Athens has just published the latest statistics on youth crime. Overall, the youth crime rate is steady—which would appear to be good news. However, violent youth crime has risen steadily for the past three years. So—same proportional numbers, but increasingly violent. This implies growing depths of desperation, de-sensitisation and depravity.
Other statistics include:
83 percent of youth offenders are male, but the number of violent female offenders is rising.
50 percent plus are Maori
80 percent of youth offenders have drug or alcohol problems
70 percent are not enrolled in school
Most youth offenders come from dysfunctional and disadvantaged families and lack positive male role models. (NZ Herald, 9th May, 2008)
The top Youth Court judge, Andrew Becroft offered some “very simple suggestions” to combat youth crime: firstly, kids must be provided with good role models; secondly, they must be kept in some form of education for as long as possible.
The first represents a pipe dream. The second incorporates a fallacy. So much for “very simple suggestions.”
Athens has no meaningful answers or solutions. It will dance its dervishes forever around the fire—and it will temporarily feel better for the sweat and effort—but no solution or change will be at hand.
Let us deconstruct these “very simple suggestion”. The first calls for providing kids with good role models. As the Judge acknowledged, most of the youth offenders come from broken homes and have never had a good role model to which they could look. They come from blended families, where adults are constantly moving in an out of sexual relationships with one another. By the time the children are two or three, irremediable damage is done.
The parents, the two people commanded and ordained by the Living God to provide abiding values and verities (truth, honour, respect, loyalty, love, tenderness, care, order, structure, and discipline upon which one can rely) have likely changed several times. The child has probably heard endless wrangles, fights, tantrums, screaming fits, cursing, and blasphemy. It will have witnessed alcohol and drug abuse. The child will have been serially passed from adult to adult and he will have intuitively learned that he is just an objectified thing. He will have picked up that it is an appendage at best, a nuisance at worst.
In most cases, the child will have been born for the economic advantage of his mother—under the DPB, income will rise as a result of having another child.
The child's world view will have been set by age two or three, such that everything thereafter will be interpreted according to that world-view. So, now, let's meet the new role model which “someone” is going to provide. Immediately and instinctively the child will respond to this role model as one more transient influence in his life. Therefore, while the community or state might anoint him/her as a role model, the child already has its own view of role models, and the two views are diametrically opposed. Unless the child changes his world-view, the expectations of the community for the positive influence of the role model will be hopelessly dashed.
We would hazard a guess that whatever role models the community might provide, they will be transitory and temporary—just one more damn thing after another in the child's life. By now the child will have learned irrevocably that this transient, temporary, changing flux of existence is the real world. Everything will be interpreted accordingly. The child grows up thinking that the world just is, it happens, whatever will be will be. There are no verities that will bind the world for the next one thousand years, around which you can build your life, structure your existence, plan for the future, or establish your line.
By the time the child becomes an adult—co-inciding with the assumption of an adult's physical strength, exponentially increased by the opportunity to band together with peers into both formal and informal gangs—the ethos of “whatever will be will be” elides normally and naturally into sociopathic behaviour, crime, living for the moment, doing what lies at hand, and let the Devil take the consequences.
Then, let's think about the role models Athens is going to throw up. Athens will only put forward the role models which reflect its own religious position. In order for the role model to have any chance of influencing the child he will have to have a strong, clearly defined set of principles that touch everything and which will be so clearly and strongly advanced to the child that they will have at least the prospect of counteracting the acute relativistic world view in which the child already operates.
But Athens itself is an acutely relativistic world. There are no ultimate rights or wrongs in Athens—only social conventions. So the kind of role models which Athens will approve are those who, at best, will be allowed to say to the child—do this, or don't do that, because society likes this, but does not like that. But the child will have already worked out that the world consists of the temporary serial imposition of someone else's prejudices or preferences. The upshot will be that the only kind of role models Athens will tolerate in the child's life are those who will systematically reinforce the child's world view. There is no right and wrong—there are only power complexes.
The second “simple solution” is to keep the children in education as long as possible. This is just one more tedious example of the fallacy of reductio ad educatum. This is a fallacy of relevance. Education has little or no relevance to a child who has already been so conditioned that they are un-educable. This solution represents Athens wringing its hands and in effect demonstrating that it has no solutions. The appeal to education makes middle class liberals and elites feel good because no doubt they call upon their experience of how education assisted them and developed them. But it is actually worthless. Moreover, it will make the situation far worse.
It is not hard to imagine what happens when a child with a radically relativised world-view is sent to school. Yes, you have guessed it. The child regards school as one more succession of influences that are meaningless and will pass. It is one more imposition that has no meaning or significance. It will soon be replaced by another influence or experience. School is just one more damn thing after another. From the time the child first steps foot in the school he will be disengaged.
To be educated in any sense that will result in meaningful lifetime change requires that knowledge be both structured and ordered (which in itself is a violation of the child's world view to begin with) and which requires that the child enter into the discipline of learning to master the tools of learning that it can take on out into life. But in most cases the heart of the child is already damaged beyond repair.
To keep such a person in school will only generate a sense of frustration and anger—for increasingly the growing child will regard successive years of schooling as a waste of time and of little or no meaning. To be kept at it will only breed resentment and anger. Which is why, of course, 70 percent of children involved in youth crime are no longer attending school. Despite compulsory education laws they dropped out long ago. In truth, they were never enrolled. They may have physically spent some time in the class room, but in heart and mind they were never there.
Since Athens is so bankrupt and impotent, what does Jerusalem offer? Jerusalem represents a solution which is offensive to Athens—and which we expect Athens will resist to its dying breath.
Jerusalem says you will not redeem and restore the children unless you are first successful in redeeming and restoring the parents. But, we hear you say, the parents are too far gone. Is it not significant that the solutions being trumpeted by Athenians have clearly capitulated on this point? They assume that something must be done to counteract the already destructive influence of utterly negligent parents in the lives of children—and all their solutions sideline and ignore the parents, and represent an attempt to replace the parents in one way or another (role models, schools, etc).
But Jerusalem knows that any plans or programmes that ignore the vortex of the Covenant God has made with humanity is doomed to failure. That Covenant is not between God and individual human beings, but between God and “familiated” human beings. God deals ordinarily with people in and within families. Whakapapa is an essential construct within the the Covenant of Grace. God says to Abraham: “I will be a God to you and to your children after you.” Consequently the family is the most powerful socialising agent, for good or evil, in the life of a child. Nothing will ever change that. To change the evil socialisation effects that lead to youth crime and a host of other problems, you have to change families, which means you have to change parents.
Moreover, the change must be from the inside out; it must be root and branch. Only the liberating, transforming power of the Gospel of Jesus Christ can bring that change. But once the change has occurred, once a parent has been born again by the Spirit of God, intense and constant work on behavioural patterns needs to take place. If parents were to change in this way, within a generation the problem would have largely dissipated.
So Jerusalem suggests that Athens invite Jerusalem to provide an army of preachers of the Gospel of Christ to this terribly unfortunate underclass. Jerusalem suggests that Athens gives a Macedonian call to Jerusalem: “Come over here and help us.” Jerusalem suggests that Athens work to take away every obstacle and hindrance, and meanwhile let Jerusalem do its work without interference, rules, regulations and bureaucratic meddling. And Jerusalem also demands that Athens provide no money, no financing for this great rescue mission. We know that “he who pays the piper calls the tune” and Jerusalem serves the Risen Lord, not ungodly Athenian mammon.
Now, as noted above, we do not expect that Athens will issue that invitation. It would be too close to putting the stake into Athens own heart. But maybe Maori would consider it. We learn that at least 50 percent of youth offending is from Maori. Maybe Maori would have the humility coupled with the depth of concern to issue the call.
In the eighteenth century, the Great Awakening occurred in England and the eastern seaboard of North America. Spearheaded by the Wesleys and George Whitfield, the Great Awakening represented (in large part) the English underclass turning to Christ in response to the clear, clarion, preaching of the Gospel. Many of the converts were from Gin Lane (immortalised in Hogarth's etching) and similar places and were people whose lives had become truly wretched—as wretched as many New Zealand underclass families have now become.
The Wesleys established weekly new convert growth groups that began training the members in methodical, disciplined Christian living. These groups helped people establish Christian disciplines such as Bible reading, prayer, fellowship, giving, thrift. This inculcation of the methods of Christian living through small groups led to them being called Methodists. But the point is that within a generation this afflicted underclass had largely attenuated, if not disappeared. The new Christians began to put their lives back together as they began to live for God, Who alone brought them hope in their degradation.
The “simple solutions” of Athens to increasingly violent youth crime are not solutions at all. They will end up being no more than cruel mockeries and will make the problems worse. The only social utility they have is that they will make Athenian social liberals feel better—but that utility is worthless on any meaningful moral or ethical scale.
Jerusalem's answer will be mocked and spurned by Athens. But that will not deter us in the least. So it has always been. So it is likely to be for the next two or three generations. But, in the end, God's Word will be the anvil that breaks up Athens, and a strong refuge for those desperate enough to turn to God when all else has failed.
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