It is all too easy to convince ourselves that we are fearers and worshipers of God because we attend church and sing songs. Yet Scripture clarifies for us that external shows of worship do not always reflect the heart: “…this people honors me with their lips, while their hearts are far from me, and their fear of me is a commandment taught by men” (Isaiah 29:13).

Revelation 19:5: And from the throne came a voice saying, “Praise our God, all you his servants, you who fear him, small and great.” (ESV)
There is something striking to me about the idea of fearing the one for whom I live.  A moment’s thought leads me to consider that the fear of God is one way of describing the entire motivation for living for him in the first place. If there is a supreme reason for living our lives and an ultimate aim to which they ought to be directed, then it stands to reason that not living for him should strike the greatest fear in our hearts by definition. What could be more fearful than missing the entire purpose of our existence?
And yet, there is something positive here as well. It is not just that we fear the lack of God, but that we fear God himself. The fear of God is not fundamentally one of privation (“What if I don’t have God?”), but is intensely God-directed. It is not the absence of God that we fear, but God himself.
And not only that, but it is a fear that is marked not by servile subjection but by heart-filled praise. The fear of God is a wondrous thing! It is the first step in an entire economy or ecosystem of dynamics in the relationship between us and God, us and each other, and us and the rest of creation.
Fear and Worship
This train of thought, combined with continued meditation on this passage, leads me to something closer to the reason why fearing the one for whom I live is so striking: fear and worship are inseparable. This may not break new ground for many, but I have never explicitly drawn some logical inferences which now present themselves to me: if fear and worship are connected, then our fears and our gods are also linked. We cannot separate what we fear from who or what we worship.
Nevertheless, we do this often enough. We prefer to limit our conception of worship to lip service. There may be a root of motivation in laziness here. Worship is so intrinsic to our being and nature, so deep in the well of our hearts, that it takes work to draw it out and know it. Oftentimes, we prefer to leave our hearts on autopilot to taking hold of the controls and attempting to steer in the proper direction.
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Written by Charles L. Glenn |
Wednesday, September 7, 2022
“The family,” Koganzon writes, “does prepare the child for citizenship, but not by having him rehearse civic principles from a young age. Rather it does so by inoculating him against the worst tendencies of liberalism—the tendencies to be ruled by fashion, custom, and the opinions of the majority.” This essential rootedness is in urgent demand today in a society tossed about by passions that make unbridled democracy a threat to the freedom not only of individuals, but also of families and religious communities.

Parental authority has been an issue of lively and often bitter public debate over the past two centuries, and it seems likely to play a significant role in the 2022 elections and beyond. As I write, a lead story in the Washington Post features a new nationwide organization called “Moms for Liberty,” which insists, “We do NOT CO-­PARENT with the ­GOVERNMENT,” and objects to a variety of practices of local public schools, including mandatory masking and purported indoctrination of children in Critical Race Theory.
Rita Koganzon does not address these current controversies; she discusses how John Locke and other political theorists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries understood parental authority in relation to wider civic goals. For Thomas Hobbes, it was essential to minimize any threat the family posed to the authority of the sovereign. The child should learn “to appreciate the curbs that the sovereign’s law places on what would otherwise have been their fathers’ complete power over them and to anticipate the day they are freed from their fathers to be subject only to a distant and largely non-­interfering master.”
Hobbes sought to delegitimize the family and other independent sources of formation, thereby creating a monopoly of authority within the state. This vision became public policy during the Jacobin phase of the French Revolution, during subsequent eras of nation-building in Europe and the Americas in the nineteenth century, and under authoritarian regimes worldwide in the twentieth.
Government policies in many countries have sought to use popular schooling to inculcate loyalty to the nation, and to overcome divisions that might arise from community traditions, religious convictions, and other differences among the population. The child belongs to the state, with parents enjoying a temporary guardianship subject to cancellation at any point if they are guilty of providing an understanding of life that is in tension with the state orthodoxy.
Koganzon goes on to discuss the very different role of the family in John Locke’s essays on education, society, and government. Unlike Hobbes, Locke had a pluralistic vision of society. He sought to weaken the role of authority in civic life. And he argued that doing so required emphasizing authority within the family. “It is precisely to provide a hedge against the power of fashion, custom, and opinion,” Koganzon writes, “that Locke re-introduces a narrow and strictly pedagogical form of authority over children into the family after he has delegitimized it everywhere else.”
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Bad Therapy should shake parents out of the world’s therapeutic parenting ideology. Then, of course, Christians will have to replace the worldly wisdom Shrier debunks with sound Biblical teaching. God is gracious and when we walk by faith and parent according to God’s design, we can be confident that we will raise godly children capable of meeting life’s challenges.

Currently at the top of Amazon’s bestseller booklist, Abigail Shrier’s Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up tackles one of today’s most pressing issues:
[W]ith unprecedented help from mental health experts, we have raised the loneliest, most anxious, depressed, pessimistic, helpless, and fearful generation on record….How did kids raised so gently come to believe that they had experienced debilitating childhood trauma? How did kids who received far more psychotherapy than any previous generation plunge into a bottomless well of despair? (xvii)
This issue affects everyone: parents, teachers, pastors, coaches, and more. Today’s children are tomorrow’s future. Despite the weighty topic, Bad Therapy is easily readable, full of humor and hope, including clever chapter titles like “Trauma Kings” and “Spare the Rod, Drug the Child.” Bad Therapy is also secular validation of the natural order God created for parents and children and is an encouragement to Christian parents.
Shrier outlines the problem: therapy and therapeutic concepts (“mental health”) are ubiquitous today and parents are quick to find therapeutic solutions for everything, including medicating kids with psychotropic drugs and stimulants to treat normal childhood behaviors. Any pain or disappointment is equated with trauma and, in our risk-averse society, must be avoided at all costs, or treated as a problem to be solved with therapy and drugs. This ideology is even common among Christian parents, who readily rely on therapy to address perceived behavioral issues (aka sin) or on medication for normal childhood characteristics like being wiggly or distracted.
Shrier argues that therapy can often introduce iatrogenesis (i.e. treatment itself creates harm). Therapeutic interventions also undermine parental authority, fracturing countless family relationships, and create anxious, needy children who grow to adulthood unable to cope with basic life problems (40). Shrier recounts interviews with psychologists, therapists, school counselors, parents and children, and provides academic studies, school survey results, and more for overwhelming evidentiary support. And the evidence is powerful. Shrier surmises that individual therapy has very little proven benefit for kids, and rather sows self-doubt among parents and an over-reliance on “experts.” Bad Therapy is the slap in the face needed to wake parents up so that they will course correct.
Not surprisingly, therapists tend to think otherwise. Even the most altruistic therapist has bills to pay and needs a steady stream of income:
No industry refuses the prospect of exponential growth, and mental health experts are no exception. By feeding normal kids with normal problems into an unending pipeline, the mental health industry is minting patients faster than it can cure them (xviii).
A therapist, for many, has come to replace traditional friendships and wisdom from older family members or friends (9). Although not mentioned by Shrier, therapy has even replaced traditional pastoral care and advice. Marriage problems? Take it to the therapist, not the pastor or elders. Rebellious or difficult children? A behavioral therapist can help; medication will fix the kid with ADHD. What could the pastor know about a child with sensory processing disorder?
Contrary to the popular wisdom of the day, which encourages eternal introspection and navel gazing, Shrier discusses the different types of mindsets that enable success in life.
There are at least two we can adopt: ‘action orientation’ and ‘state orientation.’ Adopting an action orientation means focusing on the task ahead with no thought to your current emotional or physical state. A state orientation means you’re thinking principally about yourself: how prepared you feel in that moment, the worry you feel over a text left unanswered, the light prickling at the back of your throat, that crick blossoming in your neck. Adopting an action orientation, it turns out, makes it much more likely that you accomplish the task (46-47).
In short, therapy is not necessary, but a stiff upper lip and a can-do attitude are effective at getting one’s life in order. Christians especially should recognize that life is hard (anyone who says differently is selling something, says Westley in The Princess Bride) and that the solution isn’t to avoid difficulties or be quick to medicate for troubles, but rather to learn how to persevere or repent of sinful behavior.
Isn’t therapy good for kids who have gone through trauma: abuse, abandonment by parents, divorce, etc.? Shrier says:
There is no good reason to believe that most kids are traumatized. The best research indicates the opposite: even among victims of heartbreaking circumstances, resilience is the norm. Disturbing events are best understood as ‘potentially traumatic,’ meaning they may leave no lasting psychological imprint at all, and certainly not necessarily a negative one (105).
Unfortunately, the so-called experts often conflate hardship (poverty, death of a parent, a major move) and actual physical or emotional abuse, and thereby fail to serve the students they claim to help. Psychologist and writer Rob Henderson (who, despite spending most of his childhood in the foster care system, graduated with an Ivy League Ph.D.) says, “What [children who have suffered the most abject circumstances] need is also the thing so few adults in their lives are willing to supply: high expectations” (105). This is a theme repeated throughout the book: kids don’t need to be coddled; they need to have the freedom to fail, make mistakes, or do hard things and then to learn from their experiences. Hard times, difficult experiences, and risk, all tend to make people more resilient.
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