Salt, light and schooling

One of the standard critiques of parents who opt out of public schools, either for private education or homeschooling, is that they're guilty of selfishness or other egocentric, anti-communitarian moral failure. If the parents are Christians, even other Christians will criticize them for abandoning their responsibility to be "salt and light." Writing in First Things, Sally Thomas, who sacrificed her daughter's well being for a time to a morally insane English public school, says nuts to all that. Excerpt:

The idea of sending a child daily into a hostile environment—if not actively hostile, as in bullying, then certainly philosophically hostile—expecting him not only to withstand assaults on everything his parents have told him is true but also to transform the entire system by his presence, seems sadly misguided to me. There may be many valid arguments for sending a child to school, but that one doesn’t wash.

In the Sermon on the Mount, in addition to the salt-and-light business, Jesus also tells the multitude, “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” A child’s greatest treasure, to my mind, is his childhood itself. He has only one, and it’s over quickly enough. If we as parents invest that treasure in sex education that makes us cringe, history we know to be a lie, and busy work we recognize as meaningless, we should perhaps not be too surprised if at the end of the day these things, and not the things which are above, have claimed our children’s hearts.

If this sounds hyperbolic, consider the responses of students in an evangelical college here, in a class taught by one of my husband’s friends, who decided to poll the students on their views of Christian sexual morality. He was taken aback, to put it mildly, to discover that the sole moral conviction held by an overwhelming majority was that it was wrong for Christians to judge other people’s behaviors. “Sex is just a bodily function anyway,” one student said. Bear in mind that these students were self-described Christians, from Christian homes, who had chosen their college for its Christian environment. Somehow, in all their years of formation, they seemed to have missed the fairly crucial lesson that Christianity establishes clear guidelines regarding sex. That Christians should regard those guidelines as neither repressive nor even negotiable was right off the radar.

If, as a correspondent of mine has suggested, Christians are impotent in engaging with secular culture, perhaps the problem is not that too many of us have withdrawn from it but that too many have surrendered our cultural distinctiveness. If we urge our children to integrate into the secular mainstream, and it turns out instead that the secular mainstream is integrated into them, then what we end up with is, well, what we largely have: a generation that believes that Christianity is only about not being judgmental.

This strikes me as a weak position from which to influence anything. If we’re called to speak the truth in love, we have to do so from the locus of a distinct Christian culture, however microcosmic, that makes readily apparent what the truth actually is and that nurtures moral courage.

Hear, hear. Again, the Macintyrean question: At what point do people who wish to live by the old virtues decide that there's no future in being part of the mainstream, and secede (even if they secede in place?)