Paul Coughlin

Nice people may not be interested in the defiled world of predators, but predators are interested in their children.  Adult predators, sexual or otherwise, aim to separate children from their parents and/or from other adults who might stop them.  Most kids are not separated at gunpoint or knifepoint; rather they are lured away by those who earn trust in dishonest ways.

Here’s how they earn our trust.  (Gavin DeBecker broadly calls these “Survival Signals.”)

Forced Teaming:  A predator uses the word we when we isn’t true or accurate.  It establishes premature trust and makes a kid feel obligated to stay around this adult.  He says things like, “We’re sure in a mess, aren’t we?”  Teach your child to say to a stranger, or to someone they know but do not trust, “I didn’t ask for your help, and I don’t want it.  Leave me alone.”  This isn’t wrong.  It’s wise.

Charm and Niceness:  In order to deceive, you have to remain at least one step ahead of someone.  Charm and niceness can hide intent and give a head start.  People who take control of others almost always pretend to be nice in the beginning.  Teach your children that “nice” is not the same as good.  This is especially important for girls, who are generally expected to be warm and friendly toward adults.

Too Many Details:  Con artists often use too many details to tell the story because they know that since it’s not true, the story must be sold.  After a while, details can wear down a person’s defenses, as dishonest salespeople know well.  Teach your child to consider context by asking herself, Why is this person talking to me in the first place, and why is he telling me so many things?

Typecasting:  This involves a slight insult, initially one that’s easy to refute.  “You’re one of those kids who’s too scared to disagree with your parents, aren’t you?”  It’s designed to get a child on the defensive, breaking down resistance.  Teach your child he does not have to answer every question put to him.  In some cases, short answers like “Whatever” are appropriate.

Loan-Sharking:  Predators will often give a child something (the common example is candy) to make her feel indebted.  It can also be advice or sympathy:  “Your parents don’t listen to you, do they?  I’m glad to listen.  I care about you even when others don’t.”  Teach your kids not to accept gifts from people who want something in return.  Otherwise it’s not a gift—it’s a debt installment.

The Unsolicited Promise:  Someone promises to do something for a child who never asked for it but is getting it anyway.  Don’t worry.  I’ll take care of you.”  Promises are used to convince us of an intention, but they are not guarantees.  Nor does such a person behave in a way that he will guarantee anything.  If he did, it would expose his deceitful intent.  When someone provides an unsolicited promise, teach your child to think, You’re right, I am hesitant to trust you.  Thank you for making that clear.

Discounting No:  Anyone who chooses not to hear the word no is trying to control your child.  A frequent (and potentially dangerous) response in this situation is negotiation:  “I really appreciate your offer, but let me try to do it on my own first.”  Teach your child, instead, to say out loud what she’s really thinking.  If that’s “Bug off,” she should say it.  Teach her to look a person in the eyes with strength, to walk away, and to be loud if necessary.  De Becker says, “You cannot turn a decent man into a violent one by being momentarily rude, but you can present yourself as an ideal target by appearing too timid” (and nice).

If your child never talked to strangers, then he would never talk to a police officer or a store clerk.  Telling a kid that strangers are dangerous equates strangers with danger, which prevents kids from finding that line between protection and overprotection.  Once again, most predatory behavior toward children involves someone they know; pinning danger on strangers is one of the best ways to destroy a child’s perception of and intuition about true danger.  Instead, teach your children to evaluate behavior, specifically strangeness (not necessarily strangers).  Teach them to pay attention to stares that last too long, a smile that’s not real, rapid looking away, and other signs of discomfort.

If a stranger talks to you and your child and doesn’t give off warning signs, talk with your child about why you felt safe around that man, and also what would have made you feel unsafe around him.

If your kid is lost in public, train him to ask a woman for help before asking a man.  This does not contradict the fact that a mother is more likely than a father to physically abuse her child.  This is not her kid, and, furthermore, it’s highly unlikely that she’s a sexual predator.  According to De Becker, a woman is more likely to stay involved in a lost child’s trouble until it’s resolved; a man is more likely to let authorities handle the problem.

Kids should know that it’s okay to be “mean.”  In fact, being good sometimes requires you to be “mean” to others.  “Mean” in this context means conflict, which isn’t always mean.  Children need our help understanding this, because they are wired to seek the approval of adults, even when adults don’t deserve it.  Predators bank on that.

This is hard for Christian parents to accept if they believe it’s wrong to use verbal and physical force.  But read just the first few chapters of Mark’s gospel and tell me Jesus didn’t believe in or enter into deliberate conflict.  Saying that Jesus (and, by default, Christianity) denounces conflict is like saying Karl Marx was a capitalist.

When it comes to self-protection, conflict is good.  It does not mean retaliation.  It means telling your kid it’s okay to rebuff an adult and even injure one if needed.  It’s okay to yell and to otherwise make a scene—teach your child to yell, if he or she is being grabbed, “This is not my father!” (or mother).  That’s likely to get a bystander to step in, since most assume a child is being escorted by a parent.

Regarding authority, a child’s view toward it can be dangerous in two key areas.  If he questions authority too much, he will be blackballed by adults, who will find him unnecessarily contentious, and his peers won’t like him much either.  But if the child is too trusting of all authority, he sets himself up to become a naïve victim.

Paul Coughlin is the author of numerous books, including No More Christian Nice Guy and No More Jellyfish, Chickens or Wimps. He also co-authored a book for married couples with his wife Sandy, titled Married But Not Engaged. His articles appear in Focus on the Family magazine, and he as been interviewed by Dr. James Dobson, FamilyLife Radio, HomeWord, Newsweek, C-SPAN, The New York Times, and the 700 Club among others. Paul is founder of The Protectors, the faith-based answer to adolescent bullying, which provides curriculum for Sunday Schools, private schools, retreats, and individuals that trains people of faith to be sources of light in the theater of bullying. 

Visit Paul's websites at: http://www.theprotectors.org, and http://www.paulcoughlin.net

Visit Sandy's website for reluctant entertainers at: http://www.reluctantentertainer.com

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While offering individual instruction for the Christian Nice Guy problem throughout the United States and Canada, I’ve discovered a dangerous pattern: The group of men who ask for help the most are pastor’s sons.

Let that sink in for a moment.  Think about its ramifications.

In No More Christian Nice Guy, I wrote about subtle and overt forms of spiritual neglect from the pulpit to the pews when we are encouraged to emulate a gentle Jesus meek and milk who really did not exist.  Now I’m going to reveal one of the most damaging forms of spiritual abuse that comes from the pews to the pulpit.  And like most spiritual abuse, it isn’t intention, though the result is sure real.

The pastor’s sons I work with are almost always separated, divorced, or on the verge of divorce.  Their wives or ex-wives complain that they just don’t possess the kind of vigor or fire that they want from a husband.  They sometimes complain that their husbands drain them of energy instead of invigorating them.

These men often have no definable self, a fact their wives point out, sometimes with disgust, when walking out the door.  Our sermons encourage us to have self-control, but these men don’t have a self to control in the first place.  They are anchorless and are often too easily influenced by others.

Because they’ve been trained to be pleasant to everyone, they often over-yes and under-no others.  Many think that it’s simply wrong to tell others “no.”  And when they do, they lose sleep at night.  Being human, having boundaries, feels unnatural and sinful to them.

They are resentful of how people have treated them and their families, and because they don’t think they should experience or own negative feelings, they don’t know what to do with them.  They often denounce them as unchristian as opposed to being honest and working through them.  As a result of poor treatment from others, they do not trust others very well, including their wives.

They are known by many, but not knowable in part because they possess personas, an assumed identity, but not discernable personalities.  They feel that they have been forced to play rolls in life, to wear masks (one of the original meanings of “persona”), which is exhausting and depletes them of integrity and healthy self-confidence.  Integrity makes us conspicuous, and it is always painful.  It’s important to realize that the word Jesus used for “hypocrite” while denouncing the Pharisees literally means “wearer of masks” (Matt. 23:13).

They know the right words to use in marriage—they know how to perform—but they don’t know how to deeply love another person.  This is what personas do: they are like holograms and holograms by nature are all surface, no substance.

They think that never showing indignation (which includes as part of its original meaning “much to grieve”) or other forms of healthy anger toward anything or anyone and always remaining gentle are among the highest forms of spiritual maturity, even though Jesus wasn’t always gentle and pleasant.  More so, their spiritual training has them believing that it’s wrong to not be gentle.  But if this is true, then Jesus was wrong.  Jesus sinned.

For example, one son of a pastor who asked me to help him overcome passivity in marriage told me how his mother’s “gentle spirit” made her the perfect Christian woman.

“She was always so gentle,” he said warmly.  “She never got angry about anything.  She was perfect!” he gushed like a child.

My inner Dr. Phil came out.  “Perfect?!” I exclaimed.  “In more than 25 years of ministry, she had to have seen wickedness and evil tearing people apart.  She had to have seen divorce, adultery, child abuse, drug addiction, homicide and even suicide.  And she never became indignant when she saw that kind of destruction, the way Jesus was indignant?!”

There is much to grieve in this life, and responding to life’s destructive forces gently instead of with indignant power may well make us accomplices to these destructive forces.  For many, gentleness is a disguise for being dispassionate spectators of life and a hiding place for fear and passivity. 

The pastor’s sons who ask for help are always expected to be happy, one of the most damaging myths in evangelicalism today.  I call this the Happiness Mentality, and it needs to go away.

Here’s an example from my own life that I write about in my upcoming book, Unleashing Courageous Faith.  I went to a funeral of someone I loved and the minister said that we should not shed tears because he was with Jesus now.  “This is not a day of mourning, but of celebration!” he said, with a level of enthusiasm that appeared fake to me.  He didn’t even seem to believe what he was saying.  He spoke as if he was following a script.

“Celebration?!” I thought.  “I loved this guy.  I’m not going to celebrate his death, I’m going to weep his loss.”

True to the Happiness Mentality that we slavishly idolize, this talker of spiritual matters did not allow for the spectrum of human life, love, and longing because this spectrum is not considered “spiritual.”  He didn’t allow for both weeping and celebration.  True to his spiritual training, he axed the negative stuff and gave us a plateful of spiritual dessert.

And instead of leading us toward a more loving and compassionate orientation toward life as it really is, he encouraged a very selfish approach toward those closest to the family man.  Why express your condolences to his 12-year-old daughter who just lost her father when the spiritual leader just told you there’s nothing really to cry about?  She remains untouched and unloved.  The Happiness Mentality in many ways is actually a cruel mentality.

This plastic world of our own making helps to make the Christian faith appear more and more irrelevant and ill. 

Pastor’s sons who find No More Christian Nice Guy indispensable have not been allowed to exercise a real will of their own.  Instead, their wants, needs, desires and dreams have been subjected to the will of others.  As a result, they are pretty much the ideal Christian child because they are tremendously pleasant to be around, but they later flounder in adult life.

Ultimately, these pastor’s sons just don’t feel safe in life, and if you gave them a shot of sodium pentothal—truth serum—my guess is most of them would say that it’s sinful to be human.

A dear friend of our ministry in Wisconsin once told a pastor’s son something that is worth repeating to many other pastor’s sons and daughters.  Like many children of ministers, he felt he always had to be “up” and always had to have an answer to most every question.  So she turned to him while working on the same project and said, “You don’t always have to be happy and you don’t always have to have an answer.  It’s okay to not know something.”  These are wise and compassionate words that we should keep in mind as we do our part to change this terrible situation.

Pray for the pastor’s sons and daughters who you know.

Treat their parents with dignity when you disagree with them.

A friend of mine, Nate Larkin, Founder of Samson Society (www.samsonsociety.com) and author of Samson and the Pirate Monks: Calling Men to Authentic Brotherhood, is a pastor’s son who knows the pressure they feel to live two very different lives.  Here’s what he recommends: “Let the kid be a kid.  He’s not a representative of the pastor, nor is he responsible for upholding his father’s reputation.  Let him make his mistakes.  Give him the same grace you’d give any other kid in the church.”

Second, “Don’t compete with the kid for his father’s attention.  Too many pastor’s kids grow up feeling that the congregation comes first in their father’s affections.  As a result, they become either resentful and rebellious or overly compliant and artificial in an effort to attract their father’s attention.”

Forward this article to people you know who could use it.

Let us know what you think.  Email us at paul@christianniceguy.com.

Paul Coughlin is the author of numerous books, including No More Christian Nice Guy and No More Jellyfish, Chickens or Wimps. He also co-authored a book for married couples with his wife Sandy, titled Married But Not Engaged. His articles appear in Focus on the Family magazine, and he as been interviewed by Dr. James Dobson, FamilyLife Radio, HomeWord, Newsweek, C-SPAN, The New York Times, and the 700 Club among others. Paul is founder of The Protectors, the faith-based answer to adolescent bullying, which provides curriculum for Sunday Schools, private schools, retreats, and individuals that trains people of faith to be sources of light in the theater of bullying. 

Visit Paul's websites at: http://www.theprotectors.org, and http://www.paulcoughlin.net

Visit Sandy's website for reluctant entertainers at: http://www.reluctantentertainer.com

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My first book, Secrets, Plots and Hidden Agendas, took on conspiracy theories:  why some people believe in them and why some are even willing to die for them.  I debated numerous theorists across the country and was interviewed by C-SPAN and the New York Times, among many other media outlets.  The conspiracy theorists had read the same news reports I’d read about national and international affairs, but we interpreted them very differently.

My best attempts to talk them down from that ledge of life did hardly any good.  The theorists had to believe in their theories, even when I was able to show them how contradictory they themselves were and how blatantly absurd were the alleged conspiracies.  Conspiracy theories are a kind of security blanket woven together to help the theorist make sense of the world.  Such people were transmitters, not receivers, of information—they couldn’t receive new or objective information because they’d already decided where everything would fit into their already established labyrinth of self-protection.

Remember that conspiracy theories don’t just consume individuals (think of Waco, Ruby Ridge, Oklahoma City).  The resultant actions by those who are consumed hurt us all, and most notably their spouses and kids; I received numerous letters from wives and children of theorists (most are men), begging for help.  A conspiracy theorist’s fearful view of the world always hurts those who love him but cannot reach him; he refuses to set aside or reject any of his inclinations in order to begin relying on intuition.

This is similar to what can happen with parents who over-protect—many of them have so deeply entrenched their worried habits and perspectives into their families that they don’t relate to their kids intuitively.  Increasingly frenzied by life’s pace and by their own anxiety, their mental and emotional inclinations begin to rule their children in ways that eventually result in kids simply shutting down.  As we’ve already noted, this is happening in younger and younger kids.  Children of all ages are becoming less and less able to function, and while we’d like to think it’s because the world has become so dark, or because society has become so generally misguided, it’s usually because the problem is rooted, fostered, and festering at home.

Most overprotective parents don’t use clean intuition; the real problem, frequently, is that they think they’re using it.  But true intuition leads to good results.  Overarching fear, the driving force of worry, doesn’t even when it’s couched in ways that in the short term appear good and noble to other overprotective parents.  When we’re convinced that life is a tragedy waiting to happen, our kids suffer.

I remember when what I called intuition backfired.  I’d hired three men to move my hot tub, and when they pulled up and jumped out of their truck, they looked to me as though they may well have just been released from prison.  My daughter, uncharacteristically, went to open the door.

My blood roared inside.  A primal sap flowed from my gut, throughout my body.  My inner-protector (I call him Thor, God of Thunder) drew his sword.  I yelled, “Don’t open the door!”  She escaped to her room.

I helped them move the tub, a beast of a job involving nearly six hours of difficult labor.  I don’t claim to have gotten to know them.  I enjoyed working alongside them, and while I made sure they didn’t enter my home, none of them gave me the willies.

What flared up inside me when they arrived wasn’t intuition.  It was inclination via stereotypes that threw all kinds of warning bells in my head, and I sounded the alarm loudly in my home.  Not at all to say I shouldn’t have had any thought to safeguard my family while they worked on my property.  But so what if none of them owns a pair of Dockers?  Knowing what I know now about which kids get abused and by whom (90 percent of sexual abuse committed by a man is done by someone the child knows, not a stranger), I would be more productive observing relatives at family functions than worrying about hot tub movers.

If you suspect you need your intuition adjusted, clear the way for honesty so you can find out to what level fear, rather than intuition, is driving your decisions with your kids.  Remember this helpful acronym for FEAR: False Evidence Appearing Real.  All fear is not false; fear that’s justifiable can be extremely helpful.  But false fear can lead to unhealthy anger and blurred perception.

Ask friends if they think you’re overprotective of your children.  Ask a certain kind of friend, someone you know is willing to be truthful, even if it means he or she makes you uncomfortable at times.  Ask someone whose perception you admire and who isn’t prone to gossip or excessively harsh criticism.

Tell them they’re free to tell you the truth, even if it hurts, and that you won’t punish them afterward.  (Giving this green light to key people in my life has kept me from making some awful decisions.)  Then, truly listen, and don’t correct.  Do not completely deny their claim.  Instead, ask for clarification and, if possible, examples.  Cry if you need to, then act on the information you’ve been given.  This is how wise parents can fine-tune their intuition.

In addition to asking friends, you might consider making an appointment with a counselor.

Fearful children often come from fearful parents whose intuition is skewed and whose inclination is over-empowered.  Furthermore, fearful people are often angry people in disguise and/or denial.  This anger can become a wicked force in a child’s life, and the consequences are tremendous; it’s critical that parents with an angry disposition get themselves under control.

Contrary to common perception, mothers are more likely to physically abuse and even murder their children than fathers.  Child abuse perpetrators are 62.3% female; child fatality perpetrators are 62.8% female.  The mother/father ratio is actually greater because many of the male abusers counted aren’t biological fathers but stepfathers or boyfriends.  Regarding murders of children by single parents, the estimated total in the report is 264 parental murders of children committed by single custodial mothers and eleven by single custodial fathers.  There are roughly five times as many single custodial mothers as single custodial fathers; the child-murder ratio, though, is twenty-five to one.

I come from abuse.  I know what it does to a kid.  If you abuse, and if you want to darken your child’s future and fill him with psychological “holes,” keep pretending that everything’s great and that it’s everyone else’s fault that you’re out of control.

One of the most insidious psychological holes: Children of abuse are not only less likely to stand up to abuse by others, they do not stand up “for themselves to themselves,” explains Hara Estroff Marano.  They not only believe bad things said about them by others, they do not even denounce their own self-attacks, such as “I’m so stupid,” or “It’s my fault people beat me up,” or “Whatever I do doesn’t matter,” or “I’m worthless!” and so on.  As I explain in No More Christian Nice Guy, children of abuse become their own worst enemies by bearing false witness—against themselves.

Abusers know that with enough force, deceit, and manipulation they can keep entire family trees at bay.  Nevertheless, if you are angry and abusive, the kind of parent who creates victims of abuse, you’re not fooling anyone.  In time your tyranny will be exposed for what it really is.  After all, you are raising your own biographers.  Rejecting humility and pressing forward in pride may result in their turning their back on you.  In your later years you may howl in protest if no one is there to ease your pain, but you will have brought it on yourself.

If you abuse your children, take an honest look at your upbringing.  Like my mother, you’ll most likely see that you are doing to others what was done to you.  You didn’t deserve that abuse.  But neither do your children.

Break the chain that binds your lineage.  I did, and so have many others.  Gather people around you who will help you overcome this problem.  There will be shame and guilt to handle.  Feel them—experience them, because they are required for healthy change—then move on.  Don’t stay stuck in remorse forever.  The goal isn’t to eternally serve penance but to begin learning how to live by loving.

Ongoing, seemingly never-ending sorrow is sometimes an excuse to avoid the next phase, which is changing how you respond to stress and fear.  Your kids don’t want you to be continually broken in this way, and neither does God.  Both need you to rise up and to start using your parental strength justly.

In order to find the line between protection and overprotection, we need to take an honest look at our own understanding of who we are and how we relate to others.  Specifically, we need to discover if we are too passive or too aggressive with others; one way or the other, our children are likely to inherit or incorporate much of what we display.  If we show them an assertive approach toward life, they will be leagues ahead in knowing how to ward off anyone who would seek to take advantage of them.

Assertive people build good fences between them and others, and though they’re no one’s fool, they are not cold, distant, or cut off from others.  Their personality creates many gates, but only to the right kind of people.  They’re comfortable in their own skin, so they don’t feel the need to try to control others, and they’re not controlled by others.  Most everyone, except the abuser, likes the assertive.  They’re not mastered by fear, anxiety, or worry, so their perception of life and their intuition are clearer than most.  That’s where we want to be as parents.

It’s time to become more assertive.  The aggressive don’t rightly protect children because their borders are impenetrable—they tend to lock their children away from the world.  Time to start including gates in your fences so that when your children move more and more into life on their own, they will be neither painfully awkward nor wildly inappropriate, and most important, they will be a non-target for predators.

Paul Coughlin is the author of numerous books, including No More Christian Nice Guy and No More Jellyfish, Chickens or Wimps. He also co-authored a book for married couples with his wife Sandy, titled Married But Not Engaged. His articles appear in Focus on the Family magazine, and he as been interviewed by Dr. James Dobson, FamilyLife Radio, HomeWord, Newsweek, C-SPAN, The New York Times, and the 700 Club among others. Paul is founder of The Protectors, the faith-based answer to adolescent bullying, which provides curriculum for Sunday Schools, private schools, retreats, and individuals that trains people of faith to be sources of light in the theater of bullying. 

Visit Paul's websites at: http://www.theprotectors.org, and http://www.paulcoughlin.net

Visit Sandy's website for reluctant entertainers at: http://www.reluctantentertainer.com

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In my previous article, I discussed how misunderstanding and ignorance have too often led Christian parents to raise fearful, unassertive children.  Now we reflect on how we came to that point.

Marital disintegration often creates fragile, timid, and wary children.  If they ever had it at all, the parental strength they once relied upon to help them face their inner insecurities and outer-world concerns becomes disrupted and usually dismantled.  Sometimes their fragility is concealed behind a fake toughness; what’s not hidden is a closed spirit that requires special healing to reopen.

Pop star Kelly Clarkson, who experienced this kind of home-life distress, wrote a dark and accusatory song that resonates in the hearts of many young adults who find themselves in a similar place.  Her “Because of You” video shows a husband and wife at each other’s throats while a little girl watches.  After verbal brawls, depression, breakage, and tears, the father moves out.

Clarkson is that brokenhearted little girl.  The song’s poignant and painful chorus says that because of her parents’ choices, she stays on the safe side of life, has a hard time trusting herself and others, and lives in constant fear.  In an online interview she admitted it was hard for her family to watch the video, but she says “Because of You” is more than a protest.  “The song is about breaking that cycle [of domestic violence and divorce] and not carrying it on to the next generation.  Kids are like sponges, and they imitate what they see.  And sometimes that’s not fair because what we see is not good for us.”

It’s a phenomenal tragedy that divorce rates in the church aren’t markedly different from those in the general culture.  At the same time, in recognizing the damaging effects of divorce and in seeking to stem its prevalence, the Christian community is among the few brave entities to confront the nefarious effects of divorce upon individuals and societies.

We need to learn how to start showing courage in other ways as well.  Christian culture is prone toward “bubble living,” isolating (or thinking we’re isolating) ourselves from danger when sometimes what we’re really doing is trying to immunize against living real life.

We’re good at focusing on the negative: Jesus did say we’re not to be of the world.  Yet we somehow manage to forget the positive: we also are to be in it (see John 17).  Failure to recognize and apply this—indeed, many Christians seek to live out the opposite—contributes to the crisis of fragile and ill-prepared children.  If they’re sealed in a biosphere for eighteen years, sure, they may stay “uninfected”…until they’re let out.  Then, far from being immunized or inoculated, they’re prone to catch almost anything.

I’m still amazed by what I saw kids from Christian homes do when they got to college, away from their highly sheltered lives.  They had professed to follow the Lord and receive His whole council, and they had lived such highly prescribed lives, but if their parents only knew half their exploits, they might, like Job, tear their clothing and sit in ashes.  “Every fall,” observes John Portmann, professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia, “parents drop off their well-groomed freshmen, and within two or three days many have consumed a dangerous amount of alcohol and placed themselves in harm’s way.  These kids have been controlled for so long, they just go crazy.”

By and large, we’re not debilitating our kids on purpose.  Over the years I’ve slogged through a ton of negativity, and I’m insistent that guilt is not an acceptable synonym for parenthood.  Nonetheless, often with the best of intentions, Christian and non-Christian parents alike are raising children who are passive, pleasant, and malleable rather than innovative, proactive, and bold.  These “nice” children prevalently struggle with fear, anxiety, loneliness, and, later in life, relational instability and divorce.  Our goal should be to create confident and truly virtuous kids who are capable of doing more than their part in obtaining an abundant life.  These children become adults who lend their strength to others and help them obtain happiness as well.

I have coached soccer for both genders, mostly boys, for more than a decade.  Some are home-schooled, most go to public school, and some come from private schools.  The kids from religious homes are mostly Christian, some Jewish, or a mixture of religious expressions and beliefs.  Some don’t go to a house of worship at all.

The only consistent difference I’ve noticed is that the kids who come from religious homes might swear less.  If my kid doesn’t curse, we say to ourselves, I’m doing well.  In that one sense, this does make them different, but in the larger picture of life, it’s a pathetic difference.  Talk about straining at gnats and swallowing entire camels!  (See Matthew 23:24.)

Jesus used this metaphor to describe errors the religious leaders of His day were perpetrating.  They paid too much attention to minor matters and in the process ignored “weightier” matters like “justice, mercy, and good faith.”  I sometimes do the same thing as a parent, and I’m not proud of the reason: I strain at gnats because in myriad ways it’s easier than teaching and living out for my kids a Christlike example of what matters most.

Swearing is the gnat some schools strain as well.  My old high school, for example, held a summit among teachers and staff and decided that in the entire galaxy encapsulating tumultuous youth—which includes bullying so pervasive that an estimated 160,000 U.S. kids each day skip school—curtailing swearing was the most important crackdown they could undertake.

I’m not advocating swearing, especially taking the Lord’s name in vain.  But instead of a primary emphasis on rearing children known for not swearing as much as their peers, what about producing children known for their love of justice?  Children who, with this love, are trained in the shrewd ways of creating righteousness and peace?  What about rearing warriors of light, the kind of kids with fortitude and perseverance to withstand the wicked peer pressure that pounds them and others?  Give kids this kind of upbringing, and issues like swearing may well just take care of themselves.  After all, Jesus said it’s what comes out of us that defines us and can defile us; a heart that produces blessedness and light cannot continue to produce profanity and darkness (Mark 7:14-23; Luke 6:44-46).

Here’s another difference I’ve seen as a coach, and it’s heartbreaking.  Religious kids are far more inhibited than their secular peers, and in the wrong way.  They’re less likely to put up a healthy boundary against another kid.  They’re also less likely to defend another person, and most of them have been drilled from toddlerhood that all conflict is wrong.

Conflict-avoidance disguised as “patience” or “gentleness” is a false front; the vice of cowardice is frequently disguised behind a “forbearing spirit” and a false understanding of gentleness.  A gentle person uses the appropriate amount of force and power.  When gentleness needs to take a stance, it does, and it does so with grace.  But gentleness is always truthful, as well; niceness favors pleasantry and manners over truth.  Niceness is the drowning of force (sometimes a good thing), but it can also be the refusal to honor what’s right, the unwillingness to stand tall for any and all reasons.

The understanding that a gentle man still wields force is an eye-opening revelation to many men at my conferences, a revelation that often propels them into more godly living.  Learning to use appropriate force in any given situation takes time and a cultivation of virtue.  Trace the origin of the word virtue and you’ll see that one of its meanings is “force”:  Virtue brings whatever energy and force is needful to a situation.

The belief that nice equals good is among the most amazing deceptions of our time, and it’s resulted in profound spiritual and relational degeneration as we’ve continued to atrophy behind the façade.

Next time we’ll talk about the terrible impact of cowardice and the terrific importance of courage.

Paul Coughlin is the author of numerous books, including No More Christian Nice Guy and No More Jellyfish, Chickens or Wimps. He also co-authored a book for married couples with his wife Sandy, titled Married But Not Engaged. His articles appear in Focus on the Family magazine, and he as been interviewed by Dr. James Dobson, FamilyLife Radio, HomeWord, Newsweek, C-SPAN, The New York Times, and the 700 Club among others. Paul is founder of The Protectors, the faith-based answer to adolescent bullying, which provides curriculum for Sunday Schools, private schools, retreats, and individuals that trains people of faith to be sources of light in the theater of bullying. 

Visit Paul's websites at: http://www.theprotectors.org, and http://www.paulcoughlin.net

Visit Sandy's website for reluctant entertainers at: http://www.reluctantentertainer.com

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