Compromise #1

Chapter Two of Darryl Hart’s A Secular Faith was, as you may recall, a really disappointing treatment of the theocratic and establishmentarian convictions of the Westminster Assembly. This next chapter was quite different — all of it was admirable, and most of it was simply outstanding.

Darryl begins by showing how two early presidents, Jefferson and Adams, wanted the ethical rectitude that they believed public appreciation of religion could provide, and they desired this despite their own deviations from orthodoxy. Darryl then shows how, with the disestablishment of churches at the state level, the young nation turned to the common school to provide the inculcation of public virtue. This was attempted by means of a generic Christianity, which has caused all kinds of problems down to the present. The whole enterprise got off on the wrong foot, which Darryl shows repeatedly — “it tried to turn the Jesus of faith into a model citizen” (p. 83). All of this is just fantastic, and those Christians who want to get “lowest common denominator” faith back into the schools really need to read this.

Darryl reviews and discusses R.L. Dabney’s four options about what to do about the “necessary evil” of public schools: 1. Impose the religion of the majority on the minority; 2. have the state fund all schools, both common and denominational; 3. have religious instruction first hour of the school day, which would be optional for dissenting families; and 4. secularize the teaching of the schools absolutely.

Or, and I am trying type this without a mischievous grin, 5. abolish the government school system. In any other setting, if someone says “checkmate” to me four times, I would suggest we play a different game.

There are only a couple places where Darryl’s assumptions about a “secular society” peep through, and because those are the kind of assumptions we should challenge every chance we get, I want to do so here. Although Darryl does not develop these in this chapter, I still want to spin a few comments off them. Here they are:

“Obviously they did not favor a secular education. But a classroom free from all religious influence was preferable to one in which the Bible was read, a hymn sung, and a prayer offered, because the logic of public school religion ran directly counter to historic Protestant ideas about faith and good works or virtue” (p. 92).

This way of stating it is really problematic. Would you rather die by drowning or in a car accident? Would you rather eat a bowl of cockroaches or a bowl of centipedes? Given that your kid was going to apostatize, would you rather it be to the Mormons or to the JWs? I read somewhere recently (I forget where, or I would cite it), the lesser of two evils rarely is.

“The American Protestants thought their exclusive faith could provide the moral standard for a republic conceived in religious neutrality is one of the more surprising twists in the history of biblical religion. Not only was the misunderstanding of religious liberty in the United States glaring, the distortion of the Christian religion was enormous” (p. 93).

Quite right. And so we need to return to square one, and question the fundamental axiom — that “republic conceived in religious neutrality” part. And ironically, it appears that Darryl’s dissection of compromises #2-17 in this chapter has prevented him from seeing that he is still personally invested in compromise #1.