The Orthodox priest Father Jonathan Tobias writes in (constructive) criticism of a post I put up the other night about the need to tell our kids the stories of the martyrs, and what they suffered for the faith. I mentioned that after finishing a chapter in the Madeleine L’Engle book I was reading to my younger kids, I read them an account of a liturgy that the late Father George Calciu served in a Romanian communist prison. The point was to show them how precious the liturgy is. Father Jonathan writes:

The Church is entering into a time of persecution in America. This has long been said all over the place in conservative Christian America, and now it is being chanted in Orthodox America (perhaps because of importation by converts like me). This article is a good example of such a jeremiad prophecy — tightly analogous with the OT prophet’s warning of state dissolution as a consequence of moral ruin. I was intrigued, in this essay, by the possibility of juxtaposing the bedtime reading of Madeline with a narrative of a confessor’s torment at the hands of a modern tyrant. The conclusion of the essay was clear:

“The kids wanted to hear more, so I promised to find other (appropriate) passages to read for them later. That boring Sunday liturgy looks different in light of what Father George suffered for it, and to be able to say it in prison. I could tell a change in my children’s view. These are the stories we have to start telling our kids. They are the stories that belong to the church.”

Please note that I do not doubt any of these sentences. I, too, am honored to be a member of the fellowship that includes Fr George. I think young people ought to be acquainted, well, with the history of the Church, and the biographies of her saints and martyrs — if only to reinforce the reality of Christ’s presence and His transcendence.

It may be that all the surveys and all the observations are correct. They are likely true because America has never been as Christian as people thought. Morality may not have been so successful in the past as has been assumed, in the popular narrative. And, dare we say it, ethnic communities that revolved around the church have been completely assimilated into the dominant culture.

But I doubt the efficacy of doomsaying in either keeping kids in church after they graduate or insuring the survival of orthodoxy. And I struggle against such (and all) future-phobic language.

I have lived with the language of impending doom for over fifty years: in that narrative, America has always been in decline. The Rapture was always coming. The Communists were always on the verge of taking over. The liberals were always toxifying the faith. Strangers were always invading the community, messing things up.

And I have to tell you, these narratives never worked. They never packed the church. The kids, made to watch “A Thief in the Night” and “The Burning Hell” and getting entertained by rock bands and praise choruses and made to feel important, left anyways.

Well, hang on. That’s a serious misreading of what I actually wrote. Check it out for yourself. First, I didn’t read Madeline to the kids; I read Madeleine L’Engle, specifically her novel A Wind in the Door, in which kids do battle against the Echthroi, demons who try to destroy life. It’s much less jarring to read an account of a liturgy celebrated in prison when you’ve been reading a novel (which the kids loved) about a kind of spiritual warfare waged by kids, as opposed to a book for very young children about a sweet orphan girl in Paris. I linked the themes in the L’Engle book to the kinds of spiritual battles Father George fought.

Second, I certainly didn’t read them stories about the tortures Father George and the other inmates suffered. I read them a beautiful account of how Father George celebrated the same liturgy that we participate in on Sundays, in his cell, in the presence of two murderers who were put there to kill him. And they ended up kneeling and hearing the Gospel. It’s an amazing true tale of hope and the triumph of faith and goodness. In church every Sunday, we pray for the persecuted Christians overseas, and we do as well in our evening prayers at home. We do not shield our children from general knowledge of the suffering Christians today, on the other side of the world, are undergoing for their faith.

I’m not sure why Father Jonathan thought that I was trying to frighten the kids into staying in church. As I made clear in the post, my talk with them wasn’t along the lines of “They’re Coming To Get Us!”, but rather about how the kids are going to face real challenges to their faith over the course of their lifetimes, and they need to be prepared for that. Their experience of the practice of our faith is — as it should be — rich and joyful (though the length of the liturgies can wear them down sometimes). I think it’s important to share with them, in an age-appropriate way, the fact that the faith sometimes requires courage and fortitude. The other night, we talked about how Father George resolved in prison never, ever to hate his persecutors, and how this was an important virtue for us all to practice, even though our daily lives are nothing like what he suffered.

I don’t see what’s wrong with that, frankly. I completely agree that jacking Christian kids up on apocalypse porn is wrong, and certainly counterproductive. This was not that, and it won’t ever be that in our house. We don’t live in Fortress Orthodoxy. I hope, though, we live in a milder, lay version of Monastery Orthodoxy: keeping a household of prayer and hospitality and seriousness about the faith, but also joy and laughter within the normal rhythms of family life.

Our kids are somewhat sheltered because we have always been kind of strict about the media to which they have access, and because they have been homeschooled. In all the places we’ve lived, they’ve been part of social groups in which most people are serious Christians, and in which Christian norms on faith and morals are shared. The kids don’t really understand that many people, perhaps most people, don’t see the world the way we do. This doesn’t make the others bad, or mean that we shouldn’t be friends with them, but some of the people they’ll meet when they grow older will hate them for what they believe. I made it clear to the kids that what happened to Father George is not going to happen to us here, but that the day will probably come when they are put to some kind of test, and have to stand up for what they know to be true, even if it costs them.

I think these conversations are important to have with our kids, in an age-appropriate manner. I suspect Father Jonathan, prior to his conversion, had a far, far different childhood than I did. He writes:

I have lived with the language of impending doom for over fifty years: in that narrative, America has always been in decline. The Rapture was always coming. The Communists were always on the verge of taking over. The liberals were always toxifying the faith. Strangers were always invading the community, messing things up.

And I have to tell you, these narratives never worked. They never packed the church. The kids, made to watch “A Thief in the Night” and “The Burning Hell” and getting entertained by rock bands and praise choruses and made to feel important, left anyways.

Future phobic language not only does not work.

Future phobia is, more importantly, toxic.

Even though I think Father Jonathan seriously misread the post that prompted his discourse, I encourage you to read it, because he makes some good and important points. Such as:

Never before in human history until this moment — when there is one civilization unified with one culture (whatever we want to call it) — has humanity been so non-metaphysical.

Indeed, if civilization is anything, it is anti-metaphysical (despite its complete dependence upon metaphysical realities).

And what can we do for that, when it comes to our kids, our church, our communities, our personal existence?

You can go ahead and tell the scary stories and linger in a doom that might even be likely.

But far, far more important is this: Tell the narrative and doctrine of Christ. Teach your children well — tell them how to answer the insane and inane anti-theistic complaints of our nitwit culture. Teach orthodox theology by first learning it yourself — a theology that must go far beyond the simple propositions of brochure catechisms and even exceeds the likes of Pomazansky and Romanides — these catechisms are not enough for an anti-metaphysical age. By all means, read out loud the saints and the elders: but you need to read and teach the Fathers’ doctrine much, much more.

I notice something whenever I talk about the Benedict Option. People who came out of fundamentalist or fundamentalist-ish backgrounds have flashbacks, and think I’m talking about creating the fraidy-cat ghettos from which they escaped. All I know about Father Jonathan’s background is that he converted to Orthodoxy from a revivalist Evangelical church. I’d be willing to bet that he was steeped in apocalypticism. Me, I drank deep of it when I was 12 and 13 — I was never taught it in church or in my family, but got sucked into reading Hal Lindsey books — and I burned out on it. It has a lot to do with why I gave up Christianity as a teenager. Even though I had that relatively brief exposure to that mindset, it’s hard for me to imagine how traumatizing it is to have been raised in that fear-based religious culture. I recently bought George Marsden’s acclaimed study of fundamentalism in America so I can better understand the way people raised with that vision of Christianity think, and have historically acted.

We can’t help seeing the world from the perspective of our own personal history. I was raised in a culture that was rural, conservative, Southern, and Protestant — but not fundamentalist. The closest I ever came to fundamentalism was two years of reading a lot on my own about the Rapture, from 1979 to 1981. I think a big reason it lit me up so much for a time was that it was so sharp and vivid, that Christian vision, and what I was used to was so gentle and formless. It was considered a virtue not to get too wound up about religion. We were very English in that way (true fact: my parish was settled mostly by Englishmen, including Tories fleeing the American Revolution). That kind of small-town piety has its comforts, heaven knows, but it does not prepare young people for the challenges of an aggressively post-Christian culture.

Again, I don’t know much of anything about Father Jonathan’s pre-Orthodoxy background, but I’m pretty sure that if I had been raised in a hellfire-and-brimstone, Rapture-ready church culture, I would be unnerved by anything that sounded like that. Whenever I run across Orthodox literature speculating on the identity of the Antichrist, bar codes as the Mark of the Beast, and things like that — there really is an Orthodox subculture that indulges in that stuff — I turn away from it. Two years of it in my youth was enough for me.

I think the priest and I probably agree that we have to prepare our kids for the world that we live in, which is post-Christian and, as he says, anti-metaphysical. I would ask recovering from fear-based, apocalypse-obsessed fundamentalism, though, to consider the perspective of a kid who was raised ignorant about the stark challenges the world will pose to his faith, because most of the grown-ups pretty much assumed that there weren’t any. Christian kids like that are going to be in real trouble when they leave the nest, because they will have taken so much for granted. Father Jonathan is right that we need to fill our kids with knowledge and hope, not fear. But I do believe it is also important to tell them the true stories of men and women who suffered for their faith, and who triumphed. We watched Selma together the other night, and talked about the Christian courage of MLK and the other pastors leading the civil rights movement. Be like them, I said. And the next night: Be like Father George. 

When the time comes for them to be tested — and it will — they need examples to show them how a faithful Christian behaves under fire.