Recently, I was talking with two young men who would be pretty widely regarded as "well-educated"—both have post-secondary education; both are progressing well in their careers, earning recognition from their employers, fellow-workers and friends.

Although not Christians, they wanted to ask me about the Christian Heritage Party (CHP), especially what our main policies are.

One launched his enquiry with, "Tell me what you're against." I demurred that you can learn more about a party by what it's for, rather than what it's against. He then asked, "Okay. Tell me what you're for."

I told him we're pro-life and pro-family. As an example I described the CHP's family-friendly tax credit (our party's plan to strengthen families by giving a $1,000-a-month tax credit if either parent chooses to stay home and raise their own children, instead of putting them in day-care).

"But people aren't having families any more," he said. "What's the point in encouraging what people don't want?"

I tried to respond with academic research showing that parent-care is better for children than institutional day-care. He replied by citing individual exceptions he knew of (including his own family); he was unwilling to hear the research.

I then pointed to the results of a recent survey in which 77 per cent of mothers who work outside the home said they would prefer to stay home with their children, if they could afford it.

"We'd like to make it possible for them to do what they want," I suggested. "We want to strengthen families."

"But people aren't having families," he persisted. "So why promote ‘family values' when people don't want families?"

The most disturbing aspect of this conversation with a "well-educated" 30-year-old was not merely his refusal to hear objective facts, but somewhere in his "education" he'd been brainwashed by postmodernist professors to believe that objective truth cannot exist—that there are no absolutes.

And even more troubling was his concomitant assumption that whatever is, is right. "People are not having families? Then people should not have families, and the family (as we have known it, at least) does not deserve be preserved."

The natural family will survive this kind of so-called "thinking." It has survived many civilizations that in their "sophistication" turned their backs on it. But people who allow themselves to be drawn into this specious kind of "thinking" will not survive.

If we, as a society, don't strive to correct this intellectual "fashion" of teaching our young people anti-thinking and political correctness, then western civilization—like Egypt, Assyria, Medo-Persia, Greece and Rome—will inevitably disappear.

And it won't go quietly; it will crash and burn in orgies of violence and corruption.

As one sage has written, the ideas set down by obscure scribblers in the academy today become the legislation of tomorrow... and these are "ideas" with which no society can survive.

The closed-mindedness found on university campuses and in the media during the 1960s, '70s and '80s is the very reason why our government and courts are awash in destructive ideas today.

We reap what we sow.

Ron Gray is the national leader of the Christian Heritage Party of Canada.