Christian Education Without Apologies

All education is religious indoctrination. The sooner conservatives recognize and accept this fact, the sooner they will make gains in red states for the good of the same. 

A proposal in Texas would pay school districts to adopt a new curriculum. Not a particularly noteworthy headline, but the Texas Education Agency (TEA) is taking flack because the proposed curriculum is allegedly Christian, overtly so. The critics are the usual suspects: teachers unions and radical church-state separationists. Texas republicans, they say, are trying to corrupt the youth with religious indoctrination. Why does the Sermon on the Mount have to be included in instruction on the Golden Rule unless it is “pushing” Christianity on youngsters? 

The Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath denied that the curriculum is favoring Christianity, appealing to a broad sort of western pluralism and the need for “background knowledge” for reading proficiency in “great literature” instead. 

This is exactly the wrong move by Morath. Appeals to curricular neutrality is what got us into this mess. In other words, the critics are right and Morath is wrong. It is religious education, or it should be. Conservatives shouldn’t run from that. 

Now, Morath is correct that instruction in Christian theological concepts and vocabulary are inherent to the west and its literary canon. A public-school teacher recently told me that her eighth graders had no idea what a sermon was and, therefore, could not define or employ the adjective, “sermonic.” This kind of literary and cultural illiteracy is an indictment of our country. The story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, for example, should, indeed, be “core knowledge” of any American. Scholars like Donald Lutz and Daniel Dreisbach have shown how essential biblical narrative and language were to the founding era. Imagine reading Shakespeare without familiarity with the King James Bible, or evaluating calls for resistance to the British Empire without having encountered the Geneva Bible. This is part of being culturally and nationally literate. 

But leaning on general western civilization without particularization to justify any mention of Christian things only reproduces the preconditions for the situation just described. Denying religious particularity in curriculum is self-defeating. Neutrality is a myth and a shaky foundation for educational maintenance. Endless curriculum wars occupy even the ostensibly conservative circles for this reason. 

Noah Webster, the father of American education, included hundreds of Biblical references and allusions in his famous dictionary, but his insistence on the profitability of the Bible’s inclusion in school curriculum was not reducible to cultural literacy. His reasons for doing so were decidedly religious and moral.

Our reasons for including Christianity in public curriculum should follow Webster’s. Cultural literacy provides necessary but insufficient rationale, one too weak to endure liberal attacks. Christianity is true and not all cultures or religions are equal. Full stop. 

Conservatives Christians, and those states willing to back them, need to ditch their passivity and reacquire cultural and moral assertiveness. We used to have it. America is a Christian nation and, as John Fea has pointed out, up through the 19th century, every American would have said so. Any well-constructed curriculum worth a dime will necessarily be Christocentric and Eurocentric. There’s no way around those historic contingencies. Liberals know that, hence their expressions of outrage any chance they get. 

Zhihui Fang, a researcher at the University of Florida, told the Washington Post that “Curriculum is always a political animal… Whoever has the power gets to decide what gets to get included.” Exactly right. The left gets this; it's time for conservatives to as well. 

More importantly, Fang should have added that all curriculum is religious. Some moral orthodoxy, some anthropology, some creation story is going to be presented, demonstrated, and told. This is, in part, due to what we all implicitly know: education forms our children and, by extension, the nation. 

Our eighteenth-century forbears—not just Webster—understood and embraced this. Neutrality is impossible because man, if he ever was a blank slate, does not remain such for long. Benjamin Rush faced the same objections we face today, namely, “that it is improper to fill the minds of youth with religious prejudices of any kind, and that they should be left to choose their own principles, after they have arrived at an age in which they are capable of judging for themselves. Could we preserve the mind in childhood and youth a perfect blank, this plan of education would have more to recommend it; but this we know to be impossible.”

The “religion of Jesus Christ” was to be recommended, then, for purposes of moral and religious formation. Not only is Christianity true, continued Rush, but it is demonstrably the most civilly and socially beneficial religion to inculcate, especially in a republic. In other words, there is a clear state interest here, and, to paraphrase Rush, Christianity supplies more knowledge of man’s present state in light of his future state than any other religion. Rush was thoroughly convinced that Christianity was indispensable to republican living. The Greeks and Romans were excellent, but Protestant America, armed with better light, would achieve more. 

If conservatives do not abandon the neutrality play and readopt the older vision of Rush, they will remain vulnerable to charges of “unfairness” and “bias.” Accepting the possibility of neutrality is to occupy the endless spiral of equality and choice. These “values” function as a one-way ratchet in the left’s favor. Their design works only to de-Christianize, to erode heritage and tradition, and to belittle spirituality and piety by flattening the moral playing field. The neutrality argument is like a DNA-coded firearm. 

These “secular purpose” style standards were essentially developed for public school contexts; almost all the current establishment clause jurisprudence emerged from school-related conflicts. The left knows how important that battleground is; and they are unwavering in their determination to control it. 

The proposed Texas curriculum is definitely Christian and Texas leans into that. Any denial of that fact exposes conservatives to pressure they cannot reciprocate. 

The choice is between boldly and unapologetically asserting the religious inheritance of our nation and its moral system—not just cultural curiosity or general literacy—or giving up the ghost and embracing an entirely amoral, anti-Christian, ahistoric curriculum designed to replace the nation as it has been with something else. 

Oklahoma’s superintendent, Ryan Walters has been bolder in describing Biblical instruction as necessary for “core values.” But even there, it's not like liberals can’t sniff out what’s really going on, namely, an assertion of “Christian political ideology,” as the New York Times put it. And so it is. Might as well say so instead of resting on our proverbial back foot.

Neutrality—the search for universal satisfaction—is simply not an option. Indeed, as Rush argued, the purpose of education in a republic is moral and intellectual homogenization; it necessarily cannot be all things to all people. And as Joseph Story instructed, the First Amendment was not designed to level the religious playing field. 

If state governors want to keep this republic, they should do exactly what Texas and Oklahoma are doing (and more), and not apologize for it. For the red state governors who might worry about this play, surely the conduct of president Trump this past week provides a lesson: courage is much more attractive than passivity.