The Carpool Question I Pray Every Kid Keeps Asking

I love morning carpool. That 20-minute ride to school has produced some great conversations with my 16-year-old daughter and her friend. One interaction stands out. It’s the morning we talked about Carrie Underwood.

I have two morning-carpool playlists. One (my wife’s playlist, which I love) features copious amounts of classic rock. It has all the Bon Jovi, Heart, Journey and Aerosmith you could want. The other is my worship-music playlist. It features songs from Shane and Shane, Caroline Cobb, The Gospel Coalition, Sandra McCracken and Underwood’s My Savior album.

One morning as we cruised across town listening to Underwood and CeCe Winans belt “Great Is Thy Faithfulness,” my daughter’s friend said, “Is this the same woman who sings about keying her boyfriend’s car? How can she sing Christian music too?” At that moment, I felt defensive for Underwood’s sake and jokingly said something like, “Well, she sings ‘Jesus Take the Wheel’ too.” But on reflection, this high schooler’s question was a great one. It’s the kind of discerning question that Christian parents like you and me hope our kids will ask about the world.

Begin with the Basic Story

When your kids were young, you likely began teaching them the basic patterns of a Christian life. You taught your preschooler to bow his head and pray before meals, and you established a regular bedtime routine that involved sitting on the bed, reading from a Bible storybook and praying together before turning out the lights. You’ve taken your sons or daughters to Sunday school and to a midweek program like Awana. As they learned to read, you helped them memorize Scripture and learn to navigate their Bibles.

Writing in 1947, Dorothy Sayers said that from a young age, kids should learn the “grammar of theology”; they should “become acquainted with the story of God and Man in outline—i.e., the Old and New Testament presented as parts of a single narrative of Creation, Rebellion, and Redemption—and also with the [Apostle’s] Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Ten Commandments.” Even if our kids don’t know those last three items by heart, most evangelical parents follow Sayers’ advice.

We teach our kids the Bible’s basic storyline and give them a clear Christian vision of faith, devotion and ethical living. Yet while teaching our kids these basics, have we also taught them how to use this “grammar” as a grid for interpreting and evaluating the confusing messages they hear in today’s world?

Use That Story as a Lens to Evaluate Culture

In her essay, Sayers observed how young children soak up new teaching like sponges. They even relish memorizing. But as kids grow, they move into what Sayers called the “pert age.” The later-elementary, middle school and early-teen years are often “characterised by contradicting, answering-back, [and] liking to ‘catch people out’ (especially one’s elders).” In many ways, these years are oriented toward critique. Kids are critical of parents, teachers, one another … and even the musicians they hear on the car stereo.

As a parent, it’s easy to simply get annoyed with this stage. But it’s better for us to see middle childhood and the early-teen years as a time to train our kids to use the Christian “grammar” they’ve learned to evaluate the messages they encounter in both culture and their own hearts. Timothy Paul Jones tells about one practical way he’s done this with his daughters. He uses questions based on the biblical storyline to help them think through the movies they watch on family night:

The first question is, “What in this movie pointed to God’s good design?” Maybe it was just beautifully filmed and designed, like Encanto or Across the Spider-Verse. Maybe it showed a husband and wife who were deeply committed to each other, like Hawkeye in Avengers: Age of Ultron, Mr. and Mrs. Incredible in The Incredibles, or the most romantic relationship of all: Bandit and Chilli in Bluey. . . . Here’s a second question: “What mistruths did this movie try to tell us about what is good?” Another way of asking this same question is, “How did this film distort God’s design?” Maybe it’s the lie in the movie Wish that all the answers we’re seeking are inside us because we’re made of stardust. It could be simply the increasing normalization of homosexual relationships that we see in Marvel and Star Wars films.

When you regularly ask questions like these after watching a movie or listening to popular music, you reinforce with your kids that a biblical worldview is the standard by which we evaluate the world and ourselves.

Learn to Recognize Cultural Counterfeits

Teaching our kids to use their Christian worldview as an evaluative lens is essential. But as they grow toward adulthood, we don’t want their posture toward culture to simply be reactive. Instead, as Matt Markins encourages us in his book The Story We Tell Our Children: Gospel Formation in a World of Counterfeit Imitation, we must also teach our kids to proactively expose the counterfeit stories they hear in television shows, in movies, in music and from their friends.

Want to understand yourself? “Follow your heart.” Need to separate fact from fiction? “Trust the science.” Want to experience freedom? Throw off your parents’ oppressive standards and “live your truth.” Tim Keller called scripts like these cultural narratives. As Collin Hansen writes, they’re the stories “we tell each other, and ourselves, that help us to make sense of the world and our place in it.” Whether we recognize them or not, these shape the way we live each day.

How might we train our kids to identify the shortcomings of secular narratives and then to subvert those narratives with the biblical Gospel? Several new resources are designed to do just that:

• • Making Sense of Us (The Gospel Coalition), a video-based study that can help pre-teens and teens identify and respond to six common cultural narratives.

• • The Gospel Way Catechism for Kids by Trevin Wax and Thomas West (Harvest House) helps middle-grade children grasp the truth of God’s Word and recognize the many mistruths present in today’s culture.

• • The Story We Tell Our Children by Matt Markins (Awana) issues a timely call to children’s ministry leaders, pastors and parents, equipping them to expose the counterfeit stories that compete for our kids’ hearts and minds.

Sussing Out the Inconsistencies

One prominent script we hear today is that a person’s religious beliefs are “personal and private.” People think you should keep your convictions to yourself, in a separate compartment that doesn’t interfere with your life and relationships. Country music artists have modeled that script for decades, singing for much of their concerts about getting drunk or vandalizing a cheater’s car but then closing their set with a “gospel song.”

This inconsistency doesn’t mean artists like Underwood aren’t true believers; after all, none of us live and speak in a way that’s fully consistent with the Gospel. Yet when cultural icons sing lyrics that are inconsistent with their faith, this can reinforce false scripts that have already infected our hearts.

That’s why, looking back at that carpool ride, I’m proud of my daughter’s friend. She knows that the truths we rehearse in worship should affect how we relate to sinners, that we’re to forgive each other, just as God in Christ has forgiven us (Ephesians 4:32). So this teenager asked, “Can this be the same person?” That’s the kind of question I pray all our kids keep asking.