Same Sex Marriage and the Christian School
By Dr. Barrett Mosbacker
August 29, 2015
Our relatively comfortable Christian world in the United States has changed.
On the evening the Supreme Court issued its ruling legalizing same-sex marriage, the White House was illuminated in rainbow colors — a vivid and deliberate symbol of governmental celebration. That image saddened and angered me. How did we arrive at this place?
The day after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt addressed a joint session of Congress. His speech summoned a nation to war and became among the most iconic in American history:
Yesterday, December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamy, the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.
June 26, 2015 is also a date which will live in infamy. On that date the Supreme Court of the United States legalized same-sex marriage.
I am saddened but I am not surprised by the decision. I am saddened because our country continues its relentless march toward Sodom and Gomorrah. I suspect that everyone reading this article feels something of what Peter describes of Lot in his second epistle:
… Lot, greatly distressed by the sensual conduct of the wicked (for as that righteous man lived among them day after day, he was tormenting his righteous soul over their lawless deeds that he saw and heard) (2 Peter 2:7–8).
I am not surprised because we long ago sowed the seeds that eventually bore the fruit we see in the Supreme Court’s decision. It is not so much the seed that was sown as the seed that has not been sown.
Let me explain.
Jesus taught that the student will be like his teacher:
Can a blind man lead a blind man? Will they not both fall into a pit? A disciple is not above his teacher, but everyone when he is fully trained will be like his teacher (Luke 6:39–40).
We have fallen into a deep moral pit.
For decades and across generations, the majority of our nation’s children have been educated by non-Christian teachers — or by Christian teachers who are legally prevented from bringing God’s Word to bear in their classrooms. God’s Word is absent for eight hours a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for thirteen years — and that does not include four to eight years of college. Seventeen to twenty-one years of secular education, compounded by the influence of all forms of media, will produce secularized students and a secularized country.
Whether through overt falsehoods or the simple absence of truth, students are secularized and molded into the culture’s secular image. Students will be like their teachers. Echoing the words of Jesus, an anonymous proverb observes that “the philosophy of the schoolroom in one generation will be the philosophy of the government in the next.”
I have always been struck by the fact that C. S. Lewis used a brief passage from an elementary textbook as the foundation for his profound book The Abolition of Man. That passage illustrates how we have arrived at this point in our country — in large measure because we have miseducated our young across many generations.
I doubt whether we are sufficiently attentive to the importance of elementary text books. That is why I have chosen as the starting-point for these lectures a little book on English intended for boys and girls.
I do not think the authors of this book intended any harm. [The authors] quote the well-known story of [tourists] at the waterfall … [one tourist called the waterfall] sublime and the other [called it] pretty.
When the [tourist] said this is sublime, he appeared to be making a remark about the waterfall. Actually, he was not making a remark about the waterfall, but a remark about his own feelings. What he was saying was really I have feelings associated in my mind with the word Sublime, or … I have sublime feelings. We appear to be saying something very important about [the waterfall] when actually we are only saying something about our own feelings …
I am not concerned with what [the authors intended] but with the effect their book will certainly have on the schoolboy’s mind … I do not mean, of course, that [the schoolboy] will make any conscious inference from what he reads to a general philosophical theory that all values are subjective … It is not a theory they put into his mind, but an assumption, which ten years hence, its origin forgotten and its presence unconscious, will condition him to take one side in a controversy which he has never recognized as a controversy at all.
The point Lewis makes is that the authors of this elementary textbook, though they meant no harm, did great harm by teaching young students that there is no objective truth — that everything is essentially subjective and relative.
Allan Bloom, in his book The Closing of the American Mind, describes the result:
There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative … The students’ backgrounds are as various as America can provide. Some are religious, some atheists; some are to the Left, some to the Right; some intend to be scientists, some humanists or professionals or businessmen; some are poor, some rich.
They are unified only in their relativism … The danger they have been taught to fear from absolutism is not error but intolerance. Relativism is necessary to openness; and this is the virtue, the only virtue, which all primary education for more than fifty years has dedicated itself to inculcating.
What Lewis predicted in 1944 — that a false assumption planted in young minds would, a generation later, condition them to take a side in a controversy they had never recognized as a controversy — Allan Bloom witnessed in reality. Lewis looked ahead with alarm; Bloom looked around with lament. What both men identified is precisely what we see reflected throughout our culture. Relativism — created and fostered in public schools, textbooks, and through the media — is the seed that sprang forth in the Supreme Court’s legalization of same-sex marriage.
The fruit of public education, relativism, and an immoral onslaught through all forms of media is that we no longer have moral anchors. We are adrift upon the sea of relativism, and it is shipwrecking our students, our families, our churches, and our country.
As frogs in the boiling kettle of relativism, we are being morally destroyed.
Were they ashamed when they committed abomination? No, they were not at all ashamed; they did not know how to blush (Jeremiah 6:15).
Our students are growing up in — and we are teaching in — a perverse culture that mirrors Isaiah’s accusation against Israel:
Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter! (Isaiah 5:20).
Research on the impact of secular education on Christian young people has produced sobering findings. Studies indicate that the more years a person spent in public school, the more likely he or she was, later in life, to lack Christian faith and practice, to lack life satisfaction, and to diverge from the beliefs held by his or her parents — and this among young people who were actively churched while growing up.
In light of the Supreme Court’s ruling and the rapid descent of our culture into a post-Christian neopaganism, the Christian school has never been more important than it is today. The Christian school is an essential ally of the church and the Christian home.
Concerning the importance of Christian education, Robert Dabney — theologian and Southern Presbyterian pastor — wrote:
The education of children for God is the most important business done on earth. It is the one business for which the earth exists. To it all politics, all war, all literature, all money-making, ought to be subordinated; and every parent especially ought to feel, every hour of the day, that, next to making his own calling and election sure, this is the end for which he is kept alive by God — this is his task on earth.
Teaching children to love, fear, and serve God in every academic subject — from the arts to zoology — is the essential business of Christian parents, the church, and by extension the Christian school.
Sadly, for generations in our country, Christian parents, teachers, and pastors have separated the sacred and the secular, relegating biblical truth to the spiritual life and divorcing it from formal education. The result is a secularized culture.
The Scriptures teach that biblical truth is to be constantly integrated into a child’s life from morning to evening and in all activities in between:
Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates (Deuteronomy 6:4–9).
God’s Word should not be absent from children’s schooling for eight hours a day, nine months a year, for thirteen to twenty-one years.
Research on the relationship between the church and the Christian school points to their potential as mutually reinforcing institutions. When the church actively supports Christian schools, the benefits extend not only to individual families and children but to the broader community. The evidence suggests that church leaders would be wise to strengthen that partnership.
In short, the Christian school has never been more needed or more important — for our children, for the Kingdom of Christ, and for our country.
Until the Christian family, our seminaries, and the leaders of our churches embrace, support, and promote the Christian school — and homeschooling — we will continue our relentless and deadly descent toward Sodom and Gomorrah. We will continue to reap what we fail to sow.