Mindset List Points Out Danger Of Worldview Thinking

“For the wind passes over it, and it is gone, and its place remembers it no more.” (Psalm 103:16)

Beloit College, a small Wisconsin liberal arts college, released its thirteenth annual Mindset List this week. The list provides context for how eighteen-year olds entering college this fall view their world. The “List” has become a late summer staple about what incoming freshman are thinking. Indeed, everyone from professors to military officials use the list to try to better relate to young people.

Here are some examples from the list that might help you to better understand why the Class of 2014 does not see things like the rest of us:

• Few in the class know how to write in cursive.
• Email is just too slow and they seldom – if ever – use snail mail.
• Al Gore has always been animated.
• John McEnroe has never played professional tennis.
• Doctor Kevorkian has never been licensed to practice medicine.
• Colorful lapel ribbons have always been worn to indicate support for a cause.
• Czechoslovakia has never existed.
• They have never worried about a Russian missile strike on the U.S.
• J.R. Ewing has always been dead and gone. Hasn’t he?

The importance of this list to Christians is it emphasizes how dangerous it can be for people to make decisions about what is right and wrong in relative terms. Absolutes do not make sense to those who use worldview thinking.

Forming opinions from a worldview completely ignores history and emphasizes that the present is the only thing that counts when forming an opinion. Today’s eighteen-year olds view sex, marriage, and morals much differently than eighteen-year olds did twenty-five years ago.

The Mindset List should give us a wake-up call. Beliefs and morals are being taught to our children by television, the Internet, advertisements in magazines, etc. As Christians, we need to take back our children and train them that some things are absolutely right or wrong, and time will never change it.

I will admit that I didn’t always take the time I should have to teach this important truth to my own children. Life gets busy and sometimes we don’t put them first when we should. Yet, the other day, I saw something in one of my children that reminded me that some of what I taught him was still there.

Mark is a twenty-four year old deputy sheriff. While on duty one day, he was eating at a local restaurant when a teenager stepped in and asked the manager if he could get a cup of water. The manager agreed, pointed the way to self-service beverage counter and went about his business. The teenager filled his cup with orange soda and carefully began to exit the restaurant.

As he walked by my son, Mark said to him, “Pour it out!”

“What?” the young man replied.

“You heard me,” Mark said. “I said pour it out. You asked for a cup of water, not an orange drink. Pour it out and get out of here.”

The teenager was stunned, but did as my son asked and mumbled his way out the restaurant.

I have to admit, I was a little stunned, too, but in a good way. Mark later explained to me how he felt about what he saw. “It wasn’t just that he was stealing. He lied. If he has asked me for the money to buy an orange drink, I would have helped. Instead, he just chose to lie and steal.”

He’s right. There is no such thing as a little white lie, and stealing, even when it’s a glass of orange soda on a hot summer day, is still wrong.

We may not see it lived out in the life of our children every day, but the spiritual truths we plant in their hearts will eventually sprout and bear fruit. As the Bible says, “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.” (Proverbs 22:6)