Should we really be shocked about the declining health and welfare of many children influenced by America’s cultural preoccupation with all things make-believe? After all, why wouldn’t our little ones be in turmoil when the educational agenda of our time isn’t about the three Rs, but rather about teaching our youngsters to reject their God-given identity and live as some sort of magical being empowered by the incantation of their preferred pronouns and the medical wizardry of gender reassignment?

The truth is, if we allow children to be constantly exposed to academic malpractice, fantasy narratives, virtual-reality gaming and cosplay cultism, then we should not be surprised when they prefer to live their life predominately outside of reality and God’s truth.

These days, our poor kids have little hope of avoiding the insidious mindworms of our society’s fantasies and mad delusions. Just look at the present cultural landscape: the satanic pagan imagery of popular music performers, the woke indoctrination of Disney entertainment, and even the baffling sight of drag queen RuPaul on a box of Cheezits at the local grocery store. This widespread propaganda, produced by unprincipled adults who want to promote overt rebellion against parents and God, is a major reason why we are seeing a rise in the psychological distress and spiritual confusion of innocent children.

New studies on children’s wellness, in fact, are showing the incredible damage taking place. Recent data shows reading and math proficiency among our public school students are at 20 year lows, especially in Illinois where dozens of schools statewide had zero grade-level proficiency. And in case you were wondering, some of the numbers were only “slightly better” in pre-pandemic 2019.

Schools have also failed to protect our children from the fallout of America’s increasing social turmoil and anger. Despite massive educational campaigns to stop it, bullying is on the rise with 90% of students in grades 4-8 becoming victims of harassment that often includes cyber-bullying and physical assault. The NEA, in fact, reports that over 160,000 kids refuse to go to school each day for fear of being bullied.

Likewise, self-harm is a huge issue. Suicide rates have increased among U.S. adolescents and young adults (age 10-24) and now account for 14% of all suicides, which is indicative of the overall rise of cases over the last decade. According to the latest study by the CDC, nearly three in five teenage girls in America felt persistent sadness in 2021, double the rate of boys, and one in three girls considered attempting suicide. The findings also showed high levels of violence, depression and suicidal thoughts among lesbian, gay and bisexual youth.

 

The Spiritual Risk Of A Child Reared On Fantasy

Clearly there is a genuine spiritual risk for the younger generation growing up in this current crusade of make-believe and skepticism towards transcendent morality. It’s one thing for adults to deal with these assaults upon truth, but young children are not intellectually and emotionally developed enough to make a clear distinction between what is real and what is imaginary. Some people who are involved in early education have found this to be true in their professional experience:

“A child who spends too much time in a world of fantasy may find it difficult to relate to others, to interact in a group, to be in the here and now. It can also be scary for a child… When a child under 5 or 6 hears a fairy tale with a wicked witch, they then also imagine this witch to be real as a child of this age has a very concrete understanding of the world. They visualize it as if it is real as they are not yet able to clearly separate fantasy from reality.” — Pretend Play: A Complicated Question

Sadly, this childhood interaction between fact and fantasy can be even more complicated when you, as a Christian parent, begin to introduce your child to the real person of Jesus Christ. This should be an exciting and joyful truth to share with your little one as you begin the process of rearing your child under the instruction of God’s word, but it can oftentimes be a difficult education if Jesus has to compete with Santa Claus, Marvel superheroes, or Harry Potter as the object of your child’s fledgling hero-worship.

Recent research has proven this childhood confusion with fantasy to be a real issue. Case in point, a 2014 research study at Boston University where it was discovered that young children with a religious background were less able to distinguish between fantasy and reality compared with their secular counterparts:

In two studies, 66 kindergarten-age children were presented with three types of stories: realistic, religious and fantastical. The researchers then queried the children on whether they thought the main character in the story was real or fictional.

 

While nearly all children found the figures in the realistic narratives to be real, secular and religious children were split on religious stories. Children with a religious upbringing tended to view the protagonists in religious stories as real, whereas children from non-religious households saw them as fictional.

 

Although this might be unsurprising, secular and religious children also differed in their interpretation of fantasy narratives where there was a supernatural or magical storyline.

 

“Secular children were more likely than religious children to judge the protagonist in such fantastical stories to be fictional,” wrote the researchers. “The results suggest that exposure to religious ideas has a powerful impact on children’s differentiation between reality and fiction, not just for religious stories but also for fantastical stories.” — BBC News, Study: Religious Children Are Less Able To Distinguish Fantasy From Reality

The researchers concluded (as most college researchers are prone to do) that exposure to a religious education is probably the main culprit in a child’s difficulty in identifying fact from fiction. This conclusion, however, seems to indicate an anti-biblical bias that completely ignores the alternative possibility. Why is religious upbringing the problem? Isn’t it just as plausible that fictional stories involving magic are the real cause of confusion, especially when these tales of superheroes, witches and wizards are the ones mimicking God’s supernatural power in the Bible?

In light of Scripture, this alternative conclusion is clearly confirmed. For starters, God is not a God of confusion. God’s word will not return void, but will accomplish what He pleases and will prosper in that thing for which He sent it. Over and over again, the Bible confirms that scriptural instruction from the word of God is essential to a child’s proper upbringing. It keeps them far from folly, equips them for good works, and makes them wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus (Proverbs 22:15; 2 Timothy 3:14-17).

 

Allowing The World To Shape Our Children’s Reality

The one thing that is likely to undermine this God-ordained training is when an unaware parent sees the interjection of worldly ideas from movies, lyrics and books as a harmless distraction from their child’s moral development. This parental blunder is even more egregious when the parent’s reason for doing so has nothing to do with the perceived educational value of these entertainments, but rather that they don’t want their children to miss out on what all their classmates are enjoying in the popular culture, even if it contains unbiblical content.

To be blunt, raising children with such an indiscriminate exposure to worldly influences is almost a cultural form of Moloch worship to which the faithless Israelites succumbed when they delivered their infant children over to paganism for the sake of their temporal prosperity (Psalm 106:34-39).

Some may suggest (and rightly so) that we can’t always shield our children from the world’s influences and the confusion these things might engender. Surely this is part and parcel of the average childhood and will no longer be an issue once they grow older and gain the intellectual capacity and religious understanding to correctly divide fact from fiction or right from wrong.

This is a valid point, and yet not particularly the issue at hand. The concern is not so much in how such exposure might temporarily affect a child, but how it might impact the child later on and into adulthood. A childhood immersed in make-believe might well lead to a misguided adulthood that finds more “truth” in paganism or occultism than in the Bible. (See The Sad Truth Of Tolkien Spirituality for more insight).

Such childhood forays into fantasy fiction might also lay the groundwork for the idea that God’s word is just another fairy tale of human invention. And eventually, these adults might find themselves falling into the ditch of full-blown skepticism or atheism.

This possibility of a fantasy-prone child becoming an apostate from his religious upbringing, in fact, was recently explored in a research study titled, Make Believe Unmakes Belief?: Childhood Play Style and Adult Personality as Predictors of Religious Identity Change. Published in 2014, the study looked into the relationship between childhood imagination and religiosity, finding that people who intensely engaged in pretend play as children were more likely to change their religious identity later in life, with apostasy being the largest category. As reported by Merrill Miller:

“The study assessed the role of ‘pretend play’—creating and acting out imaginary scenarios in made-up worlds—in the childhoods of individuals… and found that individuals who did not change their religious or nonreligious identification were less likely to have engaged in pretend play. Converts and switchers, however, were more likely to have played pretend, and apostates were the most likely to have often engaged in pretend play.” — The Humanist, Are Nonbelievers More Imaginative? A New Study Suggests They Might Be

Why were children who often engaged in a fantasy world more likely to abandon their religious upbringing as adults?

“The study’s author, Christopher Burris speculated that the higher correlation for apostates is because of the shift from structure — common among religious institutions — to unstructured — that is found in pretend play. ‘The realm of the nonbeliever is much less structured than the realm of belief is,’ he explained. ‘People’s cognitive, intellectual and emotional needs are not met sufficiently by faith traditions, so they strike out on their own way.’” — Massarah Mikati, Deseret News

 

The Biblical Approach For Christian Parents

The Bible, of course, has already anticipated the possible spiritual fallout from cultivating a child’s wild imagination instead of grounding them in reality and the clear instruction of God’s revelation. The biblical remedy?

Train up a child in the way that he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it. — Proverbs 22:6

This is not to say that Christian parents shouldn’t encourage their child’s emerging creativity. But it should be grounded and fostered in reality. To truly instill an active and abiding love for God and neighbor, a child’s imagination must be connected to this real-life task and to exposing the child to those faithful people in their lives who emulate Christian duty in their various talents and occupations.

Even without the benefit of this Biblical insight, Dr. Maria Montessori made the academic observation that reality was the key to a more profitable imagination:

“The true basis of the imagination is reality, and its perception is related to exactness of observation. It is necessary to prepare children to perceive the things in their environment exactly, in order to secure for them the material required by the imagination. Intelligence, reasoning, and distinguishing one thing from another prepares a cement for imaginative constructions… The fancy which exaggerates and invents coarsely does not put the child on the right road.” — Spontaneous Activity in Education p 254, Chapter IX

Don’t misunderstand this point. Pretend play is not necessarily a bad thing, but it is an activity of natural childhood development meant to assist children in processing the real world around them. “For example, if (children) see an excavator at work in the street,” writes one teacher, “they may then be attracted to working with a model of an excavator, to reading books about construction vehicles and to play based on this. This is a child’s imagination at work.”

The fact is, even children themselves would much rather engage with real-life activities when possible. Many educators are well aware that a child is much more excited by helping Mom or Dad prepare a meal in the kitchen than pretend-cook with a toy stove. And Scripture finds great wisdom in this approach.

Notice how God instructs His people to teach their children in the course of their daily activities:

You shall teach [the words of God] diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. — Deuteronomy 6:7

Here we see no significant time set aside for daydreaming or chasing after empty phantasms. This is an all-encompassing lifestyle that weaves God’s truth into one’s daily labor from dawn to dusk, and from childhood to adulthood. It is the command from Genesis and throughout the Bible to bear fruit in every good work and increase in the knowledge of God (Colossians 1:10) “until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ” (Ephesians 4:13).

Brothers, do not be children in your thinking. Be infants in evil, but in your thinking be mature. — 1 Corinthians 14:20

 

The Mature Approach For All Christians

So where is this maturity of which Paul speaks? Truly, one of the problems with American Christianity today is that too many professing believers have failed to see the importance of sobriety and maturity as a Biblical imperative for discipleship. They twist the meaning of Luke 18:16-17 and simply refuse to grow up. They see their childlike fascination with games, fairy tales, and the playthings of their youth as a crowning virtue instead of a possible impediment to spiritual growth. In turn, these parents immerse their children in the same enthrallments and find great satisfaction in molding little ones into their own image, forgetting that the Bible instructs them otherwise.

On the contrary, God is the only object of wonder we need to focus on:

We will not hide them from their children, but tell to the coming generation the glorious deeds of the Lord, and His might, and the wonders that He has done. — Psalm 78:4

I ask you: How could anyone fully submit to this sacred task if Jesus is only viewed as a mythological “archetype of Christ” or a good teacher who said wise things but never really existed except in some Jungian collective mindset?

Any confusion about the reality of the Son of God is never going to serve this dark world, especially in an age where fantasy is actively usurping real life. As Christians, we have a holy calling to go into the world to make disciples, not to go into a fantasy-land to do so. God’s word and the Holy Spirit have shown us the only mind-altering vision we need to ignite our passion. We need to humbly submit to our Lord’s charge to deny self, follow Him, and stay true to our Gospel witness and testimony for the sake of the lost.

We know, of course, that shielding people, young or old, from the counterfeit fictions of this world won’t guarantee their eventual conversion. Ultimately, it is only by God’s grace and power that hearts are changed and the lost through faith are saved. Yet, we also know that if salvation does come to an individual, it won’t be because of fairy tales or myths, but despite them. Our job as Christians is to stay on point with Biblical teaching and righteous living, and not capitulate to the world’s insatiable desire for an alternate reality. To give in to that desire does nothing more than bring confusion and cast doubt on the existence of the living Savior and the faith that brings eternal life.

Thankfully, by the grace of God, many Christian parents and other morally-sensitive adults are finally waking up. Hearing that Disney+ lost 2.3 million subscribers in the first quarter of 2023 because of a backlash to their entertainment’s immoral and inappropriate content brings us great hope that for millions of children all is not lost. Indeed, may God bless and preserve our little ones to be “trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil” so that one day “they will grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ” (Hebrews 5:14; 2 Peter 3:18).

 

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