Dr. Phil McGraw, better known on television as “Dr. Phil,” recently spoke to Pastor Ed Young at Fellowship Church in Grapevine, Texas, about raising kids and helping create a healthy society. As part of that, the TV personality and actor explained that helping kids build a strong relationship with God is key to building a healthy society.
Speaking to Pastor Young during the interview, Dr. Phil explained that family formation is, in his opinion, under attack in America. He said that families need to fight back against that, and that one of the best ways to do so is to built a strong and active relationship with the Lord. He said, “Family in America is under attack. We need to fight back with the tools we have, and one of the tools that we have is our active relationship with God.”
Continuing, the entertainment personality explained how two-parent households that emphasize faith are incredibly important, and that the parents need to embody other Christian values as well. He said, “If you are married and you do have two parents in [the] family and you are going to church, that’s your best shot of those children going into a lifestyle that will be drug-free, alcohol-free, abuse-free, divorce-free, that’s your best shot.”
Then, Dr. Phil explained that church attendance has fallen dramatically in recent years, suggesting that people are worshipping things like money instead of God. He said, “Church membership in this country has dropped below 50% for the first time in our country. And I have pretty good observations empirically supported as to why and that is people are worshiping something other than God.”
Building on that point, Dr. Phil, married to the same woman for nearly five decades, insisted that church attendance helps families stay together and that marriage is good for earnings, saying, “The divorce rate among families that don’t worship together, aren’t members of a church is 70% higher than those who do. Married men, on average make at least 30 or 40% more money than unmarried men.”
Stressing that point, Dr. Phil argued that church attendance and the values taught at church are good for the family, saying, “The church brings something to the family unit that causes cohesion, that causes values to be thought of and talked about and prayerfully considered.”
This wasn’t the first time Dr. Phil spoke about church and the family. Speaking in an interview with TBN, he said, “As a Christian, I have raised my family based on the core teachings that I received growing up, and I always knew that the family is so important, and it’s absolutely biblical that the family is the future. The family is everything to humankind and keeping everything together.”
He continued, in that interview, “It was important to me, as a father, to model to those children that they see their father in a prayerful relationship with the Heavenly Father, because I won’t be here forever. I know in my heart that when I’m gone, they won’t be alone because they will have a well-practiced relationship with their Heavenly Father.”
Featured image credit: By Angela George, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26603572