My 15-Year-Old Is Holding a Debate

Labor Day, 2026. My 15-year-old spends her free hours on civics, research, and debate.

She is currently in our dining room, laptop open, doing more research on the 19th Amendment.

This October, on her birthday, she’s holding a city-wide debate of her own.

Her own. At 15.

I watch her prepare. That is my part in it.

A year ago this Thursday, Charlie Kirk was shot and killed. Answering a question at a campus debate.

My 15-year-old counts him a hero.

That is all I’m going to say about him.

So in my house, this year, a question is not a game.

That is why Christie and I wrote the guide. Watching her.

The first line is ours. “If Christianity is false, we ought to stop teaching it to our children.”

I mean that. She deserves to know what is true. So does yours.

Not what comforts a frightened person. Not what keeps a family together. Not what has been repeated for generations. Those are reasons somebody would want to believe it.

We believe there are reasons they should. We wrote fourteen chapters of them. Good without God. The flood and the fossils. Where was God? Copies of copies. Dead men stay dead.

But I know where this actually gets tested. Not on a page.

A child asks. A friend asks. A brother asks.

And you give an answer that survives until they leave the room.

We wrote that we owe our children something better than that.

I received many of these questions while doing street evangelism in some of the craziest situations of my life.

The second question is the one that finds you. It doesn’t need you ready. It’ll wait until you’re not.

The Bible puts it as an order. “But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts: and be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear:” (1 Peter 3:15)

Ready. And with meekness. Both halves.

That’s what the last chapter is for. The question at the kitchen table. It lets you ask what the kid means before you answer. It lets you give a short answer and allow a follow-up. It lets you say it out loud. “I do not know; let me find out and get back to you.”

The guide says the child learns something from that. That faith and honesty “live in the same house.”

The words go into your own heart first. Then the table. The road. Bedtime. Breakfast.

Then, if it’s my kid, a city-wide debate in October.

The introduction ends with a sentence and leaves it open.

“I believe this is true because...”

She is preparing for October.

Somebody is going to ask you sooner than that.

Finish the sentence before they do.

Adam