The Fading Christian: Part 2

This will be a difficult read for some parents and pastors, and perhaps even for some college students who identify as Christians. I have been involved in Christian education for many years, 19 to be specific. If I could rank the many lessons I've learned over these many years, the most important lesson would be the following:

All of the teaching in the world towards Christian truth is wholly futile if it is not brought into a larger network of redeemed Christian relationships, with books, art, committed Christian parents, community and all. In other words, the child must find his or her way into truly Christian community, but not just any community; he or she needs a community that is committed to the kind of Christianity that is richly grounded in the truth (Scripture) and imbues every aspect of life, from the mind down.

In other words, the Christian school may be crucial, perhaps even necessary in cases, but it is not sufficient by itself.

Think of it this way: A nominally Christian family sends their kid to the local Christian school because they believe the education will be better and because they don't like the alternatives and because of "the morals," whatever that means. The kid enters the school, but his attendance to the school does nothing to derail his runaway progression towards utter secularization (that is, a life that is practically without reference to Christian thought patterns). He goes to church here and there, but it is probably a church that is itself largely secularized. He attends his Christian school, but approaches it as most students do--that is, an obstacle to what he wants, which is what everyone else in his culture wants (that is, goals that are wholly without reference to Christian thought patterns). He jumps through the academic hoops, plays the game, cheats where he can, and learns precious little about a total Christian perspective on life, though he is probably daily exposed to such a thing.

Truthfully, there is nothing that presents a serious challenge to the prevailing secularization of this young man's life, except perhaps 5 hours each week; hours that are drowned out beneath the sound of his phone, iPad, computer, television, ear-buds and friends, who are themselves clones of their decidedly secular culture, and many of them claim to be Christians as well.

Perhaps the reason for this trajectory in his life, which got started when he was quite young, is that he saw nothing to compete with it, perhaps didn't even see an alternative at all. Perhaps he was never remotely exposed to a distinctively Christian community with a robust intellectual and cultural life. He didn't see it in his home or his church. He was perhaps exposed to many who felt Christianity, but none who allowed Christianity to orient the mind, the soul and the body in dynamic ways. What does Jesus have to say about the way I dress or the way I converse with people or the way I conduct my education? Such questions probably never even enter his neatly sub-divided mind, where Christianity is quarantined behind a safe partition, lest it endanger his commitment to the excellent life of, well, whatever his friends and music define "excellence" to be.

The timeline of this young man's life is such that there really is little hope for him, outside the grace of God. He grew up going to church, but these isolated hours were only brief interruptions in the process of his true habituation before the golden idol of entertainment. He was efficiently and completely programmed to think like everyone else around him, for homogenous thought is surely necessary for economic and cultural unity with the dominant secular culture. He went from watching to acting things out that he watched, and so did his friends. They rehearsed the thought patterns, content and manner of the things they watched on their endless screens and heard in their uninterupted music. That is why they are all materialists, relativists and worshippers of creation rather than creator. That is why they are conformed and not transformed. Then he went to the Christian school, where many of his teachers also act out the thought patterns of the secular world and the school itself does much to mimic the world, but this time in a "Christian way." Then he went to youth group at church, where the youth pastor works much harder to secularize the gospel than to bring the gospel to the secular. He comes away from youth group with the curious impression that the unpardonable sin is boredom, or perhaps uncoolness. Then he graduates from his Christian high school, and quickly learns that keggers are more fun than church--that is, he discovers that blatant secularism is really a form of refreshing honesty, and the fun really begins. He now seeks authenticity rather than holiness, and as such he hangs on to a Portlandia version of his former Christianity, but he is now so isolated, jaded and thoroughly cynical that he ends up worshipping his own critiques of Christianity rather than Christ himself.

By now he is twenty-five, has a job and a wife he found in the secularized culture. Like him, she has little time or interest in Christian thought patterns, though she still loves her Jesus. Her Jesus never judges! They are clinging to some vestige of their former Christian identity, but their whole life together is a daily microscopic fade away from the holy. Eventually they have kids, and because of his past he wants to bring his kids to church, but again he does little to interrupt the real, strong, unremitting secularization of his own kids. What he never suspects in the whole of the process is that he probably never was a Christian in the first place. He was a secularist all the way through, given enough of Christianity at a young age to thoroughly inoculate him against its influence. His Christian school and its attempt at putting up some dam in him against the current of cultural secularization was washed asunder by the torrent long ago. All that remains is a ruin that he refers to often as his Christian faith, and indeed he would be deeply offended if anyone ever suggested that he wasn't a Christian. Give him a few more years and perhaps he won't be concerned about that either.

Step back into his timeline for a moment again and consider the parents of this lost soul. His self-professed Christian parents and his Christian church don't know it, but they raised this secularist. They certainly would be offended at the suggestion, but look at the facts. What can define a secularist better than the neatly compartmentalized Christianity of this young man as he grew up, where it is his secular friends and secular entertainments that dictate the boundaries of his Christianity. These influences will be sovereign over Jesus and his role in life rather than the reverse, and he will never suspect that this entire perspective is antithetical to Jesus from the first.

His parents are perhaps only to be blamed in the way that a sheep is to be blamed for producing another sheep. Many of these parents are not likely to be people who see Christianity as a thing that threatens everything, that claims everything. They are likely people who merely "expose" their kids to Christianity while assuring all the life and leisure conditions that will teach them secularism with an efficacy that rivals any brainwashing or indoctrination that one could find in the history of the race.

And that is why I feel that my work as a Christian educator is often a journey into futility. Now all would be hopeless if not for grace. God breaks through in people's lives. He is raising a remnant of people who will receive his word as truth and live accordingly. It remains to see how great this remnant will be.

Why Christian Education and Not Public Education?

Why are Christian schools better than public schools? Several reasons:

1. The Christian worldview makes sense of education.

Let's be clear about something; there is no separation of church and state in education. There is only a systematic replacement of the Church of Jesus Christ and His influence for the faith pronouncements of naturalists/postmodernists and their influence. It is not as if there are no religious/philosophical presuppositions informing the work of public education in the absence of Christianity. Christianity can no longer bring its influence into public education while postmodernism, materialism, methodological naturalism founded in metaphysical naturalism and even Marxism enjoy unbounded access to the children of this nation. As it turns out we want every "church" but Christianity (well okay, Islam's not allowed either!)

A case in point: Let's say students are discussing World War II in history class and a particular student has the audacity to ask, "What if Hitler had won the war? In that state of affairs would the Nazi's have had the right to establish their moral claims?" Fascinating question. How on earth is a teacher going to answer this question without offering some presuppositions concerning what he or she takes to be morally right or wrong? If the teacher says, "Well sweet ignorant Johnny, that is a moral question, and we can't address those questions here," then what are we to think about such a teacher? Does she not know what is morally right? Is it a matter of opinion (which incidentally is a moral position)? Is she suggesting that we can only know the brute facts of history but can't interpret them morally (which is also a moral position)? Should the teacher abdicate to Johnny's parents if they are skinheads or if he belongs to a racist church? 

This idea of separating religious/moral/philosophical ideology from the "real work of education" is as silly an idea as has ever been suggested in human history. At least earlier thinkers knew you couldn't separate philosophy/religion and politics, so you better be absolutely certain that the set of ideological assumptions motivating education is of a sublime quality. Just because at times people have been wrong in the principles they chose doesn't mean it is preferable or even possible to wholly eliminate ideological assumptions from the realm of state affairs, especially in education. 

What has happened in American culture is simple. We have replaced a superior set of philosophical guiding principles for an inferior set in the interest of "separation of Church and state," and that is why it is becoming increasingly difficult to motivate a lifestyle of thoughtful inquiry anywhere in American life, but especially in the public school.

Here is a short list of the corrosive ideas deeply cherished in modern public education that Christian schools (good ones) unilaterally reject:

a. Truth is elusive and evolving and thus there can be no final epistemological (truth and knowledge) framework in education; and as such the various subjects are brought together in one place by nothing more than the administrative contrivance of an institution (a notion I will call the "multiversity").

The Christian school of course favors a theological/university model in education, in which theology serves as the unifying interpretive framework, suffusing the whole educational enterprise with purpose and harmonizing all subjects within a comprehensive search for the Truth.

b. Education is not about finding "The Truth" (after all, what can that even mean?), but about exploring the diversity of human perspectives and joining the conversation.

The Christian school promotes the quest for truth as central to our identity as human beings. We set forth our desire to know God, know His world, find our place in His world and serve His world to our utmost.

c. Certainty amounts to intellectual immaturity. A deep respect for ambiguity expresses the eclectic and tentative nature of intellectual maturity.

The Christian school boldly proclaims certainty in areas of certainty, and boldly promotes the search for certainty in areas of uncertainty.

d. The discovery of "Truth" is not sufficient to motivate a desire for education; personal pay-off in the form of specialization is the only practical motivator in the educational program.

The Christian school suggests otherwise--namely, that personal pay-off is an insufficient principle by which to motivate true learning. The Christian school seeks to inculcate a desire for truth, and secondarily to equip students for future careers. We want hyphenated people--that is, theologian-businessmen, theologian-farmers, theologian-doctors, etc.

e. Human beings and indeed human minds are unintended by-products of the mindless, purposeless and wholly natural process of evolution. Wind the clock of evolution backwards and start it up again and a wholly different creature with wholly different capacities would have emerged.

The Christian school says that human beings have dignity over against the whole created order as beings made in God's image.

The choice really is simple. If you want your children exposed constantly to these five ideas, then by all means send them to the local public school and attempt to stem the tide of this eroding influence at home.

2. We cooperate with local parents and not distant bureaucrats. 

The state determines the curriculum of the the public school and not the parents. If the state says that students are to be taught "tolerance" (according to a particular moral ideology), then the parents must accept this, or protest it without much hope of changing anything. If a state is liberal in its leanings, then the various policies it adopts concerning the education of the masses will be imposed on segments of the population that are not liberal and don't want those values merely imposed upon their children by the majority. One way to deny the state its power of indoctrination is to remove students from state public schools and place them in the local private school, where the desires of parents will be heeded and where the parent is heralded as the ultimate educator.

The Christian school still says that the parents know how to educate their children better than the political intelligentsia does, and seeks the approval ultimately of the paying parent rather than government officials.

3. The Christian school provides a more liberal education.

I recently asked an atheist whether he would like his daughters taught some of the arguments of the best Christians. He said that such a program would "of course" be a violation of the separation of Church and state. I told him that his response is classic narrow-minded parochialism, but this time it is not Christians arbitrarily excluding the challenge of naturalism, but naturalists arbitrarily excluding the challenge of Christianity. In the interest of education, don't we want our children exposed to the best ideas? I went on to tell him that I expose my students to the ideas of atheists like David Hume, Nietzsche, Russell, and modern atheists like Christopher Hitchens, Victor Stenger and Edward Tabash. In short, at the Christian school, I am not afraid to teach my students the best of atheism because the best of Christianity can effectively answer the best of atheism. Surely such an approach is a more "liberal" approach than the closed-minded, isolationist program of the public school. The public school student doesn't hear a bias towards a particular position amid several presented. He is presented with only one!

The fact is that many graduates of liberal universities are not very liberal. They have never been exposed even to rudimentary challenges against secularism while the graduates of many Christian schools have wrestled with the best of modern secularism firsthand and are prepared to address it thoughtfully. My students can tell you the best challenges against Christianity. I wonder how many public school kids could tell you the best Christian challenges against naturalism or against the prevailing relativism within the public school culture.

On the one hand this is to the Christians' advantage. In my experience, because of their lack of training, the typical product of the secular university cannot withstand even elementary challenges from a well trained Christian. They merely assume that the pronouncements of their professors or the cultural axioms ingested by the majority of their peers are sufficient to quash all intellectual challenges to secularism. As it turns out, they usually can't even counter the second tier questions of philosophically trained Christians. These people honestly think it is acceptable merely to uncritically brush Christianity aside as a "remnant of the past," because, after all, that is what all the sophisticates are doing. No wonder Christianity always wins when truly thoughtful Christians are pitted against thoughtful unbelievers. The fact is that atheists are not exposed to enough of Christianity to debate effectively against it.

Meanwhile my students train in evolution, naturalism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, postmodernism, etc. in order to engage the most important ideas of the day comprehensively.

4. The environment is more conducive to learning rather than cultural indoctrination.

It seems that one of John Dewey's ideas was to cloister teens together in learning communities so they could socialize and educate each other. In one sense, Dewey was right. High schools certainly are places where a form of education is utterly efficient and unchallenged--namely, homoginization. Everyone becomes exactly the same as everyone else! It creates equilibrium and not tension. Because the teacher has become largely an accessory in the public school, which is now only a context for the youth sub-culture to train each other in language, dress, music, movies, values, lifestyle, love, the purpose of education, etc., adults have virtually lost any capacity to challenge the uncritical assumptions of the youth sub-culture. If you doubt this, ask the average teenager to discuss various facts concerning his sub-culture and then ask him to discuss various facts concerning biology, history or philosophy, or even the culture of his parents. What he rehearses consistently with his peers will become readily apparent in a matter of seconds. Or better yet, show up to a public school during lunch and listen to the casual conversations of the sub-culture and you will see that what I'm saying is manifestly true. Many public school kids today are for the most part utterly cut off from knowledge of anything outside of their tiny world. Everything else is frankly irrelevant.

In the private Christian school, at least this notion of culture isolation is consistently confronted in classes where teachers are not vastly outnumbered. In the Christian school one can seriously challenge the idea that the teen sub-culture in America is the pinnacle of human civilization.

5. Christian schools are more successful at the work of real education.

It is clear that public schools spend more to educate individual students than Christians schools do. And Christian school teachers are remunerated for their services at a much lower rate than public school teachers, especially when one considers the impressive retirement advantages and health care benefits afforded to those working in public schools. And isn't it odd that Christian schools are also obviously more successful at training students to be thinkers and lifelong learners. And perhaps it is too simplistic to suggest that this is because they can select their student bodies from among the rich. I think it is the other way round--namely, families see that the Christian school develops thoughtful young people and so they select the school, removing their kids from the public system that would stultify their growth.

Christian education prepares students for the world and also for careers while giving students a vision of truth that inspires a lifelong desire for knowledge. 

6. There is a deeper concern for what becomes of students in the Christian school.

In fairness I know that many public school teachers care deeply about what becomes of their students, but I think any public school teacher would be hard pressed to make a case that the local public high school more consistently expresses a deep love for students than the local Christian high school. Some of this is a matter of simple numbers. How can teachers really care for students in the context of mass produced education?

The best Christian schools feel like an extended family, and students sense that teachers take a sincere interest in their futures. The teachers I've known in private schools are consistently available to students who have needs as well. And it should also be noted that in the best Christian schools, discipline is seen as an expression of love. In point of fact the best way to convince a student that he doesn't matter is to let him have his way without resistance. Christian high school teachers do not see themselves as friends to students, but they are friendly and compassionate authorities in the lives of students.

In conclusion then, it is fascinating to see the present desire in our country to reform public education. Obviously that indicates that many in this country see public education as seriously broken. We see this desire for reform expressed in films like Waiting for Superman, a documentary about problems especially in inner city public schools. Curiously absent from these films is any assessment of the prevailing worldview that informs the present educational enterprise in America. The thesis of the cultural intelligentsia is that the problem is a union problem, a teacher competency problem, a political problem and a money problem. In Christian schooling we know that the real problem for public schools is the godless worldview that controls these schools. As long as the public school system tacitly assumes that students are accidents of evolution destined for annihilation, they will struggle mightily to provide a rational foundation for education. Unless and until that is fixed, no amount of money or skilled teachers will fix this problem. The problem is not with the various elements of an otherwise good system, but with the system itself. The problem is not with the paint and carpet; it is with the structure of the house. Clearly repainting the cracks in the walls of a house is foolish if the reason for the cracks is a broken foundation.