Messianism and Moralism

Why schools veer toward moralism . . .

Education is one of the most religious things we do.

Law always embodies the will of a deity. Idolatrous societies embody the will of an idol in their statutes, and faithful societies embody the will of God the Father in theirs.

But societies do not just register the will of their gods on their books. It is also a fact that they catechize their citizenry in what is expected from them, given the authority of those laws. And that process of catechesis is called education.

Now the secularists have no transcendent God. Their god does not dwell in the heavens, outside the world. He is not eternal. Rather, their god is going to wind up somehow, some way, as demos, the people. Secular humanism necessarily must locate the highest authoritative voice somewhere in humanity.

But there is a problem for them, and the problem is fairly hard to ignore. People don’t like having gods that are loser gods, and to date the human race is kind of a loser god. People want their gods to be holy, and it is hard to maintain the holiness of the human race when you are confronted constantly with the sort of unholy things we do—wars, crimes, abuses, profligate behavior, and so on. It is hard to maintain the essential goodness of man when the bodies keep piling up.

This is a perennial problem. How can a humanist account for all the evil things we do? The only real answer they can come up with is that man does the evil he does because of ignorance. This option goes back at least to the time of Socrates. Man does evil because of ignorance. Yeah, that’s it.

But obviously, if ignorance is the problem, what does the solution need to be? Who is the savior when it comes to ignorance? The savior would have to be knowledge—and that means some form of schooling or education. And this is the driving force behind the perennial humanist reliance on education as savior. Given the premises, that conclusion is something of a logical necessity.

Whenever a social problem is identified, just imagine a news reporter wrapping up his report on the problem. He is delivering straight talk to the camera. Of course, there is always some form of “remains to be seen,” but there is frequently an appeal. The problem could be anything—teen pregnancies, drug use, crime rates, whatever. The solution is always money for more “programs.” We need information, we need knowledge, we need to instruct people. Education is always the savior. After more than half a century of relentless sex education, we need more money to inform these teens about what causes pregnancy.

But suppose the problem is not a lack of information at all, but rather . . . sin?

So we are living in a time when this god has clearly failed. Dagon is lying on the threshold, shattered. There used to be a bumper sticker that said, “If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.” To which our reply ought to be something like, “We did try ignorance, and now it wants a raise.”

Calling for educational programs in a world that is already crammed full of educational programs is just another example of our priests dancing around the altar to Baal, cutting themselves with knives. It is the middle of the afternoon, and Baal is still not responding. But their logic is that if nothing is happening, it is obviously time to double down. The god of educational uplift is not answering us and so we beseech the gods of educational uplift. Another half an hour and they will get out the knives.

However lame all of this might appear to us as believers, for the humanist, there is really no alternative. The sinfulness of man continues to present us with the problem, and there is no other way for the humanist to address it except through education that seeks to correct the “ignorance.” This is because the only alternative explanation to ignorance is deliberate wickedness—sin, in other words. Please pardon the crude monosyllable.

This is why, incidentally, a true Christian school has to be evangelical, both in doctrine and practice. Christians believe that the solution to what ails us is gospel—the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, appropriated by faith alone. When this emphasis is lost in ostensibly Christian school, there will be a slow and inexorable drift. In a healthy Christian school, education is an aspect of our sanctification, not our justification. When the gospel emphasis is lost, the school will start to drift into some form of “virtue” schooling. But this seeks to make Christian education some kind of a savior, which it is no more capable of than the pagan schools are. All true virtue is the fruit of one thing, and one thing only, and that would be the death and resurrection of Christ.

Virtue is a fruit of grace, and not the result of industrious labor in moralism academies.