The Big Lie

                                                                                                                                                                            Vol. XXIII, No. 5, May 2010

Those who want to reform government schools never have as their goal making those schools into explicitly Christian institutions. Far from taking every thought captive, most Christians have settled for simply tidying up the secularism of the government schools. All they really want is to be "left alone." They don't want their "values assaulted." All they want to believe is the big lie their parents believed about government schools in the fifties.

This big lie is that education can be "religion-neutral." The government will provide all the neutral facts, we were told, and parents can add their own values at home, as though the Christian faith were not a world-and-life view and could be reduced to an intellectual seasoning or a condiment. Because Christians swallow the myth of neutrality, they do not see established government schools as institutions that propagate an established religion. They see them as established propagators of "neutral" facts to which everyone agrees.

[Douglas Wilson, Excused Absence: Should Christian Kids Leave Public Schools? (CruXpress, Mission Viejo, CA, 2001), p. 67]