Fighting for our Kids
Brett King, RMCA Headmaster

It’s disappointing but not surprising. Some statistics I recently read stated that only 4% of today’s teens will identify themselves as Christians in adulthood. Compare that with 35% of Baby Boomers, and 65% of the World War II generation. For those of us concerned with generational faithfulness, this downward trend is sobering.

The reasons for this decline are certainly varied. But one article that appeared in World Magazine clearly expressed one possible reason for this decline. And for all of us who have committed to educating our children in a Christian school, I hope the excerpt from that article below will serve as an encouragement and a reminder of why we invest our time and treasure in a Christian and classical education. The fight for the hearts and minds of the next generation is a crucial battle.

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“Leaving the Backdoor Open.”
Joel Belz. World Magazine, June 4, 2005
www.worldmag.com/articles/10707

…The reason we're all fighting a losing battle is that even if we controlled every last detail of the denominational structures we find ourselves in, we have left the back door of the barn flapping so wildly in the wind that most of our livestock have escaped. In this case, the livestock are the littlest of our lambs.

For the fact is that most evangelical Christians continue to leave the primary task of teaching their children not to their churches but to the secularist state. Statistics are hard to come by—but I don't know of a single evangelical denomination where at least two-thirds of the children don't get the bulk of their education from the state. At least 85 percent of Southern Baptist children get their elementary and secondary education from the state—and except for the Christian Reformed Church and the Missouri Synod Lutherans, who have emphasized Christian schools for generations—the 85 percent figure probably applies to most other evangelical church groups as well.

The result, of course, is that a huge majority of our churches' young people inherit an education to which we should be objecting on two critical fronts: First, because that education is so ineffective. And second, because it is so effective.

Even the defenders of state education admit regularly how deficient their product is. That's why they always want billions more to improve it. By every measurement—educational, behavioral, moral, financial—the statist system tends toward bankruptcy. Dozens of individual schools, of course, and hundreds of individual teachers, stand as exceptions to that pattern. But such exceptions tend simply to prove the rule.

But it's the effectiveness of statist schools, much more than their ineffectiveness, that should concern us. In the task of secularizing our society, they have been wildly, overwhelmingly, and devastatingly successful. It is not too much to say that in many cases, they have neutralized the work of our evangelical churches.

Such secularism is never as neutral as it sounds. It is a high-octane religion of its own, imposed on Christians at their own expense. These high priests of ultimate American values, from kindergarten through the great graduate programs of the state universities, tell us what is politically correct. They tell us what to believe about our origins, about what is wrong with the human condition, and how to make everything right again. Those are not merely educational concepts; they are the most profound of all religious issues.

But it's the effectiveness of statist schools, much more than their ineffectiveness, that should concern us.

And we in the evangelical church have sat by while 85 percent of our young people are indoctrinated with such alien theologies. We wring our hands as we watch more and more of our young people forsake the faith of their fathers. We wince every time another poll tells us how little different our kids are from those of the public at large. But why should we be surprised, when they are all basically products of the same system?

I'm thankful for the valiant fight in recent years of faithful conservatives in the Southern Baptist Convention, in my own denomination, and elsewhere in the ecclesiastical structures of various churches. Those were battles that had to be fought. It's sobering, though, to realize that the enemy may be doing his worst damage on an altogether different front.

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