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Them Before Us Podcast
Them Before Us #074 | The Battle for your Child's Mind Starts at Home
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- [00:00]
Hillary Morgan Ferrer
Foreign.
- [00:08]
Jen Friesen
Welcome to the Them Before Us podcast. This is your host, Jen Friesen. And we're continuing highlighting different organizations and folks who are doing, we would say, kind of pro family, pro marriage, pro children work, but maybe it's in a little bit different sphere. But we love highlighting great resources and great folks for our listeners, too. Check out and follow. And today we have Hillary Morgan Ferrer, who is the founder and president of Mama Bear Apologetics. Hi, Hillary.
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Hillary Morgan Ferrer
Hey.
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Jen Friesen
She feels a burden for providing accessible apologetics resources for busy moms. She's the chief author and editor of the best selling books Mama Bear Apologetics. Empowering Kids to Challenge Cultural Lies. Mama Bear Apologetics Guide to Sexuality and Gender Identity. Super needed resource. And your latest book is Honest Prayers for Mama Bears. Hillary has her master's degree in biology, loves helping moms discern truth and lies in both science and culture. She and her husband John have been married for 18 years this year and minister together as an apologetics team. And she says she can never sneak up on anybody because of her chronic hiccups, which you can hear occasionally on the podcast and in interviews. Which is great that you mentioned that, because some people might be like, what is that in the back?
- [01:25]
Hillary Morgan Ferrer
People tell me, like, when I, when I speak, they're like, oh, my gosh, it was so cute. And I'm like, I don't even hear it anymore. So I just like, mentioned it so that people know when they hear me make this really loud squeak that they know what that is.
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Jen Friesen
That's awesome. Well, thanks so much for being here, Hillary, and I'm a little bit familiar with your work and have heard it promoted and I've heard that it's encouraged a lot of people. And for those of you that don't know, I just asked her a question offline that was super great. So just amazing resource and we're so excited to have a conversation with you today. Will you start just by telling us. Yeah. A little bit about your maybe family and faith background? What made you want to do apologetics for moms specifically?
- [02:02]
Hillary Morgan Ferrer
Yeah, so I would say I. I've been in into apologetics since I was about 12. The grew up in a Christian home. I have one of those rare testimonies that I always thought was boring, but I realize now it's not boring. It's just rare. Where I grew up in the Christian home, I was walking with the Lord and I never had any big, you know, walking away from the Lord some big time in the wilderness. I've known that I was called from very early Age. But I vividly remember the first apologetic series that my pastor did, because my pastor actually became a Christian kind of the way Lee Strobel did, in the sense that he thought this Christianity thing is stupid. He was an atheist. And he was like, I'm just going to disprove this. And going in and studying, he was like, holy cow, this is actually true. And so he was able to bring a lot of those questions that he'd had as an atheist into his sermons. And so he went through a series. The first one was on Liar, Lord Lunatic, which is called the Trilemma. We kind of have the, I don't know, what if they call it the quadrillemma now with Liar, Lord Lunatic. And legend is the other one that people are arguing just, you know, reasoning and logicing through who was Jesus. And then he did evidences for the resurrection where he de, like, basically looked at every single possible other, other thing that could have happened other than Jesus rising from the dead. And in each one of those cases, it's so unlikely that you're almost like, faced with all these different types of miracles. You just have to pitch pick which miracle you want to believe in. And then finally, on the evidences for the reliability of the transmission of the New Testament documents and showing how many manuscripts and how, how similar they are to each other and how we know if there is one word that's changed, we know where, where it's changed. Like, you know, where ones were copied from that. And so I just remember being 12 and my little hand was just, I mean, practically starting a fire in my page, you know, realizing, wow, Christianity is not just something that I've been told is true, but I can actually talk about this with people who aren't Christians. And, and this is something that's actually true. I, I kind of jokingly call it the for reals true, not just this is what we believe. And so I had a passion for that for a very long time. Now the, the, the, the fact that I've ended up in some kind of women's ministry and women's ministry for also for kids is very odd because I was never kind of a girly girl. I didn't fit in with a lot of the girls. I preferred hanging out with guys most of the time. And so women's ministry is not something that was ever on my radar at all. And so when I kind of felt the Lord called me into this, it was when I, A friend of mine actually said, she's like. It was when I started getting involved with Women in apologetics. And I was like, why do. Why do we need our own thing? Why can't women just read apologetics? What's wrong with that? And she informed me that there was a large demographic out there of women who would not read something unless it was by women for women. And that just made my mind. That was like this whole aha moment that just kind of made my head explode a little bit. And I went straight from who's teaching the women? To, oh, my gosh, who's teaching the moms? Because moms are getting all the questions you can ask any mom out there. You will have a child that walks past dad sitting on the couch, watching tv, goes into the bathroom where her mom's on the phone and shaving her legs from the bathtub, and kid will go there to ask her where the pickles are. Instead of asking dad, who's on the couch questions, go to mom, and like, sometime around high school, like, maybe dad start getting the political questions more. But everything else is mom, dad doesn't know anything. Mom knows everything. So she really is kind of your youth pastor in the home. So if we were going to be equipping someone to be answering all these tough questions, I was like, why is no one trying to equip the moms? Because every time I went to an apologetics conference, they never had childcare. And it was always a bunch of men with maybe a few smattering of women whose kids were old enough now that they'd. They didn't have to stay home, and all the other women just had to stay home with the kids. So I just kind of made that. That became just my overwhelming passion. I can't even say that I decided to do it. It's more like the Lord just placed something on me, and woe is me. I couldn't not do that. I was so, so passionate about it. And it probably because of what I saw apologetics do for my faith as a kid, that no matter what I've gone through, you know, I struggled with depression and anxiety for many, many years. And the Lord's thankfully kind of walked me out of that. My sister died from cancer. My mom had cancer when I was in college. I've had cancer. We've all had cancer in my family. I've had major surgeries. I don't have kids because that all the cancer happened in the childbearing years. And so there's plenty of things that I could be angry about with God. But walking away from Christianity was never a choice for me because I Was like, oh my gosh, I'd have to check my brain at the door to walk away from Christianity. Which is exactly what people always say that you have to do in order to become a Christian. But that is. So I say, you know, faith in Jesus Christ saved my life, but apologetics saved my faith.
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Jen Friesen
Oh, so beautiful. Wow. Well, and you can just see God has brought you through so much to be able to use you exactly where he needs you and wants you. And that doesn't mean there isn't suffering there. There isn't struggles. Well, and even just very much intersecting with the work that we do at them before us. When people struggle with infertility or for you, you're saying, oh, I literally do not have the capacity to have children. Like you're saying there could be a number of ways and choices, things that you do that you could basically kind of put that burden and suffering on someone else by, well, I'm going to go get children by whatever means necessary. But instead, you know, especially people who can rely on some kind of greater principle than before us is not religious, but we definitely have the Judeo Christian underpinnings to organization. I'm a Christian, I believe in Jesus. But you, you have a greater something that you count on. That's true. That gives you purpose. And so we can face struggles and challenges. And God believe at some level God will do something with it and he will redeem it.
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Hillary Morgan Ferrer
He will. He, he will. Every tear is just like this little water that plants, you know, the seed of. For what, what purpose he has for your life. And the thing that I've been starting to say to myself, and this is especially after I had a major, major surgery a couple years ago, is like, no matter what the Lord brings me, I'm like, I can, I can do anything for 50 years. You know, sometimes where you think 50 years sounds like a long time, but when you look at it in light of eternity, you're like, eh, 50 years. We can do anything for 50 years.
- [08:26]
Jen Friesen
Yeah, that's so good. Well, and I was just thinking too, so even in the most sort of traditional homes mom is at, if mom is at home and dad is working outside the home, just the amount of hours in the day that a mom has with kids versus the dad has with kids. Yeah, moms should really be equipped to answer the questions that are coming up. And so that's, that's really great. And then another thought I had is, I think we've talked about this, or I've kind of heard it in a number of different sort of statistics is that many people are turning away from Christian faith or deconstructing in some way in large part because when they came up, whether it was in the sort of. I grew up in church in the 90s and the aughts and it was a lot of Christian music and culture that was just directly copying and pasting secular culture.
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Hillary Morgan Ferrer
T shirts, the T shirts, it's like instead of Mountain Dew, I can't remember what it says, but it's like that you've got these T shirts that you just kind of baptize all these things and you're like, now it's Christian.
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Jen Friesen
Yeah. And it's just bad art. It's cheesy and. But, but, but not being able to answer the questions. Yeah, well, not that they're not able to answer the questions because I would say Christianity has the answers, but parents weren't equipped to answer them or the youth pastor wasn't equipped to answer them or the cultural answers were more compelling.
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Hillary Morgan Ferrer
Or whatever it was just weren't encouraged that it was kind of, you know, like I kind of only jokingly have this thing that my husband and I say. Adult makes baby Jesus cry. You know, like, don't ask the questions. But you know, what that teaches your child is that, hey, God can be stumped with the questions of an eight year old. And this is a God I'm supposed to like worship is all knowing and all powerful. No thanks.
- [10:05]
Jen Friesen
Well, okay. You've talked about how important it is for parents to being the one to introduce and shape their, their children's worldview before culture. But also not that we're relying on Christian teachers at school. We're not relying just on the youth pastor. Why do you, why would you say it's important for parents to be the primary, I guess, trans transmitters of biblical worldview to their kids?
- [10:30]
Hillary Morgan Ferrer
So yeah, so there's a psychological phenomenon that I've been aware of for a while, but it didn't have a name. And I've asked so many psychologists what is the name for this phenomenon? And as far as I can tell, nobody has one. So I've decided to coin it and I'm coining it the founder's effect. And I think Katie uses it in some of her talks that she does now. So the founder's effect is this idea that whoever introduces a topic first automatically gets filed away by the listener as the expert in that topic. Not only are they filed away as the expert, but whatever worldview they're bringing to this topic becomes kind of ground Zero. And now you're comparing all the other worldviews or all the other paradigms in light of this very first one that you learned. So this is why it's so important to get the right one the first time, because it's a lot easier to build from the ground up than it is to basically have to reconstruct someone's faith. As we've even seen in the whole deconstruction movement, a lot of people can't handle the restructuring process. It's like they think, I either have to toss it all or I keep it all. And they rage against some straw man version of Christianity that they were presented with that wasn't the true Christ. And so they have. They're, like, unable to see the true Christ or the true biblical Christianity, historic Christianity, because they, they don't know how to separate what was told to them versus what is actually in the Bible. And so when it comes to gender and sexuality, we want to be the first ones to introduce the, the ideas that God has given us. And it's, it's not, it's not ideas of like, oh, God's a big killjoy.
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Jen Friesen
He.
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Hillary Morgan Ferrer
He likes things this way. He. He hates pickles on his burger, therefore we all hate pickles on our burger. You know, it's like, it's not one of those things like we're going with God's preferences. It's more like he knit us together. He designed us. He designed the chemicals in our brain, he designed the cells in our body. He designed the elasticity around different parts of our bodies. Which ones are supposed to stretch, which ones are not supposed to stretch, all the things. And he says, this is how I designed you to work. This is, this is the whole system and how it works together. And it's this beautiful, beautiful system. But if you start treating it in a way that is not how I designed it, you're going to start breaking parts of it. It may break parts in your mind, it may break parts in your body, it may break parts in your future. And I want you to have a good and glorious future. So therefore, this is my good gift to you. This is how to use it, because this is how I designed it. A lot of times it's always presented as this just kind of, you know, killjoy of him just saying, don't do that, don't do that, and shaking his finger and, and just being on a more, you know, people on a moral high horse, looking down at people for having too much fun. And we don't want that to be the paradigm that kids are constantly having to be answering. Because at that point, you have to then prove why God is good, instead of starting out with God is good proving why humans can create a better design than he can. Those are two different perspectives. So we want to get there first. We want to present it as God's goodness and beauty and something that we celebrate and a gift. And then when the world starts trying to redefine that, we can just keep asking, why do you think the world can design something better than the person who designed it the first time?
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Jen Friesen
Yeah, that's really good. And then. Yeah, so you're saying, you know, you're starting out with God's good creation, good design. One of the things a lot of us know from different stats is how few people who say they're Christian actually hold a biblical worldview. When you look at the different. Yeah, 4% is always that. Wow.
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Hillary Morgan Ferrer
Well, can you combine it all together? Like, all the different things? It's like 4%. At least that's what Barna is teaching.
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Jen Friesen
Yeah. Wow. And so what would you say, like, if you could kind of sum it up? And that's kind of a super easy question, I'm sure.
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Hillary Morgan Ferrer
Yeah.
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Jen Friesen
What would you sum up as kind of. These are the real basics of the Christian worldview that. That fall into that good God's good design and true and beauty. For that, we have to tell our kids.
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Hillary Morgan Ferrer
Yeah. So I think we need to start out with, number one, original design. Original design. That is good. Everything that's created here is good. Then we have to also talk about how when sin entered the world, it jacked things up. Not just in a moral level, but I study in biology. I have seen things where I'm like, holy cow, this is what sin looks like on a molecular level. We just swapped out one amino acid for another. And all of a sudden a person has. What is that? Cystic fibrosis, you know, stuff like that where he had a very, very good design that you just tweak it just a little bit, and it can become deadly. And so we have both evidence of perfection, and we have evidence of brokenness. And when you can look and say, is this evidence of original design or is this evidence of brokenness? All of a sudden the world starts making a lot more sense. Because a lot you'll have people that are switching this up saying things like, well, God never makes mistakes. And then they point to something that sin broke and said, it's supposed to be like that because God doesn't make mistakes. And it's like, nope, that's evidence of the fall. That's evidence of imperfection, not evidence of good design. Or they say, well, however anybody was made, it has to be good because God says everything is good. Well, if we don't understand, again, original creation and the Fall, then again, we're not going to know which way is up. So just the concept of good creation, the Fall, and then redemption, the idea that everything is redeemed, but not yet. We say that we live in the already not yet. And so part of our job here on this earth is to be living out for eternity, meaning that we're going to say, you know what, God? This is what your Bible says is true and is good. And I'm going to live in that kingdom, excuse me, here on Earth, even though sometimes that means warring against myself, warring against my flesh, sometimes having to battle different ideological ideas between people, but knowing that ultimately that, that redemption, that future, that eternity is secure, but I just may not experience all that yet. So all of those things right there gives us the idea, if we can see original design, we can see how things got jacked up. And then we know that there's a way forward for redemption. If you can really get those down and show what can redeem versus what can't. I think this is where people start having a lot of either Jesus plus theology, meaning, oh, you have Jesus, but you also need to do all these kind of occult things. You know, you need to learn how to, you know, do this grounding, or you have to do energy work, or you have to. It's all these Jesus plus things. Or people take things away and they say, oh, well, there's redemption. But you know, Jesus, he just came as a. As a good example. It's not like he actually did anything here. He just showed how badly people needed blood. And we're supposed to love like he did. No, that's Jesus minus. It's like we need to have the gospel in terms of what happened, how did he redeem us? And how is this a powerful thing? Because I would say that one of the most powerful things that I've discovered in my life is being able to identify little subtle lies and then replacing them with truth and sometimes just identifying the lie. All of a sudden it's like you can hear these spiritual shackles breaking. You're like, wow, I've been living as if that lie were true. But comparing it, what to what does scripture say? I would say that would be the basic worldview right there. And the fact that we are living for eternity helps you make sense of reality, helps you persevere in the now because you know what you're going for.
- [18:03]
Jen Friesen
I'm a psych major by, you know, by background, just undergrad for. For psychology. But it's been really interesting. I'd heard of this thing called cognitive reframing. There's so many things within psychology that is exactly what you would think if you just read the Bible, right. So things like, you know, putting off the old, but. But to replace the old, you kind of need to put on the new. And you'll read the power of habit and they'll say, you know, you can't really get rid of bad habits without replacing it with other ones. Or putting aside anxiety by thankfulness and gratitude. And the secular world will say, a gratitude journal.
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Hillary Morgan Ferrer
The power of gratitude is huge. Or just even that. That verse, it's like, whatever is good, whatever's true, what is holy, noble. You know, think about such things. We start looking at what's going on neurocognitively and with. What's it called? I'm blanking on the word. It's where you grow the new neurons. Neuroplasticity. Yeah. You can literally change your brain. And this is like that transforming by the renewing of your mind. Who knew that you could re. Like physically renew your mind, Right?
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Jen Friesen
Yeah. And so I. So cognitive reframing, you could even. It's funny, I don't know how much you like using AI or any of those sorts of things, but you could put your lies into cognitive or sorry into ChatGPT and say, help me cognitively reframe this with scripture citation.
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Hillary Morgan Ferrer
Interesting.
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Jen Friesen
And it will lay it out. But it's exactly to your point is. I mean, you don't have to go. You don't have to go and do it.
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Hillary Morgan Ferrer
I'm totally going to try that.
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Jen Friesen
But, but it's the, it's. It's very cool because it's just doing exactly what you're saying. You, you take a cultural lie and you meet it with the truth of, you know, if it's authoritative to us is biblical truth. And you repeat that and you reframe. Okay. No, it's not that I'm worthless and it doesn't matter that I'm here. No, I was fearfully and wonderfully made you segue perfectly into what. Into the lies that we need to fight back on. What would you say are kind of the main big ones that are targeting kids in particular today?
- [20:05]
Hillary Morgan Ferrer
Yeah. So I would. So the way that our first book, the empowering your kids to Challenge cultural lies the way it's kind of designed, except for the first chapter. The first chapter on self helpism is just like we didn't know where to put it. And I was like, we'll make that the first one because that's like women just love their self help books. But past that, when I would say that, if I were to summarize it into one thing, I would say truth and its alternatives. Number one, what is truth and how do we find it? So every single possible kind of twist that we can do. So what is truth? Is it objective or is it subjective? We went from being pre modern times to modern times where you know, both of those are saying that there's objective truth. But because everybody couldn't agree on it, they decided, well, no such thing as objective truth. So now we just turned into that nobody can really know truth at all. And that's what we're, we're marinating in this really perverse experiment of people acting as if that were actually true. But we're like vacuums in the sense that what would they say? Nature abhors a vacuum. We cannot exist without truth. We will always try to find something that's true. So the question then is where does it come from? So at some points we thought, oh, it comes from God or the gods. That would be in the pre modern time. And then we said, oh, it's going to come from science, which basically said there's no such thing as the supernatural unless we can test it, measure it, count it, whatever, feel it, smell it. We're not going to act like it's true. Well, I mean that doesn't give us everything either. And then if we don't have something objective that we can point to, well then subjective, well what are we left with? That, that point we're left with power and emotions. And so now any kind of like authority or any kind of any kind of truth at all, people are saying that's a power play. That's someone trying to bring their truth and force everybody to believe their truth, or they're saying emotions. It's like, I think this is why we're seeing so many of the protests. We're seeing so many of people on TikTok and social media just losing their ever loving minds, screaming at their phone because they are believing the lie that the more I feel something, the more true it is and the more true it is and the more I can show you how much I feel it, the more you're going to believe that it's true too. Therefore we can come to this comprehensive knowledge of truth. And then it goes on to, you know, can everybody have different truths? That would be pluralism. And then it just kind of starts weaving its way into which authority are we going to listen to? Are we going to listen to the authority of identity politics? Is it only women that we're listening to? Do we make sure we never listen to old white men? You know, is it, is it Marxism? Is it critical theory where it's like everything is a power dynamic? Or what we see at the end of our book, progressive Christianity, where they're kind of starting to go back and take some of the, the older truths that they used to have and then twist them into whatever they want in kind of this Franken religion of whatever they want to put there. And so that would be kind of a type of syncretism. Syncretism means that I'm taking things that are Christian, but then I'm trying to make, you know, this puzzle fit with all these other puzzle pieces from occultism or Marxism or identity politics and see how I can make it all fit together. And it doesn't. So I would say that's kind of the 30,000 foot view right there of the progression that we've came, that we've taken. But again, it really does count and come down to what is the nature of truth and how do we know it? If you can get those two questions right there, everything is an experiment right now around those two questions.
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Jen Friesen
Yeah, that's really good. You just redid your book about sexuality and gender identity and, you know, marriage and the distinctions between male and female are really big deal in our organization, particularly because we're saying a, that's where a child comes from. They have one mom, one dad. They should be able to be in relationship with both of them. The ideal is that, that mom and that dad would be married, raising their children. They'd be healthy, loving, you know, all those things. Can you tell us just a little bit about maybe what you learn in researching and writing your book about, you know, the good distinctions between male and female? Is marriage important? You know, why is. Well, I was going to say why is gender identity important to kids? But that's not kind of what I mean. But I guess, I mean, why is it good to be a male or good to be a female? And what would we tell kids about that?
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Hillary Morgan Ferrer
Yeah, I would say a lot of. If we were to look in the Bible, there is not a lot of absolute like, this is what it means to be a man. This is what it means to be a woman. It's, it's kind of one of those things where all we know is that there's a difference and don't try to appear differently because that's like the only thing when it comes to transgenderism, they say, what does the Bible have to say? Well, like one of the only things the Bible really says directly on that is men shall not wear women's clothing, women shouldn't wear men's clothing. And it's because that's an identity statement. It's trying to tell people who you are. Like, I think back to the movie Mulan, there's a reason why they didn't guess that this little 105 pound girl was a girl because she had the men's clothing on. It was so not done to wear men's clothing that they would rather believe that this is like tiny little dude than actually being a girl. And you see the same thing in what book? The Horse and His Boy from the CS Lewis Narnia series, where the best dress up Erevis could do was dressing up like a servant boy because no one was going to guess that's actually a girl. So this idea that we just need to maintain a distinction, but how distinct those are, you really don't see, except for when you're really talking about marriage and roles within the church. And other than that, there is so much freedom. And I think this is one of the things that doesn't get talked nearly enough, how much freedom there is in our biological bodies. So, for example, Amy, one of the girls with Mama Bear, has a series on like five boys your children need to know from scripture. Five girls that your children need to know from scripture who are basically define what you would call the gender stereotype. You know, we've got Jacob I love, but Esau, I hated. If you could think of someone more manly than this, like, ferociously hairy hunter of a dude. Esau versus this kind of, you know, hairless, loves to cook in the tent with mom Jacob. And the Lord's like, I've chosen Jacob. He didn't care about who was defining manhood through some kind of stereotype. He looked at the heart. Same thing with David. I mean, the dude cries a lot and plays a harp. Yeah, he can go and slay whoever he wants to slay, but at the same time, he's got a lot of very, you know, existential quality, shall we say. That can be very feminine. And that's the one that says that is a man after my own heart. But, you know, there's Lots of men that were very, very manly, that the Lord said, that is a good man. Lots of men that were kind of femme, and the Lord said, that's a good man. So we have this bundled in our idea that the Bible has this one way to be a man or a woman. And I think that kids need to realize that that is not the case. And there's a chapter that I have at the end of our book that says things to repeat to your kids until they want to gag. And one of those is that personality interest and aptitudes are on a spectrum. Gender is not. Because you listen to anyone who's struggling with their gender idea or gender identity. Every single time they're going to list. They're going to list you a reason for they know that they're the other gender by their personality, their interests, or their aptitudes. And so kind of, I guess for kids, one of the things we need to do is bring that freedom back. And as a church, let's make this the way that we're set apart, that we are the ones that have the men that are coming out and being just excellent, excellent dancers and having big families with their wives, and we are the women who are creating the next Formula one race driver and have lots of kids with their husbands. It's like that we need to, as a church, we need to say, how were you created? In fact, there's a verse to raise up a child, train up a child in the way he should go, and when he's old, he will not depart from it. There's actually an another translation that you look at that. Some people translate this, and that's train up a child according to his way and when he's old. So it's almost like, don't look at the kid you wish you had, look at the kid you have. How can you take the gifts, the talents, the interests, the personality? And if Jesus himself were born with those same interests, talents, personality, gender, even health constraints, what do you think he would look like? That's what we're going for. And that has all the freedom in the world. And so training up the way they are, not the way we wish they were.
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Jen Friesen
Yeah, that's so good. Well, and it's. It's funny because even if you joke about, oh, you know, some of the men were kind of femme, that's. That's still kind of basing it on, like, a cultural sense, right? Of, like, what it means to be masculine or feminine. Masculine men go to war, feminine men play the harp. But it's like, we know that's sort of not true.
- [28:49]
Hillary Morgan Ferrer
That's not true. What was I going to say? What was I going to say about that? Yeah, I think in the book I say, you know, when we talk about manhood, what are we talking about? Because time and location matter. Are we talking about the Wild west where a man was determined by whether or not he could build a house with his bare hands, or are we in, you know, aristocratic France where his man card was contingent on rocking kabuki makeup and, you know, giant powdered wigs? Time and location matter.
- [29:13]
Jen Friesen
Yeah.
- [29:14]
Hillary Morgan Ferrer
And so we don't have this set definition, but there are a couple things that we can say that there is a strength that men bring and there's a protectiveness that they bring that men are meant to protect and they are meant to be strong. And it doesn't even always have to be just like physically strong or emotionally strong. You can be strong in a lot of different ways. There's an organization, I'm trying to remember what it's called is, I think it's like what makes a man.org or something like that, where they go through biblical manhood. And it has these definitions that overlap with, with femininity in some senses, but just this, the protective nature and that strength nature, stuff like that. That's something we can encourage every one of our boys to be. Yeah.
- [29:59]
Jen Friesen
That's so good. I just remember Nancy Pearcey has done so much good work about. I have her book Toxic Masculinity, but I haven't gotten to read it yet. But Love Thy Body was huge for me. And, but in, in a lot of her tweets and she, she's just engaging with some of the argumentation online. And one of the things I remember her saying was talking about when the Bible. Her take was. And she quoted some other scholars when the Bible tells men not to be effeminate. She said that. That's not saying that these Roman men were acting like women. She more connected it to. They are acting without self control over, over their world. Because Roman men were notoriously, quote, masculine.
- [30:42]
Hillary Morgan Ferrer
Yeah.
- [30:42]
Jen Friesen
But their rule was you were allowed to have sex with men as long as you were the certain kind of man. And they are certain. Right. And so I mean, we don't call. We would not consider that a good man or, or masculine, you know, in the sense of like sexually moral and restrained and self controlled. And so her take and who she was quoting was saying, no, Paul is basically saying that Christian men, masculine men, are self controlled. They are the husband of one wife. They take care of their children, they provide, they protect. And men who are effeminate are the ones who. You bump into them at a bar or something, and they pop off and punch in the face. So it was not that they were acting like women, though. It was that they were acting not in accordance with what it meant to be a good man. So we've kind of equated it to he likes art. Yeah, that's a sin. And so I. I really liked that distinction. I need to look up what she. Where she quoted that, actually.
- [31:43]
Hillary Morgan Ferrer
Yeah, no, that's a. The toxic word. Masculinity is really good, and I love it, especially as it talks about the. What we think of as traditional gender roles. And basically she's like, dude, all of that came from the industrial revolution. You fools need to stop. Stop with that.
- [31:56]
Jen Friesen
Yeah.
- [31:57]
Hillary Morgan Ferrer
She described what it was like pre industrial revolution. I'm like, that sounds amazing.
- [32:00]
Jen Friesen
I want to go back on one property. And there was so much more crossover of jobs. Right. Like, you know, of course the guy would be in the house helping build or create something, and the wife would be outside of the house with the kids helping plant or process food or. And so it was just all integrated into one unit. And we're. This is our family. Yeah.
- [32:20]
Hillary Morgan Ferrer
So.
- [32:21]
Jen Friesen
So cool.
- [32:22]
Hillary Morgan Ferrer
It just. It makes you like. I was reading it. I was like, this is like how it was on Little House on the Prairie. This would have been amazing.
- [32:28]
Jen Friesen
Totally. Okay, final kind of question for you, thinking more about social media and kids. And, you know, I don't know if you have insights about, you know, what age should you give kids their cell phones or should you let them on social media at all. But what strategies can parents use to be not afraid of these kinds of technologies? Not like you're not allowed to do anything ever.
- [32:52]
Hillary Morgan Ferrer
Yeah.
- [32:52]
Jen Friesen
But at the same time, be cautious and proactive and really engage. Like you said, founders principle.
- [32:58]
Hillary Morgan Ferrer
Yeah.
- [32:59]
Jen Friesen
With their kids. But. But kids need oversight, I would say, especially at certain ages. So what's kind of your take on the social media cell phone dynamic with kids?
- [33:09]
Hillary Morgan Ferrer
So I think the number one thing is you never give a child a cell phone as a gift because gifts become their property. You give cell phone as a tool, and tools can be taken away if the tool is not being used properly. Never make it a right that they have. Number two, they have no right to privacy. If they want privacy, get a diary with a lock on it. You are not invading their privacy by going into their phone. And if they think you are, well, too bad. So sad. We're going to take away your phone because apparently if you don't know how to do not private things on there, then you don't need to have this tool. Anything you do on your phone should be accessible to us because that means you're not doing private things. And private things are for your diary or in talking, gabbing with a girlfriend, you know, till late in the evening. That's what we had to do when we were young. If I needed to talk trash about my mom, I did it in the diary. And so that there is no privacy there. There is no invading of privacy there. Number three, you need to figure out what kind of activities do you think are healthy for your kids. And then you and your husband need to say, we're going to make sure that's what we're going to do first. Because you are not going to be able to tell your kids you're not allowed to do XYZ as they sit there and watch you do xyz. So something that my husband just got us that I love. Unfortunately, they don't have it for Android yet. I'm hoping that they will. It's called the brick, where it's just this thing that you can just tap your phone in and you can pick which apps you want to be basically blocked from using during this particular time. There's the gab phone that kids can have, where it keeps them from doing a lot of the things that you wouldn't want them to do. I would say social media. Not until they're 18. Not until they're 18. While it's like. And even then just make it to where it's not something that they're obsessed with. I heard one, one couple talking about the. When they. When everybody comes in their house, they have a basket. It doesn't matter. Friends, family, the plumber, whoever, they got to put their phone in the basket. Everybody treats their phone when you get home like it's a land phone. And I don't know if you're young enough. I know I'm young enough to. Or old enough to remember having to run across the house when you hear the phone ringing because you're trying to get to it in time. It didn't kill us, it won't kill us now, so. And one of the beautiful things also that I'm starting to see is with Gen Alpha, they are starting to realize what zombies everybody else looks like. And their way of rebelling is actually saying, y'all look stupid with this screen in your face all the time. I Don't think we're going to do that. So we're actually seeing a little bit of a changeover going on right now with the next generation that their way of rebelling is getting back to healthy practices. So praise God for that. No phones in the bedroom. Get an alarm clock that's atomic so that it changes time on purpose. Or get. Get like, one of the watches. I actually got one of the Apple watches because I like to listen to audio books to help me sleep, and I wanted to still have my alarm there. And so I have my phone, like, across the room, so I can't access it. Or now I just tap the brick, so I can't access anything anyway. But I still have access to the things I need, like the alarm and. And the audiobook. So figuring out what they actually need and making sure that's provided and anything else, just get rid of it.
- [36:21]
Jen Friesen
Oh, sorry. I just was gonna say I like what you said about privacy, too, because I think the way I've seen some of the parents in my sphere go about it is they present the phone as a tool. And the idea of, hey, we have the. We have the right to kind of look through your phone whenever we want is just known out outright.
- [36:37]
Hillary Morgan Ferrer
Yeah.
- [36:37]
Jen Friesen
It's not that they put secret. I'm reading all your texts.
- [36:41]
Hillary Morgan Ferrer
Yes.
- [36:41]
Jen Friesen
That the kid doesn't know about. It's just, hey, it's not that we don't trust you. We're helping protect you.
- [36:46]
Hillary Morgan Ferrer
Yeah.
- [36:47]
Jen Friesen
There might be other people that are trying to do and say things to you that is not right that we want to keep an eye on with you.
- [36:52]
Hillary Morgan Ferrer
Yeah.
- [36:53]
Jen Friesen
And so it. So I don't think any of these kids that I know, these teens and older teens, they don't feel like I'm scared. I'm trying to hide stuff. It's just an understood thing.
- [37:03]
Hillary Morgan Ferrer
Hey, it's like, they weren't, like, presented like this is this private thing, and then all of a sudden, it wasn't. And honestly, my husband and I have the same rule. I can go to his computer and go through all his Facebook messages or all his email messages anytime that I want. I mean, I don't a lot of times, just because they're usually pretty boring. But every now and then I'm like, you know what? I'm curious who he's been talking to. And I'll sit down, and he doesn't flinch at all. He's like, what are you doing? I'm like, I'm reading all your Facebook messages. He's like, oh, cool. And that's just the way it is. There is no privacy there between husband and wife, and there's no privacy between parent and child. And in fact, I've had some par. Came up and said, we had that happen with my child. And I found this person that they were talking to online, and I was able to walk them through. Look at this conversation they're having. You see this question, this question, this question, this question. They are now able to find you anywhere. This is why we don't answer these questions. And the child was horrified, didn't realize that they had given out as much information as they did. And that kind of said, thank you, Mom. I'm so glad. Like, you know, they. They were embarrassed at first, but they came around to be like, I did not know I was putting myself in that situation. So, I mean, yeah, those are great insights.
- [38:08]
Jen Friesen
That's awesome. Well, hey, to wrap it up, where can people find you? What are you working on now that you're excited about that people will have to look forward to.
- [38:17]
Hillary Morgan Ferrer
Yep. So you can find Mama Bear Apologetics, we're on online, and it's spelled M A M A Bear B E A R apologetics dot com. You can go to us on Facebook, Mama Bear Apologetics. We're on Twitter some, but, you know, not a lot. And then Instagram, my favorite. Just, I love all the pictures and videos of cute animals. That's my fave. So, yeah, we're on Instagram. We can ask questions through our website. You can find a speaker through our website by. By emailing us. And then the project I personally am working on right now is a book called Diagnosing Doubt, where I'm looking at kind of more scientific basis behind doubt and what's happening and how it spreads and like, basically how to get back to the root of the issue and bypassing all the Christian platitudes where it's kind of like, you know, bump up, you know, buck up, little camper. I got through it. You can, too. I've never found stuff like that to be helpful. So actually understanding the process that it goes so it almost gives you like, these breadcrumbs so that you can reverse course and go back. That's what I'm personally working on right now, and I'm super excited about it. Oh, and we have the new, updated Mama Bear Apologetics Guide to Gender and Sexual Identity that has basically three new chapters all devoted to gender identity in. In that book. So I would highly recommend, even if you have the first one, go get the second one anyway. Because those three new gender chapters are going to be very helpful.
- [39:41]
Jen Friesen
That's awesome. Well Hillary, you've been such a great guest. Thank you so much for all your work, you and your team at Mama Bear Apologetics, and I hope everyone enjoyed listening to this. But thanks for being here.
- [39:50]
Hillary Morgan Ferrer
Yep, absolutely. I love what y'all are doing at Them before us. We are just ah, love Yalls Ministry.
- [39:56]
Jen Friesen
Awesome. Thanks so much. Hey everyone. I hope you enjoyed this conversation. I'll put all the notes and links in our description for you to find Hillary and more of their work later. Thanks for listening. Thanks for joining the Them Before Us movement.