Better in their words…

When my daughter was finishing her freshman year of high school in Canada, all at once and without warning, she became the target of school bullying because she was a Christian, or, as the other kids teased, “a Chrees-jan”. A “Chrees-jan” group chat was created by other high school kids, whose sole purpose was to mock my daughter and her faith. Some kids threatened to beat her up. Others, those she thought were her friends, quietly abandoned her. It got so bad that the public school’s principal and vice principal had to get involved. Their solution? “We’ll put her in an empty and locked classroom during lunch so that no one hurts her. That way she’ll be safe during free time and won’t fall behind in classes.” I was livid. A child being bullied for any other religious faith, I said, would result in suspensions of the students involved. The school board would intervene. It might even make the local news. But somehow for a Christian, the prescribed course of action was to put her away and let the other students carry on with life as normal.

When one pictures a 14-year-old teenage girl being ridiculed for her very ordinary Anglican faith, one might imagine her leaving her faith, or at the very least, not acknowledging it publicly. But the events of that horrible spring forged my daughter into a stronger Christian than she was before. Instead of shrinking away from Christianity, she wore a crucifix necklace to school. Instead of hiding, as the principal suggested, in a locked classroom, she remained out and about with the other kids during lunch; instead of meekly shrinking from discussions, she told those who were targeting her that she forgave them. It was, strangely, a time of joy for her, a time to discover that she really did believe in the things she professed to believe in and that her Sunday rituals weren’t empty. She felt loved and strong and free. There is something in the Christian that makes her bold. If you know, you know, as the kids say.

The results of her refusal to back down were surprising. First of all, she discovered who her real friends were (African and Eastern European immigrants, it turned out: kids who are also Christians, and who have some familiarity with persecution). The second surprising thing was how many of her bullies slowly became her friends again. This didn’t happen en masse. One girl reached out through text to say sorry. Then a few weeks later, another did. Some started coming to church with my daughter. Some became Christians themselves. That was four years ago; my daughter is now a senior and is thriving. She’s on the varsity volleyball team, has a part-time job as a lifeguard, and spent her summer volunteering at our Anglican church. She wears Christian clothing to school. “Faith Over Fear,” says one of her hoodies. “The Lord is on my side. What can man do to me?” It’s a verse from one of the Psalms of David. It might elicit the occasional eyeroll from one of her classmates, but the verse disarms their contempt even as they express it.

It was clear that attitudes towards Christianity were changing; one could see this shift happening both in pop culture and among the high school teens themselves. This past summer the Amazon Prime show The Chosen, which chronicles the life of Jesus, moved from niche Christian to top 10 most watched. Justin Bieber released his album Swag, which ends with a cover of an Eighties praise and worship song, familiar to anyone who attended church camp in the last 40 years, “Lord I Lift Your Name on High”. (Bieber and his wife Hailey are born again Christians. He is headlining Coachella this year and has more Instagram followers than Taylor Swift, even though his life is both quiet and private.) Last year religious jewellery made a huge comeback; crucifixes and saint pendants were at every teen girl store.

And so I was not surprised that one evening just a few weeks ago, a group of my daughter’s teenage friends, both guys and girls, came to my house for late night snacks with some questions about Christianity. Only one of them is Christian; the others were simply curious. “How do you know that Christianity is true?” they asked. “Why is it hard to believe in God?” They wanted answers. The wishy-washy values they’d been raised with, those of subjective feelings, validating speech, and “my truth”, they were now rejecting. There is a certain kind of teen for whom the cultural narrative of victimhood now seems brackish and empty, both self-serving and anxiety producing. They want to be courageous, and they see that the self-affirming “truths” of some of their classmates aren’t a way to be brave, but rather a way to control how others respond to them.

I am not a theologian, but I do know more than the average person about these things. So it was with great pleasure that I sat with the teens and explained what I could. Christianity is a wrestle, I told them. And that is what the believer does, struggles with her inner proclivity to self-centeredness. One wrestles against pride, against envy, against self-satisfaction. One wrestles most of all with a truth that is seen through a glass dimly. The work of the Christian isn’t to know with certainty what truth is, but to continually chip away at what is untrue. Much of the time, “my truth” is a mask for “my self-delusion” because for the Christian, inwardness begins not with the acknowledgment of one’s inner goodness, but of one’s inner sinfulness. You deceive yourself, the Christian must acknowledge. You are not who you think you are. In fact, you are much, much worse. For teenagers who have been raised on words affirming their inner perfection, this is bracing stuff.

Then came the murder of Charlie Kirk. Whether they loved or hated him, all teens knew who he was and what he stood for. He resonated with so many young people because he said out loud things that have been anathema to think about, let alone speak about, especially on university campuses. His appeal is — was — his courage to hold fast to beliefs rooted in the Christian scriptures. Even if one didn’t entirely adhere to his interpretation of the Bible, it was genuinely new for teens to see a young man root his values in an ancient authority rather than the tyranny of personal feelings. For the young student who has been raised within the totalitarian politics of enforced empathy, this is immensely appealing. But it is also in its own way something to treat cautiously. The teens in my kitchen were looking for clear answers, but clear answers can often tempt one into self-righteousness.

To many of their questions, I had disappointing answers. “Who goes to heaven and who goes to hell?” was one of these. My answer was firm: “It’s not up to us to judge, and we don’t get to know.” For the teens, this was a difficult answer, not because they were hoping to be able to condemn people, but because they are largely unacquainted with uncertainty and humility in the face of mystery. This may be just a feature of youth in general. The world is big, wicked, frightening and beautiful. As the world’s murkiness makes itself known, it’s tempting to want to cling to clarity and certainty. But to have an attraction to moral answers that are very rigid is also, of course, a feature of the culture in which they’ve been raised, one that has been divided into two groups: villains and victims. As our conversation went on, it became evident that none of these teens understood the first thing about history, about historical context, or about how our culture came to have the moral judgements that we do (it’s because of Christianity, kids).

The teens have, through the cultural ether, picked up the idea that Christianity offers harsh judgements of others. What they have failed to grasp is that Christianity offers harsh judgements of oneself. The youth has imbibed the myth of progress which places them at the end of history. They look at the past with breathtaking judgementalism while being blind to the formations of their judgements. Trained only in the ethic of debunking their civilisation’s merits, they seem to have no sense of the complex movements of human culture, nor, more importantly, of their own inward inclination toward moral absolutism. To make matters worse, it is precisely one’s inward state that our therapeutic culture has valorised as the highest ethical good that needs to be not only accepted but admired by others. To tell teenagers that Christianity says the opposite, that your inner state is sinful, selfish, corrupt, and deceitful, is the most radical thing they’ve ever heard.

Many are ready for radical. In the wake of the assassination of Charlie Kirk, there has been a flood of social media posts about Christianity. Many people are announcing that they are suddenly going to church. “Ive never been a believer” (sic), writes one, “I actually didn’t think God was real, watching Charlie be assassinated for his beliefs makes me think im (sic) wrong and he was right. I am now ready to learn about God. Charlie did that.” Here’s another: “Charlie Kirk’s death made me pick up a Bible for the first time in my life and I found a truth I didn’t know I was searching for.” And another: “I used to be a ‘closet’ Christian because I’m not one for the backlash. But babyyy when I say a fire is lit.” There are thousands of these.

The satirical Christian news outlet, The Babylon Bee (“fake news you can trust”), ran a headline in the hours following Charlie Kirk’s memorial: “Satan: ‘I’ve made a huge mistake’,” it reads. The photograph shows the packed stadium filled with people worshipping God: “‘Well’,” says Satan, “‘this isn’t going how I planned at all.’” Indeed. We are now watching something unfold in real time, the likes of which I have not seen in my lifetime. We are discovering that we do not live in an era in which God is irrelevant, but instead that a religion based on resurrection has some capacity to come back from the dead.

It’s estimated that at least 20 million people streamed Charlie Kirk’s memorial. I was one of them. By far the most moving moment of the event was when Erika Kirk announced that she forgave the young man who murdered her husband because it was what Christ did on the cross. “The answer to hate is not hate. The answer we know from the gospel is love and always love.” There is a power in forgiveness. There is a power in speaking of forgiveness. Donald Trump’s calls for retribution are clownish and vulgar in comparison.

And so what is this revival (it is most certainly a revival) going to accomplish? Of course we don’t yet know. But we cannot ignore that Christianity is strong. And we also cannot ignore the power of loving one’s enemy. The Christian should condemn in the harshest terms any political manoeuvre that seeks to dehumanise and hate one’s political opponent, even if one feels that they are spreading sickness and nihilism. For it is the hate within one’s soul that Christ’s love first needs to conquer. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn says: “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart.”

Christianity no longer represents something oppressive or intolerant to youth, and Christians need to be careful that, backed by administrative power, it doesn’t become this. The United States should not become a theocracy. Christian strength is not filled with resentment, condemnation or blame, but with a vitality that is born of courage and humility. Christianity beckons towards something that is larger than one’s own inner truth or one’s own inner feelings; it makes one’s inner self larger, braver, freer, and stronger as they turn towards it. It takes more strength to forgive than to blame.