It’s Not so Easy

By Dr. Barrett Mosbacker

April 07, 2013

Soviet dissident and author Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote this about a fellow prisoner in the Soviet gulag during the Communist era:

Before the war Anatoly Vasilyevich had graduated from a teachers’ college, where he had specialized in literature. Like me, he now had about three years left before his “release” to a place of banishment. His only training was as a teacher of literature in schools. It seemed rather improbable that ex-prisoners like us would be allowed into schools.

But if we were — what then?

“I will not put lies into children’s heads! I shall tell the children the truth about God and the life of the Spirit.”

“But they will take you away after the first lesson.”

Vasilyevich lowered his head and answered quietly: “Let them.”

I could not help wondering: what if every evangelical Christian teacher in secular schools in Ontario and the Maritimes decided to follow Vasilyevich’s example? What if they committed to tell their students the greatest and most important good news — all on the same day, irrespective of consequences? Unlike Vasilyevich, they would not be put in jail, not in our pseudo-tolerant culture. But I doubt their unions would defend them from being fired, placed on probation, or severely reprimanded. Of course, it is easy to raise that scenario from the relative safety of Christian schooling. Our jobs are not at risk when we share all of God’s truth with our students. We are not hazarding the loss of generous salaries and comfortable lifestyles by expressing our faith at school. Christian teachers in secular schools would need extraordinary courage and faith to follow Vasilyevich’s example. In the real world, courage is not all that common.

And what about those of us in Christian schooling? What would we do if our jobs — and even our schools’ existence — depended upon teaching values we know to be false, such as affirming a homosexual lifestyle? Most of us know that prospect is not out of the question, at least in Ontario, in the not-so-distant future. Although we presently enjoy constitutional protection to teach our values, how would we react to the leverage of new provincial accreditation standards or even the possibility of government funding tied to curriculum demands? “Your school will be accredited — and funded — only if you teach…”

“We would never abandon our convictions for those things!” I can imagine us saying. But talk is cheap. That statement is uncomfortably like Peter’s promise to Jesus before the rooster’s convicting crow.

The voice of uneasy compromise whispers, “Well, at least we would still be able to present the gospel message, so our students can be saved.” But what does that do to our Christian integrity? And that would be only the beginning — with many more compromises to follow. Accepting compromise is a bit like eating potato chips: it is hard to stop at just one.

Courageous actions are far more difficult than courageous words, especially when the consequences of those actions may threaten our personal security. In recent months I have been praying that the Lord would give those of us in Christian schooling — and me specifically — real courage in the face of opposition from an increasingly antagonistic media and culture: Anatoly Vasilyevich’s kind of courage.