Some schools, though, are already promoting sexual or gender issues—issues that are controversial based on parental and religious beliefs. Likewise, many race-oriented issues are especially controversial. Those influenced by Critical Race Theory focus heavily on Black and White populations even though the United States may be the most racially diverse of all nations.

Around the country, parents are vocally challenging curricula related to race issues in the K-12 schools of their children and on their school boards. Not a few of these curricula contain elements taken from Critical Race Theory, which separates at least two races into two categories: “oppressed” and “oppressors.”
My local newspaper, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, ran an op-ed article, “Why St. Louis-area classrooms need more open discussions about race.” The authors are two St. Louis-based women: Sienna Ruiz, a research coordinator at the Washington University School of Medicine, and Akilah Collins-Anderson, working on her doctoral degree in public health sciences at Washington University. The article ended with this sentence: “Schools should provide critical thinking tools about race because it shapes everyone’s lives, whether parents accept it or not”—an exceptionally bold statement. The obvious question it raises is, “Are the ‘critical thinking tools’ that parents must accept unbiased and fair?”
First, it needs to be firmly stated that the public schools’ main purpose is to teach basic subjects as thoroughly as possible to prepare students for their futures. Traditionally, this has meant giving them the knowledge and skills to serve them well for either a vocation or higher education’s demands as well as to enhance citizenship.
This type of education takes time and demands sufficient priority. Students should graduate with basic English and math skills, and knowledge of science and both national and world histories. No one should need remedial reading classes in college if K-12 schools accomplish their purpose. Adding issue-centered courses should not diminish time spent on core subjects.
Some schools, though, are already promoting sexual or gender issues—issues that are controversial based on parental and religious beliefs. Likewise, many race-oriented issues are especially controversial. Those influenced by Critical Race Theory focus heavily on Black and White populations even though the United States may be the most racially diverse of all nations.
This exaggerated focus dismisses the fact that students are multi-racial, not simply Black or White. It’s like forcing one to watch black and white movies when technicolor is not only available, but it also represents the most enjoyable of movies. It’s passé and terribly narrow-minded to remain stuck on one binary issue of race when we are so beyond that issue. It’s unfair to students who are Asian, Hispanic, African, Middle Eastern, or Native American—and all the many subsets of those broad classifications.
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For some, the attraction of Roman Catholicism is its emphasis on social ethics. The perception for some—especially those converting from forms of fundamentalism—is that Protestants have become hyper-focused on individual salvation while the Catholics have been busy building and sustaining hospitals, schools, orphanages, nursing homes. And yet, Christian history reveals that Protestants have and can have a robust social ethic while affirming a biblical understanding of personal salvation by faith.

A surprisingly large number of conservative intellectuals in the United States are Roman Catholic. Consider, for example, that six of the nine justices on the U.S. Supreme Court are Catholics. Many of these public intellectuals are converts from Protestant Christianity. This leaves some with the sense that the Protestant tradition is somehow deficient.
Both the Catholic and Orthodox churches make weighty claims by purporting to be the true church established, continued, and kept by Jesus Christ himself. In Why Do Protestants Convert?, Brad Littlejohn and Chris Castaldo consider nine motivations for Protestant conversions. Despite these claims, the authors argue that the conversion of Protestants often says less about the strength of the Catholic or Orthodox churches that it does about perceived weaknesses in modern Protestant practice.
Intellectual Concerns
Many more people convert to Roman Catholicism than Orthodoxy, so that move is the focus of the book and this review. The Protestant to Catholic pipeline is a topic of ongoing cultural discussion. However, according to a 2015 Pew study on the U. S. religious landscape, Roman Catholicism is losing more members than it is gaining from any source. Still, the conversion trend is significant.
Littlejohn, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and Castaldo, lead pastor at New Covenant Church, note that Catholic converts are oftentimes intellectuals who carry a certain public credibility. Historically, converts like John Henry Newman, G. K. Chesterton, Richard Neuhaus, and Peter Kreeft have written a great deal about their conversion narratives. Thus, Roman Catholicism, compellingly perceived and portrayed, makes some Protestants wonder whether we left some of the best intellectual resources behind during the Reformation.
In reality, Protestants have at least equal intellectual resources to other Christian traditions. However, “until we teach them effectively to our pastors, parishioners, and children, we should hardly be surprised when they go in search of greener pastures” (10). The apparent contrast between Roman Catholic and Protestant intellectualism is “in large part the natural result of the self-inflicted wounds of the late 20th century scandal of the evangelical mind, which will take generations to undo” (9–10).
At the same time, the Protestant intellectual tradition has largely been overlooked by many contemporary believers. And, doctrines like the belief in “total depravity” have caused some to believe that Protestants disregard the value of human reason, or philosophy. In contrast, the Roman Catholic view appears more positive toward reason, is more openly reliant on philosophy, and thus to some appears better equipped to deal with the social challenges of the day.
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Family is wonderful. It can also, at times, be volatile. Establish a regular rhythm of prayer together as a family. This can be as easy as praying at mealtimes. This regular rhythm, even if it is only at one meal a day, gives us an opportunity to go before the Lord whenever inevitable tensions arise. When a fight has just broken out, Jesus calls us to be reconciled. One way to clear the air is to ask for help in prayer. Something about the ordinariness of a mealtime prayer of thanksgiving makes such requests surprising but, most importantly, ordinary.

Parents are parables. Our lives tell stories to our children. The great gospel story that we hope our lives will tell is one of forgiveness. God forgives us in Christ, and a living witness of God’s forgiveness is a heart of forgiveness in us—a heart that not only receives, but gives. We must begin teaching our children about forgiveness with the gospel, but we must also become parables of forgiveness for them with our lives.
One of the most striking parables about forgiveness is told in the negative: the parable of the unforgiving servant. In the parable, a servant who owes much is forgiven much, only to turn around and demand from another the relatively little that was owed to him (see Matt. 18:21–35). This parable stresses how incongruous it is for the forgiven not to forgive, but the fact that Jesus stresses such an incongruity implicitly teaches us that we first become forgivers by being forgiven. That is why we teach forgiveness to our children by starting with the good news that we are forgiven because of the incarnation, death, resurrection, and ascension of Christ.
The Heidelberg Catechism in its exposition of the Apostles’ Creed helps us understand the extent of our forgiveness in the gospel:

What do you believe concerning “the forgiveness of sins”?A. I believe that God,because of Christ’s satisfaction,will no longer rememberany of my sinsor my sinful naturewhich I need to struggle against all my life.Rather, by his graceGod grants me the righteousness of Christthat I may never come into judgment. (Q&A 56)

As outlined here, our forgiveness is lavish—secured in Christ and forever. The next lesson for our children is that if this is our forgiveness in the gospel, then so it should be when it comes to our forgiveness of others.
We teach our children that their forgiveness of others should look like their own:

Our forgiveness should be because of Christ, in honor of Him, just as God forgives us “because of Christ’s satisfaction.”

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