a review by Melinda Lavorante
In Lies Young Women Believe: And the Truth that Sets Them Free by Nancy DeMoss and Dannah Gresh I discovered truth on every page and continually found reason to applaud the authors’ straight talk about hard issues.
At first, however, I had a negative impression of the book; its design bordered on too busy (a lot of pull quotes, sidebars, and ornate page decorations) and seemed to pander to media-hyped generation. But I had to remind myself that DeMoss and Gresh did write it for a generation trained to have a short attention span, so I admire them for trying to reach everyone while not succumbing to worldliness or a “cool” grungy look to their book. All those elements, pretty and feminine, make the book easy to skim through, and since many girls may only deign to skim it, they will still benefit from this valuable book.
Among many other pertinent issues in this book, DeMoss and Gresh took an exceptionally strong stance on the lie “having a career outside the home is more valuable and fulfilling than being ‘just’ a wife and mom.” They interviewed girls who made comments such as “it has become uncool to want a husband and a family” and “for me the whole family idea is kind of overrated.”
Those quotations reveal a disconcerting direction of our society. What if a society had just a few families or no families at all? What if a world existed where only the “uncoolest” of people get married and have children? Such a picture should unsettle and frighten us because God created the unit of a family; he has built nations on the building blocks of families. Leaders and world-changers come from families, modeling their behavior and ideals after the good examples they see in their own families. So what will happen if families disappear?
The parents of our generation still have some of the family-focused mindset. I still hear of mothers who pray endlessly for their children, fathers who guide their children in godliness, and siblings who support each other through life, but we find such people more in our grandparents’ generation than our parents’. If such a decrease in training children in godliness continues, what of our current generation? What of our next generation? Unless something changes, a focus on godliness will disappear further still because people today hold such a skewed perspective on the vital nature of the family.
As much as this anti-family mindset may unsettle us, I understand it. And for a while I even embraced it. Different influences of my life have fed me the anti-family lie. A number of circles I have spent time in have deemed the desire for marriage and children as “uncool” or inconvenient. They viewed it as just a “thing” to do at some point in life—if it fit in. And they always looked at it in regards to self-fulfillment. They never saw it as a higher calling, a desire to devote one’s lives to other people, a willingness to nurture another generation. No, I thought, that was homeschooler frumpiness, right there with the white tennies and denim jumpers.
But I was wrong. Time had to pass before I could untwine the truth from the lies, fads, and clichés, but now I have come around to what I hope is the right perspective, the biblical perspective. As DeMoss and Gresh truthfully explain in Lies, God created the woman to help the man: “Her relationship with her husband was the first [back in the Garden of Eden] and primary sphere in which she was made to live and serve.”
To be continued… (Click here to read part II.)
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