A Christian exodus from government education?
by Deborah Kovach Caldwell Vol. XII, No. 4, April 1999
[The following is a condensation of an article printed in the 30 January 1999 Dallas Morning News.]
Leaders of a rapidly growing movement of conservative Christians are urging followers to withdraw their children from public schools by next year in order to bring down the government school system. At least four organizations have sprung up around the country in recent months to encourage parents to abandon what fund-raising letters describe as "atheistic" and "unclean" public schools in favor of home schooling and Christian academies.
The movement, which is just beginning to surface among mainstream evangelicals, bills itself as a way to "trump" public education by offering strategies to "thoroughly supplant the corrupt government school system."
This is dangerous hogwash, said Lee Berg, an expert on the religious right at the National Education Association in Washington. "Public education happens to be the foundation of democracy," said Dr. Berg, a Southern Baptist ethicist from Houston who battled the fundamentalist takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention in the 1980s. "It's where our diverse society learns to live with each other."
The movement is gathering steam at a time when the nation's public schools are already under siege. Many schools are battling high-profile problems with violence, drugs, racial strife, funding, and poor educational performance while facing challenges from the growing support for school voucher programs and charter schools [and home-schooling].
The movement's leaders have gained the endorsement of the Rev. D. James Kennedy, an influential conservative Christian broadcaster who heads Coral Ridge Ministries in Ft. Lauderdale, FL. His Center for Reclaiming America was behind last summer's national anti-gay rights advertising campaign featuring "former homosexuals." Another endorser is Tim LaHaye, a conservative political activist and author of 43 books, including the spectacularly successful Left Behind novels based on the Book of Revelation.
"The Christian Right has been calling on the nation to correct all these social and moral problems we have," said the Rev. E. Raymond Moore, a South Carolina minister who founded Exodus 2000 just over a year ago. "We're trying to stop pornography and eradicate abortion, and yet we have not been obedient to God on the biblical mandate for educating our own children. Perhaps the renewal of the culture could be as simple as the Christian church renewing its obedience to that biblical mandate."
He also said that if evangelical Christians exited en masse, "this event could seriously cripple the power [that] secularism now holds over our culture by holding our children as near-hostages in state schools." The "death to the schools" movement, as one conservative Christian described it, is spearheaded by Mr. Moore and three other men. One is Brannon Howse, founder of Exodus Project in St. Paul, Minn., who believes public schools are so anti-Christian that those who don't agree with the secular state's world view will be discriminated against and ultimately stuck with a bad education that will prevent them from succeeding as adults.
Another is Robert Simonds, founder of the Irvine, Calif.-based Citizens for Excellence in Education, which during the 1980s fought well-publicized textbook battles over religious issues and urged conservative Christians to run for school board seats. He is now organizing Rescue 2010, whose fund-raising letters describe public schools as places where Christians are "spiritually raped."
The founder of the movement is Marshall Fritz, a Libertarian Party organizer and former computer programmer who started the Fresno, Calif.-based Separation of School and State Alliance as a think tank to change public opinion about state-sponsored schools. About 6,500 people have signed his proclamation calling for an end to public schools, including 550 Texas signers (The proclamation is on his Web site at www.sepschool.org ). Mr. Fritz's group is the most eclectic - it includes a sprinkling of Jews and Muslims as well as people who are motivated not so much by theology but by political philosophy. "There is no peaceful solution to the school wars other than the separation of school and state," said Mr. Fritz, a Roman Catholic. "It's the only plan that has in it the makings of a turnaround of American culture."
Government-sponsored schools are bad, Mr. Fritz said, because they shift what he believes is a parent's duty to educate children to the state; they keep God out of children's education; and they coerce homeowners to pay for their own children's education, as well as the education of non-homeowners, who don't pay property taxes. He said that if the public school system crumbles, citizens would realize a $300 billion tax cut, which means two-thirds of the population would be able to afford private school tuition. He expects churches and charities to pick up the rest of the tab.
The movement's founders say state-sponsored education is too far gone. "The schools are not going to be fixed, nor should they be," said Mr. Moore, who home-schooled all four of his grown children. "They're really unbiblical at their core." He hopes to persuade the parents of about 4 million children to abandon public schools by next year, or soon after. He explains his views on his Web site, www.exodus2000.org
There are about 52 million American children in public schools, according to education experts. Eight million, about 11 percent, are educated in private schools or at home, experts say. Mr. Moore estimated that half of the second group is composed of evangelical Christians. But he said that between 12 million and 15 million evangelical Christian children still attend public schools.
"We don't think they're a safe place anymore for Christian children," he said. "The public school system is doing more harm now to the country than any single thing except perhaps the popular media."
[Editorial Comment: Regarding Mr. Berg's statement that "Public education happens to be the foundation of democracy", I wonder how he copes with the fact that there were no government schools in the United States until the 1830s, 50 to 60 years after our founders established our great democracy? TCP]