Pastor Tate Cockrell: Your Kids Are ‘Dumb And Immoral, But Feel Great About It’

Pastor Tate Cockrell sent a blistering message to parents who believe their children’s self-esteem is the most important thing in their lives Easter Sunday.

The Pastor of Member Care at the Church at Brook Hills believes that parents have bought in to the “myth of self-esteem” and as a result are setting their kids up to fail.

In fact, he notes, that failure is already prevalent in the lack of discipline and the educational decline that American children are illustrating.

Yellow Hammer published Cockrell’s thoughts earlier this week, and they’ve caused quite a stir, with some heralding the Pastor’s remarks as brilliant and insightful and others believing the words are a bit too harsh and jaded.

If you can’t watch the video below, here’s an excerpt from the speech itself.

“Rather than preparing them for life by giving them discipline and instruction, we have taught them to buy into the lie that the most important thing in their life is their self-esteem — the absolute most important thing in their life is how they feel about themselves…. And this started around the 1950s when the myth of self-esteem came into play.

In 1950, the Gallup organization asked high school seniors, ‘Do you think that you are a very important person?’ In 1950, 12 percent of them said ‘yes.’ In 2005, they asked the same question. 80 percent of high school seniors said ‘yes.’

In 1962 there were no articles on self-esteem in any educational journals. In 1992, 30 years later, there were 2,500 articles that year, and there have been that many or more every year since.

So this paradox has now happened in our culture where because we don’t instruct and because we don’t discipline, we are falling further and further down the scale morally and educationally and performance-wise, but we are feeling better and better about ourselves.

So we’re dumb and immoral, but feel great about it.”

This certainly isn’t the first time in the last couple of weeks that a pastor raised controversy with something he said.

Last week, the Inquisitr brought you the much-maligned thoughts of Pastor Patrick Embry, who declared that women were “less than a mother” if they had to have a C-section.

Unlike with that case, however, there are many more supporters backing Cockrell’s words as the sermon spoke to a growing frustration with children in 21st century culture. But as frustrated as some adults are, Cockrell asserts that it’s the kids themselves who are really frustrated because they’re being turned out into a world they aren’t prepared for by well-meaning adults.

Do you think Tate Cockrell hit the nail on the head with his thoughts on the “myth of self esteem”? Sound off in the comments section.