According to Canada’s Lifesite Web portal, two major American denominations, the Southern Baptist Convention and the Presbyterian Church of America, are advising their adherents to remove their children from the public education system. That fact is reported and read rather wistfully in Canada, since denominations here are unlikely to take a decisive stand on any issue.
To some, however, even in Canada, the assertions of the Baptists’ "Exodus Mandate" are not new. Homeschoolers, for example, have long since understood that it is the obligation of parents to "see to it that [their children] receive a thoroughly Christian education, for the glory of God, the good of Christ's church, and the strength of their own commitment to Jesus". We have recognized for decades that "Government schools are by their own confession humanistic and secular in their instruction, [and] the education offered by the government schools is officially Godless".
No doubt many of those who have been scrimping in order to send their children to private Christian schools will not be much surprised by the proposals of the Exodus Mandate either. But it is good to see at least some of the churches finally catching up to what the people in the pew realized decades before.
But all Christians still have a long way to go. Even in the vanguard of the movement for alternative education in North America people have been slow to acknowledge the real scope of the problem portended by the collapse of public education.
Many see nothing in it beyond the failure of the public system to provide our children with an education. But we need to look again.
For one thing, state education is not a failure from every point of view. It mass produces exactly the kind of citizen that is now in demand: one who is capable of exercising managerial responsibilities within a pluralistic, hedonistic, atheistic setting, but who would never question the goals and commitments of the enterprise he manages.
In the second place, the state is more than just indifferent to children of the kind we wish to raise. It is hostile to them. It does not want us to have children in the manner we do (in greater than average numbers, the natural offspring of heterosexual, monogamous parents). It does not want us to raise them as we do (in intact homes, on traditional religious principles). It does not appreciate the aspiration in life we try to foster in them (of becoming men and women who kneel before God, but stand up to the state).
When will religious people begin to see their qualms about public education in a more general light? The stream of obscenities being shouted through the public bullhorn is not simply lowbrow, crude and insulting. It contains a message for us. And the message is, "get with the program or get off the planet".
Yes, churches who call on us to leave the public system are serving us well. But they would serve us even better by organizing conferences on surviving persecution and living in hostile times. We need to hear from Chinese and Arabic Christians who have learned what it is to live every moment as a "stranger and sojourner". We will all need to know this soon. Now is the time to build new communities of faithfulness.
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