Rebellious Kids getting religion...For spite!

"If you have liberal parents, getting religion is the only way to go."

That's the way Kira Cochrane sees it.

Kids rebel in the strangest ways. For example, my wife and I hate tomatoes and our kids rebelled by liking tomatoes (but then we homeschooled and family life was pretty tame).

I guess you can count on things going full circle, given enough time and the right circumstances.

In England, according to a piece in Sunday Times Online, an interesting phenomenon is taking place among kids with liberal parents. No kidding!

'When I look back, I suppose that Ben's conversion to Christianity was quite gradual really, but he's definitely fallen hook, line and sinker now,' says Ellen Parker, a teacher from Surrey and a lifelong agnostic. Her son Ben is in his mid-twenties and has been a devout evangelical Christian for a few years. It is a situation about which Parker feels deeply ambivalent.
'On the one hand,' she says, 'he was quite aimless when he joined the church and I can see that it's given him a real sense of purpose: he went from being someone who had literally never read a book for pleasure, to studying the Bible for hours each day. But it also makes me sad because none of the rest of the family shares his beliefs and it excludes us from a massive part of his life. Sometimes I think that the gulf between the values of his church and my own liberal values might be impossible to bridge.

That might be unsettling for liberal, unbelieving parents, but even so, what's the worst thing your Christian kid is going to do...try to convert you?

There's more to the story. It's not just Christianity kids are converting to:

In the past few years at least 15,000 Britons are estimated to have made the shahadah (the formal declaration of faith in Allah and the prophet Muhammad), although many believe that this is an underestimation, given the numbers who convert in secret.

Now that could be a problem, at least for Christian parents. In this case the worst thing that could happen is he might try to convert you, or else! But maybe that's just the radical Islamo-facists with whom we are at war.

This could become a serious problem in secular families and secular countries. The old adage that goes, "when you don't believe in something, you'll fall for anything" is true. Many of these newly converted kids were taught nothing about religion and when they see that the ideals their parents stood for don't work or aren't working, they seek other philosophies or religions.

If kids aren't given a strong foundation of well founded ideals when they are young, they are more apt to be rudderless in their search for meaning. What makes secularism even more problematic is that all philosophies, religions and beliefs are equal (except for Christianity which is disdained above all beliefs and religions in secular parlance). Therefore, in secular societies, if and when their children convert to Islam, they may have less a problem with it than if the children became Christians.

However, some in Europe, especially in France and Holland, may be rethinking this strict egalitarian philosophy in light of the recent riots and anti-semitism.

Be sure to read the piece. It might be exposing a trend.