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Why "Consent" Is The False Religion Sterilizing Future Generations · The Family Teams Podcast

• 0:00
  our society decided to adopt consent as the foundation of what determined whether or not something was sexually moral or immoral. This is a terrible mistake.
• 0:16
  Hi, welcome to the Family Teams Podcast. Our goal here is to help your family become a multi-generational team on mission by providing you with biblically rooted concepts, tools, and rhythms. Your hosts are Jeremy Pryor and Jefferson Bethke, and we can't wait to chat about all things family. Hey guys, welcome back to the podcast. Okay, I was taking a look at Twitter this morning, X, and saw that this podcast is a
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  Particular tweet from this mom got over 6 million views. I wanted to unpack some of the lessons here because I think this is super helpful for family teams to understand. This is an area especially that I see families...
• 0:57
  really wrestle with how to think about college, how to think about what is happening to young people today as they're turning 18. And our basic way of thinking about both parenting teens or our older kids and how we are bringing them into adulthood is dramatically changing because I think there are there are
• 1:20
  forces and ideologies that we're just unaware of and not sensitive to, oftentimes maybe because they've been weaponized in ways that are so much more advanced than when we were going through those stages of young adulthood, college age, things like that. So I've been really wrestling with this. Our family has really thought about this deeply with our five kids, four of whom are in that stage, and our last child is about to go into that stage of young adulthood. Yeah.
• 1:46
  This is something we have to really dive into because she describes in this thread elements that I think are really important for families to be aware of. So I want to talk through how to think about this. Now, her language is very political, and that's really not the conversation I want to have. I want to have an ideological conversation. I want to have a conversation based on scripture.
• 2:08
  But she frames it as primarily political. I don't see that as the real driver here. I think there are elements of it that you can say are intertwined with our politics in America or whatever. But man, there's something much more ideological. I would call this much more religious going on than primarily political. But let me read to you this series of tweets, and I want to talk through what she is uncovering here. So she says, I have a conservative child. This is Mountain Girl on X.
• 2:38
  I have a conservative child and a liberal child. My conservative child works hard. He has been steadily employed since graduating college. He bought his first home not too long ago. He is adulting. We are very proud of him. Never wants to have to ask for help. Wants to make it on his own. As a matter of fact, he believes he should pay us back.
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  the standard amount it takes to raise a child. We tell him, no, of course, because that's just not how it works. He's always been motivated to do better and be better. My liberal child recently told me that capitalism is evil. It's not right to have to spend your childhood going to school and then have to get a job where you just work all the time and never get to have fun, have a life. Trust me when I say this convo didn't end well.
• 3:25
  Our relationship is a roller coaster to say the least. She is disgusted with us for being Trump supporters, expresses her disdain for me, especially daily. She also told us that she didn't ask to be born. So since we decided to have her, we're on the hook for life.
• 3:47
  We're going to dive into that. That's such a, uh, like a new growing, uh, belief that that is really going to wreak havoc on this next generation. She has a college degree as well. Tried once to make it her chosen profession.
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  I didn't bring instant success. So she gave up. She's a creative writer. She wrote a novel, got it published, but stopped there. There's so much more she needed to do to get promoted and seen. My conservative child chose a small private Christian based university. My daughter chose a liberal arts university. No explanation needed there. I guess as to why my children are so different,
• 4:23
  They grew up in the same household. Both saw our struggles and triumph. My husband and I both worked. We were both very involved in their childhoods. One appreciates everything and is so grateful to have us as parents. Always thanks us for showing him how to make it in the world.
• 4:38
  The other blames us for everything wrong in her life and expects us to continually compensate for it. She is liberal to the extreme. This causes great conflict in our family. The reason I'm posting this is, I guess, to say liberal indoctrination and ideologies, in my opinion, are ruining us as a society, destroying the foundations, values, principles, and morals and beliefs of our great country. They've turned one of my children into a stranger.
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  I don't know if I'll ever get her back. Sounds dramatic, but true. She expects us to be accepting and tolerant of her views, but we simply have no right to ours. She's been programmed, and there's no way to break through the fanatical muck. We must get our country back on track.
• 5:18
  And then she goes on to make a lot of political statements. But I want to sort of take this conversation into a little bit different realm. And so there's a few takeaways I want us to unpack here when we think about, and I do think this is instructive to say, yeah, these two kids grew up in a similar home, but they are going very different paths. So how do we think about this? Well, the first thing we need to be aware of is that ideas really matter.
• 5:44
  They determine the frame or the lenses through which you see all of reality. We call this a worldview, but you can also look at this in different... We all have ideologies, and when you are parenting your children, you are giving them this frame through which to see reality. We do this through teaching our kids about scripture. We do this through exposing our children to stories. These are really lens-creating activities that a family needs to engage in.
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  And our culture is constantly thinking about how to shift that frame into other ideologies. And so it's really important whenever you're watching a story, for example, to be aware of the lens that it's trying to put on your eyes and who it's telling you, what is good, what is evil, and what are you rooting for in the context of the plot of that story arc. And so somehow what she's describing is –
• 6:41
  Whatever lens these parents gave, tried to give their children, one of them really took and the other one found another set of glasses. And so even though they're looking at the same basic circumstances, they see the world differently. And you can put on a set of glasses that are so extreme that, as Isaiah said, you can get to a place where you're calling good, evil, and evil good, that you can literally reverse your frame. And that's a real challenge that we need to take very seriously.
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  There's also a question about the nature of life. And one of the most disturbing elements of this thread to me that this mother described is this new framing around whether or not life is good, innately good. In other words, you inflicted life on me, and therefore you are on the hook for the rest of my life. Everything that I experience, every bit of pain and trauma
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  is directly attributed to you because I didn't ask to come into this world. You inflicted it on me. And where does this ideology come from? It's growing very rapidly. Yeah.
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  And it's extremely anti-life. Like if you think about there are basically three ways of thinking about life. There's like pro natalists, like life is good. Having kids is good. There's anti natalists. Having life is evil. It's inflicting. And then there's sort of a neutral frame like, well, we don't really know what this is.
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  This is actually kind of fits into the neutral frame and then it pushes into that life can be evil. But the way that it is framed is life is only good if it is given by consent. And I didn't consent to be born. You'd made that decision. And therefore, every bit of trauma and pain I experience in life is your fault. Where in the world did this come from?
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  This is a really interesting and very unfortunate kind of set of circumstances. So where this language of consent or ideology of consent came from was that once our culture threw off our Christian moral sexual ethics, we needed a new foundation that was not based on Christianity that would give us an idea of what kind of, like, what are the boundaries for sexual morality?
• 9:08
  And our society decided to adopt consent as the foundation of what determined whether or not something was sexually moral or immoral.
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  This is a terrible mistake. Hey, it's Jeremy. I grew up in the Pacific Northwest where having a child was treated like a lifestyle choice, kind of like getting a dog. Most families I knew didn't talk about vision or legacy or building something together. So when my theology around family changed, it hit me hard. I realized I wasn't just raising kids, I was forming a multi-generational team, but I had no idea how to do that. I needed tools, rhythms, frameworks, and I needed examples. That's why we created the Family Teams Accelerator is the kind of path I wish I had back then.
• 9:50
  Each month, we walk through one key area of family life, like Sabbath, discipline, or family mission, and give you a simple video, a playbook, and real-life tools to build it into your home. If you're trying to lead your family with intention, but feel like you're making it up as you go, you're not alone. You don't have to figure it out from scratch. Join us at familyteams.com slash accelerator.
• 10:15
  The Bible makes clear that that consent is not the foundation of what makes something sexually moral or immoral acts themselves. Sexual acts themselves can be moral or immoral. Consent is certainly an element of consent.
• 10:30
  That's a component, but that's not the foundation. God himself has declared what acts themselves. Rape, because it's an act that does not involve consent, yeah, that is always immoral. But what the Bible says is any kind of sexual relationship outside of marriage is immoral.
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  Well, people, our culture did desperately wanted to get rid of this framework. And so we've adopted consent. And what we didn't realize, and this is what's so tricky about every ideology, is that when you do something that foundational, this idea of consent did not just stay in the realm of sexual morality.
• 11:08
  We needed a foundation for all of morality. And so somehow what is beginning to occur is that this next generation is going to the language of consent to find its basis for all of morality, including whether or not life itself is moral. And of course, if you use the language of consent to try to understand whether or not life is good or evil, then life is always going to be...
• 11:35
  neutral, but the person inflicting life without consent, in other words, parents are always going to be evil. So this ideology has basically made parents evil. Now imagine what that's going to do to society as a whole. Why would anyone with that kind of frame ever want to have children?
• 11:56
  if you believe that parenthood is sort of similar ethically to sexual assault, that is what's occurring in this next generation.
• 12:07
  Now, let me really try to, it's such a dark and such an unfortunate ideology. And again, it is growing. You're going to hear this more and more. How do we combat this? What do we believe as believers in scripture? And you guys, this is such a good example of why we are totally dependent on divine revelation for our understanding of reality.
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  We are revelation-dependent creatures. If we do not have access to revelation, we're going to come up with these crazy foundations for our beliefs, for morality, and we will not be able to even come close to predicting the kind of damage it will do. And God knew that, and in his grace and in his wisdom, he gave us divine revelation. We absolutely need the Bible. Now, the Bible says some foundational things, and it just says you have to take these by faith. One of those things is revelation.
• 12:58
  that you are to honor your father and your mother. It's such an interesting, that that is in the 10 commandments. The purpose of the 10 commandments is to create this bedrock foundation for the nature of morality. And in that bedrock foundation, we have this incredibly important command, honor your father and mother. That there is something, if you do this, this will create a culture of life. And God's like, you might, you can come up with some other ideas.
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  They're going to destroy your entire civilization. Let me give you a foundation stone that I just need to accept by faith, right? Honor your father and mother and it will go well with you. Like this is what's going to create a flourishing life for everyone in your society.
• 13:37
  Wow. This is one of the reasons why I'm so grateful for the Bible, and I believe it's absolutely from God. It is a gift from God because it is so true. We're going to watch, unfortunately, in high definition, what happens when a society throws off its belief in the moral foundations of the Bible and tries to adopt other moral foundations.
• 13:59
  So, you know, Friedrich Nietzsche, who was a famous philosopher who said, we need to create our own morals. Well, this is what happens when you create your own morals. When you say that the Bible cannot tell us what's sexually moral or immoral, we're going to go with consent. This ideology just starts to bleed everywhere into all other aspects of people's moral foundations. And so we need to...
• 14:22
  found it on scripture. Now, Jesus also really addressed this issue in Mark 7. It's interesting when he was talking to the Pharisees about the difference between...
• 14:31
  having traditions that are made by men and really holding to the word of God or divine revelation. He says in Mark 7, he says, You leave the commandments of God and hold to the traditions of men. And he said to them, You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to establish your traditions. For Moses said, Honor your father and mother, and whoever reviles father and mother must surely die. But you say, If a man...
• 14:53
  tells his father and mother, whatever you would have gained from me is Corban, that is, given to God, then you no longer permit him to do anything for his father or mother, thus making void the word of God by your traditions that you have handed down, and many such things you do. Man.
• 15:09
  Jesus is really confronting the Pharisees because he's saying, look, God gave you a deep foundation for understanding that there is a obligation that children have to honor their parents and that this obligation is to care for them in their old age. Well, the Pharisees were creating a way out of that and said, no, you can just give the money to God. And so if you do that, then you no longer have any obligation to honor your father and mother to care for them because that money doesn't belong to you, belongs to God. Right.
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  Jesus is like, absolutely not. Like this man-made tradition you've created, you're attempting to use this to nullify God's word. And so Jesus himself really affirms the importance of this command for all of us. And, you know, Paul also does this in 1 Timothy 5. He says something really interesting in 1 Timothy 5. I love 1 Timothy 5. It's one of the most interesting multigenerational chapters in all the New Testament, particularly in Paul's writings.
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  where he describes how to make sure that you're providing for your family. And he talks about the importance of caring for widows. And he says in 1 Timothy 5, But if a widow has children or grandchildren, these should learn, first of all, to put their religion into practice by caring for their own family and still repaying their parents and grandparents. For this is pleasing to God, repaying their parents and grandparents. In other words, according to the Bible,
• 16:30
  the direction that there is a debt owed
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  is not from parents to children, but from children to parents, because life is a good thing. And so they, as parents, gave you life, which is inherently good, according to the Bible. They provided for you. And so if they did their duty as parents, then it's your job to also repay them. And this owing of honor is what fuels the family.
• 17:05
  This is what creates tremendous generational bonds.
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  And the way that the Bible describes this and to think about this is you owe your parents honor, but a lot of what you do in order to repay your parents is to pay this forward by having your own children, right? So part of what this does is it creates this continuity that, wow, I was given this incredible gift and I don't want it to stop with me, right? I want to receive that. I'm going to give honor back and then I'm going to give life to the next generation. And so this creates this virtuous cycle of paying it forward.
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  into the next generation. This has been completely disrupted by our decision to create this new religion, this new moral foundation that is totally anti everything that scripture describes. So the last thing I want to mention about this is it's important to think about this as a religion. In other words, one of the reasons why I'm using that language, she doesn't use this language in her post because she's really framing this politically, but what her daughter has done
• 18:06
  and what these maybe college professors that she's learning these ideas from, what they've done is they've adopted a new set of axiomatic beliefs, right? You can't prove any of the things she's saying. There's nowhere you're going to go in a secular world to prove an axiom or to prove an idea as true, like you've inflicted life on me, and therefore you owe me. Like that requires religious conviction.
• 18:34
  And so what has happened is they thought they were sending their child to a university, but they were really sending their child to be indoctrinated into a new religion. And so many of these liberal universities are really seminaries for a new religion.
• 18:49
  And they're doing an incredibly good job of giving that generation deep belief in foundational ideas that provide a lens through which to see all of reality. And if you don't see it as a religion, if you don't understand it as a false religion, then you become incredibly helpless. If you think that you're sending your children to a neutral place when you send them to a liberal university.
• 19:13
  and then you're shocked that they come back indoctrinated by a false religion, then you're being very naive about the nature of what's happening. So college has been hijacked.
• 19:26
  really to sterilize the next generation and indoctrinate them in this new ideology. We are sterilizing them through debt, sterilizing them through promiscuity, sterilizing them through career-based status, sterilizing them through anti-family ideology, sterilizing them through a vision of freedom rooted in impulsive hedonism.
• 19:48
  This is what is happening to this generation. And this is why you're going to see the fertility race just continue to plummet because there's no value for life in this religion. That religion, that ideology that's erupting and is spreading like a contagion or a virus within these universities is going to destroy our ability to have any motivation or any moral foundation for why it's a good thing
• 20:16
  to have families. So what do we do about this? And so one of the things I think we need to really recognize as Christian families is we must take responsibility for our kids' education instead of forcing our kids to align with confused peers or with these kinds of faculty members, right? We have to be aware that when we send graduates out into these different places, they're likely to be indoctrinated in these kinds of lives.
• 20:46
  There's a lot of things we can do differently. We can really, we must think much more strategically about what we're investing in when our children get to be this age.
• 20:57
  And there are lots of alternatives to sending our kids to liberal seminaries in order for them to be indoctrinated in a false religion. We really need to think about, obviously, there are Christian colleges like this woman describes her son went to. We can send our kids into mission experiences. I think that Paul describes in 1 Corinthians 7, one of the wonderful things about being single is living this undivided life. I wanted each of my kids to experience what that was like.
• 21:24
  to be immersed in a Christian community that is on mission for the kingdom of God. I think that this is the perfect time for our kids to experience that. If you're so petrified that your kids are gonna get behind somehow in their ability to provide, I just encourage you guys to really trust the Lord in these areas. There's lots of things we can do to also help our kids. And part of what we've done is really encourage our kids to get into much more entrepreneurial efforts to start businesses with our family team.
• 21:52
  Instead of selling their services to other families. So this is, we're constantly trying to understand what can we do as a family to help our kids get on a path where they're able to get married, establish a deep, lasting covenant with their spouse, have children early and often, and be completely dedicated to the kingdom of God. This is possible. But man, it is really, it requires us to sidestep.
• 22:21
  this trap that this woman describes in this thread. And I really encourage all of you guys listening to this. We can do better. We can really understand how to help our kids through this. So hopefully this has helped for you guys. I'd love to discuss this more with you guys. Please leave a comment if you're watching this on YouTube. I'd love to hear what this turns up for you or what ideas you have for how to combat this kind of ideology. But yeah, we've got to really be on the lookout for how to help our kids avoid this.
• 22:51
  Thank you for listening to the Family Teams podcast. If you're enjoying this content or have learned something new, please make sure to leave a rating and review and share with a friend. To stay up to date with our events, new content, and products, you can follow us on Facebook and Instagram at Family Teams.