As parents, we all want to raise kids who can recognize truth, love what’s good, and stand firm in a world that often feels confusing or apathetic. In this episode of the Upside-Down Parenting Podcast, hosts Matt Jones and Janel Greig talk with global children’s advocate Katy Faust about how ordinary moms and dads can find their voice and confidently lead their families.
Katy shares her inspiring journey from being an anonymous blogger to becoming the Founder and President of Them Before Us, a movement dedicated to protecting children’s rights. Her story shows that you don’t need a platform—you just need conviction and a willingness to speak up.
In this conversation, we explore:
*Why kids need more than love and safety—they need both their mom and dad
*How to talk with your kids about cultural messages that contradict biblical truth
*Practical ways to push past fear, self-doubt, or criticism as a parent
*The most important thing you can do to help your children stand boldly for truth
*Encouragement for parents who feel overwhelmed, unsure, or alone
You’ll also get to know Katy through a fun rapid-fire round that highlights the habits and influences that shape her own family life. If you’re a parent wanting to raise confident, grounded kids in today’s world, this episode will give you clarity, courage, and hope.
Have questions for a future Q&A episode? Email us at podcast@summit.org
with the subject line “Upside-Down Parenting.” Thanks for listening!
Episode 22: Summary & Transcript
Disclaimer: Please note that this is an automatically generated transcript. Although the transcription is largely accurate, it may be incomplete or inaccurate in some cases due to inaudible passages or transcription errors.
Episode Summary
In this episode, Katy Faust shares her journey from an anonymous blogger to a global children’s rights advocate. She discusses the founding of her organization, “Them Before Us,” which asserts that children have a fundamental right to be known and loved by their mother and father. Faust outlines a three-stage parenting philosophy for instilling a biblical worldview: filtering out distortions for young children, equipping middle schoolers to be experts on cultural issues, and acting as a consultant for high schoolers. She also speaks about the significant personal and professional criticism she endured for her views and argues that Christians need to encourage early dating and marriage to combat societal problems like the fertility crisis. She concludes by emphasizing that parents must model the character and courage they wish to see in their children.
Episode Transcript
Janel Greig (00:00):
Well, welcome to the Upside Down Parenting Podcast from Summit Ministries. Parenting is one of the greatest adventures ever. Yet we all know that parenting can also feel overwhelming and confusing. The great news is you don’t have to do it alone. We are here to walk with you as you raise your kids to embrace God’s counter-cultural truth, his upside down kingdom and champion a biblical worldview.
Today on the show, we are honored to have Katy Faust. We’ll hear her incredible journey from anonymous blogger to global children’s advocate and explore what it looks like for parents to find their voice and speak boldly in an apathetic culture. Katy is the founder and president of Them Before Us, a global children’s rights organization and co-author of the book by the same name. She writes and speaks widely on marriage and family as matters of justice for children and serves on the advisory board for the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship.
Katy and her co-author further developed their worldview formation philosophy in Raising Conservative Kids in a Woke City. Great book. I’ve read it. And her third book, Pro-Child Politics, which is also a great read and they continue that work. She and her husband are raising their four children in Seattle and I think one is married now. Right, Katy? Yeah, welcome to the show, Katy. We’re excited to have you here.
Katy Faust (01:26):
Thanks. Great to be with you. Love the parenting emphasis. I’m at the tail end of it. I’ve got one that just graduated last year from Hillsdale, one that is a sophomore at Cedarville and then two boys that are still home in high school. And if you’re a young parent or if you’ve got parents of young kids and you’re probably thinking like you’re elementary schoolers or whatever, well, I better enjoy this now because once they become teenagers, it’s all going to be just awful. They are lying to you.
(01:58):
They’re lying to you. Teenagers are fantastic. Young adults are fantastic. Every stage. There’s just brand new sweetness and joy if you do the kind of investment and training early on, which I know that’s what this podcast is all about, and I know that’s what Summit is about. So if you really are pouring into your kids with that kind of biblical framework early on, you really just have a lot to look forward to.
Dr. Matt Jones (02:22):
Yeah, that’s what we share with parents who are asking us or newly just had kids, they say, are you having fun with your teenage young adult children? We have so much fun with them. They are such a blessing. And you’re absolutely right whenever you lay that foundation, there is so much joy in the later years with them. And I was actually talking to my 97-year-old friend last night. He goes, the parenting doesn’t end. It takes a different form, but there goes my water bottle. But even though it takes a different form, you still get to invest in not just them, but also their grandchildren. So that’s awesome.
And so you have a great and incredible story of truly picking up the mic, and that’s kind of been or has been the name of our series the last few weeks. You went from an anonymous blogger to becoming a bold, outspoken voice for children’s rights. And we were just wondering if you could share a little bit of that journey with us.
Katy Faust (03:18):
Yeah, we had just moved to Seattle in 2010 and my husband was the senior pastor of a church here. And then right after that, like my gosh, maybe two months after we got into the house that we finally were able to purchase, God called us to adopt. And so we spent nine months adopting our youngest and then we brought him home from China.
And then it wasn’t six months later that the whole gay marriage debate really hit the scene here in Washington State. And what I heard gay activists saying is, number one, the only reason that you would possibly object to gay marriage is animus, hatred, phobia, and bigotry. And then number two, I heard them saying that gay marriage is fine because kids don’t care if they have two moms or two dads. In fact, sometimes it’s awesome. And I was rankled by both of those claims.
(04:14):
Number one, because my parents had divorced when I was young and my father dated and remarried, but my mom repartnered with a woman right after that. And I split time in her home, the home of her and her partner and their lesbian community. And so I knew through at that point decades of experience that you can believe in traditional marriage but also love your gay family and friends.
But the thing that really got me off the couch and behind the keyboard was this idea that a child being raised by two moms is going to be doing great because that’s the story of a child being raised without their father. And a child who’s being raised by two fathers are going to be a child who has lost their mother. And I’ll tell you, doing enough youth ministry, volunteering in schools, working as the assistant director of the largest Chinese adoption agency in the world, junior high ministry, high school ministry, college ministry.
(05:05):
I just stopped running the youth ministry at our church last year. I mean, it’s been like three decades of close contact with kids. And I’ll tell you, there’s nothing kids care more about than who is my mother? Does she love me? Why did my father leave? Why did they get divorced? And why is it that they prioritized that new relationship or that new family over me? There’s very few things that you can do to wound children more deeply than cutting their mother or father out of their life.
So that’s where I felt like I needed to start blogging. And I did it anonymously at first because I understand what an angry leftist internet mob will do to you if they are able to get their hands on you. So I played it very safe and I just blogged anonymously for a couple of years and kind of worked out my theology of the family if you will, because I knew that kids needed a mom and dad. I didn’t know they had a right to their mom and dad. I didn’t understand that the conversation was beyond just the definition of marriage.
If you really believe that children need, deserve, and have a right to their mother and father, that actually needs to inform conversations about divorce, reproductive technologies, IVF, modern families, the rise of cohabitation and a proper understanding of adoption. So that all kind of morphed into me starting a nonprofit and formally advocating for children’s rights on this side of the womb.
Dr. Matt Jones (06:32):
Well, and that’s where you got the idea of the concept of them before us, and that’s the namesake. As we’ve been doing this podcast together, Janel and I have been thinking that for some of our listeners, this might be a disconnect that you could clarify for us because we’ve been saying, listen, moms and dads, you guys need to continue to go on dates. There are times where we need, well, we need to build our family around Christ and emphasize the parental relationship and then say, here kids, here’s how you fit into that.
And as I was thinking about that, I go, wait a minute. She’s advocating them before us and we’re saying, listen, you got to invest in the husband wife relationship in order to invest in the kids. Well, it’s like when an airplane announcement says, put your mask on first and then take care of others. So could you clarify if there’s a disconnect there? And if there isn’t, just resolve that for us.
Katy Faust (07:30):
Yeah, I promise. Don’t worry, there’s no conflict.
Dr. Matt Jones (07:33):
Okay, good.
Katy Faust (07:34):
The idea is, children have fundamental rights. Not everything that a child wants is a right. Not anything that anybody wants is a right. Rights are actually very narrowly defined, and they exist pre government, they’re distributed equally. Nobody has to provide it for you. These fundamental natural rights that were outlined in the Bill of Rights, for example, they’re limited for a reason because not everything that you want, not even everything that you need is a right.
But children do have fundamental rights. Their first one is their right to life. The second right that they have is their right to be known and loved by both people responsible for their existence. And so when we talk about prioritizing them before us, we’re talking about their rights. We’re not talking about their desire to stay up a half hour past bedtime. And we’re not saying that they become little emperors of your family where all of their wishes and desires trump any other needs of anybody else that’s in the home.
(08:26):
When you’re properly ordering your world around children’s rights, it means that their needs are going to be met. And part of their needs being met is you and your husband having an incredible marital relationship so that you can continue to pour into your kids as is needed all throughout their life. So we do spend quite a bit of time talking about the nature of rights in the first chapter of our first book, Them Before Us: Why We Need a Global Children’s Rights Movement, because this is really important.
Unfortunately, rights talk has gotten a bit out of control and anybody that really wants something, we have a right to government funded birth control, and children have a right to sexual pleasure, and you have a right to testosterone from Planned Parenthood. I mean, not everything that you want is a right. And so we need to be very clear about what exactly that is.
Janel Greig (09:17):
Yeah, Katy, I love that too. The felt needs versus what is actually a felt need versus a right. These are my wants, and that’s where our society, I think that toxic empathy is really coming in, that feelings and how you’re responding is more important than anything else.
But one of the things that we’ve been talking about in this current series that we’ve called Pick Up the Mic is we’ve been talking about what it looks like for parents to push back against apathy, especially in teens, and take action based on your experience. You have multitudes of interactions with teens especially, but what encouragement might you give to parents who feel scared, confused, unsure how to boldly step up and help shape the next generation and their worldview, especially in the societal times that we’re living.
Katy Faust (10:04):
Well, here you’re going to get way too many answers from me. My coauthor, Stacy Manning, and I wrote a whole book on this, how is it that you transmit your worldview to your children? And we’re writing it in the context of Seattle, one of the most hostile cities to a Christian worldview.
Most of our kids have gone through public school, almost all of their schooling existence. Neither of us have believing family members that have grown up or lived near us. So in many ways, other than our church community, it’s us communicating truth to our kids against the world. And so we’ve got an awful lot to say about this. I’ll give you a few highlights, but if you’re listening and you’re like, I need a little bit more, trust me, there’s a book about it.
Janel Greig (10:47):
And it’s great.
Katy Faust (10:48):
And you’ll laugh all the way through. It’s very, so first of all, I would say it’s important to understand what stage of parenting that you’re at, and we sort of break it up into three different segments kind of aligned with that trivium approach of grammar, logic, rhetoric, which sort of was derived from the different developmental stages that children go through.
So that first grammar phase goes up through elementary school. And in that state of parenting, what you want to be doing is you want to be filtering out the distortions that the world is going to throw at your kids. You need to be filling them with the good, true, and beautiful. And so you don’t want them to have any exposure to glorified violence or unrealistic body images or distortions of the sexual relationship, for example. You don’t want them to be exposed to or evangelized into a concept of their own sexed body that is out of alignment with reality, for example.
(11:46):
So you’re filtering out most of that distorting content in the first 10 or 11 years of their life. You are telling them the good, the true and the beautiful. And so the truth is that pornography exists. The truth is slavery happened. The truth is that some people are confused about the nature of marriage. And so you’re going to tell them the truth about those kinds of things, especially as it enters their world and give them a baseline understanding that it’s not all good and beautiful. Okay? There’s truth in there that they need to know and they need to hear it from you.
We talk a little bit about this principle called the Founder’s Principle, coined by Hillary Farer of Mama Bear Apologetics, where she says the first person to talk with the child, especially about a controversial topic, the child will automatically consider to be the expert.
(12:37):
And so it’s very important that you get to your kids first. So we have a whole chapter on getting to your kids first. So then you want to look at middle school, and while the first 10, 11 years you work to filter out the distortions in middle school, the adults are going to introduce the distortions. You are going to make them experts. And so we go through what we call the great equipping with our kids when they enter middle school, hopefully the summer right before.
So we just do this massive download with our kids on homosexuality and transgenderism and abortion and socialism and critical race theory and the distortions about the American founding. I mean, we really want to make sure we tell our kids, we expect you to know more than anybody else, than any of your friends about this. If you get into a conversation about race or if you get into a conversation about the free market, you may not know enough to challenge your teacher, but you had better be the authority in your friend group.
(13:30):
So that’s what we do in middle school. We really emphasize what we filtered out before. We’re now going to build a filter in you that you are going to be able to sift through these ideas on your own by making you the expert. And then in high school, it’s kind of counterintuitive. A lot of people think, well, that’s when the equipping happens. That’s when we really, in our philosophy, you’re done. You’re done telling them what to do and telling them what to think.
And then you move into what we kind of categorize as a role of consultant. Now what you’re doing is you’re not saying boys and girls are different, and you’re not saying, oh my gosh, I can’t believe Zohran Mamdani got elected. Do you know what socialism does? Socialism will destroy a country. They know. They know if you didn’t tell them, somebody else told them your job in high school, that rhetoric phase is allowing them to work out what they believe on their own.
(14:19):
And so what we say is we lean out when it comes to their decisions, we actually let our kids choose whether or not to have a job, where to go to school, how to spend their money, whether or not to play sports when they wake up, when they go to bed. It is your business. You’re going to live and die by the consequences of your own decisions.
But what we do do is we lean way in on emotional connection. We want to be the people that they tell everything to, that they want to be with the most. And the way that you get that is physical proximity. You must physically be with your high schoolers whenever possible in the car with them at the dining room table, going on runs, going on walks, taking them to the store, sitting there watching Instagram reels with them, watching shows with them.
(15:03):
Any amount of time you can physically be near them, not for the point of saying, did your teacher say anything today that isolated your Christian convictions? No. You’re there present with them because after 22 minutes of sitting at the dining room table, when they’re drawing and you’re chopping vegetables, they go, you would not believe what my teacher said to me today. And I went, oh, tell me.
So that’s basically how we segment things out. We’ve got it in three different buckets. And I think that if you can hit those main messages, that main area of emphasis in each of those three buckets so far between Stacey and I and our seven kids, we’ve got kids that love the Lord, can stand firm. None of them are voting Democrat at this point. And all of them have got my natural colored hair. That’s a huge win, I know.
Dr. Matt Jones (15:56):
Especially on the hair.
Janel Greig (15:59):
Yeah. In that book, that book really was a charge. It was a call to action for me, Katy, when I read it, equipping. And I think the thing that really stood out to me when you talked about having them be the experts, equipping them so they can be the experts in their friend group, that was a call to action for me. And so that’s one of those in this series, especially parents, pick up the mic, and that’s the passing of the mic to the kiddos for those high school years. So that’s great. Thank you, Katy.
Dr. Matt Jones (16:26):
Well, and the other thing too is we are just curious, how did you handle the criticism or pushback? Because my understanding is I’ve listened to a couple podcasts, you’ve really had to endure some challenging criticism. So what was it like to handle that criticism when you first started speaking out as you picked up the mic? Were there moments where you had doubt or even considered, let’s not be as bold as I am right now.
Katy Faust (16:55):
I have never hidden my convictions, but I also didn’t feel like I needed to go tell everybody what I think. And so on that spectrum of that, Christians generally fall on one side of the spectrum. You’re either a grace giver or you’re a truth teller. And we’re either dispositionally people that want to keep the peace and prioritize the relationship, or we just want to tell everybody everything that we think all the time, regardless of the fallout.
And actually both of those can be biblical and both of them can be hindrances. We need to just kind of recognize where we are naturally. So naturally, I am a grace giver. It’s hard for me to confront people, and it’s hard for me to say something that I know is going to make somebody sad or angry or mad. And so that is something I had to overcome.
(17:41):
So when I first started blogging, the people in my immediate world knew, I mean, I wasn’t going to hide anything from them. And where the first cost came, it is the first time that I said, this is where I stand. This is what I believe. I disagree with gay marriage. I think that children need their mother and father.
And then as I went on, I’d say, and that also means that I’m highly critical of IVF that destroys more embryonic life every year than abortion does. And then for the few children that are actually born alive, one third to two thirds of them are going to lose. Their mother or father are both in the process. And oh, by the way, surrogacy is always a violation of the rights of children. And I think divorce has wreaked absolute havoc on the American family.
So every time you say something out loud like that, and even if you do it gently and sweetly, and even if you do it speaking in principle, not targeting a person, you’re going to get a response.
(18:31):
So I think that a lot of the personal fallout happened right away when I made my public’s opinions public, when I first started to articulate that, that’s when I lost friends. That’s when I had to have some of the most challenging conversations with family members that none of which zero of my family agreed with where I was coming from. And many of them thought that I was a horrible person for doing it. So that is where the cost came.
But then personally, once you get over to the other side of that initial reveal, it’s better now. It’s better personally. But then if you really get in the cross hairs of powerful profiles or powerful influencers, they know how to bring pain. And it’s going to go beyond just the DMs of, we know where you live. We want your children to die, describing in detail things that they wish would happen to you, that maybe they will inflict on you themselves.
(19:32):
It goes on to actually making the people you love pay, and I can handle, I’ve learned to handle people calling me bad names and making fun of my appearance and telling me that I’m a hateful bigot. I’ve gotten over that, but I never get over when somebody in my world has to pay for what I’m doing, when somebody will not allow my kid to come over and spend the night, or when my church gets negative Yelp reviews because the pastor’s wife runs a hate group. Or when somebody, a church will no longer collaborate with our church because of the things that I’ve written when other people have to pay for what I’m doing, that is not something that I’ve learned to deal with yet.
Dr. Matt Jones (20:20):
Well, thank you for sharing that. And it’s interesting. My kids go to the university where I teach, and what bothers me is that because I’m a more difficult teacher, my kids have to endure. And it’s nothing to the degree you’re talking about Katy, but I completely understand this feeling that, man, I wish my kids did not have to endure some of the things that I take a stand on. And again, it’s not to the same degree as we’re thankful that you’re willing to take, and who knows, Janel, this might be us in the future, but it’s inspiring and encouraging for us.
So one of the things we do like to get to know our guests, and honestly, you’re one of our first, and we came up with this short speed round of what we are calling flourishing shorts, where we get quick insights to know our guests and hopefully provide a foundation for people taking more and more of an interest in your work and what God’s called you to do. So these are designed to be fun, serious, however, whatever direction, but hopefully short. So are you a coffee or a tea person?
Katy Faust (21:25):
Coffee. Coffee. Coffee, coffee, coffee.
Dr. Matt Jones (21:27):
Okay, good. And then favorite book on children or family?
Katy Faust (21:34):
Oh my gosh.
Dr. Matt Jones (21:35):
Alright. Least favorite. We’ll take a least favorite too.
Katy Faust (21:40):
There’s a woman named Sheila Gregoire who I think is a charlatan, and she has led a lot of women astray as it relates to marriage and divorce.
Dr. Matt Jones (21:48):
So this would be least favorite book. This would be least favorite. Okay. Alright.
Katy Faust (21:52):
Yeah, this is least favorite. I think The Great Sex Rescue is one of her books. There’s another, I would say any Christian woman who has deconstructed and then talked about how really sexualness is the goal of a free and they’re promoting, and obviously it was the church that was just trying to repress them. Mark and avoid, mark and avoid. So I don’t like female influencers that have large platforms, big degrees, and big followings, who are lying about who God is and what he says about marriage.
Dr. Matt Jones (22:28):
Great. Thank you. Early morning or late night?
Katy Faust (22:33):
Early morning. I get up at 4:30 every morning.
Dr. Matt Jones (22:34):
Yay. Okay, so Janel’s 4, Katie’s 4:30 and I’m 4:45, so that works out pretty well. Okay, good. One habit that shapes your worldview daily.
Katy Faust (22:47):
Can I tell you the habit that I want to shape my world daily?
Dr. Matt Jones (22:51):
Sure. Because Janel and I are still learning too.
Katy Faust (22:54):
Okay. So it is that I give God the first fruits of my time. The first fruits of my free time. So I have not yet, some seasons depending on when the kids wake up, I’m able to read the Bible the first thing in the morning, but sometimes I can’t. And so then my goal is to give God the first bits of my free time every day, even if that’s not right away. So that’s probably it. I used to think I was a bad Christian and a bad pastor’s wife because I didn’t wake up and have quiet alone time for one hour with just me and my Bible. And then I realized, hey, it’s okay. I can actually do this later and not feel guilty about it.
Dr. Matt Jones (23:34):
That’s great. Two more. A biblical character you relate to most.
Katy Faust (23:40):
Can I say Jael?
Dr. Matt Jones (23:41):
Jael.
Katy Faust (23:43):
Everybody talks about have you seen memes online? Like, Lord, give me a biblical woman. And they’re like all Proverbs 31. They’re like, yeah, that’s one option. But driving the tent pig into an enemy after luring him in and pulling him to sleep with all of your feminine gifts, that’s also a biblical woman.
Dr. Matt Jones (24:00):
That’s awesome.
Katy Faust (24:02):
And it’s really interesting because I realized that there’s two women in the Bible that the Lord says are blessed above all women. It’s Mary and it’s Jael. And I’m just like, it’s great because there is definitely a swing towards the trad wife, which I love a lot of that. I love a lot of the sort of returning to traditional gender roles, especially as it relates to women embracing motherhood young. It’s very important for women to embrace motherhood young and prioritize marriage early.
But that does not mean that you’re a doormat weak. It does not mean that you just sit around and knit and bake pies all day. There is a tent peg obligation that everybody has, and this is exactly what it says in, shoot, 1 Peter 2 where it says, you’re Sarah’s children if you are subjected to your own husband. And if you don’t fear anything that’s fearful, like fearlessness is actually one major characteristic of being a Christian woman.
Dr. Matt Jones (25:04):
Last one. You do get on quite a few platforms and podcasts and I’m just curious, is there a question you are not asked that you’d really like to be asked when you’re on these different opportunities to proclaim what you believe and why and taking care of these kids and having them before us? Because sometimes whenever I’m being interviewed I’m like, I really want them to ask this, and it just doesn’t work out. So is there something that you say, man, I really want people to ask me this or hear this as you’re on our podcast today?
Katy Faust (25:41):
I don’t know if anybody’s ever asked me that question. And I am on a lot of podcasts, and so I often will be like, stump me, I dare you. I just feel like everything has been asked. But the thing that I think is probably the most important thing that is at the root of a lot of what it is that I’m talking about that not many people ask and not many people put together, is the fact that a lot of this.
I was just on with Isabelle Brown, a Daily Wire host who was talking about the fertility crisis that we’re having because so much of the work that them before us does in the space of critiquing big fertility and how it victimizes children. And she was talking about how one in seven women are infertile and I’m like, no. One in seven women probably miss their primary childbearing years and are trying to get pregnant when they’re 37 or 42.
(26:27):
And so I think that one of, especially for a Christian audience, honestly, if you want to back up the train on so many of the struggles that we’re having as a society and then as individuals is, people need to get married younger. We all need to get back to the place where we are encouraging our kids to get married in their early twenties.
But if you’re going to encourage your kids to get married in their early twenties, that means they need to be dating in their early twenties and late teens, which means that in their mid-teens, you need to be talking with them about how to do some very low level casual dates with people of the opposite sex so that they will be able to move into a place where they can do a little more serious dating when they’re 18, 19, 20. So they can think about getting engaged when they’re 20, 21, 22 and then get married when they’re 22, 23, 24.
(27:20):
And this is an area where I think Christians have lost the plot. I think that a lot of us that are parents now, I mean I wasn’t raised as a Christian, but the friends around me were raised on I kiss dating goodbye and they were raised on, no, we’re never going to date. We’re only going to do courtship. And that has let, and maybe that was the appropriate response to a wild hookup culture that was taking place in the nineties and early two thousands. That is not the problem we are having today.
People, the problem we’re having today is nobody is dating, nobody’s talking, nobody’s having in-person relationships. And then you do get together in sort of a Christian environment, and if a guy does have the guts to ask the girl out on a date, her mindset is, oh my gosh, he has this one thing and I don’t think I can marry him.
(28:01):
The answer is no. And so you have girls saying no, you have guys being conditioned that they’re always going to be rejected. They’re growing up in a world where the girls are trained to see men as predators because of this anti male mindset that is coming from the rest of the world.
I guess what I’m trying to say is there are a million barriers even in the Christian community to healthy dating and marriage formation, especially during the time when it will be the easiest for people to make those connections and then move into the place where they can have babies on their own. And by the way, save civilization because our fertility rates are cratering to the point where we’re probably going to see entire ethnicities wiped out because they’re not going to be able to recover from the population winter that they brought on themselves.
So I think that that’s probably the thing that some people have asked. Not enough people do, but we as Christians, when my husband was going to seminary, the emphasis was still apologetics. Apologetics defend the Bible. How do you answer these hard questions? I love it. We agree that’s really important. But the real apologetic, the thing that is really going to make the difference in the world today is not our answer to whether or not the Bible is the ER word of God. It is how do we do relationships?
(29:20):
How do we parent, how do we marriage, how do we date? How do we have friendships? How do we do conflict resolution? How do we care for the elderly when our parents are getting older? How do we deal with infertility when we are struggling to conceive? All of these different areas of human connection and human relationships, that is where our witness is going to speak the loudest to a culture that is utterly confused. And I think that Christians have a lot of those answers, but when it comes to early marriage and the critical skill of building the dating muscles to do that well, that is an area where Christians just have absolutely lost the plot.
Dr. Matt Jones (29:56):
Great points. Thank you.
Janel Greig (29:58):
Yeah. Those are great. Katy, I feel like we could sit in this for quite a while. I have a lot of follow-ups I want to ask, maybe we can circle back at some point too and have Katy back on. But Katie, as we look to close and wrap up, honor your time and our listeners time, what would you say is the single most important thing that parents can do to raise children who stand boldly for truth and justice? And so by that truth and grace, truth and justice, it’s the and.
Katy Faust (30:28):
We often say in that book and at Them Before Us, that you become what you behold. So if you want your children to be biblical, clear-eyed, courageous and compassionate, well-informed, able to rebut challenges, but able to also be empathetic where needed, do not expect them to become something that you are not first. You have to become the thing that you want them to be able to behold. Don’t expect them to be able to be even keeled in a frustrating situation if they do not watch you do it over and over and over and over and over again.
So we talk about, in Raising Conservative Kids, you are the program, you are the program, right? You are going to replicate what you are in your children. And so if there is an area where you need to get things straight, maybe there’s a subject you don’t know enough about, or one attribute that you think, this is something that I need to govern better.
(31:26):
Because if I don’t govern it, well there’s no way, if I can’t regulate my anger, there’s no way my child is going to be able to regulate their anger. Okay? So you are absolutely cooked as the kids would say, if you are modeling something that you don’t want your kids to become. So first you have to be the person you want them to become, and then you just invite them into your world. You don’t have to.
I mean, I love Summit Ministries, we love Worldview Academy. We love great books that help our kids understand these things. But there is no book, there was no class, there’s no program that is going to be able to get them from starting to talk toddler to 18-year-old who can go into the world and navigate everything on their own and not be susceptible to terrible, deranged, damaging ideas that will wreck their physical bodies and their souls.
(32:11):
There’s nothing that is going to get them there except you pulling them into your world and allowing them to see what you see and do what you do and hear what you hear and talk with their one parent, the consultant who is the most statistically invested in, connected to and protective of them in their entire world.
So the good news is nothing can save you. I’m sorry, that’s the bad news. The good news is you have everything that you need to do this, you everything you need to do this. You just have to be very, very intentional about building that worldview into your kid really from the moment that they utter the words mama, dada.
Dr. Matt Jones (32:51):
Yeah, because that reinforces 2 Peter 1. You have, we have everything we need for life and godliness through a knowledge of him who called us. And so I appreciate you encouraging us with knowing Christ, knowing the implications of what that means in real life. So that’s really about it. That’s about all we have time for in today’s episode. But Katy, we appreciate you sharing your story and wisdom with us. If parents want to learn more about your work, where should they go?
Katy Faust (33:19):
If you want to go to thembeforeus.com, that is the website where you can subscribe, you can get on a substack. We will stuff you full of materials to help you defend children if you want my opinion on absolutely everything.
Dr. Matt Jones (33:33):
Well, it’s great to get your opinion because it has been inspiring, it’s been encouraging, and hopefully it has challenged people to say, listen, it is worth it to take up the mic for our children. So parents, remember, you have an incredible opportunity to shape the next generation. As Katy has so eloquently described. Even small intentional actions at home can help your children stand boldly for truth, love, grace, and God’s upside down kingdom.
If you have questions for us, we’d love to hear them and answer them in our next Q and A episode. You can reach us at podcast@summit.org, that’s podcast@summit.org. And in the subject line, please include upside down parenting so we know you’re submitting a question for the show.
Thank you so much, Katy, for your time. Janel, it’s great to be with you again, folks. Thanks for tuning in and Lord willing, we’ll see you next time. Thank you, Katy.
Katy Faust (34:26):
Thanks for having me.
Janel Greig (34:27):
Thank you, Katy.