Should We Send Our Kids to Public Schools?

Should We Send Our Kids to Public Schools?

It has taken a while for Christians to see public schools in America as an existential threat to their children’s Christian faith. I saw one comment about this topic on Twitter which was the inspiration for this post. The guy said sending your kids to a public school is like playing Russian roulette with the school system. In other words, you’ll be lucky if your kids make it out as Christians. If there is a bullet in the chamber, they on their way to become heathens. I sympathize with this perspective, and agree the public schools are an indoctrination machine into secularism. I will further argue the idea of “public” schools is unbiblical because education is the responsibility of the parents and not the state. The latter idea goes back to something I call the conservative progressivism of the 19th century, which was progressive ideas promoting conservative ends. The Marxists would take over the progressive movement in the latter half of the 20th century, and in the 21st century bring to public education the reality of the Marxification of education, in the title of a book by James Lindsey.

Our children went to public schools because we didn’t know any better. Our youngest was able to start going to a classical Christian school in the 5th grade, which was an educational red pill experience for me. At the same time our daughter was attending Hillsdale College and fell in love with classical education, minoring in it and making it her career. But never when our kids where in public schools would I have for a minute considered it Russian roulette. The reason is because my wife and I saw their education as completely our responsibility. Never did I think it was the school’s responsibility to educate my children. Yes, the schools would teach them the “three Rs,” but it was up to my wife and I to inculcate that knowledge into a Christian worldview. Interrogating them about what they were learning at school, and exploring the hidden assumptions, was a common practice in our home. What they learned there was continually critiqued from the perspective of our Christian faith. They were raised from their earliest days learning that Christianity is ultimate truth about the nature of reality, and everything else is not. I wrote a book showing how I did that called, The Persuasive Christian Parent: Building an Enduring Faith in You and Your Children. Each of our children as adults are committed Christians. That was the plan all along, regardless of where they went to school

Our job as Christian parents is to teach them not only what we believe, but why we believe it. The latter is apologetics, or defending the veracity of the faith, and that is how we need to raise our children in a secular age. This is why I was always lecturing, teaching, and persuading them about why Christianity is true and why it is the only worldview that makes sense of all of reality. In my favorite quote from the ever quotable C.S. Lewis:

I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.

It is only the biggest of big pictures, God in Christ in Scripture, that makes sense of anything and everything. Every particular has meaning because of the universal, the puzzle pieces of life now fit because God is the author of the picture of life.

I say this to declare that a public school has no power over our children if we as parents do our job. That being said, a public school is the last place on earth you want to send you children! The rest of this piece explains why.

The Primacy of the Family in Education
I came across some quotes about the family from President Theodore Roosevelt that in our day would be considered “controversial,” but in the early twentieth century were common:

It is in the life of the family upon which in the last analysis the whole welfare of the Nation rests . . . . The nation is nothing but the aggregate of the families within its borders—Everything in the American civilization and nation rests upon the home—The family relation is the most fundamental, the most important of all relations.

His traditional conception of the family including the roles of men and women as husbands and wives would be positively shocking to our secular cultural elites, woke or not. R.J. Rushdoony states what Roosevelt observed as axiomatic for Christian Western civilization:

The family is, sociologically and religiously, the basic institution, man’s first and truest government, school, state, and church. Man’s basic emotional and psychic needs are met in terms of the family.

This was an inarguable statement of fact until the twentieth century and the rise of secularism, and with that rise the state slowly began to usurp the prerogatives of the family in education. J. Gresham Machen writing in 1925 argued it had already happened:

The most important Christian educational institution is not the pulpit or the school, as important as these institutions are; it is the Christian family. And that institution has to a very large extent ceased to do its work. . . . . The lamentable fact is that the Christian home, as an educational institution, has largely ceased to function.

Wherever as Christians we come down on the nature of education in America on which there will be disagreement, we must all agree with Machen, the education of children is the primary responsibility of the family. But Christian classical education was not yet on my radar.

Then in 2012 while my wife was working at the elementary school our youngest son attended, she was growing increasingly dismayed with what she was witnessing in public education. She insisted that he not attend our local public middle school; unfortunately, a private school was a pipe dream as far as I was concerned. There was no way we could afford it financially, and our other kids survived the public schools, faith intact, and so would he. It’s pathetic when surviving is the criteria by which I judged an education for our children, but we had no choice, I thought. Thankfully, my mother-in-law decided she would cover the tuition, and our son entered Covenant Classical School in Naperville, Illinois for the fifth grade. To say I was blown away by the education we encountered at this Christian classical school would be a massive understatement. But even with our son at a Christian classical school, in my mind the ideal along with home schooling, his education was still our responsibility.

Government and Education Need to Get a Divorce
America’s founders believed deeply in the importance of education, and to that end the Continental Congress in July 1787 passed The Northwest Ordinance in which they stated:

Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.

Religion to the Founders meant Christianity, and its morality and knowledge was necessary to good government and a happy populace. In other words, civilization depended on education. It didn’t follow, though, that encouragement meant government control of education given the Founders’ deep suspicion of human nature and government power. Yet, over time “public” education came to mean government education subsidized by taxpayers controlled by the government. In this sense, public education is an oxymoron. Machen put this presciently in 1934:

Every lover of human freedom ought to oppose with all his might the giving of federal aid to the schools of this country; for federal aid in the long run inevitably means federal control, and federal control means control by a centralized and irresponsible bureaucracy, and control by such a bureaucracy means the death of everything that might make this country great.

Who can argue with this after 90 years of hindsight. Rushdoony further makes our point, writing in 1961:

The public school is now unmistakably a state school, and its concept of education is inevitably statist. This is apparent in various ways. First of all, education has ceased to be a responsibility of the home and has become a responsibility of the state. . . . the state still claims sole right to determine the nature, extent, and time of education. Thus, a basic family right has been destroyed and the state’s control over the child asserted.

It cannot be both state and family, only either/or. And this is not just an argument for liberty over against government tyranny, but a fundamentally religious question. Secular neutrality is a myth, and American public schools are the establishment of a secular religion in the guise of religious neutrality. Joe Boot explains:

We can clearly see . . . that neither the structure within which we educate, nor the purpose for which we educate, nor the content by which we educate, can be neutral.

Doug Wilson states why this an indisputable fact:

Education is fundamentally religious. Consequently, there is no question about whether a morality will be imposed in that education, but rather which morality will be imposed. Christians and assorted traditionalists who want a secular school system to instill anything other than secular ethics are wanting something that has never happened and can never happen.

He further asserts that public or “common schools were going to be the means by which the entire progressive agenda was ushered in.” Progressive in the twenty-first century is nothing like the early progressives imagined, but in hindsight it’s easy to see how secular progressive education paved the way for a takeover of education by cultural Marxists.

Does this mean that what we know as public education needs to be “abolished,” to borrow from Marx? Yes! School choice may be a good stopgap measure to take away some of the monopoly power of the government, but it is only temporary. It follows from the biblical imperative of the familial responsibility of the educating children, that it must be completely private and divorced from government at any level. Government money always brings with it government influence. Education is a worldview enterprise, and in America parents should be free to decide in what worldview they want their children educated.

What that looks like and how we get there I don’t know. I only know this should be the objective of any Christian who understands the incompatibility of Christianity with any other worldview in the educating of children. In the meantime as we work toward this, I believe that charter classical schools are a critical means to challenging the secular progressive monopoly on education.

The Rise of Progressive Education in America
Having made the case for the complete familial responsibility of the education of children, let’s look at how modern education came to be so horribly modernly horrible.

Conservatives have been complaining about public education for a long time. In fact, a popular book called Why Johnny Can’t Read—And What You Can Do About It came out in 1955. Some people think the 1950s was the golden age of conservatism. It wasn’t. That decade continued the consequences of secular progressivism in American culture, even if the effects were masked by leftover conservative Christian cultural influence. Education was a fundamental part of the progressive vision of transforming America into a “modern” democracy based on “scientific” principles among other things, and progressives paved the way for what has become the Marxification of education in the 21st century.

Progressive education goes back well before there was a progressive movement in America to the influence of Horace Mann (1796-1859), considered the father of American public schools. As a reformer, he convinced Americans they should pay for public, or “common,” schools, and established the Massachusetts State Board of Education. According to Britannica, Mann “believed that, in a democratic society, education should be free and universal, nonsectarian, democratic in method, and reliant on well-trained professional teachers.” We can see immediately from a Christian perspective this is a non-starter, yet not only did it start, but in due course this perspective took over education in America. Nonsectarian eventually became in practice the progressive secular religion.

To reiterate, there can be no such thing as a “nonsectarian” education because education is fundamentally religious and always inculcates a worldview in the children being educated. Also, there is no such thing as free education. In practice, free always means someone else pays. There is no constitutional right in America to insist that other Americans pay for my children’s education, or that I pay for theirs. Yet by the twentieth century this became an unquestioned dogma, and if challenged, charges from the left erupted like a volcano, hot and fast.

Doug Wilson tells how these reformers were uniformly hostile to orthodox Christianity. Many were Unitarians, the number one Christian heresy of the day. As he points out, the local government schools were mostly run by Christians who had no idea the true intent of the reformers above them. If the communities were Evangelical, so were the schools, but the secular progressive die was cast. He writes of one nineteenth century Cassandra, R.L. Dabney (1820-1898), whose prophecies of the inevitable consequences proved true. Dabney wrote:

We have seen that their [the schools’] complete secularization is logically inevitable. Christians must prepare themselves then, for the following results: All prayer, catechisms, and Bibles will ultimately be driven out of the schools.

At the behest of radical atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair, the Supreme Court in 1962 basically outlawed prayer in public schools—nonsectarian indeed.

Arguably, the Olympic champion of progressive education was John Dewey (1859-1952) who was passionate about “democracy,” and education as the way to achieve it. Cultural transformation starts with education, and the torrent of secular, progressive ideas like a rushing river had a momentum by the late nineteenth century that would not be stopped. The basic outline of Dewey’s influence is found in the word progressive itself; it had to be different than whatever came before, and unfortunately it was. Prior to the progressive era, education in America was basically classical. Progressives believed “classical” was against “progress,” so it had to go. Here is a smattering of Dewey’s ideas:

  • Education should promote the practical over the abstract.
  • Experience was the great teacher, and the scientific method the primary source of knowledge.
  • The idea of “public” should replace the “individual.”
  • Traditional religion, i.e., Christianity, is an obstacle to true education and progress.
  • Human nature is not fixed but can be changed via education.
  • Traditional classrooms stifle a child’s curiosity, creativity, and excitement for learning.
  • Discipline or correction is not a teacher’s duty, but rather to understand and follow a student’s interest and impulses.
  • The utility of ideas is what makes them important.
  • Education is not primarily about academics or morality, but societal change.
  • Goals and standards are harmful to a child’s motivation.
  • Pedagogy must be a discipline apart from subject matter and methodology over content.

Henry T. Edmondson summarizes Dewey’s influence well:

Thanks in no small part to Dewey, much of what characterizes contemporary education is a revolt against various expressions of authority: a revolt against a canon of learning, a revolt against tradition, a revolt against religious values, a revolt against moral standards, a revolt against logic—even a revolt against grammar and spelling.

And a mighty successful revolt it has been! But now there is a counter revolt happening as the poverty of progressive education and its Marxist progeny becomes impossible to ignore. I mentioned James Lindsey and his book, The Marxification of Education above. If you want to see how Marxism in the guise of woke infiltrated K-12 public schools, and many private schools as well, I would highly suggest reading his book.

As with the Enlightenment and it’s offshoot, secularism in the form of progressive education and now Marxification, i.e. woke, took a long time, hundreds of years, to get us here. It will take a long time to turn around, but it’s starting and gaining momentum. When I was growing up, home schooling and classical education didn’t exist, now it’s everywhere. Christians are waking up to the realization that we can’t entrust our kids to the secular, woke indoctrination factories of so called public education. It will be hard for many Christian families to break out of “free” public schools, but the church needs to take seriously the need for that to happen. I trust that will become a more prevalent topic of conversation in the years to come.

Paganism, Telos, and Re-Establishing Christendom

Paganism, Telos, and Re-Establishing Christendom

As Christians, our understanding of the world goes back several thousand years to the creation narrative in Genesis, and God calling Abram out of Ur of the Chaldeans, out from his pagan world to become a people of God. Telos, the Greek word for purpose, is critically important for how we understand both creation and history, and both are critically important for our battle against the forces of secularism to re-establish Christendom in the generations to come. I will start with history because it’s easier to grasp, then discuss teleology in creation after we get our biblical historical bearings.

Do you ever ask yourself how we got here? As the late great Rush Limbaugh used to say all the time, most of us think history started when we were born. I hate to break it to you, but none of us are that important. Before I get into a bit of theology and philosophy, I need to establish a Christian understanding of history. That’s not as simple as it sounds. History is stuff that happened, right? Well, yes and no. Most historians agree that certain historical events happened, by they disagree wildly on what those events mean, and why and how certain events lead to other events in the flow of history. All history, in other words, needs to be interpreted, and all interpreters are human beings with limits of knowledge and insight and wisdom. These human beings are also sinners, which brings up fundamental assumptions these people hold about the nature of reality. Such assumptions cannot be escaped, and thus will determine how we interpret history. As Christians, we must interpret history as Christians, which means our assumptions will inescapably be different than non-Christians. Let’s find out just how different.

A Biblical Teleological View of History
Like most Christians influenced by secularism, I’ve tended to see history and events like hurricanes, just happening and who knows which way either will go. In September 2022 when Hurricane Ian was tracking toward where we live in the Tampa area, I had to remind myself it is God alone who determines where it goes, not mere “natural” forces. Regarding history, we too must often must remind ourselves God directs all events, past, present, and future. As David says in his great doxology to Yahweh, the Lord, the God of Israel, He is “the ruler of all things” (I Chron. 29:10-13).

A proper Christian providential theology of history is captured by Daniel when God revealed to him Nebuchadnezzar’s Dream (Daniel 2). Grateful he and his buddies would not be killed, he proclaims the greatness of our God, the author and perfecter not only of our faith (Heb. 12:2), but of all history:

Then Daniel praised the God of heaven 20 and said:

“Praise be to the name of God for ever and ever;
wisdom and power are his.
21 He changes times and seasons;
he deposes kings and raises up others.
He gives wisdom to the wise
and knowledge to the discerning.

In Daniel 4, after Nebuchadnezzar’s sanity was restored, this pagan king of Babylon also couldn’t help coming to the same conclusion as Daniel the Hebrew prophet. The Old Testament affirms this continually. When we come to the New Testament, our providential understanding of history should be intensified by the death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus, Israel’s Messiah and the Savior of the world. The Apostles Creed declares our belief in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth, and then we affirm of the second person of the Trinity:

I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord,
who was conceived by the Holy Spirit
and born of the virgin Mary.
He suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, died, and was buried;
he descended to hell.
The third day he rose again from the dead.
He ascended to heaven
and is seated at the right hand of God the Father almighty.
From there he will come to judge the living and the dead.

We Evangelicals do not pay enough attention to Christ’s ascension. In the ancient world the one who sat at the right hand of the king shared his kingly authority and power. In this case, Jesus has the ultimate position of power and authority in the universe. We find this in Ephesians 1, the crowning New Testament rationale for the confidence of Daniel and Nebuchadnezzar in God’s providence. We cannot overemphasize the theological and providential implications of Christ’s ascension, and Paul tells us why. Speaking of the surpassing greatness of the power for those who trust the Lord Jesus, he says:

That power is the same as the mighty strength 20 he exerted when he raised Christ from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly realms, 21 far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every name that is invoked, not only in the present age but also in the one to come. 22 And God placed all things under his feet and appointed him to be head over everything for the church, 23 which is his body, the fullness of him who fills everything in every way.

This is not only the rule and authority of material creation, but over beings spiritual and mortal that exercise rule and authority and power and dominion—over all of them. Many Christians quote Paul’s declaration in Ephesians 6:12: “For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.” But it is critical to quote this in the context of the passage in Ephesians 1. Nothing happens that Christ doesn’t permit or cause to happen; his rule is sovereign and absolute.

I tended, however, to see this passage eschatologically when Christ comes to consummate all things in him. It’s more difficult to grasp that Jesus has all this power now and is using it in this world, in space and time, for the advancement of his kingdom and ultimately for his church. This has implications beyond the church, though, which is why Paul tells us Jesus’ kingly rule is for present age, as well as in the one to come.

Linear versus Teleological View of History
Once we accept God’s providential control over history, we need to have some idea how it works out in actual history, as in what the implications are for events themselves.

Prior to “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen. 1), all ancient peoples viewed time cyclically, a perpetual wheel endlessly turning going nowhere. One of the most profound changes Jews brought to the ancient world was the conception of time and history. This change started when God called Abram to go from Ur of the Chaldeans to the land of Canaan, by faith he left everything he knew and the world was forever changed. History going somewhere, forward, in a different direction was now possible.

We tend to think the contrast to the cyclical view of history is linear, a line going straight in one direction from A to B. That, however, is not the biblical understanding of history. If we’ve learned anything from thousands of years of recorded history, it’s anything but straight. It zigs and zags all over the place, backward, forward, and sideways. Biblically, the contrast to cyclical isn’t linear but teleological, meaning the end is bound up in the events themselves. History is going somewhere, every event leading to God’s appointed end regardless of what it may look like on the surface. This means there are no throwaway events in history, things that just happen. Every event has teleological significance whether we think we can see it or not. Too often we presume that we can. There are many times looking back in history, or at current events, or even in our own lives, when this is difficult to swallow. The most common question in all of history attests to this, “Why, God?” It just doesn’t make any sense. . . . to us.

As Christians, our fundamental assumption about history is what Jesus revealed in Luke 24 as the ultimate biblical hermeneutical principal—that the entire Old Testament was about him. But it isn’t just the Old Testament. The same hermeneutical principle applies for all history: we interpret it all according to God’s revealed word. Because of this, we can no longer look at the past, present, and future, and all events contained therein, in any other way. They are all ultimately about Jesus in some way, unless we have some other interpretive non-biblical framework for history, to which we turn next.

The Secular View of History
Those who don’t have a biblical and thus providential view of history will by default have a secular one. Even though there are variations on the secular view, a strictly God-less interpretation of history means there is no overarching narrative, no telos, or purpose, to history. Things happen randomly. If there is no God ordaining and guiding history providentially, we’re forced to conclude it is but chance and agree with Macbeth at the death of his wife:

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time.
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle.
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Typical of Shakespeare, it could not be said any better. However, given we cannot escape living in God’s created universe no matter how hard sinful humanity insists otherwise, chance has never proved a satisfying explanation, for anything. We also live with thousands of years of the influence of Judaism and Christianity, so the teleological view of history can’t be completely escaped. Which brings us to Hegel.

German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) is the father of historicism, which is a teleological view of history without God—well, without a God any of us might recognize. As a child of the Enlightenment, Hegel could not believe in a personal God who ordains history according to His will. Instead, for him God was history itself as the unfolding of a World-Spirit. Hegel’s writing is inscrutable, but it made sense to a lot of other philosophers and intellectuals, including one Karl Marx. Historicism is in effect a bastardization of the Christian idea of God’s providence, and a competing assumption on how we interpret history. The takeaway from Historicism is that it strips human beings of agency, that we can change things and alter the course of history. The World Spirit is impersonal and deterministic. We’re basically cogs in the World Spirit Machine. In the Christian view, human beings have real agency, they can change things even though God ordains and is in control of all things.

While most modern Americans and Westerners are not Hegelian per se, his influence can be seen in their assuming history is the story of inevitable “progress,” an idea baked into the historical cake. A driving assumption is that things just naturally get better because as secularism teaches, we went from ancient superstition and “the dark ages” to Enlightenment and science.

Therefore, we have three options for how we interpret history, the biblical providential view of a sovereign ordaining God, or the two secular options, a historicist view a la Hegel, or chance. That’s it. There are no other options when it comes to interpreting the events of the past, the present, or the future. Agnosticism is not an option. As Orwell said in 1984, “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” For our purposes, whoever defines history defines the present and the future. These are not just academic questions debated in ivory towers, but questions the answers to which will affect everything about our lives and the generations to come.

The Importance of Telos in Creation
As we’ve seen, our assumptions about history will determine how we interpret history. The same can be said about creation, or what people today refer to as “nature.” I no longer use the word nature because it is loaded with Darwinian assumptions, and as we saw with history, assumptions determine interpretation. So what has telos, or purpose, to do with creation. Only everything!

Way back in the Middle Ages, a brilliant scholar and monk, William of Ockham (1287-1347), developed what in philosophy is called nominalism, and having some understanding of it will help us grasp the importance of telos in creation. These are very deep philosophical waters in which to swim, so we’ll only get our toes wet. Bear with me and its importance will become apparent.

Richard Weaver in his book, Ideas Have Consequences, believed nominalism was “the best representative of a change which came over man’s conception of reality.” He argued the seeds of this move to the subjective (meaning, we think our perspective is reality itself) goes back to nominalism. Ockham rejected the idea of universals, a concept developed by ancient Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle. Very simply put, nominalism contends that things only have meaning because of the names we attach to them (Latin nomen). What does this mean in practice?

Over time this led to empiricism, or the idea that knowledge can only be attained via sense experience. In due course experience came to be viewed as ultimately authoritative, and as the only thing that really counts. As a result, personal preferences become sovereign, and people tend to deny any authority exists outside of the self. In other words, all meaning exists inside, not outside of them. This connects directly to how nominalism affected our perspective on creation, and in due course destroyed the possibility of telos in God’s created order, what people mean whey they say “nature.

There are numerous deleterious implications of a nominalist perspective, but one is that we no longer see the created world imbued this its own meaning and purpose, or telos. Nature, as we see it through a secular lens, no longer has an end to which it works. It just is. We’ll use the most common of things in human experience, dogs, to illustrate this. Since nominalism rejects universals, there is no such thing as “dogness,” only things that have dog qualities we call dogs so we don’t confuse them with cats, for instance. Think of a dog like you think of puffy clouds that take the shape of a dog. it may look like a dog, but we know it’s only a bunch of moisture particles condensed in the air that just happened at that moment to take the shape of a dog. Nominalism does the same thing with atoms of matter. There really is no such thing as the universal dogs, only matter that by chance just fell together and there were these things we call dogs for convenience, so we don’t confuse them with other animals.

Again, as I said, these are deep philosophical waters, but we in the modern world are drowning in these waters, and God is throwing us a life raft called telos in creation. Once Darwin came along, evolutionists rejected any kind of telos or purpose in nature, in matter itself. Matter just fell together without any guidance from an outside source, and out popped dogs! And everything else. There’s nothing behind the matter but . . . . more matter. In my favorite metaphor, there are only puzzle pieces and no puzzle, so no bigger picture, universals, to give the pieces, the particulars, any meaning. Here’s the takeaway: the individual pieces can only be given ultimate meaning from the bigger picture. If we only see pieces in isolation, we will get a distorted picture of everything. Welcome to the modern world in 2024! No wonder we are in the middle of a Great Awakening. People are tired of nominalism, so to speak, tired of the puzzle pieces without the big picture, and the resulting confusion. They’re exhausted.

To show the practical implications of this concept, let’s finish this with an example as simple as it is relevant; human sexuality. If human beings are merely a collocation, an arrangement, of atoms or matter and that is all, then male and female don’t actually exist. Simply put, the concepts of maleness and femaleness are malleable, can be changed on a whim by rearranging some of the matter. Same with sexual organs. If bodily orifices are just so much matter with no inherent telos or purpose, then we can do whatever we want with them, pleasure and preference is all. If homosexuality floats your boat, knock yourself out. If, on the other hand, God’s creation is filled with the purpose he gave it at creation, then we look at it all completely differently. We try to find the meaning outside of us, in the things themselves, to discern their purpose, which leads to human flourishing because we’re using things as they were designed to be used! It’s incredible how simple it is, yet sinful rebellious humans want to “be like God” and call the shots. Telos says, they . . . . don’t . . . . get . . . . to!

Culture and Making America Christian Again

Culture and Making America Christian Again

When I started writing my latest book in early 2022, I knew it would be about the Great Awakening happening all around us, and along the way it also became about the re-founding of America. I didn’t realize until a little later into the journey, specifically after I embrace postmillennialism in August of 2022, that Making America Christian Again was the only way America could truly be RE-founded. The book is an historical analysis of how we got our post-Christian 21st century secular America from our founding as a deeply Christian enterprise with a ubiquitous Protestant Christian culture. Without Christianity again becoming the dominant ethos and plausibility structure of the nation, a re-founding will not happen. Which means without America rejecting secularism and embracing its Christian roots, it cannot be the constitutional republic conceived in liberty it once was.

I first heard Joshua Haymes of the Reformation Red Pill Podcast use the phrase, Make America Christian Again, and it perfectly encapsulated in a Trumpian way what I’d been hearing among my new post-mill compatriots. This gets into discussions of the divisive phrase, Christian nationalism, and the even more divisive concept of theonomy, or God’s law over the nation. But those are meaningless concepts and useless discussions without a Christian culture undergirding them. We must work on parallel tracks as we seek to rebuild a Christian America, studying and debating and thinking through exactly what this will look like, but developing a Christian culture is a prerequisite if a Christian America is to even be a possibility.

It’s All About Culture
Culture is a people’s religion externalized. However a people answer ultimate questions of life and death, purpose and meaning, will affect not only how they live, but how they perceive everything in the lives they live. American culture, and the West in general, is secular, God is persona non grata, unwelcome at the societal table. He may or may not exist, but either way He is an invisible, unimportant God, irrelevant to everyday life. This is the driving assumption underlying the secular worldview, and it’s doleful consequences are everywhere. In The Book that Made Your World: How the Bible Created the Soul of Western Civilization, Vishal Mangalwadi puts this succinctly:

Every civilization is tied together by a final source of authority that gives meaning and ultimate intellectual, moral, and social justification to its culture.

The final source of authority in a secular culture is man and his reason, the poisonous fruit of Enlightenment rationalism. Unfortunately, Christianity played along with the rise of secularism in Western culture through the influence of Pietism, a German Lutheran movement in the 17th century, which was a not unreasonable response to a dry, scholastic theology coming out of the Reformation. It was also a perfect example of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. What made Pietism the ultimate disaster in the demise of Christendom was an over spiritualized Gnostic dualism it created in practice. All this means is that most Christians today effectively live in a two story reality (dualism). Upstairs is the important, spiritual stuff, like prayer, church, evangelism, Bible reading etc., while downstairs is every day mundane life, which is not as important, and above all, not “spiritual.”

The is a profoundly unbiblical and destructive take on Christianity, one that has allowed secularism to grow and dominate the culture, which is why I’ve argued that Pietism and secularism are two sides of the same coin. Most Christians see the purpose of Christianity as being saved so when we die we go to heaven, and while on earth practice and grow in personal holiness. This is a terribly truncated, narrow, and distorted view of Christianity. Before we see why, let’s take a look at culture, what it is, and why it’s so important. As Christians, we must think about culture biblically, as opposed to sociologically or anthropologically. In other words, how do we as Christians define culture differently than non‑Christians. 

A Biblical Take on Culture
Christians start with the Bible, God’s story about his relationship with the human race, and not with something called culture somehow existing independently of His story. The Bible has no word for culture, thus, no definition of it, but we can say culture is the imprint human beings put on God’s creation. In the Genesis 1 and 2 creation account, we find something we now called the “cultural mandate.” Human beings are commanded to govern God’s creation:

God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”

But it is the prior two verses that gives the cultural mandate its true power:

Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.” So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.

The significance of the Imago Dei (the image of God in man) for the Christian worldview cannot be overstated. We are God’s visible representatives on earth! We reflect his likeness and attributes in every aspect of our human faculties, be it moral, intellectual, relational, practical, etc. All of these attributes contribute to creating culture. God commands Adam and Eve to act (be fruitful, fill, subdue, rule), and these commands define the essential purposes of human existence. Reformed theologian and philosopher John Frame had this to say in a lecture on Christianity and Culture:

Why did God give this command to Adam and Eve? Well, for the same reason, ultimately, he does everything else: for his own glory. God’s glory is that beautiful, intense light that shines out from him when he makes himself visible to human beings. [He] wanted Adam’s family to spread that glory through the whole world. Adam was not to rule merely for himself, but for God, glorifying God in all he did. So culture is based on a divine command. Adam must develop culture because that is God’s desire. Culture is for God’s sake. So it is subject to God’s commands, God’s desires, God’s norms, God’s values. 

I will add that this God orientation is the only way culture and the people in it can truly flourish.

I may create a beautiful piece of art or music, or build a magnificent building, or tell a moving story in words or film, or plant a garden, or do any number of mundane things, but all of these reflect the glory, greatness, power, and knowledge of the living God! All human creations ultimately point back to him. Obviously the efficient cause, i.e., me, deserves recognition, but the point is that every created thing, whether in the natural world or culture, reflects God himself. Nothing is trivial. It doesn’t matter if the person or people doing a thing are Christians or not, for they too are made in God’s image. Just because they are blind to his glory, try to suppress His knowledge and take the glory for themselves, doesn’t mean God is silenced.

There are significant apologetics implications (i.e., evidence for the veracity of Christianity being true) for a proper biblical understanding of culture which play a critical role in re-Christianizing the culture. The importance of cultural apologetics (culture is the evidence) cannot be overstated in its implications for re-Christianizing and refounding America on its foundational principles. There isn’t space to get into this in detail, but contrary to the doomers who bemoan the debauchery of the hostile secular culture, the culture is our best friend. In my first book, The Persuasive Christian Parent, I have a section with exactly that title, and show how I used our non-Christian secular culture to ground our children’s faith. The reason has to do with culture being a reflection of man made in God’s image, and the topic we turn to next. 

Culture and The Fall
Six times in Genesis 1 God says his work was good, and caps it off with a “very good.” When we engage culture, we aren’t simply making meaning, but responding to meaning woven into creation. We are taking that meaning‑filled creation and reshaping it in our hands, or responding to others who have, thus culture is fundamentally a religious pursuit. This means there is no neutral position relative to ultimate meaning as we interact with the culture. As I said above, culture is a people’s religion externalized. Because of the fall, man mars culture even as his distorted products of culture glorify God. This reflection of the disease of the human heart, i.e., sin, suffering, and death must be explained. As I’ve often said, if all we are is matter, merely lucky dirt, then life is basically a Woody Allen movie. His is always in a futile pursuit of meaning, hope, purpose, and fulfillment outside of Christ, and he expects the vacuum in his soul to be filled by created things rather than the Creator. All his movies end in resignation, and you can see this futile pursuit etched in his sad face.

So, an example like Woody Allen shows how all human works can be distorted by man’s disobedience to God. This is the tension that exists in all culture, but God doesn’t leave man in his sin. Immediately after the Fall, God promises redemption (Gen. 3:15). Adam and Eve realize they are naked, and they are ashamed. So taking things into their own hands, they try to sew fig leaves together to cover themselves. And when God comes calling “in the cool of the day,” what do they do? They hide. Their covering didn’t do the job. After they get through with all the excuse making, and God shares with them the promise that the woman’s offspring “will crush” the serpent’s head, we have what is possibly the first sacrifice in history. “The Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them.” From that moment on, all history is one long story of human beings furiously sewing fig leaves to try to cover themselves from God’s wrath and judgment, and earn his favor; it doesn’t work. Instead the Lord sacrifices himself because no other sacrifice will do the job! Human beings reflect this salvific drama in everything they do, including in the stories they tell, and in whatever they make.

H. Richard Niebuhr’s seminal work Christ and Culture is a good overview of the ambivalence Christians have had with culture since Pentecost. He looks at certain Christians through the ages, and how they thought Christians should interact with culture. He divides them into five broad types or approaches:

  • Christ against Culture
  • Christ of Culture
  • Christ above Culture
  • Christ and Culture in Paradox
  • Christ Transforming Culture

Christians have negotiated their interaction with a fallen world in a variety of ways, and maybe all these approaches in some way at the same time. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, conservative Protestant Christianity in America, however, slowly came to embrace a version of the Christ against culture approach. With the rise of a truly biblical postmillennialism in the 21st century, in contrast to a secular progressive postmillennialism of the 19th and early 20th century, Christ transforming culture is again becoming the dominant view among Protestant, especially Reformed, Christians. If we are to make America Christian again, we must recapture the Reformation and Puritan vision of Christ the transformer of culture.   

Professions of Cultural Influence, Plausibility Structures, and MACA
If America is to become Christian again, that will be fundamentally a cultural change. As conservatives were finally starting to understand the primacy of culture, as the late great Andrew Breitbart famously said, politics is downstream from culture. Politics and the laws of a country in its own way creates culture, but the politics and laws of a country will never fundamentally contradict the dominant cultural ethos of the people. In 21st century America, that cultural ethos is thoroughly secular. Too many Christians either ignore this or don’t understand the power of it. Whatever that cultural ethos is, is that culture’s plausibility structure, and understanding this concept is critically important.

What is plausible is what seems true and real to us, and the societal structures we inhabit determine for us what is plausible or not. For those who uncritically navigate the culture, their perspective is assumed to be just the way things are. It is the fundamental plausibility structures of culture that must eventually be changed if we’re to ever redirect the massive ship of American culture to true north, i.e., Jesus, God’s word and Law. I will address two issues related to this, abortion and homosexuality. Both of these issues are accepted as normal in a secular culture, and rejected as sinful in a Christian one.

If we are ever to get there, we must understand professions of cultural influence. When I first became aware of the power and dominance of culture in 2007, conservatives were still obsessed with politics thinking somehow if we got the right people elected, the culture would become more conservative as well. It doesn’t work that way. It is a two way street, but fundamentally, culture drives a nation’s laws and how it is governed. So the question is, how do we change the culture? It will not come primarily from changing the laws, even as we attempt to change laws. This is why John Adams, no raging Evangelical, famously said,

Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

The Founders believed it was the Christian religion and Christian morality of a providentially ordaining God that made the American experiment possible. To them, a secular America would have been a contradiction in terms.

This brings us to professions of cultural influence, something conservatives have basically been clueless about. James Davison Hunter in his book, To Change the World, argues that,

[T]he deepest and most enduring forms of cultural change nearly always occur from the “top down.” In other words, the work of the world‑making and world‑changing are, by and large, the work of elites: gatekeepers who provide creative direction and management within spheres of social life. This capacity is not evenly distributed in a society, but is concentrated in certain institutions and among certain leadership groups who have a lopsided access to the means of cultural production. These elites operate in well‑developed networks and powerful institutions.

These networks and institutions include, but are not limited to, education, Hollywood and entertainment, and the media. These three broad areas are the most powerful worldview and plausibility structure generators. As Hunter states further, cultural change, or influence for our purposes, “is most enduring when it penetrates the structure of our imagination, frameworks of knowledge and discussion, the perception of everyday reality.” Shaping reality happens primarily from the top down, not the bottom up, and as long as a secular worldview dominates the profession of cultural influence, Christians are spitting into the wind if the think the moral framework of our laws will change.

Too many Christians, unfortunately, seem to think spitting into the wind is a strategy. On Twitter I come across Christians often who declare that abortion is murder and women should be prosecuted as any other murderer would be. Or they declare sodomy should be illegal, some going further say homosexuals should be executed. Such sentiments in the real world are meaningless, not to mention unpersuasive to most people, because we live in a representative republic. That means we have to persuade our fellow citizens that Christianity and God’s law is the only source of true human flourishing, and then elect legislators who will pass laws that will be signed by the state’s or country’s chief executive.

If we truly want to make America Christian again, we need to understand it is a complex, multifaceted, difficult, and generational enterprise. It will only happen if we play the long game. As Christians we have something to learn from the history of cultural Marxism and the rise of woke in our day. Their “long march through the institutions” started in the early 1920s, and it took almost a hundred years for their perverted vision to dominate the culture. As we contemplate the future I say to my fellow Christians, we need to be as patient, persistent, diligent, and determined as the Marxists. We are building cathedrals we will never worship in, and planting trees the fruit of which we shall never eat. Thus we work as if it depends on us, and pray because it depends on God.

 

Nietzsche and Why It’s OK to Eat Your Neighbor

Nietzsche and Why It’s OK to Eat Your Neighbor

I bet you never thought cannibalism and Nietzsche would go together, but they do, quite nicely. I might never have put those two together, but I heard Gary DeMar discuss his book, Why It Might Be OK to Eat Your Neighbor, on his podcast. This subtitle gives us the apologetics focus of the book: If Atheism is Right Can Anything Be Wrong?

I’ll start with my own question. What sets Christianity apart from every other religion and worldview and philosophy on earth?

The answer is as simple as it is profound: It is true, and everything else is not.

If it is not true, as Paul says about the resurrection, we are to be pitied more than all people. That I believed Christianity is the ultimate truth about the nature of reality is the only reason I became a Christian way back in the fall of 1978, exactly 46 years ago as I write this. At the time I couldn’t tell you why I believed it was true, but God seemed entirely too obvious to dismiss. Growing up Catholic I was, thankfully, given a Christian worldview, and the reality I experienced as a teenager for me confirmed that worldview. So, when I was presented the gospel in a college Dorm room in Best Hall at Arizona State University, I believed it immediately. It would be a couple years before I would get my introduction to apologetics, or the defense of the Christian faith.

If you’re not familiar with that term, you should be. We live in a post-Christian thoroughly secular culture that tells us in ways big and small, overtly and covertly, that Christianity is not the truth, but one spiritual option among many and all of them are valid. Well, no they are not, which I’ll get to in a moment. First the word, apologetics. We get the word from Peter in chapter 3 of his first epistle:

15 But in your hearts revere Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect . . . .

The word for defense in Greek, apologia-ἀπολογία, means “a verbal defense (particularly in a law court).” This means Peter is commanding his readers, and by extension every Christian throughout all time, to not only know what we believe, but why we believe it. Apologetics, as the theological discipline of defending the veracity of Christianity is called, is not just for certain Christians of an intellectual bent. If you can’t tell your friends or family members why you believe Christianity is the truth, then you need to get to work and invest some time in figuring that out. The resources today online are endless, as are books and articles easily available. Before I get to Nietzsche, I came across a short clip on Twitter that is a great illustration about why apologetics is so necessary even as it is so rare among Christians.

Kid Rock was on Joe Rogan’s podcast which is viewed or listened to by 10 to 15 million people, and Rogan asks the Kid if he could go back in history where he would go, and Rock says, “Jesus.” Rogan asks him why he believes it and Rock says . . . . faith. We need to get Kid Rock some training in apologetics because he obviously he believes in Christianity for the exact same reason I did and do, it’s the truth, but all he could say is, faith, that he just believes it. There is so much evidence for the veracity of Christianity, historical, textual, philosophical, archeological, that Rock could have spent hours telling Rogan exactly why he believes Christianity is the truth.

The Nature of Faith
Which brings us to faith. Many people today in our secular world think of faith as a specifically religious word for believing in something just because you want to, but that is a shallow modern definition of faith. In fact, faith is something we use every day of our lives or we wouldn’t get out of bed. I define faith as trust based on adequate evidence, thus faith is not a specifically religious concept. Faith basically means trust, and when we exercise faith we generally do it with justified warrant. That is, there is enough evidence to justify putting my trust in something or someone.

Think of driving down a two‑lane road going 50 miles per hour, and another car coming toward you at the same speed. That’s a closure rate of 100 miles per hour. If the other car swerves into your lane, there will be a lot of damage. And maybe death. How do you know that car will stay on its side of the road? You don’t; you have faith that it will. What evidence do you have for such trust? You know that people generally stay on their side of the road. You trust that the person driving the vehicle has a license and got adequate training to operate several thousand pounds of metal at high speed. You trust that the state does a good job of policing its roads. And so on. Do you know any of this? Nope. How about the food you eat? Will it kill you? Do you know it won’t? Nope. How about the dentist or doctor you see? Do you know they won’t harm you? Nope.

This is a discussion about epistemology, or the study of knowing and knowledge. I challenge a specific definition of knowing: that to “know” a thing is to be absolutely certain about it, and that we can only “know” via our reason. Rene Descartes (1596‑1650) was the philosopher who introduced the poison of equating knowledge with absolute certainty in Western thought. If you’re familiar with my work, you’ll know Descartes appears often, maybe too often, but he was a fulcrum point of Western culture from Christian to post-Christian secular culture. It would take several hundred years for this bacillus to infect the entire culture, but in the 21st century secularism is the default worldview. So to average Westerners, like Kid Rock and Joe Rogan, faith equals religion because it’s not something that can be known with absolute certainty, like science or the laws of nature, math, etc., things you can observe and measure.

I’ve noticed over the years many Christians are the mirror image of atheists in this regard. They tend to think absolute certainty is necessary to justify their beliefs, and thus they deny what is obvious: they are finite. It almost seems silly for me to write that sentence. Who would not admit they are finite, limited in every way imaginable? Daniel Taylor writes about the downside of demanding certainty in his book, The Myth of Certainty:

Ironically, the insistence on certainty destroys its very possibility. The demand for certainty inevitably creates its opposite—doubt. Doubt derives its greatest strength from those who fear it most. Unwisely glorified as the primary way to truth by many secularists, it is equally unwisely feared by many in Christendom as truth’s mortal enemy.

Such an unhealthy fear of doubt is what happens when you base your epistemology on a false anthropology and psychology, i.e., that human reason is capable of achieving knowledge of an absolute sort. There is only one being who has such knowledge and certainty, and He would be the Creator of it all.

The implication of this is that there is no such thing as an unbeliever, and thus everyone lives by faith. One of my pet peeves is Christians calling people believers and unbelievers. The word “believers” is all over Acts, but Luke and those he was writing to and who read it knew exactly who he was talking about, Christians. We, on the other hand live in a post-Christian secular culture so using the phrase believer/unbeliever allows secular people, like Joe Rogan, to think faith is just a religious thing. As of yet he can’t muster up the faith to become a Christian, not realizing he’s a person of faith every bit as much as a Christian. Which brings us to . . . .

 

It’s a cookbook!!!

Since all people live by faith, the only reason cannibalism doesn’t exist anymore is faith, specifically the Christian faith. Secular people fail to realize moral values, what they consider right and wrong, come from faith, come from some belief of some people somewhere. Of course, most people never give this a second thought, it just is. As an easy example, they think obviously slavery is wrong. They think, isn’t it obvious owning another human being is evil? Well, no, it’s actually not obvious at all. In fact, for all of recorded history until very recently (the 19th century), slavery was a common fact of everyday life for people all over the earth. The reason there is nothing in the New Testament about the evils of slavery and calls for its abolition is because it was obvious to everyone at the time that slavery was a normal part of human existence. Paul implies it is good for slaves to get their freedom, but never indicates slavery is a moral wrong.

That only happened in due course because as it became apparent Jesus wasn’t returning as soon as Christians had hoped, church leaders and Christian thinkers realized they had to grapple with the implications of the Christian faith for society. These implications were profound because the competing moral system of the day was paganism. In fact, even as enlightened and brilliant as the ancient Greeks were, they were still polytheistic pagans. Aristotle, for example, believed women and slaves were inferior beings and deserved their lesser status in life. To say to any ancient person prior to the diffusion of Christianity throughout the world that all human beings were ontologically equal would have been considered absurd. Very few modern people in the West (which is most of the world at this point), have any idea their entire moral value system of liberalism is built upon Christianity and would not have existed without it. They are fed lies through their secular education and media that this value system is a result of the Enlightenment, but the Enlightenment only came into being because of Christianity.

An important book for Christian apologetics in the 21st century was written by a non-Christian, British historian Tom Holland. It’s called, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World. His story is a fascinating one. He always loved history, and found as he grew up and became a scholar he wanted to learn everything he could about the ancient Greeks and Romans. For various reasons the ancient world appealed to him, but as his career progressed something happened. As he studied the ancient world he realized he had nothing in common with them. In his own words:

It was not just the extremes of callousness that unsettled me, but the complete lack of any sense that the poor or the weak might have the slightest intrinsic value. Why did I find this disturbing? Because, in my morals and ethics, I was not a Spartan or a Roman at all. . . . Assumptions I had grown up with—about how a society should properly be organized, and the principles that it should uphold—were not bred of classical antiquity, still less of ‘human nature’ but very distinctively of that civilization’s Christian past.

Almost every person in the world today fails to realize we’re not cannibals, to use the most extreme example, because of Jesus of Nazareth, who died on a Roman cross, was buried, and whose followers claimed rose bodily, physically from the dead. As Holland adds:

So profound has been the impact of Christianity on the development of Western civilization that it has come to be hidden from view.

As in completely invisible.

The Moral Argument Simplified
Have you ever asked yourself the question, why is anything right or wrong, good or evil? The simple answer is God. In fact, the only answer is God. If atheistic materialism is true, as absurd as that is to contemplate, there can be no right and wrong, good or evil. The reason? If the material is all there is, if all we are is lucky dirt, you can’t get moral values from dirt. Another way of saying it is, you can’t get ought from is. In other words, I cannot infer cannibalism, or slavery, or murder, or adultery, or homosexuality, or lying, or theft, etc., are wrong just from material reality. Certainly, they are unpleasant, or delude us for a time, but we only know they are wrong, and ultimately lead to disaster, because God has revealed it to us, primarily in his word, but also in the created order and our consciences.

If, on the other hand, there is no God, right and wrong, good and evil, are mere preferences, like my preference in ice cream, or which sports teams I support. I once asked my brother-in-law if what we consider good or evil are mere preferences, and he said yes, like almost all modern secular would. So I asked him if Hitler butchering six million Jews was a preference, like whether he liked vanilla or chocolate ice cream. He got kind of a sick look on his face. He immediately intuited that no, choosing to commit genocide on a race of people isn’t like preferring one flavor of ice cream over another. We all know it is morally repugnant, pure evil, because God said so. He declared in the Ten Commandments, “You shall not murder.” Prior to the entire world being Christianized, killing was the preference of the powerful over the weak, and might made right.

And that is the final implication of the moral argument. If there is no God, we cannot escape might makes right, the one with the biggest stick or the biggest gun, or whoever is the strongest, determines what is right and what is wrong. If dirt is all we got, there can be no other appeal. This is why over time Tom Holland became repulsed by the ancient world. If there was no Jesus of Nazareth, nothing would have changed. In fact, as you study the rise of Christianity and the West, you see clearly through the development of the rule of law in England, that the political liberty enjoyed by much of the world today developed only because of Christianity. Because there is a transcendent moral standard, the king and the government were eventually forced into submitting to God through the law. It began with Magna Carta in 1215, eventually reaching fulfillment in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, and developed fully in the founding of America in 1776.

It’s an incredible story, and the moral argument providentially developed in history through the almighty power of the Sovereign God of the Bible turning it into reality. We must build on what God has provided as we battle God-less secularism and raise up Christendom 2.0. from the ashes of the Enlightenment. I’ll finish with the C.S. Lewis quote I use all the time because it says it all:

I believe in Christianity as I believe the sun has risen, not just because I see it but because by it I see everything else.