On Wednesday Night, February 4^th , we will discuss Godly & Godless Parenting. Recently, I received an email from one our young parents in the church. She had seen a conversation on Facebook based on an article in the Los Angeles Times about secular parenting. The article made the claim that secular parents are raising “upstanding, moral children… without prayers at mealtimes and morality lessons at Sunday School” and the children are turning out “quite well.” The article was written by Dr. Phil Zuckerman, a professor of Sociology and Secular Studies at Pitzer College in Claremont, CA (also a guest professor at the University of Aarhus, Denmark). He was also a speaker at this years annual conference of the American Humanist Association – the group that is currently suing our local county school superintendent and high school principal for allegedly allowing coaches to lead teams in prayer.

The professor bases many of his findings on a 40 year running “Bengston Longitudinal Study of Generations” which is supposed to be the largest study of religion and family life conducted across several generations of Americans.  As Christians, we often assume that if you have no religion that you may act “good” but you really have no basis or foundation for moral behavior beyond your own personal preferences. Dr. Zuckerman says that to the contrary, secular people in his studies have a better sense of morality than many religious families do. He says secular families tend to be more caring, more empathetic, more rational, more tolerant, less vengeful, less racist, less militaristic, less authoritarian – just to name a few. The care and empathy that he describes is based on something called “empathetic reciprocity” or “treating other people as you would like to be treated.” And before we say “Hey, that’s the Golden Rule given to us by Jesus” (Mat 7:12) – he says this Golden Rule is an ancient, universal ethical imperative that requires NO supernatural beliefs. He goes on to state that Atheists are almost absent in American prison populations making up less than ½ of 1% of those behind bars and that “the unaffiliated and the nonreligious engage in far fewer crimes” than the religious.

Professor Zuckerman moves on from individuals to nations. “Democratic countries with the lowest levels of religious faith and participation today – such as Sweden, Denmark, Japan, Belgium, and New Zealand – have among the lowest violent crime rates in the world and enjoy remarkably high levels of societal well-being. If secular people couldn’t raise well-functioning, moral children then a preponderance of them in a given society would spell societal disaster. Yet quite the opposite is the case.”

So the question for the evening — Would we be better off to teach our children the Golden Rule and forget about the God, Jesus, and the Bible part of their upbringing?     This is becoming a very important question – when you consider that in 1950 fewer than 4% of Americans reported growing up in a nonreligious home. But now, more than 30% of Americans between the ages of 18-29 categorize themselves as “nones” because they say they believe in “nothing in particular.”

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