This last weekend I spoke at a homeschool convention in Michigan. I was invited here to share specifically with the teens about the importance of clinging to biblical truth in a society and culture that has declared war against it. One of the hardest things for believers – who are largely protected and comfortable in American society – to accept is that doing so will naturally jeopardize that protection and comfort.
It's not difficult to figure out that one of the primary reasons "progressive Christians" embrace the counsel of the spirit of the age rather than the Holy Spirit on many cultural matters is because it's far more comfortable to be provided a seat at society's cool kids table rather than being ostracized and bullied.
It was very kind of the culture to corroborate my claim by dropping this story as impregnable evidence:
Now, the facts of the story are, unsurprisingly, skewed and misrepresented. For instance, it's true that theonomist Rousas Rushdoony pushed homeschooling back in the 1960s as a way to preserve his fundamentalist views. But that isn't the theological background of many of the homeschooling families I met last weekend. In fact, the MSNBC article totally fails to acknowledge that the modern homeschooling movement represents a broad coalition of multi-ethnic citizens who represent a wide swath of both religious and political perspectives.
Milton Gaither explained the phenomenon this way:
"Given this pan‐ideological commitment to local, authentic, private life and contempt for establishment liberalism, it is not surprising that members of both the countercultural right and the countercultural left reacted, for different reasons, against the twentieth‐century expansion of public education into a near‐universal experience."
In other words, the effort to provide a fuller, richer, better education to one's children than what they can get in the intrinsically flawed state-run education factory (of which I am purposefully a part) is not the purview of racist white fundamentalists. It's a shared movement that includes all races, religions, and socioeconomic backgrounds. For instance, black children are overrepresented in the homeschooling world as compared to their participation in the public-school system.
But the more significant and timelier element of this story to me isn't that it is a sloppily researched attempt to discredit homeschoolers as racists. That's the sad playbook of the progressive movement these days, and so these types of ignorance explosions are becoming commonly expected.
No, the point that stands out to me – and the point I really wanted to stress to these homeschooled teens – is that being taught at home does not shield or protect anyone from the long reach of America's culture war. Stay out of the public eye, learn your math and science at home, socialize only with families like yours, and strive relentlessly just to be left alone? It won't matter. The left's culture war will come for you.
Fear and trepidation never served anyone well, and it won't serve homeschooling families well either. There is no greater truism in the world of education than the fact that parents are most equipped and thus most responsible for the proper upbringing of their kids. As the home goes, so goes the culture of education. As one for two decades now, I can testify that any public-school teacher worth their salt will acknowledge that they cannot begin to compare to the significance and importance of parental influence in a child's life.
Those who take that responsibility so seriously that they make the necessary sacrifices to teach their children from home deserve our society's respect, not its scorn.
