As I considered the many requests I became increasingly dogged by the concern that staying on the board would be giving Christian parents false hope. Why? I do not believe this battle can be won at the school board level. It is lost. The State and Federal governments have co-opted your local schools. They mean to indoctrinate your children in their radical secularism. They mean to cause your children, and Christian teachers and administrators, to bow to their sex gods. I simply can’t be part of enforcing that.
It is now law in CA that your children must be taught how to have safe homosexual sex, how to obtain an abortion, and that gender does not correspond to biological sex. Think of that! It is legally required to teach your children the LGBTQ sexual mores while simultaneously illegal to mention God. I can’t and won’t enforce that foolishness.
I do not know how long Christian teachers and administrators can ethically continue. They will certainly need to increase in their wisdom as they navigate this new legal reality in our state. Please pray for them. I also do not know how Christian parents will afford to find other options for their children. I know they will need to make sacrifices their parents likely didn’t have to make. Please pray for them.
Democracy is the worst political system, except for all the others.
“The State and Federal governments have co-opted your local schools. They mean to indoctrinate your children in their radical secularism.”
Well… they mean to follow the mores of the majority and to enforce human rights as they understand them because that is what ordinary people do in democracies. Similarly, where churches still command a majority of the votes there is usually less “radical secularism” and it is the godless who feel marginalized by their own schools.
“I also do not know how Christian parents will afford to find other options for their children.”
But many will gladly do it, just as most Catholic parents used to do.
“I do not know how long Christian teachers and administrators can ethically continue. They will certainly need to increase in their wisdom as they navigate this new legal reality in our state.”
Yes. And conversely, the secular powers that be will have to manage the consequences of Christians gradually withdrawing their children and their support from state-managed education. In some places, secession to the Benedict Option will be popular enough to reduce support for public schools, which will pose some hard choices for their secular leaders.
ARE they the mores of the majority? Unfortunately, even in democracy, the system disenfranchises the public on a number of issues. In the original Greek democracy, the slaves and women were disenfranchised. During over half of the history of the British Parliament, the poor (and women) were disenfranchised – You had to be in the moneyed class to stand for election. Without the Brexit Referendum, over half the British public would have been completely disenfranchised on the matter of EU membership. And now in most countries believers in traditional values are disenfranchised. Many representatives mostly don’t seem to have much conscience about truly representing their constituents on the majority of matters, and when they do, unfortunately vociferous minorities often gain control on these points.
The USA is not a democracy. It is a Republic. It has become more radically democratic (e.g., the direct election of senators) but the founders were opposed to mob rule.
http://time.com/3669024/evangelicals-gay-marriage/
Who says they were ever “evangelicals” to begin with? They certainly were not in the historic reformed idea of the word evangelical. That’s the problem that so many Christians need to come to terms with, the reality that the culture war is downstream from theology, not vice versa. We need to first get the gospel right, the person and work of Jesus, imputation, Grace, etc. Got to start there.
A good book to read by Iain Murray is “Evangelicalism divided”
https://www.amazon.com/Evangelicalism-Divided-Record-Crucial-Change/dp/0851517838
Yet we find so many theonomic type / take dominion/ culture warrior types that habitually continue to get the cart before the horse. They seem addicted to the theology of glory (culture wars) rather than the theology of the Cross.
https://world.wng.org/2016/06/disappearing_evangelicals
What Mr. Joel Belz and many others need to come to terms with is that these “Evangelicals” have not disappeared, they are right where they have always been in the same churches that won them over to a different gospel, to a culture warrior Jesus and all manner of beliefs which habitually get the cart before the horse.
What would things look like if for the last 100 years in America the church and its leaders had been faithfully proclaiming sound doctrine, the Biblical Gospel instead of the “we have got to take back this country” gospel? What Mr. Belz and many others are tone deaf about is that they never really had it to begin with. They just had a watered down moralistic therapeutic deism that called itself ” Evangelical.” And the fact is this runs rampant in Reformed circles as well.
I think it is wonderful that Chad Vegas is now fully focused on his pastoral ministry as a Gospel preacher. Assuming he has the gospel right, it will indeed be more fruitful.