Really?
Parents who raise their children with nothing more than Christian values should not be surprised when their children abandon those values. If the child or young person does not have a firm commitment to Christ and the truth of the Christian faith, the values will have no binding authority, nor should we expect that they would. Most of our neighbors have some commitment to Christian values, but what they desperately need is salvation from their sins. That does not come by Christian values, no matter how fervently held. Salvation comes only by the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
Human beings are natural-born moralists, and moralism is the most potent of all the false gospels. The language of “values” is the language of moralism and cultural Protestantism — what the Germans called Kulturprotestantismus. This is the religion that produces cultural Christians, and cultural Christianity soon dissipates into atheism, agnosticism, and other forms of non-belief. Cultural Christianity is the great denomination of moralism, and far too many church folk fail to recognize that their own religion is just Cultural Christianity — not the genuine Christian faith.
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