Youth Group Taught Me Ideas Are Dangerous

On Reading Atheist Philosophers

Photo by Anderson Schmig on Unsplash

Few things are more quintessential to an evangelical upbringing than youth group. If you’ve been a part of one, you know there’s nothing quite like these mystifying gatherings of hormonal teenagers.

I mean, where else can you find kids crying with hands held high in worship, making out behind couches, trading Pokemon cards, and playing games that you hardly ever see outside that subculture (I’m looking at you, gaga ball) all in the same room?

And in the midst of all of that, someone has to teach these kids about Jesus.

It’s a tall order, and I want to say from the beginning, God bless all the saints that volunteer to put up with sweaty and stand-offish high school students. You all deserve far more thanks than you get.

We shouldn’t be too harsh then if youth groups aren’t parsing the faith with the precision of St. Thomas Aquinas.

Still, in my experience, most people walk away from youth group with a theology consisting in three main ideas: Jesus loves you, don’t have sex before you get married, and be careful going to college because your professors are going to try to make you an atheist.

It’s certainly a truncated view of the gospel, but, hey, high schoolers don’t exactly have great attention spans and you’ve got to leave time for pizza and dodge ball. Plus, the first of those three ideas is basically the deepest idea there is. Seriously. If you get that through to people, you’re doing the Lord’s work.

While it would probably be more popular on Substack to simply bash evangelical subculture, that’s not what today’s piece is about.

This piece is about dangerous ideas.

College and Dangerous Ideas

My upbringing occurred at the intersection of suburbia and evangelicalism. The former told us that getting into a good school to land a high-paying job was essential. The latter told us that college was a breeding ground for atheism.

The natural compromise was to go to a respectable Christian college. This, at least in theory, would lead to the white picket fence while also helping you achieve tenets two and three of the youth group gospel. It’s not foolproof, of course. Many of us graduated to find the economy in shambles so studio apartments replaced white picket fences, but on the faith side, the promise of a Christian college was that with some good campus rules and biblical teaching in class kids would manage to not have sex and keep the faith.

Tempting as it is to wade into the economy or evangelical purity culture, for the moment I’m more interested in the concern so many people had over us encountering dangerous ideas at college.

What’s particularly intriguing about this is that it strikes at a tension in the evangelical world. On the one hand, evangelicals are often derided for being “anti-intellectual.” From popular conceptions of evangelicals as uneducated bigots behind the times to more sophisticated critiques of the dearth of evangelicals in the upper echelons of our elite schools, there seems to be a general sense that evangelicals—whether individually or collectively—aren’t at the top of our culture’s intellectual food chain.

On the other hand, within the Christian world, I often hear evangelicals being criticized for being too intellectual. By this, Christian critics don’t usually mean that evangelicals are too smart, but rather that evangelicalism with its hour long sermons spent parsing the Greek and Hebrew can treat humans like brains on a stick when what is really needed is a faith that’s more sacramental, embodied, and liturgical to embrace the fullness of the human person.

Whether evangelicals are not intellectual enough or too intellectual, they’re certainly concerned about the power of bad ideas. Time and again we heard growing up that college was a place of dangerous ideas. A place where smug professors smuggled marxism into the hands of good kids in the form of overpriced textbooks. Before you know it, your kid who was in youth group six months ago comes home for winter break calling you a capitalist pig and deriding faith as the opium of the masses.

In reality, I think most kids who drift from the faith in college do so in much less dramatic fashion. Nevertheless, there’s a real fear that encountering new ideas in college will be destabilizing. And this fear isn’t entirely fictitious.

For many kids, college is the first place they come across people who see the world differently than them. Not only that, they come to find out that these viewpoints have depth to them. It’s only natural that they might wonder if these ideas are better than the ones they’ve grown up with.

So what are we to do? Should we keep kids from coming across dissenting ideas? Should we throw them into the deep end and see what happens?

My Experience with Dangerous Ideas

As I write this piece, it’s my final day of a semester spent studying Arthur Schopenhauer for my master’s program.¹ Before that, I was studying Friedrich Nietzsche, and prior to Nietzsche it was Albert Camus. If you’re a bit rusty on philosophy, none of these men are too fond of Christianity.

And yet, I’ve found it has been one of the most rewarding experiences studying these famous enemies of the faith.

Why is that?

Could it be that ideas aren’t that dangerous after all and we’ve been getting worked up over nothing?

I don’t think it’s quite that simple.

You see, this isn’t my first brush with dangerous ideas. When I was in high school, I went through a really tough period in which my mom was diagnosed with breast cancer, my sister lost her ability to walk, and my view of the church was rocked by scandals all in the course of a few short months. It was in the middle of that perfect storm that one of my teachers introduced me to Christopher Hitchens, one of the famous “New Atheists.”

It didn’t happen all at once, but I went from nodding along politely when he showed me one of his viral videos to seeking them out on my own. Before I knew it, I was agreeing with Hitchens more than I disagreed with him. Maybe all this faith stuff was nonsense after all.

Up to that point, I wasn’t just a casual church attender. I had gone through 8 years of private Christian school, was actively engaged in my church, and could crush anyone at a good sword drill (remember those?). More than that though, faith had been the center of my life, and like so many young evangelicals, I wanted to be a missionary because that seemed like the pinnacle of radical discipleship.

So how could simple ideas wrapped in clever rhetoric begin to unravel my faith?

For me, it wasn’t necessarily intellectual. I began to doubt God was good before I doubted that he existed, and I’m not sure I was ever that good at the latter if I’m being honest. That didn’t matter though, because when we cease to view God as good and beautiful, the question of whether he exists quickly becomes irrelevant. In my case, at least, I just didn’t care anymore.

I don’t think my story is all that unique. For every person who leaves the faith due to arguments against Christian metaphysics, I’m pretty sure a whole lot more leave because they’re not sure if God is good or beautiful.

My road back to faith was made possible because, despite my apathy toward God, I still found the person of Jesus compelling. And over time, as I tried to follow in the footsteps of this person I found so compelling, I realized that I needed to love the things he loved, including the messiness of the church.

It wasn’t only that Jesus was compelling, though. As I ran away from faith, I found I was running toward nothing. Luckily for me, I realized this pretty quickly before doing any real damage to my life. Not everyone is that fortunate.

My journey back to faith led me to getting an undergraduate degree in theology where I found that the beauty that drew me to Christ was matched by a rich and satisfying truth. It was there that I developed a love for the Christian tradition and delved into the Church Fathers. Along the way, I wasn’t blind to the fact that there was much ugliness in the history of the church, and yet even still, I found that here was something to build a life on. Here was a truth that captured my mind, a beauty that drew in my soul, and a goodness that I could give my life in service to.

During my undergraduate years, I didn’t spend too much time reading opponents of the faith. I was drinking too deeply from the depths of the tradition to give much time to that. Afterwards, though, I decided to expand my studies a bit in my master’s degree to focus more on philosophy. To do that, I’d have to come face to face with the enemies of the faith.

When I did, I found it much less unsettling than I thought it would be. It’s not that Marx or Nietzsche have nothing to say. They’re brilliant, and we’re still reading them for a reason. But as I read them, I couldn’t help but feel like something was missing. I wasn’t drawn into them. Perhaps I could get outraged over similar things, but I never found an impetus for life in the same way. When Camus told me to imagine Sisyphus happy, I couldn’t, despite the fact that I resonated with so much of his articulation of the absurd. I saw the problems but the solution was lacking. Not only did the intellectual foundations of my faith not crack, but far more importantly, I didn’t find beauty in these thinkers in the way I did in the Christian tradition. I imagine if an Atheist is reading this, it might sound like mere sentimentality. I get that. I really do. But we love what we love, don’t we?

I still get excited picking up these writers, as I hope previous essays have made clear. I’ve learned so much from all of them. My faith seems to have more than enough room for the good in these thinkers, while their philosophies are too narrow to fit the best of the faith.

So, what do we do with these dangerous ideas?

All of this brings us back to dangerous ideas. On the one hand, ideas really do have consequences, and they can undermine people’s faith. On the other hand, there’s a great deal of subjectivity here. What undermines one person might strengthen another.

Some of this will have to do with age. Hitchens felt impressive at 16 in a way that I’m not sure he would at 26 or 66. Other parts of this has to do with formation. My faith formation was heavy on personal devotion but pretty lacking in intellectual depth. I think we often think depth has to do with apologetic arguments, and maybe it does for some, but for me, depth was more to do with encountering a capacious theological imagination than arguing about the Kalam Cosmological Argument. Furthermore, some of this had to do with returning to what I found beautiful: Jesus. So much of faith starts with beauty before proceeding to truth. Finally, sometimes you just have to taste and see. I can’t imagine how scary it is for parents to watch their kids wrestle with faith. But so often, that’s part of the process. Sometimes you have to see what life is like on the other side of the fence before appreciating what you left behind.

So, were the youth group leaders wrong? Is there nothing to fear in these “dangerous ideas?” Not necessarily. We shouldn’t be naive to think that ideas are neutral. But as I look back on the fear people had about “secular” colleges and scary philosophers, I’m struck by the lack of confidence it betrays. Perhaps if your faith rises and falls on the dating of the Earth, the geographical expanse of the flood, or a peculiarly modern notion of what inerrancy is, then there’s reason to believe that we must avoid direct engagement at all costs for fear of a house of cards toppling. But as I reflect these days, I think we’d do better to focus less on instilling in kids fear of dangerous ideas and more on showing them the full beauty and capacity of the Christian faith. It is much deeper and wider than I was led to believe. I don’t mean we need to trade dodge ball and pizza for Latin lessons and seminars on the Summa (but if your high schoolers are interested in that, by all means). Rather, I think we need to demonstrate what it looks like to have a faith that’s open, curious, and big enough to withstand questions. A faith that looks out at the world not in fear, anxiously assuming a defensive posture, but a faith that looks out at the world and says, “all that is good, we have space for, and all that is evil we can withstand.” A faith that is confident is sings in harmony with the deepest desires of the human soul that was created for God and only finds rest in him. And, importantly, a faith that reminds kids that no matter how far the prodigal roams, God races off the porch to greet him with open arms should he have the slightest interest in coming home.

I want to end by reiterating that the people who are volunteering to walk alongside high school students who are often apathetic toward faith are the everyday saints of our times. This article is not meant in anyway to bash youth groups or those who run them. If you’re out there doing the work, thank you. Genuinely, thank you. If anything, I hope this encourages you and provides you food for thought. But keep telling those kids Jesus loves them. He loves you, too, you good and faithful servants.

Odds and Ends

The Camino beckons

1. Exciting news! I’ll be leading a pilgrimage along the Camino de Santiago July 8-18, 2027. We’ll be doing a shortened, easier version of the walk with luggage carried and transportation shuttling us between some of the most scenic stretches. But don’t worry, there will still be plenty of walking involved. Learn more: here.

2. In case you weren’t aware, my novel, The Long Road to Holy Island, is now available for pre-order. It’s a story about a grieving young man who embarks on the pilgrimage his mother always dreamed of—St. Cuthbert’s Way—despite not sharing her faith. Along the way, he meets a monk who becomes his traveling companion, and through their conversations and other people he meets, the protagonist is forced to wrestle with questions of faith in a world that so rarely makes sense. Pre-ordering is a huge help, especially for debut authors like me. So, if you’re so inclined, it would mean a lot to me if you grabbed a copy early.

3. If you’re looking for ways to start studying church history, I recently put together a Church History in a Year reading guide which takes you through 2,000 years of primary sources in just 52 weeks. It’s available for $15 individually or freely to all my Patrons.

4. Finally, paid subscribers receive access to my book club, in which we’ll be reading C.S. Lewis’s masterpiece, Till We Have Faces over the summer. We’ll meet June 22, July 20, and August 17 at 8pm EST on Zoom. Recordings are provided for those that can’t make it.

1. For some forgotten reason, I left this in drafts for about a year, so this was accurate then, but not now. Currently, I’m studying Diophantus and Al-Khwarizmi. Pray for me: math is hard.