During Tuesday night’s Values Voter Summit event, FRC’s Tony Perkins spoke with Walker Wildmon, the Vice President of Operations for American Family Association. The two talked about the younger generation and how they view faith and politics.
“I think my generation is honestly pretty complex when it comes to the issues,” Wildmon said. “It’s hard to really nail them down on what’s the most important issue that they care about.”
However, Wildmon said his generation is one of the most pro-life generations America has seen in a while. In addition, he said many people around his age are considering having kids if they haven’t already, and they want a safe, secure prosperous country moving forward for their kids.
“That’s another important issue that seems to be coming up to light that hasn’t really been a topic of conversation for young voters in years past,” he said.
People want to see a Supreme Court justice who is willing to overturn Roe v. Wade, Wildmon said.
“Whether they’ll actually say that in public or say that in Senate hearings, you know, I doubt it that they’ll say it that explicitly – the nominee that is. But young Christians want to see that overturned,” Wildmon added.
If there’s one thing Wildmon said evangelicals or conservatives struggle with, he said it’s forgetting to consider the long-term strategy.
“Christians gotta do a better job fighting the long game if you will,” he said. “And we’ve seen the Left do this. I mean, this culture war that we’re talking about has been going on for decades and that’s why FRC was founded in the 70s and that’s why AFA was founded and other groups is to have organized Christians to fight back.
“But I think we’ve really gotta start setting long term goals and not expect victories overnight. That’s one thing that our enemy does well is they set up long term goals and they go after our young people and they go after the next generation hoping that they’ll be our next power brokers or our next leaders. That’s a pretty broad answer there, but I think looking long term and focusing long term is really where we’re going to see the largest impact.”
If groups like FRC and AFA are going to be successful, Wildmon said they’ll need the church to go along with them.
“We’re going to need the Church, the Body of Christ, to continue fighting alongside of us and to continue fighting with us,” he said. “Until we take back the culture, which the culture is just a product of the values that make up the culture, which we create the values, we promote the values, so right now we’ve got a lot of darkness, a lot of wickedness that is making up our culture and things do look pretty dim sometimes and they are to a certain extent. But as Christians, we’re called to continue to fight. We’re not called to back down just because things aren’t looking good. We’ve got to stay optimistic, we’ve got to stay on offense instead of always on defense and we’ve got to continue to make disciples and wake up the Church in America to what’s going on so that we can completely retake our culture.”
Young parents, Wildmon said, must take an active role in civic engagement.
“We have to understand that discipleship and raising of children is our primary responsibility as parents,” he said. “We have to really take advantage of that, take advantage of the opportunity that we have and make sure that we are training and teaching our children as Scripture says to set them up for success. And not set them up just for success from a worldly perspective but set then up for spiritual success in the future. So we’ve got to make sure we’re disciplining our children, training our children in the way they should go and we have to set a good example by civic engagement. Always have to be involved whether at the local level, whether it be city council, mayor, governor or even up to the federal level. We have to be involved and voting and even sometimes running for office at all levels.”
