Honoring our Elders

Cultures and history have largely always had a large emphasis on the value of honoring and taking care of our parents and elders. American culture is pushing us away from that in many ways. Cartoons paint parental authority as a joke. Our sitcoms show fathers as about as intelligent as a potato. Society continually pushes parenting in terms of friendship and camaraderie. Culturally we neglect the idea that the experience of our parents or elders has any value. We treat and act like only the state can teach, and that parents should be friends to their children with nothing valuable to pass on to them.

Whether or not we believe it, our elders have experience that they can pass down to us. The Bible tells us it is to our advantage to honor our parents while culture pushes us to alienate them. As parents, culture pushes us to doubt that we have skill or value to give our children. This extreme push of culture is wrong, and leaves us with only this weird parent-child friendship. Parents, your children need you. They need your example and instruction. For youth, you do not need to be so quick to believe what culture says. Our parents can teach far more than you realize. I had a teacher once tell me, “The older I get, the smarter my parents get.” As he got older, he was realizing that his parents had more to teach than he first thought.

One reason we may not believe or want to honor our elders is due to how much of a disconnect we have, both inside and outside the church. We see older generations have different tastes in music and games than the current. They have different ways of connecting with technology, and in the church we may notice they have a different view of corporate worship. These differences are okay and great, but they do not reflect intelligence. They show a difference in cultural language.

I believe that our culture pushes these differences to leave ideas like Christianity, nuclear families, and other values into the past with these generations. After the dust of WWII had settled and communism had finished growing its borders, the Soviets had to figure out how to bring their new population into having the same socialist views they did. At first they would ban the Bible, evangelism, and other books and ideas they disliked. The issue was that simply forbidding something would make it far more interesting, and it would push practitioners into hiding. The soviet republics found they had the best results in suppressing Christianity, not by making it illegal, but by reaching the new generations first. They would teach, much like our textbooks today, that atheistic evolution is factual unlike your parents view of creation. They would teach that morals and authority come from the state and not by any natural governings by a creator. The communists discovered that teaching the youth that Christianity and its values were disproven and wrong were far more effective than any legislative actions. It took longer to work, but they were right. Even 30 years after the fall of communism in these countries, atheism is still the prevalent belief system.