Almost they persuadeth me

The annual resolution proposed by the Exodus Mandate folks will not see the light of day at the SBC this year. Their conviction that God has commanded all godly parents to remove their children from “officially atheist government schools” won’t and shouldn’t become the consensus of the Southern Baptist Convention any time soon.

Liberals, Baptist and not, flog us with this every year. If a resolution is submitted then the headlines say, “SBC leaders consider anti-public school action.” Not so. I could submit a resolution in favor of all messengers being required to wear lampshades on their heads if I like. No one would likely do so, the committee wouldn’t recommend the resolution, and in no way would my desire represent “SBC leaders.”

On education, though, if we vote on the resolution, we’re hateful, and if it never actually comes up, we’re hateful because a couple of us thought it should have. Our liberal critics, particularly at the Baptist Center for Ethics, lack a certain intellectual honesty in most debates.

Anyway, unthinking apologists for our public education bureaucracy should not take too much comfort from the fact that this motion will die in committee. Consensus or not, public schools lose a little ground with Christian parents every year. There is little sign of reform and less movement toward parental control of the institution. It deserves to lose ground with us.

Consider the recent convocation at Boulder High School in Boulder, Colo. While more than one version of the story is floating around, the defenders of the event cite the following quote from one of presenters at the convocation, a clinical psychologist: “?I’m going to encourage you to have sex, and I’m going to encourage you to use drugs appropriately. And why I’m going to take that position is because you’re going to do it anyway. So, my approach to this is to be realistic, and I think as a psychologist and a health educator, it’s more important to educate you in a direction that you might actually stick to.”

According to TV news coverage of the event, school administrators supported it, even after some parental and student criticism. They acknowledged that parts of the presentation were a little rough, though.

Everyone had good intentions I’d guess, but it’s not the approach I want taken with my kids and it’s not a subject I even want a stranger to address with my children without being asked by me to do so. You can safely assume that my opinion is a moderate one among many parents I know.

You can say, “But that’s Boulder and I don’t live in Boulder.” That’s true. Before that it was “I don’t live in Portland” or “I don’t live in San Francisco.” These convocations are not universal; neither are homosexual student clubs or social studies classes intent on teaching tolerance as an absolute, and neither are Darwinist biology teachers. Add them up and they start to look common enough, though.

Every year, my enthusiasm for government-supervised education is harder to maintain. I fully expect it will be worse next year than it is this year. I also expect whatever problems it takes to push your buttons will eventually do so?in your town or the town of your grandchildren.

Frankly, I think it will be increasingly difficult for parents to honestly say they are responsible for the education of their children if they use public schools. We’ll be Deuteronomy 6 parents on Sundays and at home, but not between 8 a.m. and 3:15 p.m. 5 days a week, 9 months a year, for 13 years of the first 18 years of our children’s lives. Is that good enough?

It will be less and less satisfactory for more and more of our parents as time passes. More of us will reach that point that becomes too much. That’s when churches have to be ready.

One part of the Exodus Mandate agenda I very much support?more Christian schools. Additionally, Christian schools need to be more Christian. That means they’ll need to be more than an expensive version of public schools, only with a chapel service added. It means that the “Lord of the Flies” culture our kids live in as they form values and learn profanity needs to be driven by and supervised by adults who are committed to helping parents raise godly children.

These schools need also to be accessible to poor and fractured families. That means money. One important question raised by the advocates of public education has to do with families who cannot afford private education and families with special needs children. School vouchers are an answer to this question but I just don’t think that’s going to happen. Realistically, we’ll be forced to pay increasing taxes for increasingly dysfunctional institutions, whether our kids attend or not, and we’ll need at the same time to support Christian schools whether we have kids attending or not. That’s truly a hard thing.

None of this suggests the Southern Baptist Convention should tell families what to do with their kids. We have no consensus about that and we won’t for a long time. In fact, a resolution on the subject may set back the rate of migration away from the schools. Parents hate to be told what to do with their kids, especially involved Christian parents.

It’s better for our agencies to continue to help Christian schools and homeschoolers with training and curricula. If it’s what our churches and people are doing, the denomination needs to provide ever-increasing resources for the work.

It is not the Exodus Mandate that sways me toward the belief that Christians are being driven out of the public education system. It’s events like the one in Boulder. It’s the quiet way that humanist teaching becomes mandatory, and thus gospel, in the hard and soft sciences. It’s the kids who think Abraham Lincoln was president during World War II, but know better the names of venereal diseases and illegal drugs.

When I think of the Exodus story I can’t help but see Charlton Heston leading a cast of thousands out of a movie-set Egypt. One day there are millions of the Hebrew children in Egypt and a few days later, not one. The removal of Christian families from public schools will not be that way.

Think instead of an oppressed minority leaving a repressive political regime. A few get out early, others need a more urgent threat, others escape through some kind of underground rescue movement, dogs baying in the background. Some will stay too long. I’m convinced that we’ll leave, not as a denomination or as churches or even as a faith, but as refugees whose alarms go off according to different sensitivities. Eventually we’ll all leave public education or wish we had.