When Kids Ask Hard Questions: Faith-Filled Answers For Tough Topics, edited by Bromleigh McCleneghan & Karen Ware Jackson

When kids ask hard questions, find a better book than this one to look for answers. It is hard to overstate just how misguided an effort this book is. This book does serve a purpose, although it’s not the purpose the authors set out to do. This is a book that seeks every sort of faith-filled answer to questions except for biblical answers to questions. Indeed, this book is a short and easy example of how you can demonstrate the wide gulf that exists between leftist woke Christianity and the actual real deal biblical Christianity. This is a book that is not only not Christian, and contains essays from writers who are not Christian (at least one Jew and one Muslim, for example, contribute whining discussions about how hard it is to deal with life in a Christianish society), but the material here is actively opposed to Christianity and someone viewing this book as Christian would know less and practice less Christian virtue upon reading it than before. The authors are not merely non-Christian, which would be bad enough, but are post-Christian, feeling it necessary to apologize and repent for a Christian belief that is calling upon them to repent. The people who write in this book are in need of as much of or more help than the people who are supposed to read that book, and that is not acceptable.

This book is about 200 pages long and consists of a couple of dozen terrible essays about various matters from a variety of writers who have no idea what the Bible has to say about the subjects they spout off about as if they have some insight to provide that can help to build a useful and worthwhile faith on the part of the reader. Instead, the authors show themselves to be a heap of blind guides who need to repent of their many manifest sins. Whether the book talks about building friendships with disabled people or dealing with the struggles of body image, this book is written from a terrible perspective. Among the only good essays in a terrible lot is one that argues (correctly) that God is not a fan of suicide and that instead he wants people to live and to live abundantly, something that an entire section of the book written on matters of wealth fails to understand. Authors talk about divorce as if it is something that God does not hate, reflect on loss, drone on and on about matters of race and sexuality, and demonstrate a sound awareness of leftist talking points but little familiarity with the scriptures, especially biblical law.

It is well worth pondering why this book is so terrible. There are several reasons why, and all of them add up to a cavalcade of terrible decisions, including the belief that this book was filled with faith instead of being filled with manure. For one, the authors view tough questions as being questions that allow the authors to discuss matters near and dear to them as leftists with little knowledge of the Bible and less interest in obeying God’s laws and practicing God’s ways. Despite the fact that the Bible says that God created man as male and female, the authors discuss supposed multiple genders. Despite the Bible’s hostility to homosexuality, the authors feature quite a few queer people and urge parents to actively corrupt the innocence of their children regarding such matters as sexuality and identity, even while whining about the adultification of black young women. And despite the biblical injunctions against envy and comparing oneself to others, the book is full of discussions of fictive privilege and the constant comparison of women to men, blacks to whites, non-Christians to Christians, poor to rich, all in the way of trying to justify a sour and ungodly and negative view of the world, thus making all of the book’s supposed insight end up being a look into the dark and insane mind of the contemporary left.