As it is now conducted in the United States, Christian education is being offered an opportunity that is simultaneously glorious and grim. It is glorious because God has blessed us with fruitful families, and He has given us a heart to return to covenantal faithfulness in how we bring up our children. More and more Christian families are discovering how rewarding Christian education actually is, whether it is conducted through homeschooling or Christian day schools.
But there is a grim aspect. Some talk about the competition between government schools and private education as though it were a simple matter of business competition, like Shell competing with Exxon. But at a basic and more fundamental level, it is a competition between life and death. It is not a competition between a fast runner and a faster runner. It is a race between a fast runner and a dead runner. The clash between secular America and Christian America is a clash between a death culture and a life culture.
And this is not “just a metaphor.” I am not emphasizing the content of the curriculum, although that is a significant issue in its place. In this discussion, I am emphasizing the content of the chairs — or, it would be better to say, all the empty chairs, or chairs that never had to be built. Over the course of the last generation, over 40 million children have been legally put to death under the blessing of Roe v. Wade. Those children, had they been allowed to live, would overwhelmingly have attended the government schools. Roe v. Wade came down in 1973. The first class of children killed would have entered the school system in 1978, and would have graduated from high school in 1990. They would have come out of college in 1994, and as of this year they would have been in the work force for ten years now. That class would have contained about 1.5 million students. The next class, about the same number, would have been in the work force for nine years now.
In the book of Proverbs, Wisdom speaks and says that all who hate her love death (8:36). We live in a culture that has rejected wisdom, and is therefore industriously pursuing a death culture. The secularists are busily engaged in slow cultural suicide, and a handful of them are just now seeing the consequences of their own macabre math. The government schools are emptying out — and the second biggest factor in this has been the Christian exodus from those schools. But far and away, the biggest factor in this decimation has been the abortion industry.
The irony is that for thirty years, pro-life Christians have been unsuccessfully trying to dissuade secularists from killing their own replacements, the next generation of secularists. We have failed in this, but in that failure we must come to see the severe judgment of a holy God. And because sin never makes sense, when it finally completely dawns on the secularists what they have succeeded in doing, they will become furious with us. Why? Because we have children, we received them from the hand of God, we loved them, we gave them a real education in the ways of the covenant. As the bumper sticker puts it, “I’m pro-life and I vote. And so do all my kids.”
God is not mocked. A man reaps what he sows. And you cannot sow empty wombs and harvest anything but empty schools.