Planting seeds of truth

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LINDSAY MAST, HOST: Today is Wednesday, November 12th. Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Lindsay Mast.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

Coming next on The World and Everything in It: how ideas take root.

Hillary Morgan Ferrer says she used to have a yard full of dandelions.

HILLARY FERRER: And I remember thinking, man, how are we getting this many? And so I would see kids like out blowing. It's like when the dandelion was in the white puffy version, they'd be out there blowing those are all the seeds. And then you have the actual dandelion weed that comes up. And so when people don't understand the seed of an idea, and all they want to do is complain about the weeds, they have no idea basically what they are planting, left and right.

Ferrer is the general editor of Mama Bear Apologetics, a book that became a ministry specifically to moms, helping them learn how to spot cultural weeds and help teach their kids to think critically, and Biblically, about the world around them.

Significantly, Ferrer is not a mother herself. But she says she has an advantage busy moms don’t have. Time to research.

FERRER: How can I boil this down in a way that you can read one chapter instead of reading 20 books, I'll read the 20 books and then put it into the one chapter, and then further distill it down to where you can equip your kids.

MAST: That research took the form of the book Mama Bear Apologetics in 2019. A lot has changed in the culture over the last six years. So I spoke with Ferrer about what’s different now, and how she thinks parents can help their kids face today’s challenges.

Here’s that conversation.

FERRER: I would say that it's just amazing how quickly culture is changing. Probably one of the biggest ones would have to do with the transgender revolution. And this really does go back to a lot of the critical theory and queer theory, which we kind of talked about the seeds of that in the first book, which would be in the Marxism chapter, but it had not come to full bloom. And secondly, one of the biggest things is it's so much more overtly being taught in the schools. It was kind of trying to just tiptoe its way into the schools back maybe in 2019 but it's very, very overt.

MAST: Your books are part history book, part culture study, part handbook. How do you envision people when they pick up your books using them?

FERRER: People say I've seen all this happening. I just didn't have the words to talk about it. I didn't have the language to discuss it. And now that I see it, I can't unsee it, and now that I have the language to talk about it, I want to talk to everybody about it. And so we see it not as trying to dump a whole bunch of new information onto people, and especially moms, but to really give them the language to interact with what they already see happening. And I would say the goal with this book is to show them that, we need to be looking at how does every single idea affect every other idea? How can I understand it? How can I have conversations about it, and how can I help my children to recognize it before it becomes a problem? And so I'm trying to give it more of a holistic look, so that we're very intentional in what we're discussing and what we're analyzing, and really how we're interacting in culture.

MAST: Explain The Founders Effect for us, your idea of the influence of the first person to introduce a topic as as applies to what you write about, which is helping children understand issues.

FERRER: So The Founders Effect means that the first person to introduce a new idea to someone, that person immediately files them away as the expert. So if the first worldview that they hear is that we were created for a purpose, as opposed to we can create an image of ourselves however we like, that's going to those are two radically different worldviews that change the concept of, what should I do next? How do I be a human? What is the right thing to do? What's the moral thing to do? It's laying that groundwork before the lies. It's a lot easier to establish a foundation than it is to tear up a bad foundation and replace it.

MAST: Well, I know another running theme throughout your books is what you call the ROAR method. So can you just briefly explain what that is and how that becomes a framework for your chapters?

FERRER: Yeah, so the ROAR method is how we're going to be breaking down these ideas. Everybody thinks they're on the right side of history, and so you need to understand why they're championing for the values that they do before you can start to refute it.

So ROAR stands for “Recognize the message.” This is where you look at movie, music, whatever, and say, What is the main message that anybody watching this can come away with?

Next we go to “Offer discernment,” because we don't want to turn discernment into we're just out there bashing everything, saying what's wrong with everything. So in offering discernment, what we do is we first say: most lies are wrapped in partial truth, which that means we have to identify what's true first before we can even extract them.

A is “Argue for a healthier approach.” That's where you say, “Okay, here's the truth that we can all agree on. Now, we might disagree on the solution to this, or we might disagree on how this is supposed to play out.” So that would be how anybody can discuss anything with anybody.

And then that final R is “Reinforce through discussion, discipleship and prayer.” And that's where we want to say, “Okay, now, how do I have practical conversations with my kids? How can we do practical activities with the kids to where it's getting these ideas across?” And if we see something that's really, really a stronghold in culture, how do we specifically pray through that? Because ideological things need to be addressed in an ideological way, but spiritual strongholds need to be addressed in a spiritual way, and we can't conflate those two.

MAST: I think when we talk about apologetics, I know that sometimes people who are very skilled in apologetics, and what I'm thinking about is they have lots of knowledge, they have the ability to reason. They have logic. They have, frankly, a whole lot of things that a lot of other people who have very strong emotions may not have. And sometimes those people who present those strong skills in a way that that is very effective, or that you would think would be very effective, they get criticized for not being loving enough. So as people get more skilled in apologetics and understand the importance of it, how can we present reasoned arguments still with love?

FERRER: Yeah, so I would say just for mama bears in general and for women in general, we've stayed away from apologetics in the past, I think, because we're not super confrontational. A lot of times, we want everybody to get along. And so I really do think the ROAR method is one of those ways to where we are building that bridge first, when you learn how to have these conversations in a way that acknowledges all the good points they're trying to make before they even have to make all of them, I think that is a place where we can present things in love.

Now we can't always do that if we have limited amount of time. So we look at how Christ really ministered in his ministry. When he was out in front of crowds, he kind of gave the whole truth, nothing but the truth. And people think of the Sermon on the Mount is this kind of, oh, blessed are the poor. It's like, Yeah. He says all that. And then he goes into the biggest spanking that we've seen since job.

So when we're speaking in a public setting, we need to be presenting things without all the wiggle room. And then when we're dealing with people in a private setting, that's when we start doing the interpersonal ministry, where we start dealing with the individual. It's okay for certain spheres to be a little more truth based like, I think of even Charlie Kirk, he had to say his piece. And that was absolutely appropriate. And people who are doing one-on-one counseling need to be able to go slow and build that relationship. This is the body of Christ. It's okay for us to have different roles within the body, and when we start really appreciating the purpose for those roles, that's when we as the body of Christ are the most effective in culture.

MAST: That was Hillary Morgan Ferrer … founder of Mama Bear apologetics. Her new book called Mama Bear Apologetics: A Guide to Sexuality and Gender Identity comes out in March. 

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