Tag: Glenn Stanton

David Barton's War on Christian Colleges: Claims Disputed by Focus on the Family Researcher and His Own Book

Last weekend, David Barton continued his war on Christian colleges when he told an audience at Faith Baptist Church in Knightdale, NC that 50% of students at Christian universities deny their faith while in college.  Watch:
[youtube]https://youtu.be/PBnk92GoKSQ[/youtube]
At 1:03 into the clip above, Barton said:

I mentioned before that between 60 and 80% of our kids deny their faith at university, you can at least send your kids to a Christian university, cause only 50% of them deny their faith at a Christian university. How does that happen? Because so many of the Christian profs we have get trained by pagan guys who think pagan in the way they go at it.

This isn’t the first time he has said this. As he did this time, he often couples his claim with criticism of Christian college professors. As with many of his other claims, he offers no evidence. Ultimately, in my opinion, this war on Christian colleges has more to do with self-defense than objective truth. Barton’s strongest critiques have come from Christian academics. He cannot claim we are on the left so he has to make up a cover story — in the case of this claim, he apparently thinks it helps him look better if he can convince audiences that Christian college professors only teach what their pagan graduate school professors taught them.
When I researched this claim before, I found nothing to support it. If anything, Christian schools are showing less erosion of faith commitments among their students.
A new wrinkle in Barton’s war on Christian colleges is the fact that the footnotes in his most recent book with George Barna (U-Turn) actually contradict his claim. In that book, Barna and Barton write about loss of faith for people under 30:

Most studies now show that roughly one-third of them [people under 30] have no connection to organized religion—and that their distaste for organized religion is growing steadily.4 Barna, George; Barton, David (2014-10-21). U-Turn: Restoring America to the Strength of its Roots (p. 26). Charisma House. Kindle Edition.

I can find nothing in the book which references Christian colleges.
The footnote about colleges in general goes to several surveys, none of which support Barton’s claims. One study in particular comes from Focus on the Family and suggests that doom and gloom predictions are wrong. Instead, they found that “only 18% of young adults raised with any religion are now unaffliated with a particular faith.” One of the authors of that study, Glenn Stanton, told me that Barton’s claims are actually discounted by current research. About Barton’s claim that 50% of Christian college students lose their faith, Stanton told me in an email:

That number is far too high even for kids at secular schools. No sound research data show anything near that.

Stanton then pointed me to a research brief he prepared for FotF which included some recent research on young people, college attendance, and religiosity. If anything, it is lack of college attendance which is associated with declines in religious participation. From the report:

Is College Corrosive to Faith?

In the last few years, social scientists have “found that the religiously undermining effect of higher education…has disappeared” and that a recent study “using some of the best longitudinal data available has shown that is not those who attend college, but in fact those who do not attend college who are most likely to experience declines” in religious participation and importance. An additional survey of college students found that 2.7 times more students said their faith was strengthened, rather than weakened, through their college experience.

Stanton added in an email:

In fact, the best research shows that all things being equal, young adults are more likely to abandon their faith if they don’t go to college, be it a Christian or secular school.

Sometimes Barton defends himself by telling audiences how many footnotes he has in his books. In this case, he should have read at least this one. David Barton’s war on Christian colleges has nothing to do with Christian colleges and everything to do with David Barton.

More on the Dr. Phil Show Little Boy Lost – Sparks fly among guests

This clip features some give and take between panelists on the Dr. Phil Show episode on gender identity issues. In this segment, Dr. Siegel defends moms by saying there is no evidence that being too close to a boy will make him want to be a girl. Dr. Nicolosi says Siegel is oversimplifying his reparative theory. What do you think?
Lights, camera, action!

More on the Dr. Phil episode on gender identity: Reparative drive theory

I have some video clips of yesterday’s Dr. Phil Show on gender identity. In this segment, Toni, the mother of a three boys, one of whom is transgender, expresses strong disagreement with Dr. Joseph Nicolosi and Mr. Glenn Stanton. Prior to this clip, Nicolosi outlined his views on response to gender identity issues. From the Dr. Phil website:

“So, what is a parent to do?” Dr. Phil asks. “You’re at home with your little child, they don’t do what other little boys do — and I’m using a little boy as an example. It happens with girls too, but statistics say it’s about five to one boys over girls who have this, but what is a parent to do at that point? Their question is, ‘Do we support his interest, or do we say, “No, no, no. You can’t play with that. You must play with this”?’”
“We see certain patterns, very typical patterns, of an over-involved mother, where the mother and son have a symbiotic relationship,” Dr. Nicolosi explains. “It’s very close, their identities are merged, and the father is out of the picture, and the work that we’re doing is to get the mother to back off, get the father more involved, get that boy to dis-identify with the mother and bond with the father, and in the bonding with the father, he develops that masculine identity.”

Most therapists have encountered families like this. However, they often come in for reasons other than a child’s gender identity. As Dr. Siegel said in a later part of the show, there is no evidence that a mom being close with a son leads to gender identity problems.
In this clip, Nicolosi and Stanton lay out their view of what happens to create a son like Toni’s. Roll the tape for the segment.

If I am following the mother’s explanation, she says she was not close to her son and her fiance became close to him after she backed off. She also notes that she was a single mom to her first son who would be expected to be closer to mom. Apparently, that child has no gender identity issues. And she says, the fiance/father-figure was less involved after the boy transitioned to a female role, but very involved prior to the transition. She further says that she wasn’t enmeshed with him. In other words, the reparative theory predicts a certain constellation but this women disconfirms it.
As noted in my first post on this episode, no middle ground views were presented. Near the end of the show, two reseachers seated in the audience were given a chance to speak. This segment was too short. I hope to post the clip of that exchange in a future post.
For now, I want to point out again the problem with confirmation bias in thinking through highly controversial topics. In this clip, the comments presented by Nicolosi and Stanton were not consistent with the experience of the mother and this son. Is it possible she was in denial? Is it possible that the reparative theorist was in denial? Sorting through this is difficult since both mom and the psychologists have powerful incentives to seek evidence favoring their commitments and views. In an area, like this one, where the science is developing, I advocate a very loose hold on theoretical commitments.
While the scientist can and should take a critical stance, it is true that parents need advice now. I tend to favor waiting until puberty to make decisions about transitioning since the existing research indicates most children do not opt for transition after puberty. However, even that finding is not as clear as Dr. Phil presented. See this interview with Ken Zucker for more on persistence of GID into adulthood.
Stay tuned…

Gender issues debated on Dr. Phil Show today

Glenn Stanton from Focus on the Family and Joe Nicolosi square off with Dan Siegel and Michele Angello over how to raise gender variant kids today on the Dr. Phil Show. Check local listings for times in your area.
The problem with episodes like this is how polarized it is likely to be with these guests. One side will say gender variance is all environment (well, I hope Glenn doesn’t say that) and the other side will say gender variance is all inborn in every case.
UPDATE: Did anyone else view the show? It was not terribly helpful for the purpose stated which was to help parents who had gender variant children. I will have more to say about it later but the social conservatives offered the close mother-detached father theory of gender variance to open scorn – deserved scorn I might add. The segment was awkwardly edited so that comments were probably not really related to each other as the show was taped.
Thinking about the episode, I have decided not to say much more about it until I can find some video clips. If you didn’t see it, then my descriptions won’t help much. The extreme positions presented left me very frustrated, knowing that most cases of GID do not end up in gender reassignment but also knowing that parenting dynamics in GID situations are not that much unlike families that have no GID kids. Indeed, the woman on the Dr. Phil episode had two other children without gender identity issues. I reported here several months on a mother of twin boys, one with GID and one without any such issues.
Both sides did not address the data points which falsify their perspective. Phil McGraw asked Dr. Siegel why 85% of GID kids do not go on to request gender reassignment. Siegel answered by saying that was a good question and the science isn’t clear but never gave a plausible answer as to why puberty changed these kids in so many cases. On the other hand, Nicolosi is so committed to his theory that he glosses over the problems with parenting theory. As noted above, GID children are often found in families with siblings who are quite gender conforming. Parents report that they do the same things with the GID children as they do with their other children with vastly different results. Most parents with more than one child can relate to this. Kids respond differently to the same environment thus helping to shape different parent and child relationships. Parents cannot be faulted when a GID male hates his gender typical Christmas presents or out of the blue at age 4 says, I want to be a mom and have babies when I grow up. Even if the reparative proponent says we are not blaming the parents just pointing out the causes, the “explanation” fails to account for the fact that the other children in the family did not respond to the parents with gender confusion. Also, as in the case of Dr. Phil’s parent, the mother was not especially close to the son. The reparative proponent is left with a need to assert untestable hidden dynamics which must be true because no exceptions to the theory are allowed. This kind of response from Nicolosi was in clear view on this episode of Dr. Phil. If all you have is a hammer, everything must be a nail.
So both sides of the theoretical debate can be faulted for confirmation bias. Holding tightly to a theory of causation in the face of incomplete science can create a situation where the client in front of you becomes secondary to the felt need to verify the theory.
I soon will be meeting with a group of parents some of who (perhaps all, I am not clear on this as yet) have felt great hurt from the application of reparative drive theory to their children. It must be quite surreal to go to someone who everyone says is an expert only to have that person be so wrong in their guesses about your lives. I am quite sure that those who hold tightly to a theory underestimate the intense anger and frustration this creates in parents. At one point in the Dr. Phil show, Nicolosi criticized the GID mom for getting “emotional.” As Dr. Siegel pointed out, the woman had reason to be emotional. She was on national television talking about the greatest hurt of her life with people who were essentially blaming her for the trauma. I believe I would be upset as well.

Glenn Stanton and Patrick Chapman debate anthropological arguments

Not new news, but noteworthy nonetheless; Glenn Stanton of Focus on the Family and anthropologist Patrick Chapman debate Glenn’s recent article on marriage over at Box Turtle Bulletin.

First Patrick Chapman had a go at the Stanton article that started the conversation and then Stanton had his turn.

Followed by a lively and ongoing discussion…