Education Is Inevitably Religious

I m a full-time public policy analyst, but I write this column as a Christian and as the father of a second-grade son. The views expressed are my own.

In its recent school-prayer decision, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that “school sponsorship of a religious message is impermissible.” With all due respect to Justice Stevens and his concurring brethren, that statement is absurd. Why? Because K-12 education itself is one gigantic exercise in “school sponsorship of a religious message.”

Education – because it deals with ultimate reality, with ideas and values of ultimate importance – is necessarily religious.

Education (duco: I lead) should lead students to answers to some of life’s basic questions: Where did I come from? What is the nature of man? What is truth? What is the meaning of sexuality? What is the meaning of history, and what is my part in it? Educators who pretend the crucial questions can be avoided for 12 years, or can be answered in some “neutral” or “value-free” way, are deceiving themselves.

One cannot separate the “religious” from the “academic,” as if the God of the universe could be placed into a tidy little compartment. Christ will not be marginalized: He is holding the universe together, and in Him are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. He is the central reality, the very I AM. He cannot be finessed.

Every school – public, private or home – will either acknowledge Him or, like Peter, deny Him. The latter choice is senseless, for as former New York Times editor Bob Slosser asks, “How can children be expected to make sense of anything – from science to social studies – if the puzzle always has the central piece missing?”

Religious assumptions will necessarily undergird and suffuse any curriculum. Did He create the world, or not? Is He the architect of history, or does man determine it? Does the government rest upon His shoulder, or not? And on it goes. From anthropology to zoology, education is intrinsically, inescapably religious.

As World magazine’s Joel Belz puts it, both churches and schools “are so profoundly involved with shaping the minds, the hearts, and the souls of their people that it should be all but impossible for someone to draw a line saying where education leaves off and where religion picks up.”

Am I saying then that the public schools should impart the Christian worldview? No. They have neither the authority nor the ability. Besides, Christians shouldn’t use the coercive power of the state to foist our beliefs on others.

But that doesn’t mean the public schools will be devoid of religious messages. Far from it. As Humanist Manifesto signer John Dewey understood, public education is religious – and whether you call the prevailing philosophy humanism, or secularism, or agnosticism, the public schools are soaked through with it.

Their religious message is clear: God may or may not exist, but He’s simply not relevant to what goes on in school.

Shallow protestations about the many fine Christian teachers in public schools, or pleas for teaching “the values we can all agree upon,” miss the point altogether: the schools are officially agnostic. They’re agnostic as a matter of policy. This isn’t a criticism; it’s simply a description.

Bottom line: let’s not pretend we can keep “religious messages” out of school.

July 8, 2000

Brandon Dutcher is research director at the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs, a free-market think tank.