Has West declared war on childhood? by Bill Muehlenberg
The Western world's love/hate relationship with children.
It was Dietrich Bonhoeffer who is purported to have said: "The ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world that it leaves to its children." Whether this is correctly attributable to him, the quote itself is quite accurate. How we treat our kids determines what sort of society we are.
But in the West at least it seems we are quite schizophrenic when it comes to children. On the one hand we have millions of parents who of course will do their best for their children, and even strangers will go out of their way to help a child in need. But at the same time it seems that the West has declared war on children.
So many adults seem intent on stealing away our children's childhood and innocence. We are forcing all sorts of adults-only agendas on them, including the desire by so many to hyper-sexualise them at the youngest of ages. Just look at how the sexual revolutionaries (including the radical homosexual and trans activists) are directly and deliberately targeting our kids. I have documented this countless times on my website.
Again, this stands in marked contrast with how we attempt to look after and protect children at other times and places. This caught my attention in June as I read a newspaper headline. It involves the rescue of four children lost in the wild for a month. As one report says about this:
"Four Indigenous children who had been missing for more than a month in the Colombian Amazon rainforest were found alive and flown to the capital Bogota early Saturday. The children, who survived a small plane crash in the jungle, were transported by army medical plane to a military airport at around 3.30pm AEST Saturday.
"Lesly Jacobombaire Mucutuy, aged 13, Soleiny Jacobombaire Mucutuy, 9, Tien Ranoque Mucutuy, 4, and infant Cristin Ranoque Mucutuy were stranded in the jungle. They are the only survivors of a deadly plane crash that occurred on May 1.
"They were taken off the plane on stretchers, wrapped in thermal blankets, with ambulances waiting to bring them to hospital, AFP journalists said. General Pedro Sanchez, who led the search operation, credited Indigenous people involved in the rescue effort with finding the children. 'We found the children: miracle, miracle, miracle!' was the message he told reporters on Friday." (Herald Sun, Melbourne, June 10, 2023).
One is reminded of a similar sort of situation back in 2018 when 12 children and their coach were rescued from a flooded cave in Thailand. It made world headlines, and international rescue teams — including from Australia — were involved to free them after being trapped for 18 days. One of the rescuers even died in the process.
We can go to such great lengths to see to it that our children (and other children) are safe, alive and well. We will even offer our own lives for their sake. But, as I say, in so many other ways we really seem to despise our kids. We are working overtime to destroy their childhood and to force them into an adult world which they simply are not yet ready for.
Many experts have spoken on this matter over the years. Here I want to mention two of them who wrote passionately about the well-being of children back in the early 1980s. I first refer to the American child psychologist David Elkind. Back in 1981 he penned The Hurried Child: Growing Up Too Fast Too Soon.
In it he offered this somewhat more general remark:
"Valuing childhood does not mean seeing it as a happy, innocent period, but rather as an important period of life to which children are entitled. It is children's right to be children, to enjoy the pleasure, and to suffer the pains of a childhood that is not infringed by hurrying. In the end, a childhood is the most basic human right of children."
He provided specifics on how we are harming our children. For example:
"Hurried children are forced to take on the physical, psychological, and social trappings of adulthood before they are prepared to deal with them. We dress our children in miniature adult costumes (often with designer labels), we expose them to gratuitous sex and violence, and we expect them to cope with an increasingly bewildering social environment — divorce, single parenthood, homosexuality. Through all of these pressures the child senses that it is important for him or her to cope without admitting the confusion and pain that accompany such changes. Like adults, they are made to feel they must be survivors, and surviving means adjusting — even if the survivor is only four or six or eight years old."
His volume is still well worth reading today. And, writing a year later, American academic Neil Postman wrote about these issues as well in his important 1982 volume, The Disappearance of Childhood. He discusses the various ways in which adults harm our children. In addition to obvious things like child abuse and actual sexual assault, there are other ways we psychologically and emotionally molest our children. For example, he discusses the rise in teen promiscuity and sexual activity, and then says:
"We may safely assume that media have played an important role in the drive to erase differences between child and adult sexuality. Television, in particular, not only keeps the entire population in a condition of high sexual excitement but stresses a kind of egalitarianism of sexual fulfilment; sex is transformed from a dark and profound adult mystery to a product that is available to everyone — let us say, like mouthwash or underarm deodorant. One of the consequences of this has been a rise in teen-age pregnancy…."
There are many more such quotes that could be featured here. And recall that these two books appeared over 40 years ago. The things the authors warned about back then have only got much, much worse. Today in the West it seems that in so many ways the war on our children is near complete.
The militants have long told us — and quite openly — that they want access to our children. They are not hiding their aims and desires. And the examples of this are endless, including all the drag-queen story-times with our kids held in schools and public libraries. Hmm, why do they never seem to hold these sessions in old folks' homes? We know the answer to that one.
In his recent book, No Reason to Hide: Standing for Christ in a Collapsing Culture (2022), Canadian author Dr Erwin W. Lutzer reminds us of what we are up against, and how we must all get involved:
"After a lovely dinner with some friends in Colorado, whose deck overlooks a mountain range, the wife said to us, 'I like to sit here in my rocking chair every morning, enjoying the mountains while rocking back and forth.' Then she added, 'And when I'm done, I look at my phone and it tells me I have walked three miles!'
"Many of us wish we could sit in a rocking chair and make progress on our journey toward a better future for our children and grandchildren. But life in today's world doesn't work that way; we have to leave our comforts and join in the fray to protect our children from those who would exploit them.
"The radical left wants our children. And they want them young. Their strategy is quite simple: Divide children from their parents by any means possible. Use social media, racism, and sexuality to confuse and lead them down a leftist path. In the minds of the left, raising children is too important a task to be left to the parents….
"The more godless our government becomes, the more insistent our educators will be that children belong to them, not the parents. Historically, Marx, Lenin and Hitler all saw the value of indoctrinating the next generation so that their respective ideologies could be passed along for generations to come."
It all sounds so very much like life in the secular left West today. So many of our elites, politicians, educators and media personnel all feel the same way, and have declared war on our children. The question is: What will we do about it?
If we are willing to die for our children in the jungles of Columbia or the caves of Thailand, how about being willing to die for them here in Melbourne or Auckland or Chicago or London? And that means protecting them not just physically but psychologically, emotionally, mentally, morally and spiritually.
Jesus was not messing around when He warned that those who will go after our young ones would be better off thrown into the depths of the sea with a millstone around their neck. This is very serious business, folks. We need to pray much more and work much more to protect our children from those who seek to defile and destroy them.
Bill Muehlenberg is an American-born Christian apologist, ethicist and cultural commentator, who lives in Melbourne. He has written a number of books, including Strained Relations: The Challenge of Homosexuality (2011), The Challenge of Abortion (2015) and The Challenge of Euthanasia (2016). The above article is reprinted, with the author's permission, from his website, CultureWatch, at: BillMuehlenberg.com
Endeavour Forum offer their deepest condolences to Bill, who recently lost Averil, his beloved wife of 41½ years, to cancer.
