We were all taught growing up that there is this thing called the separation of church and state. The phrase goes back to a letter Thomas Jefferson wrote to the Danbury Baptists (CT) in 1802 where he mentions a wall between the two. This metaphor of Jefferson was transformed by a Supreme Court case in 1947, Everson v. Board of Education, into a partition not between church and state, but between religion and public life that made the Berlin Wall look like rice paper. Ever since, American secular cultural elites have pushed Christianity ever deeper into the crevices of personal experience, so that any expression of specifically Christian faith is deemed, in an appropriate German word, verboten.
The problem is that secularism is a religion, and congress has done over the last 70 plus years exactly what the first amendment said they cannot do: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” Government run schools, what we know as “public education,” has become a daily indoctrination into the religion of secularism for 50 plus million children. God may be brought up in history, but other than that, he is persona non grata. I can understand this to a degree because secularism historically was a response to the wars of religion Europe experienced over several centuries prior to America’s founding. But God, and specifically the God of the Jewish and Christian religions, was integral to the American founding.
We know this because there is a document called The Declaration of Independence, and because of it America became a sovereign, independent nation. In the Declaration we read these famous words penned by Jefferson himself:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
Just prior to these famous words, Jefferson pens a phrase that established the basis of this Declaration: “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” And he ends his case “with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence.” Without the Creator, Nature’s God, and Divine Providence, there is no independence, there is no America! In other words, the only rationale for the existence of America is God! Yet American secular elites treat God as if he’s an interloper; you let him in the door and everything will go to hell!
Contrary to the revisionist history of the secularists, America as founded is not a “secular republic,” and secularism should not be the established religion of the state, but it is. We must challenge this as unconstitutional, and one place to do that is the growing number charter classical schools. If you are not familiar with classical education, as a Christian you should be. Simply put, classical refers to the classics of ancient Greek, Roman, and Christian/Jewish civilization. None of these peoples were atheists or secularists. God or the gods were an integral part of their societies and their education, and God is an integral part of the American Republic.
America’s Founders were adamant that America could only be successful for good and moral, self-governing people, and without religion that was not possible. At the heart of classical education is the conviction of the objective reality and the importance of the good, the true, and the beautiful. Inherent in these ideas is the concept of telos, the Greek word for purpose. If we don’t know the purpose of a thing, we can’t know if it is good, true, or beautiful. If you see someone using a hammer to tighten a screw, you know what I mean. Classical education teaches that human beings also have a telos, that it is our nature to aspire, and be taught, the good, the true, and the beautiful. Without a virtuous citizenry a totalitarian state is the inevitable result.
Secularism as understood in the West today is a synonym for naturalism, or a God-less reality. The material is assumed to be all there is. In such a reality there can be no telos, no purpose for human beings, no good, true, or beautiful. Classical education, in its Christian or charter forms, is a counter-cultural movement perfectly positioned to challenge the reigning religion of the state, secularism. It doesn’t insist or have to, in its charter forms, on any specific religious doctrine, but it does insist that human beings are not lucky dirt! And that makes all the difference.
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