WORLDVIEWS
HAVE
CONSEQUENCES
By Jeff Keaton - Renewanation Founder & CEO
I
SAT NEXT to
a young man
on a four-hour
flight from L.A. to
D.C. this past October.
The first remark out of his
mouth was something about
hoping a naked lady would sit in
between us. I knew right then that our
worldviews were probably very different. I kindly
told him that I was happily married and didn’t share his
hopes. He sheepishly said that marriage was a good thing
as well.
Over the course of the next four-plus hours, we shared
a very robust worldview conversation. It was cordial but
intense. This man of about 30 years informed me that he
was agnostic. He told me that he was into scientific facts and
not faith as I was. Since he was into facts and I was into faith,
I decided to ask him how everything came into existence.
He quickly told me that math and physics had proven how
everything came into existence and that he had even heard
a mathematician explain it all. Unfortunately, he couldn’t
remember the name of the man who had explained it all
or what he had said, but he was confident that it had been
explained. I simply looked at him and said, “You call me a
8
man of faith and yourself a man of facts and science. And
yet, you have all your faith placed in a man whose name you
can’t even remember.” I kindly told him that it took more
faith to believe in his worldview than it did mine. I told him
that I believe in a God who created everything and then
gave us a written record of his work that we can compare
against reality.
Perhaps the saddest part of our discussion came when he
told me that his two grandmothers were Southern Baptist
and Mennonite. He even said he had been named after
two men in the Bible. My heart broke as I thought about
his two grandmothers. No doubt they had high hopes their
grandson, Matthew Adam, would grow up to be a man of
Christian faith. Surely they believed he would carry on the
Christian heritage they were passing down to him. Sadly,
they were wrong.
This story has been told over and over again in the last
two American generations. 80% of the 15-35 year-olds in
America today declare they are not born again. 94% do not
believe in one or more of the cardinal doctrines of Christi-
anity. 76% do not attend church. 1 A strong majority have no
problem with same-sex marriage. 2 We are fully confident
that 16,000 hours of non-Christian K-12 education has
played a major role in the loss of Christian faith in this
generation.