Moral Matters – It’s Up To Us To Teach Our Kids

by Chuck Colson –

As turbulent as the late 1960s were when my children were in school, I’m almost glad I don’t have to raise kids today. Yes, the sexual revolution, questioning authority, rolling around in the mud at Woodstock — all the hallmarks of ’60s culture — were bad enough. But they were just the seeds of a sad harvest our culture is reaping right now. I don’t believe it’s a coincidence that many of today’s political, academic, and media elites are products of the ’60s and that they are in the vanguard of the assault on traditional marriage, traditional morality, and the traditional family.

Look around you. The courts are now routinely overturning the will of the people concerning marriage. The Administration refuses to defend the Defense of Marriage Act in court — and for specious reasons. And schools are constantly bombarding our kids with moral relativism and pro-gay propaganda. Students are now being taught that all like choices are equal, so you simply decide which one you choose, how you want to live any way you want. It’s madness!

The fact is we can’t trust our institutions to teach our kids to live according to moral principles. That job has to fall to us. I cannot say this often enough. The first and most important school of instruction is the family. If we want our children to know how to behave prudently, how to delay gratification for a higher goal, how to look to the needs of others before pandering to their own passions, then we’ll have to teach them in the context of family — best of all, of course, a loving, mom-and-dad family.

In the thousands of visits I’ve made to prisons, I’ve seen too clearly the results of broken, fatherless, or motherless families: men and women behind bars who never received moral instruction and guidance or, for that matter, the love of a mom or dad. This is why I get so alarmed over the signs that our culture is weakening the millennia-old understanding of the function of family, its importance, its value in shaping character.

Take the assault on the traditional understanding of marriage. If the courts decide that marriage is just a contract between any kind or number of consenting adults, we will have in effect removed all restraints and social conventions surrounding not just sex and marriage but child rearing and training as well. If morality is anything we want it to be, if it serves only our passions and personal autonomy, we’re doomed as a culture.

I talk about this more on this week’s Two-Minute Warning, which I urge you to come and watch today at www.colsoncenter.org. And after you watch the Two-Minute Warning, I want you to read T. M. Moore’s provocative Talking Points on how you can talk to your children about morality and how they can distinguish between their feelings and moral facts about right and wrong.

HT: Break Point (read full article)