"How Relativism Infects Our Youth"

Here are notes I took word for word from the sermon "How Relativism Infects Our Youth" by Brett Kunkle:

"Relativism has a way of, I think, corroding, in a very slow manner their convictions about things and their moral courage.  ...We've got to make sure that we realize that this is not just an academic discussion, but it's a very relevant, practical discussion.  Here are some ways I think this kind of cashes out in behavior and is practical.  I think first of all, if you have a relativistic view of morality, number one, it diminishes sin.  Because relativism reduces moral values to preference claims.  And so morality turns out to be a preference, and so maybe it's a individual preference, if you were to affirm some kind of individual relativism or it turns out to be a cultural preference, and so it's relative from culture to culture.  Now, if morality turns out to be subjective, what does that do to the concept of sin?  Because on that view, if right and wrong is merely a preference, merely a taste that you prefer, then the concept of sin disappears.  If the concept of sin disappears, you've neutered the Gospel.  If there's no bad news, in this case, then the good news doesn't make sense in that backdrop.

C.S. Lewis says this:  "It is after you have realized that there IS a moral law and a power behind that law, and that you have broken the law and put yourself wrong with that power, it is after this and not a moment sooner that Christianity begins to talk."
And so you've got to have this assumption here, or this belief, that there IS a real moral law that is true, that is objective.  And then Christianity begins to speak, because we have the "good news".  We have the bad news that we are lawbreakers, and the good news is that God has provided a pardon.

...It diminishes sin, so what you should expect to find in our young people, is you should expect that they will not do anything like confront their friends on sin, or kind of call out their friends.  You should expect that when there is a group of students who are standing around and they are just kind of launching in to another student and just ripping them apart verbally, you would expect that most students will not stand up for that kid and call out the other kids and say, "Hey, that's wrong.  You shouldn't do that,” especially if there's a larger group that's doing this.  These are the kind of things you ought to expect.  You ought to expect them to be wishy washy in terms of their moral views, easily swayed.

One of the things that [Christian] Smith and his researchers found (in the book entitled, "Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers") is:

"Certain traditional religious languages and vocabularies of commitment, duty, faithfulness, obedience, calling, obligation, accountability, and ties to the past are nearly completely absent from the discourse of U.S. teenagers."

So when you talk to your young people and you ask them about the Christian life and ask them to give you a picture of what that's about, you will not find these kinds of terms in their language.  They will not talk about duties that they are obligated to follow, right?  Again, because with relativism, relativism, it undermines the whole idea of an obligation.  Things aren't obligations, they are merely preferences.  And so, you have teenagers who don't talk about these things.  In fact, when it comes to theology in their relationship with God, here's a test:  When you ask students about maybe the meaning of the cross, listen and see if they use any of these concepts.  Listen to see how often your young people talk about repentance of sins, listen and see if you ever hear the word "Atonement for sins" or some idea of an atonement for sins, listen for the idea of forgiveness.  Listen and see if you ever hear a young person talk about the freedom from God's wrath.  When was the last time you heard about God's wrath?  And I think that's in the Bible!  Listen and see if you hear kids talk about being justified before God or reconciled to God.  See if they have any of this.  Now, Smith tells us (in the book "Soul Searching") that students in general are completely inarticulate about their faith.  So they just may not know any of this, but also I think what you are going to find is that this kind of relativism that's operating in the background kind of makes all of that kind of language a moot point.

...

I think it erodes moral conviction.  If you think about this, if a student views morality in kind of a preferential way, right, "So, these are my preferences", much like ice cream, this is the analogy I use with young people.  Morality is merely a preference just like ice cream.  Now, does that give them the necessary resources to draw from to be able to keep to their moral convictions?  It doesn't seem like preference claims are enough to keep one in one's convictions if there's enough pressure or if there is a convincing argument otherwise, right?  I mean, so you might like chocolate ice cream, but someone may be able to convince you to try something else.  Now, you're not going to object on moral grounds.  You're not going to say, "No, I'm obligated to chocolate ice cream."  Look, if someone shows me a bowl of peanut butter cup ice cream, especially Reese's peanut butter cup ice cream, I'm there, and my preferences will change really quick.  And so, imagine the young person who goes off to college, who is really swimming in this relativism, embraces it in different ways and is alone in the dorm room with their boyfriend or girlfriend, right?  And the temptation is there, and the emotions are there, and what resources at that point?  Of course, that's not a wise position to put yourself anyway if you had these convictions.  But what resources are there for someone to stick to their conditions about maybe, premarital sex or premarital sexual activity?  And if it's only a preference, then at the end of the day, it's not really wrong unless maybe I really think it's wrong.  And so, I think relativism erodes moral conviction.

It also makes religion irrelevant.  And you see on your outline there ...the box with two different stories and you can draw a little roof on top of that to demonstrate a house.  Francis Schaeffer talked about the two story house or if you're familiar with Nancy Pearcey, she wrote a book called, "Total Truth" and she talks about this.  The first chapter or two are really good to read about this kind of idea; how you have this, what Sociologists call a "Public private split", it's sometimes also called the "Sacred secular split".  And so you have this split and this is the kind of framework of thinking.  People think in terms of this two story house.  They don't realize they're thinking this way.  This is just kind of the adopted cultural view.  And so, on the top floor is your subjective floor.  This is the floor of private, personal preferences.  So with the top floor, we are dealing with things like opinions and preferences.  On the bottom floor, you're dealing with the objective floor where you have knowledge and facts, and these are not preferences, but these deal with facts of the matter.  And so then, you think, "What institutions does our culture put in each of those floors?"  These floors are cut off from each other, there's a split.  You think about the top floor, the private floor, where you might have the institution of maybe family.  Family goes in that top floor; whereas, you may have certain traditions in your family and that's fine, right?  That's your preference.  We may have certain traditions in my family and we don't try and force our traditions on one another or claim that our particular Christmas traditions are better than yours or something like that.  So, family would be kind of a private institution.  But what also gets put up in that second floor is morality and religion, right?  Morality is a private thing and you see this in our culture all the time.  What this does, is, you've got this bottom floor, the objective floor, where the institutions of things like medicine and Science and Biology, the hard sciences, these kinds of things, typically law or...those kinds of things are put into that bottom floor.  Those deal with facts.  Those make objective claims.  Those make knowledge claims.  But you (get up on) this upper floor, you don't say, "Well, that deals with knowledge", and so you get religion and morality put up in that upper floor.  And what it does is, it cuts off religion from these other areas of life.  And so, you have a very easy way to de-legitimize religious claims and you see this in the public square.  So, you have Christopher Reeve, right, who recently passed away.  After his accident, he becomes a paraplegic; he is then a very big proponent of embryo stem cell research as a possible cure.  And so when he's before a student group at Yale University and he says, "When it comes to matters of public policy, no religion should have a seat at the table."  So religions don't get to join in this discussion about public policy, because religion, you see, is a private, personal matter.  And you are free to have your own personal, private views, but just don't bring that into this bottom floor.  Keep that on the top floor.  And you see, you don't have to argue against those views, all you have to do is call them religion.  And you've labeled it, and therefore dismissed it to the top floor.  Or when you hear public discussions about abortion, or homosexuality, and whatever the side of the fence you're on, if someone says, "That view, that's your religious view," they can dismiss it.  Not even have to argue against it, but just say, "That's religion".  And you are not supposed to impose your religion or your morality on other people.  What's interesting is law ends up being an imposition of somebody's morality.  Every law is an imposed morality.  Just the question is, "Whose morality?"  And so, most westerners function with this split.  This is how our young people function.  There's this division between their personal, private relationship with Jesus, and then everything else of life.  So, our young people don't know how these worlds connect.  So this is why, I think you see some signs of this. ..."