Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - Ep 408 | Is 'Redeeming Love' Problematic? | Q&A

Episode Date: April 22, 2021

Today we've got another Q&A episode for you guys! Some question topics this time include "Redeeming Love" by Francine Rivers, the true meaning of "separation of church and state," and how parents can go about raising Jesus-loving kids. --- Buy Allie's book, You're Not Enough (& That's Okay): Escaping the Toxic Culture of Self-Love: https://alliebethstuckey.com/book Relatable merchandise: https://shop.blazemedia.com/collections/allie-stuckey

Hey guys, welcome to Relatable. Today, we are going to have another Q&A episode. If you guys love this podcast, it would mean a whole lot to me. If you would leave a five-star review on Apple podcast, you can say just briefly why you like the podcast or you don't have to say anything. You can just say hi. But that would mean a lot to me. Subscribe on YouTube. If you don't already, I really appreciate you guys. I have the best audience in the world, the smartest and most thoughtful audience in the world. And I just really do love doing this podcast with and for you guys. So thank you so much for all of your support and making it possible for me to do this and to talk about these crazy issues. Today I'm going to answer some of the questions that you guys sent me on Instagram.

One of the questions that I have gotten repeatedly is what I think about francing Rivers redeeming love. Apparently that's turning into a movie. All right. So I've got quite the answer on this. I loved redeeming love in high school. I mean, who didn't? It was new-ish. I don't know when it came out, but it was newish when I was in high school. I read it multiple times. So many times. I could probably like recite the book to you. I read a lot of Francine Rivers in high school. She's an incredible writer. The Mark of the Lion series, that trilogy, amazing. I mean, I don't know very many other Christian fiction writers. that can suck you into their books in the same way, if not more so, than secular writers. I love to read, and I really love to read in high school. I'm so thankful that I was born when I was and that we didn't have all this social media and all these apps on our phones because I really would spend my spare time almost every night reading a book.

Now, a lot of times they were trashy books. Like I think Twilight came out. The first Twilight came out when I was a freshman in high school, I think. And so we were all caught up in that. We read all kinds of those teen fiction books, my friends and me. And I'm really glad that we read. I think it helped me become a better, a good writer. I think it just helped my creativity, my imagination, my ability to be able to communicate well.

I truly think that the hours that I dedicated to reading in high school have paid off incredibly, honestly, for the rest of my life since then, I think reading fiction is incredibly important for young people. I don't think that we have to be pushing all of these complex theological books down their throats, although that can be important. I truly think reading fun fiction is so important. Now, do I wish that I had read better books when I was in high school? Yes, I probably could have focused on some classics rather than some of the cheesy and trashy teen books that I I was reading at the time it would have been more edifying, but I'm still thankful. I am thankful for the fiction that I read and for exercising my mind in that way. I think that the fact that kids are

spending or teenagers are spending probably the majority of their free time now on TikTok and on Instagram and on different social media apps, those things just atrophy your brain. Like they don't make you smarter. They have a degenerative effect. And so I know that when I'm sucked into social media, that I feel like I can't think as clearly. Like it's an addiction. Like you feel like you have to open up your phone when you're doing something that's not occupying your mind enough. Or you feel like you have to be like stimulated by two different kinds of technology. Like if you're watching a show that's not completely keeping your attention,

you feel like you have to be on your computer or your phone too. And I think kids feel that probably times 10. And so if you have a teenager, if you are a teenager, try to resist. spending all of your time on social media. If you're a parent, and I know I'm not a parent of teenagers, but I've been a teenager before, if you still can exercise that authority over your kid by saying, look, I'm going to take your phone at nine every night. That's just going to be how it is. And when you get out of the house, you can do whatever you want to with your phone. But my house, my rules, this is what's going to go down. I would encourage you to do that. I'm not saying

that your kid won't pitch a fit because I probably would have pitched a fit too when I was in high school. but I think that it's absolutely worth it. The parents that I do talk to that have kids that are teenagers who are very strict about phone and internet usage, I mean, their kids are just better. Their kids are better. Their kids are smarter. Like, they're more disciplined. They're kinder. They're smarter than the kids who are spending all of their time being sucked into technology.

That's just the truth. It atrophies your brain all of these social media apps. It makes you dumber. It does. makes you a worse communicator. It makes you less thoughtful, makes you less creative. And if you want to stand out in this world that I understand is like attacking merit and is attacking all of the things that lead to excellence and that amount to success, I promise you, you will still stand out if you are a good communicator, if you're a good writer, if you've got good grammar, if you can send good

emails, if you can write a good article. Because, okay, So I'm 29 years old. And if you are 15 or 16 years old, like my age is going to be your boss and people older than us, you know, 10 years older than us who are still millennials, they will be your boss. I guarantee you we still care about that stuff. I very much care about if someone is reaching out to me and asking, hey, do you need an assistant or like, do you need someone to work for you? If you cannot write, if you cannot communicate, if you cannot hold a conversation and look me in the eye and talk to me, that I'm not interested. And so I guarantee you that my generation and the older generation who will be employing

the current teenagers when they're older still care about your ability to communicate, you don't learn that online. Like the kids that I, that like will comment on my stuff being like, oh, clumps of cells, we should be able to abort them or socialism is great. Like their argumentation skills, their grammar of some of these teenagers, I hardly ever respond to them. But one, they're some of the most vicious and just callous people on the internet that I've seen.

And gosh, I'm so thankful also that we didn't care about politics when I was in high school. I didn't know about any of the stuff. And I think that was very healthy. But they care about all these issues. They get their information from Snapchat. and from all of these propaganda websites like Teen Vogue and, you know, their other friends who think that they know anything about the economy or moral issues. And their reasoning skills when it comes to trying to defend their politics are so

bad, are so Neanderthal-like that it's really frightening that there is a push by Democrats to try to lower the voting issue 16. Now, I'm not saying that all teenagers. are dumb or that none of them can reason. But as someone who has been 16 myself, I can say that the ego paired with the ignorance is not a good, paired and now matched with what seems to be an increased atrophy of the mind and an increased inability to be able to write and communicate and reason. Well, it's not a good combination for being able to vote. I will just say that. Remember, your frontal lobe does not develop until you're 25. And so even though

you're 16 and just like I did, you think that you know everything or you think that you know a lot or you have a really good understanding. The fact of the matter is your brain isn't developed to the point of being able to understand consequences yet. And I guarantee you all the time that's spent on social media by teenagers, I know I sound like a baby boomer, rather than doing things that are actually intellectually simulating is just going to hurt you in the long run. And you can do something about it right now. You can put your phone down and you can start reading books and you can start listening to things that are edifying. And it'll be hard at first. Like it'll be hard when you decide, okay, instead of scrolling through my phone for two hours before I go to sleep every night,

I'm going to read. That's going to be difficult. It's going to be like when you haven't worked out in a long time and you decide to exercise, it's really difficult. You don't want to do it. Like it would be so much easier for you to just sit there and to do nothing because those muscles haven't been exercised. Your brain is a muscle. It's going to be very difficult for your mind to pay attention, to stay focused, to remember what you've read. It's going to take a while for that muscle to be built, but it can be. Like, do not waste the mind that God gave you. And I'm saying that to myself as well because guess what? I get way too sexy. to social media.

And I spend more time on scrolling on social media than I should, and I should be reading as well. So what was even the question? The question was about redeeming love. Okay. So it went off on a tangent. I'm going to talk about redeeming love. So redeeming love, while I think it is so important for you to read, and while I think that I'm very thankful for reading what I did, and while I'm very thankful for Francine Rivers

and her incredible ability to write. I also see now how books like Redeeming Love functioned as a form of soft pornography and like emotional pornography for teenage Christian girls because you get so wrapped up in it and you start to think, oh, I need my Michael Josea. Like, I need my husband or my boyfriend to love me like this. And you certainly aren't getting that probably out of your high school.

relationships and you might not get it right away from your husband that you meet when you're 24 or whenever it is either because it's a fictional character and also i mean it has depictions not hardcore depictions or explicit depictions but depictions and allusions to sex that i think actually stirs up desires and like 15 year old kids that don't need to be stirred up yet because if you're a christian you know that you're not going to satisfy them i actually think that it counters any kind of responsibility that we're trying to teach teenagers and how to guard their bodies as temples of the Holy Spirit if they're Christians when we are feeding them the kind of stuff that's coming from redeeming love. Yes, I understand. It's supposed to be a depiction of Christ and

his love for the church, and it's supposed to be actually a depiction of the book of Hosea, how redeeming love pursues even after mistake after mistake and betrayal after betrayal. And I think that's a beautiful picture to paint. I really do. But the romanticizing and the sexualizing of relationships that doesn't actually meet reality, I'm not sure is very healthy. I do think that it can be very emotionally trying for people, especially for girls or for women who want to be in a relationship, but they're not. Like, this just creates a longing for something. And this idea that they need something to be satisfied or need something to be complete that God might not have in store for them or at least right then. Like if you think about, okay, a 15 year old kid who wants to

have sex because they're hormonal, who wants to get married, who wants to have a boyfriend, and you as a parent or you as a pastor are trying to teach them to live in a way that is glorifying to the Lord, to treat their bodies as the temple that it is, and to make sure, that they are investing their time and energy and the right people and the right things, and that they are, you know, that they are patiently waiting for whenever, if ever, God calls them to be married. Are you going to feed them books like Redeeming Love that makes it very difficult to not dwell on that kind of thing, which may be a long way off?

I think books like Redeeming Love make it very difficult for teenage girls and very difficult for people waiting in singleness to continue that way in a way that glorifies God. And I can now see that looking back. But again, when I was 15 and 16, how could I have possibly known that? I couldn't. And I don't even think my parents really knew either. It's a Christian fiction book. What could possibly be wrong with it?

Because it does, you know, it lays out a good picture. But if you think about what is actually best for girls and for women in the waiting, is it a form of what I think is like emotional porn? I don't know. I don't know about that. That seems to encourage impatience. So maybe when you're married, but even so, I think it paints an unrealistic depiction in some ways of like what relationships can look like.

And so I just think that we have to be careful. Again, loved the book. Loved the book so much when I was growing up. But I definitely see how it can cause damage. I mean, is it better than scrolling on TikTok and Snapchat? Yeah. But is it the most edifying thing that you could read as a teenager? No, I don't think so.

All right. Next question. Separation of church and state. What does this mean? Should we agree with it? Okay, so separation of church and state. You're not going to find that specific term anywhere in the Constitution or in the Declaration of Independence.

Of course, we do have the First Amendment. that guards against state establishment of religion. And of course, it covers all kinds of religious liberty issues. There's a reason why that's in the First Amendment. I had some inane review that said, like, oh, I care about religious liberty because I care about protecting my cis hetero-Christian privilege or whatever. Religious liberty goes for people of all religions. and it has nothing to do with privilege, it has something to do with rights.

That's one problem I see so much with young people is not knowing the difference between a privilege and a right and thinking that it's just based on like your interest groups desire to be protected in some way, that all of a sudden becomes a right. Well, it's not a right. Like we have our constitutional rights that are not given to us by the government, but they're recognized by the government. We believe fundamentally that they're given to us by a creator. That's why we believe that they cannot be arbitrarily taken away by the government.

as the Declaration of Independence clearly states. Now, the separation of church and state, it was in a letter to the Danbury Baptists, and it was from Thomas Jefferson to the Danbury Baptists, and this principle of the separation of church and state is supposed to protect the state from a takeover or dominance or undue influence too much burden by a particular religion or by the church. on the state. At the same time, it is also, and this is what most people who talk about, oh, separation of church and state when it comes to, for example, moral or abortion law, they don't care at all if the church is actually separated or if the church is protected from the state.

Like they are totally fine with, for example, Governor Cuomo telling bowling alleys, hey, you can stay open or bike shops that you can stay open, but, hey, churches, you have to stay close. They don't actually care about protecting the church from the state. They only care about religious people having any kind of influence on the law. And they view that as an important separation of church and state. They don't really want it to go the other direction. And so most of the time when people say, but separation of church and state, you can kind of push back on them and realize that what they really mean by that is that they don't think that Christians should have any influence in the public sphere. Like they don't think that we should be able to influence law in any

way. And that's not what the separation of church and state means. The separation of church and state is not the separation of God in law. Like there's a reason at the capital, there's a depiction of Moses because he is the original human lawgiver because even though this is not, we don't have an established religion in this country, it was based on the belief that a creator, again, gave us inalienable rights, unalienable rights, among them being life, liberal, and the pursuit of happiness. And because they were given to us by a creator, and because that creator, as Romans 13 says, is above any human institution, those human institutions, which are supposed to be in submission to the creator when it comes to the protection of our rights,

cannot take those rights away because they're not there's, they weren't theirs to give, and they're not theirs to arbitrarily take away either. And in our bill of rights, the founders lay out what they believe those rights to be, what they believe, those fundamental rights to be the first being religious liberty, free speech, all of the five freedoms that are protected in the First Amendment they see as primary to preserve any republic to try to push back on the encroaching totalitarian control, which is always inevitable when governments get bigger to maintain a republic that is for the people of the people by the people. A self-governing republic. We need those rights, especially those.

in the First Amendment. Now, our laws are absolutely based on the idea of God and even based on a lot of Judeo-Christian principles. And so this idea of due process, of having to have due process of law before you're convicted of something, that is something that comes out of God's processes that he lays out in his law giving to Israel. Any law, again, murder was first found in the laws for Israel. Any laws against theft are first found in the laws for Israel? Did I say against Israel earlier? I meant for Israel. And so every law, every single law has a worldview that's attached to it. When people say that your Christianity should not affect policy, that your faith should not affect laws, what they're really saying is that I only want

my worldview and my perspective to affect the law. I just don't want yours to. There's no law that exists in a vacuum. People say that you can't legislate morality. Every law speaks to morality, whether you're talking about a parking violation or whether you're talking about abortion. They all have morality attached to it. They all have attached to it a should and a should not that is based on a moral worldview. There's no such thing as a neutral law. There's no such think is a neutral worldview. The people who say, oh, America should be secular, our law should be secularism is a world view. Secularism is not neutral, as we've said so many times on this podcast. People who say, oh, public school, like, it's better because it's just secular. It allows kids to

think for themselves. You've got to be joking yourself. Like, secularism has its own dogmas. It has its own principles. It has its own rules. It has its own definitions. And right now, secularism asserts that a man can be a woman, a woman can be a man, that life inside the womb is just a clump of cells, that you can do whatever you want to sexually and you'll be healthy and happy. It has all of these rules and all of these parameters or lack of parameters and definitions that are contrary to, for example, the Christian worldview and some other kinds of worldviews. And so all that exists in the entire world are competing worldviews. And so that means we have to decide and make a decision.

in which worldview a particular law is going to speak to and is going to be based on. Is it going to be the Christian worldview or sometimes the Judeo-Christian worldview? Is it going to be the secular worldview or another worldview? And so it is actually impossible to separate some kind of belief system from our laws. The people who are saying that abortion just has to do or abortion laws are just, you know, abortion laws are just an example of the failure to separate church and state. Well, I say that the law that says, or the lack of a law, protecting babies inside the womb might also be considered by that definition of failure of separating church in state, the church of progressivism, the religion of

progressivism, the religion of secularism, which says that life inside the womb doesn't matter. That's a much more arbitrary, imaginary standard than the one that says, yeah, I don't believe that any human being at any stage of life, innocent human being at any stage of life should be murdered. And so, again, nothing is neutral. Everything in the entire universe, as C.S. Lewis said, is claimed or counterclaimed by Satan. And so when someone says, like, don't push your Christian worldview or don't push your Christian perspective, they're okay with pushing their progressive perspective, which, again,

based on their own dogmas and their own form of religion, even if they don't call it a religion. Atheism, again, is not neutral, obviously. I mean, it accounted for hundreds of millions of deaths in the 20th century via socialism and communism. So it's obviously not neutral. If it were, it wouldn't have to be forced on the populace. It would just kind of be naturally accepted. It has, you know, its own rules. And so what they mean by, when they try to use separation of church and state as an

excuse to shut you up or as a way to say you can't care about that or you can't enact an abortion law, whatever it is, they're just trying to say, look, I want my worldview in my belief system and my value system to dominate yours and yours shouldn't. Look, you should be trying to influence the spheres in which you occupy with your Christian worldview just as much as anyone who is a secular progressive is trying to influence the spheres they occupy with their world view. And I think that we can take a look at the public education system, at some churches right now, at academia, at the mainstream media, big tech, major corporations. And we can see just how serious secular progressives are about advancing their cause and advancing their belief system at the

expense of all other belief systems and being as evangelistic and as domineering as possible about their belief systems. They don't believe in separating belief systems and their own moral values from the rest of their life. But Christians have somehow been convinced that you have to. No. Everyone has a competing worldview. Every institution, every law has a competing world view. That's why free speech is so important because you have to go into the arena of ideas and you have to see which ideas are better, which ideas went out. Unfortunately, progressivism doesn't believe in doing that. It believes in domination. It doesn't believe in any kind of discussion or debate. It believes in shutting down the other side and trying to

dominate so much that any dissent is either shamed into silence or destroyed. And that's why part of it's, that's part of why it's so dangerous. I say that progressivism is a good compliment to conservatism in any society, but it doesn't do a good job of governing. It doesn't do a good job of leading. When it dominates, it destroys. Progressivism can push the status quo in a way that's healthy, but if you let it take over, all it knows how to do is push. All it knows how to do is question. All it knows how to do is take down what already exists. It doesn't know how to build. That's just not in its nature. It doesn't know how to replace. It doesn't know how to actually give solutions. It only points out problems, which is why I say it can be useful. It can be good.

compliment to conservatism, but it, when it's alone, when it acts alone, and again, when it dominates society, all it does is deteriorate. And I think we've seen that plenty over the past 100 years. Okay, my next question that I am going to answer is how to raise Jesus loving kids. Now, I am a mother of small children, and so there are people who know a lot more about the subject than I do. So I can only tell you what I know from my vantage point in my life stage. And certainly not as someone who is pretending to be like perfect or to know everything that is just not what I'm trying to do. But I do think I have the perspective of someone who not only has little kids. And so I'm thinking about the future and I'm thinking about how to best and most

kindly and most courageously raise them, but also as someone who just sees culture and sees the news and sees at least some indications of how the future is going to roll out and what the country is going to look like in a few years and how we need to be preparing our kids for that. And I just think that one of the number one things that I've prayed for my kids since I got pregnant the first time was that they would have wisdom. And the Bible is clear that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. And so I pray every day that they would be instilled with a fear of the Lord that would make them wise, that they would have discernment, that they would be able to distinguish the truth

from a lie, good, from evil, right from wrong. Because that's our big problem today, right? I mean, obviously, it's just the sin that has always been here, that we exchange the truth of God for a lie, as Romans once says. But it's so trendy today to pretend like there is no absolute truth. Meanwhile, also asserting different kinds of absolute truth. So you see the apparent contradictions in moral relativism and postmodernism. And we talk a lot about that in my book. book. But I want our kids to be kids that know the truth and to know where the truth comes from, to know if they don't know anything else to understand Genesis 1-1, that God created the heavens and the earth. Therefore, he is the authority over all of it. He says what is and what is and

what's right and what's wrong, what's good, and what's bad. In a world that is thrown into bouts of confusion and to chaos constantly, and who doesn't know if up is down or down is up or left and right, they hardly can tie their shoes in a proverbial sense. I want our kids to be kids who are wise, who are knowledgeable. I don't want them to be the kids that are sucked into social media and is sucked in to technology whose minds have atrophied, whose moral compass is just busted to where they are looking to the state or looking to other entities besides the God who made them to tell them who they are and why they're here. I want our kids to be purposeful. I want them to know

who is in charge of the universe, who is in charge of them, why they are here, why they matter. I don't want them to believe that they are just these purposeless clumps of material, the way that secular humanism tells them they are, and that they can do whatever they want to do without any consequences and that life is just this neelistic pursuit of pleasure. That's the last thing that I want for our kids. I want our kids to be smart. I want our kids to be wise. I want them to be purposeful. I want them to be serious in the things that need to be taken seriously. I want them to be lighthearted in the things that should be lighthearted. I want them to have the right priorities. This is now what every parent of every generation has ever wanted for their

Christian kids, of course. But now more than ever, like we Christians are light in the darkness. There's so much confusion. And in Christians, some Christians are tripping over themselves to add nuance to their theology so they'll be more acceptable to the world. I don't want that for our kids. Like I don't, I don't want to lead our kids in nuance. I want to lead our kids in truth. And sometimes the truth does have nuance, but sometimes it doesn't. So when you pursue nuance, you end up abandoning truth. When you pursue truth, sometimes you have nuance. Sometimes you don't. But I don't want to teach our kids that everything is gray and that everything is up for debate. Some things very much are. Some things aren't.

Another thing, right now, as I'm recording this, we're reading tactics by Greg Kokel in our women's book club. And I have always been someone who likes, I'm totally fine with confrontation. Like, I like debates. I like discussion. I like arguing. And my parents will tell you that. That's been the case since I was literally a baby. I've had an opinion about what I want to wear, where I want to go, I want to do, what I want to say. I have always tried to persuade people. And instead of trying to, because I think a lot of toddlers are that way and a lot of teenagers are that way, instead of trying to tell our kids just to not argue and to just do as we say, which I totally understand that we just have to do that. You have to assert your authority as a parent. But I want to hone those skills

in my kids. I want my kids to be able to reason. I want my kids to reason. I want. them to be able to argue. I want them to be able to state their case. I want them to be able to to persuade. I want them to think. I want them to be critical thinkers. I want them when the world tells them that two plus two equals five to be able to stand there and say, no, it doesn't. No, it doesn't. I don't want them to fear cancellation. I don't want them to fear bullying. I don't want them to fear being different. I just think that we have such a responsibility in an awesome, wonderful privilege right now to be able to train our child to grow up to be able to confront all of the problems that the world throws at them and to be clear voices of what is actually good

and right and true. And I know a lot of people are scared to have kids right now. A lot of people are so scared for their children in the world that they're going to grow up and I totally understand that. I completely understand. But God doesn't do anything accidentally. He doesn't do anything arbitrarily. You and I were not born when we were born on accident. He put us, exactly us, exactly where we are on this tiny blip of eternity for a specific purpose for such a time as this. I was born on February 18th, 1992, according to God's perfect purpose. You were born when you were born, according to God's perfect purpose. That is true of your kids. That is true of your grandkids. He does not put people in particular generations, have,

He puts them there for a reason. And so our responsibility as parents is to be so thankful to God for his sovereignty, for his specificity and all of his planning, for giving us the privilege and the opportunity to be able to shepherd this generation by teaching them who made the world, who made them, what their purpose is, why they matter, and what truth is, and to go forth in joy and confidence in all of that. And even if you're not a parent, if you're a Sunday school teacher, if you are a Sunday school teacher, if you are a teacher, if you're a mentor, if you're a counselor, like you also have this

responsibility and privilege to shepherd the next generation in those things. And we should be so grateful. We should be so grateful for that privilege. And we have every reason to be joyful in that too because, again, God doesn't do anything accidentally or arbitrarily. He does everything with purpose and with specificity. And according to his perfect purposes, that all things may work together for the good of those who love him, as Romans 828 says, and for his glory. And so may we raise our kids for the glory of God? And he has given us everything that we need. The Bible says, for life and godliness. So we have everything that we need in him to be able to raise our kids in the way they should go. It's not a promise. Like God ultimately is in charge of their souls,

in charge of their hearts. Only God can soften a hard heart. Only God can do the saving. We just have to be in obedience to God, the best parents, the most godly parents that we can be, and know that he ultimately is the captain of their fate and entrust them to the God who loves them more than we do. All right, that's all I've got for today. I'll see you guys back here soon.