Who’s Indoctrinating Your Kids?

Bill Nye “The Science Guy” believes teaching biblical creation to children is not appropriate, and atheist Richard Dawkins says teaching children creation or religion is akin to child abuse and indoctrination.

No Neutral Ground

The irony is that these men themselves are not neutral in their beliefs about origins. In fact, there is no neutral ground. All people have starting assumptions that shape their worldviews.

Jesus said, “‘He who is not with Me is against Me’” (Matthew 12:30). A person is either a child of God the Father or a child of the father of lies (John 8:44–47; 1 John 3:10). The father of lies, Satan, wants to deceive and destroy your children. But God has given parents the clear command to raise their children “in the training and admonition of the Lord” (Ephesians 6:4).

Ken Ham delivers his talk titled “Rescuing Our Kids” at the Answers Mega Conference.

In the video on this page and on YouTube, Ken Ham warns of seven types of people and institutions that we need to rescue our kids from. Leave your children to people like Richard Dawkins, and they will be brainwashed to believe they are products of a cosmic accident with the savage process of evolution gradually leading to socialized human animals with no purpose or accountability, but only the promise of nothingness after death.

So, Mr. Dawkins, we will rescue our children from false teachers like you and unashamedly “indoctrinate” our children in biblical truth. We will instill right doctrine in them by diligently teaching God’s Word to our children (Deuteronomy 6:7).

God’s Word Is Truth

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We must teach our children that Scripture is to be trusted as the infallible Word of God, but everything else is fallible, including our own hearts (Proverbs 28:26; Jeremiah 17:9). The battle since Genesis 3 has raged between God’s Word and man’s ideas, so we must teach our children to evaluate human opinions in the light of Scripture.

Compromising Genesis with man’s ideas of millions of years has led many young people to doubt the Bible in other areas and to see their Christian teachers as hypocritical (2 Timothy 4:3–4). Parents should “contend earnestly for the faith” (Jude 3), confronting the lie of millions of years, which undermines the Bible and the gospel. In the video, Ken Ham challenges us to start a new reformation and symbolically nail Genesis 1–11 on the doors of our churches and seminaries.

How to Teach Your Children

As a family and in church, immerse yourselves in the whole counsel of God (Acts 20:27), from Genesis to Revelation. Resources like are helpful, not only in learning about the Bible, but also in learning how to study the Bible. Show your kids how to interpret Scripture with proper exegesis, not eisegesis (i.e., putting their own ideas into the interpretation of the text). Ask them questions and follow up with, “Show me how you got that from the text.”

During regular family worship times, focus on reading actual Scripture to your kids rather than storybook Bibles. True, the pictures and easier text may help them understand, but remind kids that those books aren’t the same as God-breathed Scripture. The storybooks may even be dangerous, as Ken explained in the video, by giving the impression that the Bible does not contain real history (e.g., sketches of Noah in a little toy boat) or by being moralistic instead of pointing to our need for Christ.

Your Child’s Greatest Need

As we share biblical truth, we must understand that our kids aren’t blank slates with basically good hearts that merely need to be instructed in morals and principles. Our children are born sinners with hearts at enmity with God. They have inherited a sin nature from Adam, they cannot please God, and their minds naturally rebel against spiritual truth (Romans 5:12–21; Romans 8:7–8; 1 Corinthians 2:14).

In the battle for our children’s hearts, we cannot cause them to be born again (John 3:3–21). But we can faithfully pray for them and continue in Bible “indoctrination,” so that from childhood they may know the holy Scriptures, which are able to make them “wise for salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus” (2 Timothy 3:15).