Christian Culture and Raising Kids

Richard, Michael, Jerid and I have been having an interesting discussion on the intersection of public schools and Christianity in America. (That discussion should be viewable by all, but when I tried to get to it while signed out, FB asked me to sign in. So I'd be curious to know of non-FB-contacts of mine can see/comment on that thread.) I just started rereading Resident Aliens (by Hauerwas and Willimon). I hit two passages in the short section I've read so far that seemed to hit on this topic, so I thought I'd share them here.

The second paragraph touches on raising children, but the first paragraph explains the context of the term "colony":

The image that evokes this adventure for us is, again, found in Philippians 3:20 -- "our commonwealth is in heaven." Moffatt more vividly translates this politeuma as "We are a colony of heaven." The Jews in Dispersion were well acquainted with what it meant to live as strangers in a strange land, aliens trying to stake out a living on someone else's turf. Jewish Christians had already learned, in their day-to-day life in the synagogue, how important it was for resident aliens to gather to name the name, to tell the story, to sing Zion's songs in a land that didn't know Zion's God.

A colony is a beachhead, an outpost, an island of one culture in the middle of another, a place where the values of home are reiterated and passed on to the young, a place where the distinctive language and life-style of the resident aliens are lovingly nurtured and reinforced.

The context of this second quote was the change in American culture between the days when everything was shut down on Sundays and "The church was the only show in town," to our present situation where there are many alternatives on a Sunday morning and people no longer feel obligated to attend a religious service of any sort on a Sunday. This change, by the way, is a repeating theme in our Sunday school classes and gals Bible study in our congregation and therefore one that is frequently at the forefront of my mind.

The demise of the Constantinian world view, the gradual decline of the notion that the church needs some sort of surrounding "Christian" culture to prop it up and mold its young, is not a death to lament. It is an opportunity to celebrate. The decline of the old, Constantianian synthesis between the church and the world means that we American Christians are at last free to be faithful in a way that makes being a Christian today an exciting adventure.

There has definitely been a change in American culture over the past decades. It's a change that we are probably still right in the middle of. But to the extent that it has freed people to follow through on their beliefs, whether Christian, atheist, humanist, or some other system of belief, I think that's a good thing. I'm all for integrity and I see no integrity in a culture that encourages people to go through the motions of going to church and calling oneself a Christian if that doesn't match either your beliefs or the way you live your life outside of the obligatory Sunday morning service. I also think it's an important change in how kids grow up today. Rather than being raised in the heart of a culture that often said one thing and did another, the children of Christians are hopefully being confronted with the Scriptures in a way that makes it clear what encompasses Christianity and what has been tacked on by people and worldly culture.

In a sense, what we are living in the midst of is the fruition of the Reformation. In America, we have finally come to a point where we can separate "church" from "country" or "culture" and see it for what God has said it should be and not what we have said it should be. Of course you can't separate church from culture. But you can recognize a culture that is of the church and a culture that is not of the church and see that those are two distinct things, just as the culture of the colony will be different than the culture of the host country where the colony is located.

So what does that look like as we raise our children? Jerid's original post that got me traipsing down the education discussion road was this:

‎"Over the next ten years, nearly half of all new jobs will require education that goes beyond a high school degree." -President Obama

This is little because the knowledge required has increased. It is mostly because schools, especially public schools, are spending more time teaching social agendas and less time demanding excellence in knowledge and ability.

I do think that schools teach social agendas, for good and for ill. I like the overall social agenda at our kids' school - one that encourages Independence, open-mindedness, integrity, caring, and community involvement. (Granted, how that plays out isn't always what I'd wish for. There's a curriculum, and then there's staff, and sometimes the attitudes of the latter overrides some of the positive aspects of the former.) Our kids perform well on standardized tests, so their knowledge seems to be proficient despite the social agenda. And I think that more often than not, the social attitudes and teaching of the staff mirrors our own beliefs, even though the teachers' spiritual beliefs might not align with our own. The difference doesn't lie in the what, but the why, and our children learn that through their interaction with our Christian colony.

(Completely tangential: Though we raise our kids in our colony, whether they choose to remain in our colony is a decision that we leave up to them. But that's a topic for another day.)

There's of course an implied "agree/disagree" question in this post, but I'd also be curious to hear of examples of social agendas in the school that hinder the ability of a colony (of any sort - Christian, Muslim, environmental, gay, Mexican, etc.) to raise their children according to their own colony's values. I don't think that being challenged on your beliefs is a hindrance. Harassment is.