Alumna Amy Davison helps parents teach children to stand firm in their faith

Amy Davison grew up with what she calls “a pretty shallow faith.” She turned to the occult as a teen but eventually found her true calling through an apologetics conference hosted by Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. Now, as a podcast host and blog writer for Mama Bear Apologetics, Davison works to help parents raise children who “think critically, love biblically, and stand firm against the cultural tide.”

Growing up in Puyallup, Wash., Davison said her family didn’t go to church often. In high school, she said, a classmate “just gushed about being a Christian and how much her faith meant to her and everything, but she was just awful to me. … And so I remember thinking, ‘Gosh, if this is what a Christian is, then I don’t want to have anything to do with Christianity.’”

Instead, she began exploring Wicca, a modern-day, nature-based religion centered on witchcraft and ritual. Some of her friends were already involved in the occult and told her Christianity was false. They drew on her Scottish heritage and love of nature and made her feel supported, she said.

“When you’re kind of this teen girl that doesn’t quite fit in, one of the lures of Wicca is it offers you control over your situation,” Davison explained, adding, “it’s very customizable to your personality and things that you already like doing, or things that you already are attracted to, and so that really appealed to me.”

After a year of practicing Wicca, she said, “I was looking at my Bible that my grandmother had given me, and I remember thinking, ‘What if I got this Christianity thing wrong? What if maybe how that girl was behaving wasn’t really an accurate representation of what it means to be a Christian?’”

After reading Scripture, Davison said she burned her spell books that night and instead pursued the Lord. She was baptized at age 18 during summer camp just before entering the United States Air Force and taking basic training at Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma City.

Davison eventually transferred to Germany, where she met her husband, Mike, who also was stationed there. They married in 2007 and have four children: three sons now ages 18, 16, and 14, and a 2½-year-old daughter. Upon returning to the United States in 2012, they settled in Fort Worth.

One day when her oldest son was around 9, they were watching a Nickelodeon cartoon that had introduced a bisexual character.

“So this cartoon showed this scene where the two girls were passing Valentines to each other, and it wasn’t like two friends; they actually had crushes on each other,” she recalled. She said her younger two boys didn’t notice, but her oldest child did and had some questions she didn’t know how to answer.

“And so that was the catalyst moment, where I’m [thinking], ‘Okay, if I don’t give my kid an answer, somebody else will, and will they give him a biblical answer?’” She noted those themes aren’t just in adult television shows anymore, adding, “It’s now being packaged into children’s entertainment because they’re trying to raise that next generation to where it’s normal and it’s celebrated.”

Davison said she had been seeking God’s direction on what she should do when she decided to attend the Stand Firm Apologetics Conference at Southwestern Seminary.

The weekend conference “was incredible, because here were all of these questions that I had about Christianity that everyone I’d ever encountered [said], ‘Well, we don’t know. Just keep studying; you just keep the faith,’ and I’m like, ‘Man, those are terrible answers. I want real answers,’” she said. “And then that conference happened … and I just ate it up for two straight days. It was the best thing ever.”

At the end of the conference, it was announced the seminary was beginning a degree program in apologetics that fall.

“And it was like God hit me on the back of the head [and said], ‘This is what you’re supposed to do,’” she recalled. She was one of 20 students enrolled in the inaugural apologetics program.

“Southwestern was my favorite place to be,” she said. “I was usually there on Tuesdays and Thursdays for classes, and I just loved parking and walking across campus. I mean, I loved the trees, I loved the squirrels; everything about being on campus was just so special.”

Davison said she benefited greatly from her time at Southwestern and interactions she had with the faculty.

“[They] were just absolutely phenomenal,” Davison said. “You could ask them anything; they had such great wisdom, and they each had their own different personality that just made you excited to learn from them.”

In a full-circle moment, Davison had the honor of being chosen to present the first student-led session at the 2018 Stand Firm conference. She earned her Master of Arts in apologetics at Southwestern that same year. During her last year of studies, Davison made the decision that brought her to where she is now.

“Up until that time I’d been kind of meek in sort of putting myself out there, and so I had dedicated that whole year [to doing] bold things,” she said. On the last day of the year, Davison said, “the biggest bold thing I could think of was to email Mama Bear and see if they needed anybody.”

Davison had heard of Mama Bear Apologetics through reading articles on biblical worldview. She received a reply to her email from Hillary Morgan Ferrer, Mama Bear founder and president, about 20 minutes later.

Davison said Ferrer came to meet with her in Dallas in January 2019, “and we just hit it off really well, and so we started recording podcasts together, and I started writing different blogs.”

She also travels to churches and speaks at parenting conferences and women’s retreats throughout the country and abroad, addressing the subject of sexuality. She and Ferrer also addressed the subject in their book, Mama Bear Apologetics Guide to Sexuality.

Davison said many parents don’t realize how the culture has shifted, noting that gender theory now is being taught in shows geared toward children as young as 12 months, and that the sex education currently being taught in schools isn’t just basic biology; it’s “this discipleship on sexual expression and how to experiment with your bodies to figure out what you like.

“This isn’t just a talk,” she added. “This is an expression of a false worldview that’s making a false identity claim that’s directly in opposition to the biblical worldview, … and if we aren’t actively discipling them, then Satan is; he’s taking our place and luring them into this false ideology.”

Davison pointed to statistics that show roughly 80 percent of unmarried Christians between the ages of 18 and 29 have already had sexual experiences, 50 percent believe casual sex is no big deal, and about 54 percent believe homosexuality should be accepted by the church.

“My whole heart is just for parents to realize that apologetics is an incredible tool of the faith,”  she said, adding, “When we can use apologetics to help our children know and understand God better, that is when they make faith their own and are more likely to stand firm against not only the cultural assaults around them, but even in spiritual assaults in their own life, and to be able to live fearlessly for the Lord.”

She returned to the Southwestern campus in 2024 as the main speaker for the Heart of the Child Conference at the invitation of Karen Kennemur, professor of children’s ministry. Davison said it was wonderful “to be able to come back to a seminary that I absolutely adored, loved being there as a student, and then being invited back to speak, was just incredible.

“My time at Southwestern not only gave me the answers that I’d been yearning for, it deepened my own faith and gave me the boldness to be able to speak life into those around me,” she added. “So every moment of Southwestern has been a blessing, and if I could go back and redo it all over again, 100% I would, because it was just such an amazing experience.”