still at UNC Chapel Hill and is one of the most prolific scholars today. And he's very critical of Christianity. And at the time, he wasn't famous yet. I had him as a rookie professor, but I didn't realize that I was having what would become one of the most famous critics of Christianity in the world today. And of course I didn't have any answers, so I had a decision to make.

What was I going to do? And what was curious is to watch other people's reactions. Some of my fellow believers left the faith. Some of my fellow Christians just pretended it wasn't happening. Just like, I'm just not even going to engage.

I'm just going to stick my head in the sand and just pretend this just isn't happening. Others were looking for hybrid positions, like, well, maybe I can believe what I'm hearing in class and believe the Bible. And there I was, like, what am I going to do? And the Lord used it to put me on a whole new trajectory. And I decided I would go find what the answers are. And that actually ended up leading to where I am today, where now I'm a scholar myself.

So it's funny how God used it for, hopefully, for good ends. Well, it's interesting because as parents, I know what I could tend to do is I'm fearful and I don't want my kids in those situations. So you go bubble. Yeah, we go bubble and we think, don't go to a secular university. That could be the death of your faith. But instead, you're saying that ignited your faith. Exactly. And I think even as parents, just to have those conversations, you may not be able to answer the questions, but we can at least have the conversations at the dinner table.

Tell me what you think about dot, dot, dot. Exactly. It's inevitable, right? So let's imagine you kept the bubble thing going even through college and you said, okay, I'm not going to let my kid go to a secular school. Or I'm not going to let my child have a religion class. Okay, well, that's not going to fix the problem because, first of all, even in so-called Christian colleges, we know that some of that stuff is taught. But then, okay, what happens when they're 22 and they graduate?

Now they're standing around the water cooler at work and they're hearing the same arguments. So, I mean, do we really think that eventually you've got to deal with that? You just cannot exist in our world today in perpetual bubble. And I don't think anyone ever really thinks that through. And that's what hopefully my book is designed to address. Yeah, I know my first day in seminary, working on a three-year Master of Divinity, one of my first profs said, hey, first thing I want you to learn is read other people. Read skeptics, read antagonists, read atheists.

Great advice. Do not just read what we give you. You need to know what others are saying. You need to be able to prove they're right or wrong. You need to defend why you believe what you believe.

If you only stay in one little tribe and never break out, you will never expand. I remember sitting there thinking, nobody's ever told me that before. I thought I was supposed to stay away from that.

Yeah, because the church isn't saying that to people. It was like a new thought, like, what do you mean, that's not going to hurt me? It's actually going to help me? I was like, no, this will help you. That's what you're saying. It's like you have to have the antibodies to be able to do it.

You do, got to get your immune system kick-started spiritually. I remember when I was in college, Josh McDowell came to our campus. Now we've had his son, Sean, on our program. But I remember him saying this, and I'd love to have your thoughts on this. I remember him saying from the stage, and again, I'm not sure I got the number right, but I'm guessing he said this, 90% of men and women that come up to him, usually college students, and ask an intellectual question. It's not an intellectual question. It's a moral question. And he said, I'll often look at a young man or woman and say, let me ask you a question.

If I could prove to you beyond a shadow of a doubt, to your satisfaction, that Jesus Christ is who he said he was and he rose from the dead, would you surrender your life to him? And they often say, nope, because I want to keep sleeping with my girlfriend or boyfriend. And he says, well, then it's not intellectual. Exactly, exactly.

No, I don't have a hard stat on it, and certainly it may be even as high as he says. I think it's true that people believe in some ways not what the facts dictate. They believe what they want to believe, and they also believe what fits with their earlier and prior held beliefs. So one of the points I make in the book is that whenever someone is presented with the evidence for Christianity, you're not talking to someone with a blank slate.

You're not talking to someone who's neutral. They already have a set of earlier, more foundational beliefs by which they evaluate that claim. That's called a worldview, a system of thinking. And so people are going to reject Christianity not necessarily because it's false, because it doesn't fit with earlier beliefs they hold, which may or may not be true. So part of the goal of the book and in any conversation is to get people to question their foundational commitments. So for example, if you give someone the idea that Jesus rose from the dead and they're like, well, I don't believe that, when you bore down to why they don't believe that, it may turn out because they have this anti-supernatural worldview. Well, I don't care how much evidence you give me, miracles are impossible. So you could have evidence as high as the World Trade Center, now the new one in New York City, and it doesn't matter because if miracles are impossible, I'm going to dismiss it all.

So people definitely have bias, and that's one of the things that makes it hard to talk to them. I'm still thinking about your anticipation and your excitement when you saw that Emma was calling. Because you knew, like, this is going to be rich.

You know, these conversations are going to go deep, it's going to be great. And I thought if I would get that phone call and my kids were going to ask me some of these questions, I would be in a panic. She would do this. No, you know what I would do? I would be like, I'm thinking for parents right now, I'm thinking, you need to get this book.

That's what I would do. I'd get this book. Because the things that you're talking about are the things that our kids are facing.

Like, you're into, what do you do when you have a really smart professor? Christian exclusivity. Hateful and intolerant Christian morals. Homosexuality. Hell versus the loving God. Suffering and evil. Yeah, I don't talk the questions in this book, that's for sure. You're hitting all the things that our kids are being bombarded with and causing them to really think through, how do I answer this question?

Do you think that is why kids are leaving the church? What's happening? That's David Ann Wilson with Michael Krueger on Family Life Today. You're going to want to hear his response in a minute, 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? Well, 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 thanks.

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 his thoughts on why so many kids walk away from their faith at college. What's happening in college? Well, I think what's happening is lots of kids have shown up in college and they've never had to wrestle with these questions before. I think what you're discovering is that we need some deep, sustained reflection as a church upon why we have generations leaving the faith. Some of that's inevitable just on the way the world works, but are we doing an adequate job of preparing people for what they're going to face?

And I think the answer is clearly not in the way we probably ought to do. My book isn't written to parents. It's not written to churches on how to prepare kids for college. It's written to people actually that already got to college.

But one of the things I found out in all the interviews I've done for this book is that people want to know how we got here. What are we missing in the church that allows kids to go to college and get creamed and have no answers? And I think that's the real issue. It's not so much that the kids leave not believing. It's that they just leave not knowing why they believe. And if they don't know why they believe, they're going to get out there and they're going to get crushed by the intellectual climate of most universities.

So part of my book is written to just deal with the reality I'm faced with, which is a lot of kids not knowing the answers, and I'm hoping to help. But I think maybe a future book or a future discussion can be, but what can we do to dial the clock back and think, how can we get at this issue before we even send them out the door? And maybe that's a discussion for another day.

Yeah, so is that what you think we've missed? And this wouldn't just be in the church, but it'd be even in our own family rooms as parents, you know, laying down a foundation of why we believe what we believe, helping our kids understand that. I know that, you know, as a preacher for the last 30 years, 30 years ago, I could make a statement in a sermon why there's evil in the world and a loving God and give sort of a pat answer.

And it wasn't challenged. And the last 15 years, I started to realize if I don't go deeper, especially the next generation is literally sitting there listening to me, pulling up their phone, or they've already done research, they know what some of the top scholars, atheists think and write about, and they're going to listen to my pat answer and go, dude, you're not even going near this question. I can answer this better than you. And so I realized, wow, as a preacher, if I'm worth what I'm doing, I need to give them. And the parents would be looking at me like, why are you going there? And their kids are like, thank you. Thank you because I'm reading what everybody else is saying and I don't buy it anymore. So that's what you're doing, right?

Yeah. And I think one of the things I've seen over the years is a lot of parents and a lot of churches have sort of this bubble mentality of raising your kids. Like, I need to protect them for anything that's challenging to them, protect them from getting any bad teaching, and protect them from anything that's false. And so some parents honestly do such a good job of that that by the time their kids get to college, they've not really heard much of anything as far as an objection to the faith. It's kind of like that parent who's overly concerned about germs and they're always worried that their kid's going to get sick so they have hand sanitizer everywhere and really proud that little Johnny never got sick for the first 12 years of his life, but they don't realize that actually because he never got sick in those early years, his immune system was never boosted, and then he gets a lot sicker later, ironically. So you think you're helping your kid and you're actually hurting your kid.

Same thing true spiritually. I think we need to get out of the bubble mentality as parents and churches and start in one sense inoculating our kids early with these things by introducing them to these unbelieving things in small doses, so to speak, so their immune systems can be kicked in spiritually, and we're not doing that. And my book isn't designed to do that because I'm getting them at 18, 19, and 20, but if we could start sort of dropping little things into their lives to help them think through this all the better. I used to do this with the kids around the dinner table. I would pretend to be the unbeliever at the dinner table.

How old were they? They were 10, 11, 12, and I'd be like, okay, I'm going to tell you, as a non-Christian, I think there's no reason to believe God exists, and here's the three reasons why I'm sure he doesn't exist. Respond. What would you say to that? And their eyes are big, and they're like, I don't know, and they're just figuring it out.

That's a great exercise. It forces them to sort of push through what they may not know and not just accept it at face value. So what do you say to a parent that's listening thinking, well, I'm not a PhD, I'm not a seminary prof, I've had this fun a couple times where I'll be at a park or something, and this happens just a couple times, where somebody will come to share Christ with me, and I do what you just did. Yeah, yeah, pretend to be the bad guy.

I don't tell them I'm Christian, I'm like, yeah. You haven't done that, have you, Mike? Well, that's what he just said he did at the dinner table.

I do it at the dinner table, they know I'm doing it. I'm not sure the guy at the park knew that for you. He's just teasing with people. Yeah, but I mean, I tell him later, but initially I push back. Well, here's why I don't believe that.

Here's what I found. They don't know why either. Yeah. And I can almost crumble their faith because they're not, they have no depth, they have no, it's just, well, the Bible says so, and it's like, that's not going to work. So I think there's a parent listening going, well, I can't do that at dinner table because once they push on it, I'm done. Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, I hate to back the question up one notch, but this probably gets to, you know, why aren't the parents more educated, too?

Right. But I would tell parents, don't feel like you have to have a PhD to be effective at this. If you're growing in your faith and you're trying to learn and you're trying to read and you're dealing with 10, 11, 12-year-old kids, you're not dealing with some philosophy professor at your table, right? If you just know some basic things about why you believe, you can really help your kid get there. The other thing I would encourage parents to do is lean on other resources.

Maybe you don't have a PhD, fair enough, but maybe you could help them go to certain groups that are willing to do these sorts of things or go to a church that's willing to expose them to these sorts of things and really willing to challenge them or have them read books. Not to sound like a cliche, but the book I just wrote hopefully could help parents think through these issues so they could then talk to their kids about them. Yeah, I read it, and it's definitely not just for a college kid to read.

No, no. I hope it's not. What I've discovered in many conversations across the country in the last year is that a lot of parents are coming up to me, and they're saying, I gave this to my college student, and I'm reading it with them. So there's this sense in which the parents and the kids are reading the book together.

I'm like, that's exactly what I hope to see. There's nothing wrong as a parent or a mentor saying, you know what, great question. I don't know.

Let's go find out together. Exactly. I think that's part of the panic. A parent thinks, if I don't have all the answers, I can't engage in the conversations. But it's not bad to show your kids you don't have an answer. You can say, look, that's a great question.

Let's go together and find out what the answer is and whatever source we need to go into. Have your kids read the book? Yes. Of course, Emma's read the book. My son John has read it. I think all three have read the book. Actually, to be fair, the book is dedicated to all three. Each chapter is Dear Emma because she was the one in college at the time. But really, in my mind, I knew that then John would be in college, then soon Kate would be in college, and so the book is for all of them, and they've all read it. Of course, Emma's probably read it the most carefully because she's at UNC right now, and they seem to really benefit and resonate from it, and we have these conversations quite a bit around the table. Is there a question that comes up the most from Emma or college kids, do you think? You know, when I wrote the book, there's 15 chapters, and I tried to pick what I thought were the 15 most vital questions, and I'm picking 15 out of 500, right? So who knows if I got hit the mark properly? But one of the questions I think I've heard the most, and I think is a sticking point for people that they don't realize, there's always the problem of evil, we could go there.

There's always the sexuality questions, we can go there, and those are biggies, no doubt about it. But what I've learned over the years is that there's one that's even bigger that most people don't even know how to articulate, and that is the problem of why does it seem like everybody in the world who's smart doesn't believe? And at a university setting, they go in thinking, okay, so Christianity is true, and if we're Orthodox Christians, we believe it's the only true religion, and yet most of the people at my university don't believe it. And then on top of that, most of the smartest people at my university certainly don't believe it.

The people with those letters behind their name really don't believe it. And then they pause and think for a moment, what's the chance that all of them are wrong and I'm right? That one question is like a little sliver in your brain that if you don't have an answer to that, it's going to crumble you. Oh, will you answer that for us?

Yeah, absolutely. I answer it in the book, and I've actually started a little bit to already answer it, which is that that would be a very damning question for Christianity if, in fact, people formed their beliefs on facts alone. We tend to think they do. We tend to think that people just form beliefs in this white lab coat, scientific sort of way, where if you give them the right data, they'll reach the right conclusions. And so we think people form beliefs scientifically and in a linear way. Therefore, if most people believe something, it must be true, and if something is true, most people will believe it. Well, what happens when we say something is true and most people don't believe it?

What do we do then? Well, this is where everybody comes into the game with a worldview, with predetermined ideas, and not just any old worldview, a fallen, broken worldview that's at the core anti-God from the start due to the fall of Adam and due to the darkness of their heart, and that colors why and what they believe. Now, there's more to be said than that, but that's part of the answer, and I think people just don't have those categories.

You know this better than anybody. Even when you bring that to light, show that the worldviews and there's brokenness and there's baggage, even then, most people don't ever get through that worldview even though the facts point them there. They'll look at it, acknowledge it, am I right?

And they still go, I'm not going to believe. That's right, and what it really takes for a person to believe is a wholesale overturning of the way they look at the world. If you give a person all those facts, are they going to necessarily believe? No, what they need is a wholesale paradigm shift, and we have a word for that in Christianity.

It's called conversion. And that is a work that is ultimately done by the power of the Spirit. Is it apart from facts? No. Is it apart from the Word? No. Of course those things play a role, but it's ultimately the Spirit that does it.

So therefore, I could spend all day long giving people all the data, but ultimately it's something that God has to do. 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. Are you a part of a small group? I love my small group because it is the best place that I am known. I feel loved and accepted for who Christ made me to be.

Community is so important because we are not meant to do this life alone. If you're looking for studies for your group that help you feel connected and known and help you love and know God more, you can check out the studies at FamilyLifeToday.com and use the code 25OFF to save on all leader materials. Tomorrow Dave and Anne Wilson will continue their conversation with Dr. Michael Krueger on how to help a child who is having doubts about their faith. That's tomorrow. 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. Family Life Today is a production of Family Life, a Krue ministry, helping you pursue the relationships that matter most.