Splinters and safe spaces
The Gist: Alternative takes on church and state
In American public schools today, teachers can freely display signs declaring their classrooms 'safe spaces' for LGBTQQIA+ etc students but cannot post a sign that says 'Willing to pray with you' without risking disciplinary action.
The Economist profiles a clever organization: “The lesson was on the crucifixion. The teacher asked the seven- and eight-year-olds to write down a list of their ‘most troublesome sins’. She had brought an example of a whip to show them how Jesus was tortured before his death. ‘There would have been no skin left on Jesus’s back. His ribs would have been exposed because once it takes your skin off, when they keep going it’s digging into your organs,’ she said. After the beating his raw body rubbed against the cross. ‘Think of the splinters!’ she exclaimed. The children sat mostly quietly as she told them that God could not look at Jesus because he was covered in sins. Soon time was up. Jesus would be resurrected, she reassured them, but that was for next class. The session was recorded by a concerned teacher’s aide just before Easter in a small Ohio town. The instruction was part of a weekly programme run by LifeWise Academy, a non-profit. LifeWise buses children from public schools to local churches during recess, gym, art, library and other elective classes to teach them the gospel during the school day, if parents opt in. Its instructors are a mix of retired teachers, pastors and local mums. Parents initiate bringing the programme into their schools and raise funds to pay LifeWise a startup fee. The group then provides red buses and a plug-and-play curriculum. It is no small enterprise. This year LifeWise operated in 585 school districts across 28 states and enrolled more than 44,000 students. By autumn, when school starts again, it will be in 982 districts in 33 states, an increase of nearly 70%. The group’s meteoric rise can also be measured in money. In 2023 LifeWise made a $4m surplus, according to tax filings. Last year the figure was $17m.”
Figure 1. After going to law school, I thought that proselytization in public schools was severely restricted - but I’ve since discovered that it happens rather more than preferred by the American Crusade for Legal Unbelief. Or perhaps Association for Censoring Liberty Unevenly? Or maybe the Anti-Christian Litigation Unit?
A.A. Hodge was one of the great Princeton Presbyterian theologians of the 19th century (his father Charles had an even greater reputation and quipped “A new idea never originated at Princeton” because they were such stalwart defenders of orthodoxy. You may have noticed things have changed there.) In 1887, before Earl Warren was even born, much less taking prayer out of schools, A.A. Hodge wrote: “For the first time in the world's history a complete literature is being generated from which all tincture of religion, whether natural or revealed, is expurgated, for the education of the youth of a whole nation… Every intelligent Catholic ought to know by this time that all the evangelical churches are fundamentally at one with him in essential Christian doctrine. And every intelligent Protestant ought to know by this time, in the light of the terrible socialistic revolutions which are threatened, that the danger to our country in this age is infinitely more from skepticism than from superstition. We have, Protestant and Romanist alike, a common essential Christianity, abundantly sufficient for the purposes of the public schools, and all that remains for specific indoctrination may easily be left to the Sabbath-schools and the churches respectively… shall we not all of us who really believe in God give thanks to Him, that He has preserved ‘the Roman Catholic Church in America today true to that theory of education upon which our fathers founded the public schools of the nation,’ and from which they have been so madly perverted… the agnostics, many of whom do not really know that they do not know, and only half believe that they do not believe. They have no fixed convictions and no inherited institutions. Does the great mass of the national population, the true heirs in succession of our Christian ancestry, the tamers of the wilderness, the conquerors of independence, the founders of Constitution and laws, have no rights? Shall the Christian majority consent that their wealth shall be taxed and the whole energy of our immense system of public schools be turned to the work of disseminating agnosticism through the land and down the ages?” Hodge ultimately recommended hyper-local schools that could accommodate the prevailing faith. Notably, the originator of America’s mandatory public school education “Horace Mann was a Unitarian for whom education was something of a surrogate religion given his loss of faith in Christian teaching, and some of his critics did accuse him of creating Unitarian parochial schools at public expense.” In pursuing a neutral civic religion that was broadly but not deeply Protestant, the schools included Bible reading but no more substance.
In the Netherlands around the same time, the theologian and politician Abraham Kuyper pursued a different vision of principled pluralism than what we are used to in American history. Kuyper argued that God delegates limited authority to distinct “spheres” like the family, the church, the state, and the market. Each sphere is sovereign, none may swallow another, and the state’s task is to protect the delineations while allowing each to serve God. Further, in a pluralistic society, Christians could not impose a theocracy; instead, Protestants, Catholics, secular-liberals, and socialists should set up their own strong institutions, organizations, media, and social services according to their own values. To the degree there was redistribution by the state, each faith should be entitled to funds on the same terms. Schools would be Kuyper’s great crusade, and he would eventually prevail, shaping the Netherlands for decades. (We’re exploring something similar with education via vouchers today). Part of Kuyper’s political success was convincing Christians that they could faithfully cooperate with the secular: Due to common grace, God restrains sin and sprinkles insight outside the church (Sunshine falls on both believers’ and atheists’ tomato plants). But because worldviews clash at root, Christians must build their own institutions to live faithfully - and, when necessary, unite as an antithesis to secularism. Basically all of Kuyper’s work would disintegrate in the 1960s and 1970s: his political party flirted with Christian socialism before a center-right merger; his university accepted state funding and went from orthodox elitist to open to all; his denomination liberalized; and his “pillars” were torn down amidst the sexual revolution, a determined progressive assault, and universal consumption of mass media, especially television, rather than community resources. The result: the Netherlands, once a Calvinist refuge for Puritans, became the preferred holiday for sin.
Sandifer writes In Defense of Prudery: “Victorians inherited a view of human nature that saw moral traits as radically plastic. This meant that every book, every play, every conversation, indeed, every aspect of one's environment, was viewed as contributing either positively or negatively toward the development of one's character… Marriage was thus both a source of moral and spiritual energy, and a prophylactic against temptation. It followed from this that anything that undermined marriage was felt to be supremely dangerous, and so sexual immorality was singled out as especially pernicious. For Harriet Bowdler (sister of Thomas, and a reformer in her own right), seduction was a sin worse than murder, since "those who kill the body have no more that they can do," whereas the seducer would rob his victim of her virtue as well as ‘perhaps her eternal happiness.’ … representations of sexuality that were coarse or that sanctioned immorality were seen not only to weaken resistance to vice, but also to sully the soul, to desensitize the conscience, and, ultimately, to dehumanize—debasing sex by divorcing it from its properly elevated context… one of the most fruitful ways of framing the changing norms of public morality in nineteenth-century Britain is as a kind of feminization of society: the standards that had earlier been applied most forcefully to women came increasingly to be directed toward men as well. Thus Hannah More's extraordinarily popular tracts at the turn of the century may be read as a struggle to vanquish the bawdy and undisciplined masculine culture of the tavern with the order and tranquillity of domestic life.” That last point is especially interesting insofar as conservatives so often complain about the feminization of society (e.g. regarding risk).
Figure 2. Your algorithm is your liturgy.
Lifewise, Hodge, Kuyper, Sandifer would agree: Moral education is inevitable and religious communities shape it or surrender it.