Perfect Storm

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A youth crisis of momumental proportions is brewing. You can take action to stem the tide.

THE

PERFECT

STORM

by Josh D. McDowell

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n October, 1991, black clouds and powerful winds propelled sheets of rain in Massachusetts. This would not be a normal Halloween or a normal storm. It would be called the storm of all storms—the “perfect storm.”

From that 1991 storm, the phrase “perfect storm” has grown to mean a situation drastically worsened by an exceptionally rare combination of circumstances. The Massachusetts storm happened when a rare confluence of three different weather-related phenomena combined to create a massive storm. The “perfect storm” I refer to now is not weather-related.

It is not wreaking havoc to buildings and our environment, but to the minds and hearts of our young people. I see three critical “storm systems” converging to create a youth crisis of massive proportions. We have encountered various crises of young people over the decades, but what I see taking place eclipses anything I have seen in my lifetime. I believe it will soon be the greatest youth crisis of the 21st century and beyond!

© Copyright 2014 by Josh McDowell

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The Internet is the Driving Nature of This Storm

very weather-related storm is driven by a ferocious wind. This youth crisis is being driven by the incredible power of the Internet.

Technology such as the Internet is not bad in and of itself. The Internet has many wonderfully positive aspects. But the current digital age has now become part of young people’s everyday lives to the extent that today’s popular culture has instant access to your children. The volume and variety of information that your child has access to is beyond enormous.

As of January 1, 2013, there were over 2.4 billion people on the Internet.

That is over one out of every three people alive. In 2010, the average young person spent 18 hours on the Internet per week.2 One year later it rose to just over 30 hours a week! 3 Last year there were 1.2 trillion Google searches. 4 In 2010, there were 294 billion emails sent every day. 5 That is over 12.2 billion every hour or 204 million emails every minute which is 3.4 million per second. As you read this sentence, over 17 million emails have been transmitted over the Internet!

In 2011, there were 33 billion tweets per day. 6 That’s over 22 million tweets every minute of every day. In just 10 years, over 50 billion apps and songs have been downloaded from iTunes. 7 Every 60 seconds 100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube—that’s 6,000 hours every 60 minutes. 8 And the average American takes in over 34 gigabytes of data every day from a moving screen. 9 That is the equivalent data of 8,173 songs being compressed into a person’s brain every 24 hours! That is an overload of information!

If all the information coming through the Internet were wholesome and beneficial for your kids, we would not have a crisis. But the reality is this: a destructive culture can reach your child right in the shelter of your own home and church. The pervasive nature of the Internet, with its range of content and its power to fascinate, drives three devastating storms—intellectual, moral and relational—to create a crisis of monumental proportions.

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irst, we must recognize that an entire culture has immediate access to our kids, and we must realize how it is affecting them. For example, 15 to 20 years ago atheists, agnostics and skeptics had very little access to our children. They often didn’t impact our kids until the third or fourth year in the university. But the Internet has dramatically lowered the threshold of their intellectual influence.

Militant atheists have exploded onto the public scene due to the Internet.

As a result, questions I used to hear from university students about the attacks on Christianity, I now hear from 11-, 12-, and 13-year-olds. Militant atheism can impact your kids and undermine their faith right within your home and church.

In a recent “National Study of Youth and Religion,” thousands of nonreligious teenagers said they were raised to be “religious” but had become “nonreligious.” These teenagers were asked, “Why did you fall away from the faith in which you were raised?” They were given no set of answers to pick from; it was simply an open-ended question. The most common answer—given by an amazing 32 percent of the respondents—was intellectual skepticism. 10 That is a very high percentage, given the fact that this was an openended question. Their answers included such statements as: “It didn’t make sense to me;” “Some stuff is too far-fetched for me to believe in;” “I think scientifically there is no real proof;” and “There were too many questions that can’t be answered.” And the most prevalent comment was, “No one would answer my questions.”

Militant atheists have exploded onto the public scene due to the Internet. As a result, questions I used to hear from university students about the attacks on Christianity, I now hear from 11, 12 and 13-year-olds.

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The storm of intellectual skepticism is undermining the faith of our kids in an alarming way. This is the not the fault of the Internet, atheists, agnostics or the university. The problem is that these teenagers were taught at home and in their churches what to believe about Jesus and the Bible. They may have had beliefs, but what they lacked were convictions. When intellectual skepticism hit, they were unprepared. Why? Because they weren’t taught why they believed what they believed. They were only taught what to believe.

Don’t let the world reason your children out of their faith. Counter this storm by giving your kids a defense of the faith until their beliefs are firmly grounded into convictions. They must be given reasons for why they can believe that Jesus is who he said he was, that he bodily rose from the grave and that the Bible is true and reliable. “Always be prepared,” Peter said, “to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have” (1 Peter 3:15). Lead your kids from mere beliefs to convictions by instilling within them the reason for the hope that is in Christ.

We must start these discussions at a young age, for pre-teens are facing challenges to their faith as never before. Studies show that 15-20 years ago, if you didn’t reach a child by the age of 12, 36 percent would still trust in Christ later on in life. Not now. Today, if a child doesn’t trust Christ by age 12, there is only a four to ten percent probability that he or she will ever become a Christian and develop a biblical worldview. 11 If we are going to reach our kids, we must do it early.

One of the key ways current culture undermines faith is with a misinterpretation of truth. Today’s kids are embracing “truth,” but it’s a far cry from the truth you hold. To most Christian adults if something is true, really true, it doesn’t matter if a person believes it or not: it still remains true. That’s not what your kids may hear and then think. To them, what a person believes about faith and morality is true simply because he or she believes it. In other words, the act of believing makes it true for that person. An entire generation has absorbed the reversed idea that moral truth is created out of personal opinions and personal perspective.

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Have you ever asked teenagers what they believe about biblical truth? What would many of our kids say if asked, “Is it wrong to have premarital sex or cheat on a test or lie to your parents?” The majority of our kids would probably admit those things are wrong, but they might respond like this: “Well, I believe it is wrong for me. But I don’t think I can judge other people on what they do.”

The problem is that our kids have been conditioned to believe that moral truth is true only when they choose to believe it. The model of truth they hear says, “What is true is defined by the individual; it is subjective and situational. Truth is ‘known’ simply as your choice.”

At one time in Western culture, the whole of society believed that moral truth was defined by God for everyone. Truth was considered to be objective and universal; it was known through listening to God and his Word. This was an era of ethical theism, when reverence for a Creator God formed a person’s worldview, including the belief that right and wrong are absolute, unchanging and determined by God. But that cultural worldview has radically changed since the Middle Ages. Understanding this radical shift in how we view truth will help us know how to deal with it.

The Renaissance period began to unsettle the worldview that the Creator God shaped human experience. Beginning in Italy in the 1300s and lasting through the seventeenth century, a renewed attention to human possibility in this world significantly shifted human thought. Exciting new work was done in literature, learning, exploration, art and architecture. During the Middle Ages the focus of art, literature and philosophy had been on glorifying and serving God. During the Renaissance period, this focus shifted to exalting humans and their achievements; the universities called the new studies “humanities.” This humanism, stressing human dignity and ability, made man a central focus, though God shared the stage.

The Enlightenment period or the Age of Reason followed, beginning in the 1600s and lasting through the next century. Partly as a resistance to prevalent religious superstitions or dogmatism, enlightenment thinkers advanced the

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idea that individuals had the right to think for themselves in order to determine what they believed and how to act. The power of reason took center stage with philosophers like Voltaire, Rousseau, and Kant. Descartes set out to undergird reliance upon God by starting from reason, with “I think” as an undoubtable pointer to the Creator who made thinking possible. Yet to others, such confidence in the human mind brought the notion if there was a Creator God, he had no contact with his creation now—which meant people could understand natural laws and chart their destiny on their own.

The Industrial Revolution overlapped the Age of Reason, extending from the 1700s through the mid-1800s. It became a major turning point in history. Pride in human ingenuity and productivity meant that man no longer felt the need to look upward to God; he need only look inward to tap the self ’s inner resources and unleash creativity. Inventions, innovations and sustained population growth laid the groundwork for a modern capitalist economy.

Entrepreneurship with its economic prosperity fueled the notion that human potential was limitless. It was thought that human creativity and the free expression of individual will were all that was needed to fulfill human life.

Darwinism ushered in a new context from which to view human

independence from reliance upon God. Charles Darwin, a former theology student at Christ’s College in Cambridge, England, published The Origin of Species in 1859. It sparked an intellectual revolution that remains today as the foundation of scientific thought on the origin of diversified life forms.

Charles Darwin’s theories presented an alternative to a theistic view of the origin of variations in living species. God was no longer needed to explain or understand where we came from, and scientific materialism, the idea that merely physical processes could account for how everything started, began to dominate discussion of earth and life. To many in the scientific and educational community, the concept of God was now unnecessary. Twenty years later, Nietzsche wrote, “God is dead. And we have killed him.” He anticipated that people would cease believing that truth resided in a personal God. This shift, deifying natural progress, completed the journey from Theism to Modernism.

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Modernism flourished in the 20th century. Seeing the world through

scientism, modernists placed their faith “in rationality (the ability of humans to understand their world), empiricism (the belief that knowledge can only be gained through our senses) and in the application of rationality and empiricism through science and technology.” 12 In the eyes of modernists, any truth that could not be measured and quantified—such as moral truth—was relative. You can hear the fruits of modernism in the words of a generation who says, “What’s right or wrong for me may not be right or wrong for you.”

The 21st century is often referred to as continuing the Postmodern era or the information/technology age. Technology has not only changed the way we communicate, it has disseminated information on an enormous scale that was only imagined as science fiction mere decades ago. Postmodernism is complex, with its individual points often contradictory. But its complications result in the idea that any central truth or meaning to life will be as diverse and varied as the people on this planet. And the loss of truth brings the loss of moral certainty as well.

Moral truth, to the postmodernist, does not exist objectively. Your kids will hear the worldview that moral truth depends on what they choose to believe, rather than residing in God objectively. A generation taught to find moral truth in God and his Word has kids immersed in a culture promoting the idea that moral truth is something they personally create.

Our kids believe “if it works, it’s true.”

So if a youth group leader or pastor is sexually unfaithful to his/her spouse, what does a young person say? …

“The truth that says to stay sexually pure isn’t true.” Why? Because it doesn’t work!

Another generational contrast in thinking about moral truth is that we consider if something is morally true, then it will work in life. That has been our paradigm from Scripture: God’s truth, because it is true, truly works That is not what the culture is teaching your kids.

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Your kids have been taught the reverse order--that if something works, it is true. Seventy-two percent of evangelical kids from good Christian homes say, “The only way you can know something is true is if it works.” 13 Do you realize the devastating effect that this faulty thinking is having on our kids? Take the example of hypocrisy about sexual fidelity.

When you were growing up, there were hypocrites in the church. There have always been hypocrites in the church. But if your Sunday School teacher had a sexual affair, you would have said, “He’s not living the truth.” You would say that because to you, since remaining pure in marriage is true, it should work, and infidelity reveals a person’s failure, not a loss of the idea. Your belief in biblical purity wasn’t undermined; your belief in that person was undermined. Not so with today’s young people.

Our kids believe “If it works, it’s true.” So if a youth group leader or pastor is sexually unfaithful to his/her spouse, what does a young person say? He or she says, “The truth that says to stay sexually pure isn’t true.” Why? Because it doesn’t work! Our kids are growing up to be skeptics of biblical truth. When they see people fail to live out moral truth, they conclude that truth is no longer true because it simply didn’t work. Consequently, our kids’ “faith” that has been handed down by you and the church is being eroded. The intellectual storm of skepticism sweeping over our kids has profound consequences in daily life if we don’t act now!

The “sky is not falling” but we need to prepare our kids now for what they will encounter.

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his digital age is indeed shaping the morality of our kids today, especially in these deeply personal issues. Just 10 or 15 years ago, we as parents, pastors and Christian educators had a good measure of control over what our young people saw or heard.

We could in effect shape their views about love, sex and marriage by setting protective limits. We could say, “We don’t watch those kinds of TV programs in our home; nor do we read those types of books or listen to those kinds of lyrics.” These boundaries by and large insulated our children from damaging influences. We tried to limit visits with friends and neighbors to people with the same convictions.

But today we have, in a large degree, lost oversight of the controls.

The 19th century Russian writer Dostoevsky forewarned that “if God is dead, everything is permitted.” Today, that “everything” increasingly invades popular media. A perverted morality storm swirls around our kids. With just one keystroke on a smartphone, tablet, or laptop, your child can open up some of the worst pornography and sexually graphic content (1 billion+ pornographic pages) you can imagine, all in private.

Just a few decades ago pornographic magazines were sold behind store counters, placed in paper bags, and limited to purchasers 21 years and older. Most adult men didn’t even want to be seen carrying such a magazine out of a store. Today pornography is available to anyone, including your kids and teenagers. And it is just one “private” click away.

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Immoral sexual content is reaching your children at an alarming rate.

According to research from Family Safe Media, the average age of the first Internet exposure to pornography is nine years old. 14 Some experts say eight years old. And over 5 million pornographic sites exist, with over 68 million search requests daily. 15 More than 2.5 billion porn emails are circulated every day. 16 A 2009 survey of 29,000 North American university students confirmed that 51 percent of males and 32 percent of females first viewed pornography before their teenage years. 17 A journal article, “The Nature and Dynamics of Internet Pornography Exposure for Youth,” reports that 93 percent of boys and 62 percent of girls are exposed to Internet porn before they are 18 years old.

What they see demeans and disrespects the persons involved. Eighty-three percent of boys and 57 percent of girls have seen group sex. Sixty-nine percent of boys and 55 percent of girls (including Christian kids) have viewed homosexual or lesbian acts. Thirty-nine percent of boys and 23 percent of girls have been exposed to sexual acts depicting bondage. 18 How far we have fallen from honoring persons made in God’s image!

According to a study cited in the Washington Post, more than 11 million teenagers view Internet porn on a regular basis. 19 In a Focus on the Family poll among primarily Christian families, 47 percent of families responded that pornography is a problem in their home. 20 A cultural freefall changes thoughts about vulgarity; in contrast to the recent past, most of our young people see little or no problem with viewing pornography. Overall, studies show that 67 percent of young men and 49 percent of young women 18 to 26 years of age consider viewing pornography as acceptable behavior. 21 Of course, as a concerned parent, you no doubt warn your children and teens to stay away from “sex sites.” As a responsible and proactive parent, you may even install Internet filtering and monitoring software on your computers, as you should.

Yet what happens when your children visit friends or turn on cell phones?

Do all the parents have sexually explicit material blocked from all their electron-

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ic devices? Perverted material in cyberspace is everywhere and difficult to avoid, even when you try to block it. To empower choices that guard the heart against this assault, our kids must have an inward conviction that God’s view of sex—as good, deserving holy protection— holds beauty surpassing all that sensational allure.

The storm can blow in via shared downloads: more than 1.5 billion pornographic peer-to-peer photo or movie downloads occur each month, 22 and most are not detected by “family filters.” (Peer to-peer sharing transmits data from one computer directly to another device.) An entire pornographic video can be downloaded by a child, often without detection.

Most young people have been so desensitized to sexually explicit material that they see no problem with joking, posting or texting about provocative sex.

Do you realize that 4 out of 10 teens are posting sexually suggestive messages?

Another 39 percent of teen boys and 38 percent of teen girls say they have received sexually suggestive text messages or emails originally meant for someone else. 23 Texts, like downloads, can evade the filters and blocks that we hope will protect our kids from this immoral storm.

Another alarming factor is that 91% of teens who view pornography were not even searching for it. 24 They were inadvertently exposed to it while researching for homework. They were not looking for pornography; pornography was looking for them. Seventy percent of 15-17 year old Internet users accidentally view pornography “very” or “somewhat” often. 25 What does a parent do? Some time ago my daughter Katie sent me a very insightful email. She has three boys ages four and under. She wrote, “Dad, I now understand what you have been teaching about our kids. I cannot 100% protect my boys from pornography, but as a responsible mother I must prepare them for the first time they see it.” Parents, we need to prepare our kids for how to judge what they will inevitably face because they will see pornography. Prepare them now, while there is time.

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aming the intellectual and moral storms our young people are caught in wouldn’t be so difficult or devastating to them if we were not encountering a third storm, one which is escalating this crisis to a “perfect storm”—what I believe will become the greatest youth crisis of the 21st century. What makes the crisis so extreme, even among Christian families and the church, is the lack of relationships.

The digital age connects us as never before, but how much of it is helping us relate better? Parents can text their kids all day long, yet that is no substitute for a deepened relationship. Texts tend to be factual or momentary. A relationship takes time to interact with your kids and let them know you want to understand their world. You have great potential influence in the lives of your children, by sustained and loving relationships.

Recently, a dad came up to me and said, “Josh, I simply can’t compete. My kids are inundated with the media and technology – iPhone, iPad, iTunes, texting, tweeting, email, the Internet, movies, school, everything. They’re learning everything from everyone but me. I don’t stand a chance!”

A lot of parents feel that way, but they’re wrong. Despite all of today’s media and all the distractions your kid faces, you can still be the most important and most influential figure in your child’s life.

A national online study shows that 45 percent of young people consider their parents to be their role models. 26 You might have expected that today’s musical sensations or young movie stars or sports celebrities are your kids’ role models. But they’re not. The study shows that 32 percent of today’s kids look to their friends and just 15 percent looked to celebrities for guidance and inspiration. 27 In fact, other studies show that even up to 25 years of age, the greatest influence on behavior, even greater than peer pressure and the Internet, will be the loving, close relationship with you, the parents—especially you fathers. 28 Researchers at the University of Florida recently stated, “The good news is that most teens ARE listening to what parents are saying despite what they [the parents] think.” 29 The key is to tap into their desire to relate to you on a deep level.

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We could require our kids to sit for hours while we tell them why we believe what we believe. We could restrict them from dating until they’re twenty-five—if that were possible. But in reality, our kids will not care about our beliefs or moral values until they know how much we care about them. A connected, caring relationship with your kids is foundational in order for them to embrace your faith and values.

The apostle Paul said to “speak the truth in love” (Ephesians 4:15). Scripture is saying the values and truth you want to teach your kids must always come from a heart of love. Your kids need to know without a doubt that you always have their best interests at heart. You want your kids to know why they believe and why to hold certain moral values for a powerful reason: you want what is best for them. That underlying intent cannot be conveyed to them except by placing faith and value issues within the context of your relationship with them.

“Josh, what do I do about my kids?” the dad asked as he grasped my arm.

I had just spoken on parenting, and this man sounded frantic. He said he had three children – 17, 13, and 10 years of age. He added, “They’re the worst kids in my church, and I’m the pastor. I’ve done everything I know to do. I have taught them God’s truth constantly. I’ve made them memorize Scripture. They know what is expected of them—I lay down the rules, but they are rebelling and they’re ticked off at me most of the time. What do I do?”

There was desperation in this father’s voice. He was trying to get his kids to do the right things. He didn’t say it, but I’m sure he wanted them to be happy, and he knew their misbehavior would eventually cause them pain. He did love them.

I touched him on his shoulder and looked directly into his eyes. “My friend, my advice to you is to back off the rules and work on the relationships.”

“What?” he responded in disbelief. “That’s what’s wrong—they’re not obeying any rules now, and they don’t even think they need to!”

“I know what you’re saying,” I told him, “but I repeat, lay off emphasizing the rules.”

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Why did I advise this pastor that way? We can set up restrictions for our kids on the use of media and music, on choices of friends and clothes, dating and events, even on what books to read. But if all that is not done within the context of a loving relationship, it will likely be of little value and in many cases will lead to their rejecting the very thing you want them to accept.

You know exactly why you put rules in place and why you want your kids to have certain convictions. It is because you love them. You don’t want to see them go down wrong paths in life. You want them to grow up with a vibrant, life-changing faith in Christ. But do they really know that? Most kids will tend to focus on the teachings and rules, missing the perspective you bring. Don’t assume they know that your interest in their moral values and deepened beliefs comes from your love for them. Human willfulness (especially in our postmodern, global world) prompts them to see your restrictions or teachings as limitations or burdens. That’s natural, because we have grown up in an age when faith and values have not been taught within the solid context of relationships.

Yet a loving relationship is God’s pattern with us and for us.

You see God actually designed us to follow the rules because of relationship.

His truths of “do’s” and “don’ts” provide for our well-being and protect us from harm. The Ten Commandments begin by reminding that “I am the Lord your God,” who rescues you (Deuteronomy 5:6; Exodus 20:2). Repeatedly through Proverbs we hear the appeal of father or mother to living wisdom that will bring grace and delight (chapters 2-8, 31). Paul describes marriage as “a profound mystery” that even gives insight into the intimacy between Christ and his bride, the church. He calls for us to imitate God “as dearly loved children” (Ephesians 5:1). Knowing the reasons why we believe can give us deep convictions that help us remain true to them and communicate their splendor in confidence. That’s what loving relationships intend—to protect those they love and provide for their best. We must consistently and intentionally link every teaching and every rule we give our kids to our devoted love for them— and more, to God’s good and loving design.

Passing on your faith and values to your kids as they grow into maturity isn’t done in a weekend camping trip or six-week home Bible study or

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involvement in the church youth group or even a year of family devotions. It requires imparting truth in the day-to-day, week-by-week, month-by-month relational journey of everyday living with your kids. It calls for conveying certain truths about God and life and love and relationships very intentionally as a long-term process. Like the children of Israel, we must “Repeat them again and again to your children. Talk about them when you are at home, and when you are on the road, when you are going to bed and when you are getting up” (Deuteronomy 6:7). Each of our kids must feel that these conversations come with delight and love from a parent, a youth worker or pastor who has their best interest at heart.

A distressing phenomenon I have found sets up a particular problem here for those in spiritual leadership. They often struggle in relating deeply with their own family while also fulfilling their ministry. You would think they would naturally pass on their faith and values to their families. But so many are like my pastor friend with his three rebellious children. In further conversation, I found out his kids felt that the church needs always came before their needs. He said that he believed he had to put ministry to others before his family if he was to keep God first in his life.

However, this is a gross misinterpretation of the truth that God wants to be first in our lives. We are to love God with all our heart, soul, and mind. But Scripture immediately adds that we must love our neighbor as ourselves (see Matthew 22:37-39). And our closest neighbor is our spouse and children. In

You can still protect your family from this “Perfect Storm” if you act now on an individual and collective basis. Your kids need to develop deep convictions about their faith. God can empower you and them amidst the intellectual and moral storms…

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fact, God wants us to love him by first loving our families (1 John 4:19). Early in my own ministry God made it clear to me that Dottie and my children were not to come before my ministry. They were to be my first ministry. Pastor, youth worker, Christian educator, minister: first attend to the needs of your family, and that will become a successful platform from which to minister to others.

You can still protect your family from this “Perfect Storm” if you act now on an individual and collective basis. Your kids need to develop deep convictions about their faith. God can empower you and them amidst the intellectual and moral storms as you impart your convictions and moral values relationally.

You can counter the intrusive immorality of the Internet. You can combat the intellectual skepticism your kids face. It will require coming together as the body of Christ. You can’t do it alone. You need to tap into the many resources that teach God’s design for sex and reasons for confidence in His truth. You will need to study together, pray together, support one another and hold each other accountable to impart your faith and values relationally to your kids. This “perfect storm” can become your “perfect opportunity” to commit to equip and raise up those you love to think—and live—as “children of God without fault in a crooked and depraved generation, in which [they] shine like stars in the universe” (Philippians 2:15).

It is important to understand three presuppositions: 1. The church is not dying. Christ-centered, biblically-based churches are still growing.

2. There are many young people leaving the church after high school graduation. Yes, many are leaving, but for the most part they are not walking away from their faith (yet!).

3. The Internet, pervasive pornography and a relational breakdown can radically change the two points above.

The purpose of this paper is to challenge the church leadership to wake up… before it is too late. We do not have a “crises of faith,” but if we don’t act soon we will.

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ou must first equip yourself to understand both the “whys” of your faith (apologetics) and a biblical, medical and cultural grasp of sexuality and pornography. Then as you are beginning to understand the above two issues you need to expand and deepen your relationship with your children.

Please go to www.josh.org/perfectstorm for effective resources that can help you protect your children.

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Footnotes 1 “Internet 2012 in numbers,” Royal Pingdom, January 16, 2013, http://royal.pingdom.com/2013/01/16/ internet-2012-in-numbers/

2 Stuart N. Brotman, “The Digital Revolution: A quick Snapshot,” August 12, 2010, http://www.digitalworkplaceblog.com/electronic-communications/text-messages/ 3 Ipsos 2011 survey quoted in “Demographics,” New Media Trend Watch USA, accessed May 17, 2013, www.newneduatrendwatch.com/markets-by-country-17-usa/123-demographics

4 “Internet 2012 in numbers,” Royal Pingdom, January 16, 2013, http://royal.pingdom.com/2013/01/16/ internet-2012-in-numbers/ 5 ”Internet 2010 in numbers,” Royal Pingdom, January 12, 2011, http://royalpingdom.com/2011/01/12/ internet-2010-in-numbers/

6 Brian Kane, “Twitter Stats in 2012 [Infographic]”, Web Analytics World, March 5, 2012, www.webanalyticsworld.net/2012/03/twitter-stats-in-2012-infographic.html 7 Andy Boxall, “iTunes Sees 25 Billionth Song Downloaded, Just Weeks Away from its Tenth Anniversary,” Digital Trends, www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/apple-announces-25-billionth-itunes-song-download “Apple milestone: 50 billion apps downloaded,” Business Line, May 17, 2013, www.thehindubusinessline. com/industry-and-economy/info-tech/apple-milestone-50-billion-apps-downloaded/article4723616. ece?css=print 8 ”Statistics,” You Tube, accessed July 25, 2013, www.youtube.com/yt/press/statistics.html 9 http://hmiucsd.edu/pdfHMY_2009_ConsumerReport_Dec9_2009.pdf

10 Christian Smith, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2005), 89.

15 ibid. Family Safe Media.

16 ibid. Family Safe Media.

17 Michael Leahy, Porn University: What College Students Are Really Saying About Sex on Campus, (Chicago: Northfield Publishing, 2009, pp. 154-155.

18 Chiara Sabrina, Janis Wolak, and David Finkelhor, “The Nature and Dynamics of Internet Pornography Exposure for Youth,” CyberPsychology & Behavior, 2008 (vol. 11, no. 6), pp. 1-2.

19 Ed Vitagliano, quoted in “Caught! Online Porn, Predators Threaten Children, Teens,” American Family Association Journal, January 2007, www.afajournal.org/2007/january/0107/caught.asp

20 Focus on the Family Poll, October 2003, quoted in Rebecca Grace, “When Dad Falls: A Family’s Ordeal with Pornography,” Agape Press. Web. 25 Nov. 2009, www.crosswalk.com/1284103/.

21 Archdiocese of Omaha’s Anti-Pornography Task Force, as reported at www.archomaha.org/pastoral/se/ pdf/PornStats.pdf, 2011.

22 Family Safe Media as reported at familysafemedia.com/pornography-statistics.html#anchors.1011.

23 U.S. Department of Justice NSOPW.accessed 03.12.14. www.nsopr.gov/en/Education/FactsMythsStatist ics?AspxDetectCookiesSupport=1 24 Study by Ynkelovich Partners Inc., Sept. 1999. Qtd. By Proven Men Ministries. LTD. www.ProvenMen. org web 4 Dec. 2009 25 “Pornography Statistics,” Internet Safety 101, Enough is Enough, accessed September 23, 2013, http:// www.internetsafety101.org/Pornographystatistics.htm#_ftn3.

26 “Teens Look to Parents More Than Friends” Science Daily, June 15, 2011, http://sciencedaily.com/ releases/2011/06/110615120355.htm

11 Howard Culbertson, When Americans Become Christian article published by research of Southern Nazarene University, Bethany, OK, August 26, 2009, URL: http://home.snu.edu/~hculbert/ages.htm

27 Ibid.

13 George Barna, “Third Millenium Teens: Research on the Minds, Hearts, and Souls of America’s Teenagers, 1999 The Barna Research Group

29 “Talking to Your Teen About Sexuality,” Hillsborough County University of Florida Extension, http:// hillsboroughfcs.ifas.ufl.edu/FamilyPubsA-Z/sexuality.pdf.

12 Dennis McCallum, “Are We Ready?” The Death of Truth, ed. Dennis McCallum (Minneapolis: Bethany House, 1996), 13.

14 Family Safe Media as reported at familysafemedia.com/pornography_statistics.html#anchor5,1011.

28 Jeffrey Rosenberg and W. Bradford Wilcox, “The Importance of Fathers in the Healthy Development of Children,” U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2006, http://childwelfare.gov/pubs/usermanuals/father-hood/fatherhood.pdf.