Breakpoint

If you haven’t heard the terms “intersectionality” and “critical theory,” your children likely have, at least if they are in college or even high school.  What began as an academic theory decades ago is now a dominant way of seeing human relationships, at least for many: There are the oppressed, and there are the oppressors.

In our latest “What Would You Say?” video, Joseph Backholm describes how critical theory reduces human beings to categories according to race, gender, sexual preference and orientation, income, and on and on. Because some groups of people are more privileged than others, identifying one’s group ultimately determines one’s moral authority. Intersectionality, as Joseph explains, is an attempt to solve the problem of belonging to more than one group by measuring out the level of oppression a person experiences due to their various identities.

Ultimately, critical theory seeks to address these perceived privileges and imbalances of power and oppression, and it has become a dominant theory in higher education and in other arenas of culture.

So how should a Christian look at the critical theory and intersectionality? Are these concepts compatible with Christianity?

Here’s part of Joseph Backholm’s response from the latest “What Would You Say?” video:

Critical theory and intersectionality are not consistent with Christianity, and here are three reasons why.

First, critical theory offers a different view of humanity than Christianity.

Critical theory claims that our identity as human beings is in rooted in things like race and gender, features that differ from person to person. But the Bible grounds our identity as human beings, and the value every human has, in the fact that we are created in God’s own image. This is something every human being shares.

While critical theory pits some groups of people against other groups based on their status as oppressors or oppressed, the Bible says we are all equal before God: created equal, equally valuable, equally guilty of sin, equally deserving of punishment, and equally able to find grace and mercy in Jesus.

Which leads to the second point.

Critical theory offers a different view of sin than Christianity

The Bible identifies sin as anything that violates God’s design for people, including unjust oppression of other people, but critical theory identifies sin only as oppression. As a result, advocates of critical theory would see biblical practices such as discipleship, correction, leadership, and reproof as sinful assertions of power, if the speaker is among the oppressors, and would excuse sin such as anger, jealousy, hatred, bitterness, unforgiveness, or envy among the oppressed.

The Bible says that we are all guilty before God, regardless of social status, race, or economic situation. The Bible condemns oppression as one of, but certainly not the only way, in which humans rebel against God.

Because critical theory gets the problem wrong, it also gets the solution wrong, which leads to the third point.

Critical theory offers a different view of salvation than Christianity.

According to the Bible, because we are all equally guilty of sin, salvation can only be found in Jesus through repentance. Our hope is found in being forgiven of sin.

Because critical theory teaches that oppressors are guilty and the oppressed are not, salvation for the oppressed is found, not through repentance, but in social liberation here and now. Their hope is only though activism.

In other words, critical theory has a completely different understanding of who we are, what the problem is, and how to fix it, than Christianity.

Come to WhatWouldYouSay.org for the full video or subscribe to the What Would You Say? channel on YouTube.

Nobel Laureate V. S. Naipaul, referring to how its people resisted top-down rule, famously called India the land of a “million mutinies.” Apparently for many of the 1.3 billion people there, laws were thought of as suggestions, and obedience as negotiable.

The era of COVID-19 seems to be an exception. The New York Times recently reported, that Indians aren’t just “dutifully following” Prime Minister Modi’s lockdown order, but are “going above and beyond it.” The sudden outbreak of rule-following means that for many Christians, there is a break from the persecution that has escalated since Prime Minister Modi took power in 2014.

Religious freedom shouldn’t be as precarious in India as it has proven to be. While the Preamble to their Constitution declares India a “secular state,” this doesn’t imply the elimination of religion from the public square or even the non-involvement of government in religious matters. The “secularism” decreed by India’s law is that no religion can enjoy privileged status over others, which in a country that is 80 percent Hindu, guarantees religious freedom and tolerance.

For the first five decades after independence, it worked for India. Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, and other minorities played major roles in Indian society. Prime Minster Modi’s predecessor, in fact, was a Sikh. Five presidents of India have been Muslims. Indian Christians have been instrumental in creating the country’s space program and have served with distinction in the Armed Forces.

During the late 1980s, however, Hindu nationalism, known as Hindutva, made a comeback. Hindutva rejects religious pluralism, aiming instead for India to become a Hindu state. In the view of Hindutva’s founder, a non-Hindu in India should be considered “at best a guest, and at worst the bastard child of foreign invasion.”

The political manifestation of Hindutva is the BJP, which is the party of Prime Minister Modi. The BJP has shock troops, known as the RSS, a “paramilitary volunteer organization” with an estimated 5 million members.  The primary target of Hindu nationalists, so far, have been India’s 200 million Muslims. Thousands have been killed, including dozens that were murdered just a few weeks ago in Delhi by mobs that were egged on by both the BJP and RSS leaders.

Christians are also considered “bastard children of foreign invasions” and targeted by Hindu nationalists. In fact, the single deadliest modern attack on Christians took place, not somewhere in the Middle East, but in the Indian state of Orissa. In 2008, an anti-Christian pogrom there killed more than 500 people and caused another 12,000 to flee their homes. In 2017 and 2018, nearly 900 instances of violence against Christians and churches were reported in India.

At the same time, Christian activities have been targeted and limited. At least six states now have laws making conversion to Christianity (or Islam) from Hinduism either difficult or impossible. Similar laws make it difficult for Christian nonprofits to operate within India. In 2017, Compassion International was forced to close its operations there.

That such laws primarily hurt children, nearly forty percent of whom are malnourished, doesn’t matter to Hindu nationalists. All that matters to them is building India into a Hindu state.

The growth of this ideology in both numbers and power are why, under the BJP, India has skyrocketed into the top ten of Open Door’s World Watch List. In other words, India has now joined religious persecutors such as North Korea and Iran, and even rank ahead of China and Saudi Arabia.

Since people who cannot leave their homes also cannot victimize their Christian neighbors, at least not as easily, Christians are the unlikely beneficiaries of COVID-19 lockdowns. At the same time, as we’ve seen already in China and other nations, governments like Modi’s rarely miss opportunities like this one to advance their agendas. And, of course, the lockdowns across India will eventually lift, and then attacks there will likely resume.

So, let’s keep our brothers and sisters in India, as well as the vulnerable members of other religious minority populations, in our prayers. They need it.

They also need us to pay attention, and then to advocate on their behalf with our leaders. The decline of religious freedom in one of the most populous nations in the world is something we must not ignore.

"This idea that a criminal tortured to death on a cross is in some way a part of the God of Israel who is also the God who created the entire cosmos and everything in it, is possibly the strangest idea that anyone has had to persuade people of.”

But it’s also idea that changed the world forever—perhaps the most influential idea in human history. So says historian Tom Holland, author of Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World.

Human rights, equality, forgiveness, caring for the vulnerable, none concepts were imaginable in the pagan world before Christianity. The pressing question is, are they viable in a post-Christian culture?

Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, by Tom Holland

Today, Shane Morris welcomes Tom Holland to the BreakPoint Podcast.

Someday, and I say this with full confidence, the world will be on the other side of COVID-19. But I have very little confidence of what kind of world will emerge on the other side of COVID-19. How long will it take for the economy to recover? How many people will have lost their jobs or businesses? Will families emerge stronger because of the time together, or will there be more in crisis? Will we have a stronger sense of national unity, or will the partisan divide be even more pronounced and more destructive?

More importantly, what will the Church look like? How many churches will be forced to close their doors forever because of falling donations and their flocks out of work? Will the church be able to focus outwardly on mission, or will it be myopically focused inward on survival?

Not only should Christians care about these questions, we should want to be parts of providing the answers. After all, as St. Paul told the Athenians, God determined that we should be in this time and in this place. He wants, as Paul went on to put it, people to “reach out for Him and find Him, though He is not far from any of us.” If all that’s true, then part of the job of those who have found Him, is to point others to Him and to His restoring work in the world to make all things new.

In this time and this place, Christians should see, both in their faith and in their lives, a call to be part of recovery efforts. If you are sensing that call in your life, especially now, I’d like to invite you to consider studying with me and the Colson Center this year as a Colson Fellow.

Originally created by Chuck Colson, the Colson Fellows program is the leading Christian worldview study program. Colson Fellows spend 10 months in intensive worldview study, but let me be clear: One of the strengths of this program is that you don’t leave the context where God has placed you. You learn from where God has placed you, reading essential books, joining virtual discussions with leading Christian thinkers, interacting online through webinars and discussion forums. Many Fellows join one of the 46 regional cohorts around the country, studying with others who are concerned with what God is doing in their communities. Fellows from an area where there is no regional cohort can join a national online cohort of students, also mentored through their study by someone who has already been commissioned in the program.

Every Colson Fellow, by the way, develops a three-year plan for practical, culture-shaping, Kingdom-advancing work in the real world. In other words, Colson Fellows embark not only on a course of study. They join a movement of Christians committed to what God is doing in the communities and vocational arenas in which they have been placed and called.

Because of changes made over the past few years, the Colson Fellows Program is more accessible and affordable than ever. It’s as if God was preparing this Colson Fellows for this post-coronavirus moment, and as if He provided the cutting-edge online learning platform used by the Colson Fellows program for exactly this time.

Colson Fellows join more than 1,500 commissioned Colson Fellows across the country, now connected through our alumni association. You’ve probably heard of some of the, dare I say, more famous commissioned fellows who are running organizations, making national headlines, or writing popular books. For example, Jen Oshman recently published the book Enough about Me: Finding Lasting Joy in the Age of Self as the result of her three-year Colson Fellows plan. Her blog and podcast also addresses current cultural issues from a Christian worldview perspective.

Or people like Steve and Margaret Lindsey who experienced a dramatic change in calling because of the program. Together they launched the Center for Faith and Work in Los Angeles to help Christians integrate their faith with their work and to become agents of renewal in L.A.

Every calling is sacred, and we are committed to see Colson Fellow across the breadth and width of these callings, from professors, homemakers, filmmakers, pastors, educators, lawmakers, entrepreneurs, and college students. Recent Colson Fellow Julie Hildebrand said that the program “not only revealed the truth to me, but it also revealed the truth about me. …(it) helped me discover a love of teaching I hadn’t yet discovered.” So Julie is now teaching newly married women at her church and students in leadership at a local Christian academy.

Learn more about the Colson Fellows program at ColsonFellows.org. There you can not only contact us and ask questions, but you can join an informational webinar to learn more about becoming a Colson Fellow.

Become an agent of recovery. Join us.

The COVID-19 pandemic has given rise to all kinds of “I’m trapped at home with my kids and I’m going out of my mind!” memes, and more than a few articles that would fall into the “first world problems” category. I’m not saying there aren’t challenges, of course. As one of the more helpful memes puts it, with a wistful Forrest Gump looking into space, “And just like that, no one ever asked again what a stay-at-home mom does all day.”

One group of parents we should especially keep in mind at this time is the group least likely to constantly remind us what they are going through, if for no other reason than they’re simply too busy. I’m talking of parents of children with autism and other developmental disabilities. With most, if not all, special education programs and services suspended indefinitely, these parents are even busier than usual.

Many of us haven’t fully thought through what makes “special education,” well, so “special.” The goal of special education is to “help individuals with special needs achieve a higher level of personal self-sufficiency and success in school and in their community…” While that includes academic subjects, those with developmental disorders need to learn essential skills that other children can often learn by imitating parents and their peers, including basic social skills.

Consider something as simple as looking at someone when they speak to you. There is a kind of self-awareness and the ability to acknowledge another’s presence taken for granted in this basic social habit. And, this habit is an essential part of so many other skills that can dramatically impact and even improve one’s social life. A colleague of mine has a son with autism, and he marvels at how his son went from ignoring other people, to greeting them and even sticking out his hand expecting a handshake.

Another incredibly helpful skill to learn is how to cope with the sensory overload. This defining aspect of autism is why so many children on the spectrum tend to be anxious and retreat into distinct behaviors, such as rocking and flicking their fingers. Simply put, they are trying to turn the world’s volume down.

Though parents are, of course, essential to helping their children learn these skills, it often takes special training to learn how to teach these skills to those with unique challenges. So many parents rely on the sorts of programs that have not been available since the start of this pandemic. Even more, such programs provide consistency to those who often feel much safer with a routine.

Children with Down Syndrome present different kinds of challenges, that also require the training and expertise of others that many parents rely on. In addition to losing these services, studies indicate that “respiratory tract infections (viral and bacterial) do appear to be more common in most young people with Down's Syndrome.” Imagine the anxiety and stress being felt by parents of these kids in the age of COVID-19.

Finally, there’s the fact that, for many parents, the time their kids spend at school offers a necessary respite from an extraordinarily stressful and difficult life. Though they love and serve their children, they’ve lost some necessary down time because of this pandemic.

So, what can we do to help? First, we can pray for these families. Keep in mind that not only are they carrying a heavy load, but right now they offer a powerful and unique witness about the sanctity and dignity of all human life. Their witness is especially important now, at this time, in a culture where so many are left out of the categories of human dignity. All over the world, people with Down Syndrome are highly targeted in utero for elimination through selective abortion. And, of course, if a genetic test to determine autism existed, or a number of other conditions, these children would be under increased threat as well.

Second, we can ask the parents we know in these situations how we can help them. Something as simple as running errands or grocery shopping for them can make a huge difference, since getting out of the house is even more difficult for them than the rest of us.

And, don’t underestimate the power of simply calling and asking a parent how they are doing. One of the most challenging parts of being the parent of a child with special needs, as I am told, is how very isolating it can be. There isn’t much time or energy, much less opportunity, for a social life. I have it from a few very good sources that they would appreciate you just letting them know that you are thinking about them.

As I said, most of these parents aren’t going to spend the limited time and energy they do have to tell us what they’re going through. So, it’s up to us to let them and others know that their tremendous and heroic efforts aren’t going unnoticed.

Here’s one good thing about being stuck at home during the present crisis: We all have more time to do a little thinking: What is it that really matters to us?  Is every area of our life–work, relationships, lifestyle–all truly under the lordship and love of Jesus?  In this age of constant distraction, how do we live a truly integrated life—where we actually live out what we believe and know to be true?

To help us walk through these questions, John Stonestreet welcomes Regent College professor Dr. Steven Garber to the BreakPoint Podcast. Dr. Garber is the author of an outstanding new book, “The Seamless Life: A Tapestry of  Love and Learning, Worship and Work.”

The Seamless Life: A Tapestry of Love and Learning, Work and Worship, by Dr. Steven Garber, available with your next gift to BreakPoint and the Colson Center.

John Stonestreet and Shane Morris expose the spurious worldview assumptions of a Harvard Law professor who advocates banning homeschooling. They also launch into a discussion about parental rights and government responsibilities. Do governments recognize rights, or do they confer them.

They also discuss the Michigan governor's bizarre claim that abortion is "life sustaining, the rising tide of Christian persecution at the hands of jihadists in Nigeria, and end-of-life decisions.

Finally, they discuss our upcoming "Truth, Love, Together" virtual worldview conference. Check it out and register here. It's free!

Join us at the “Truth. Love. Together” virtual conference!

“Harvard Prof Wants to Ban Homeschooling: Why She’s Wrong” by John Stonestreet and Shane Morris, BreakPoint

“Let’s Cut Each Other Some Slack,” by John Stonestreet and Maria Baer, The Point

Recently, a young woman walked into the Waterleaf pregnancy care center in Aurora, Illinois. She thought she had entered the Planned Parenthood clinic across the street. She asked for an abortion pill. What she got instead was love and concern.

Believing, as a Waterleaf staffer would later describe, that mistaking the pregnancy resource center for Planned Parenthood “was a sign,” she stayed for an appointment and is rethinking her decision around the pregnancy.

One of the best parts of this story is that God has been orchestrating the details of it for well over three years now. Not that long ago, the lot upon which the Waterleaf center not sits was empty. Caddy-cornered from one of the largest Planned Parenthood clinics in the Midwest, the lot had been used for years by pro-life Christians, where they would pray, protest, and reach out to women seeking abortions across the street.

The property was acquired by a friend of mine and the Colson Center, someone I’d call the least likely person to be paying attention to something like this. He didn’t even know much about the property until a Democratic lawmaker contacted him as the new owner and asked him to put an end to the pro-life prayer gatherings and protests. As you may have guessed, the lawmaker was on the receiving end of generous contributions from Planned Parenthood.

Well, our friend not only declined the lawmaker’s request, he also decided to seek a better use of the property for the cause of life.  At the same time, God was moving the leadership of the Waterleaf Women’s Center to expand their outreach and ministry – and their CURRENT LEASE WAS EXPIRING. My friend then recruited a world-class executive coach and consultant, who helped lead the design process for a new facility. There’s more details of God moving and working, but let me just save time and say the result is a brand new, expanded and aesthetically beautiful and intentional building that, by architectural design, communicates light, life, and hope to men and women facing unexpected pregnancies. And it sits on a lot caddy-cornered to what’s often called the “Super Wal-Mart” of Planned Parenthood, an ugly, fortress-type building with hardly any windows that is aesthetically appropriate for what happens behind its doors.

But there’s more. Waterleaf’s beautiful new facility came online just before the COVID-19 crisis. Earlier this week, Planned Parenthood announced plans to consolidate its 17 centers in Illinois down to 6, which means that their Aurora facility is seeing additional traffic and extended hours in the attempt to expand their deadly services of chemical and surgical abortions.

Waterleaf has responded to that announcement, thanks to the generosity of its supporters and the grace of God, by increasing its clinic hours and outreach efforts so they can “stand strong to preserve the life of the unborn.” By the way, I’ve seen these two buildings, and they could not be more starkly different. The one that offers death, looks like it does. The one that offers life and hope, looks like it does, too. In other words, it really wasn’t an accident that this woman went into the wrong building.  God had been orchestrating her mistake for well over THREE years.

Even when we can’t see clearly what He is ultimately doing, He often choreographs our small acts of obedience into something glorious. This is a story involving multiple people and parties, multiple callings including those in professional ministry and excellent business leaders, and then even a global pandemic. The details here are staggering… a property being sold and acquired, years of faithfully showing up outside an abortion clinic to pray and protest, a board being prompted to extend their work, choosing between architectural firms,  building a new facility, seeing and seizing an opportunity… so many leaps of faith here. So many small acts of obedience. The whole time God was orchestrating and preparing His people for this very strategic moment when Planned Parenthood would double-down its assault on women and their unborn children in this city of Aurora.

The lesson for anyone who wants to find and follow God’s will is pretty clear. God’s will isn’t so much about what He wants to do through us someday, it’s about what God wants us to do next. God orchestrates small acts of obedience and advances His Kingdom. We do our best. The results up to God. Or as T.S. Eliot said, “For us there is only the trying. The rest is none of our business.”

And let’s pray for all of the pregnancy resource centers at this time. Like Waterleaf, they face new challenges and new opportunities. Who knows? Maybe God is orchestrating a similar story in your town… and maybe it involves you?

Recently, a popular scientist and podcaster was asked which scientific suppositions he holds most dear. The self-proclaimed devotee of New Atheism struggled to choose just one. There was, of course his belief that the world is totally understandable, that we could eventually find every answer to every question through scientific investigation, and of course, that no Divine intervention or starting point was required to explain life, including human beings.

He failed to mention any blind spots, however, including one so blatant it infects not only so much of modern science but also so many who report on their work. I’m talking about the underlying habit to think that whatever seems to be the most likely answer to a question must be the correct one.

From this belief the rest of us get cultural myths such as “the science is settled,” an idea which pioneers of the scientific method would find strange, to say the least. Since science studies the world through observation, hypothesizing, data collection and testing, it is, by definition, unsettled. Mathematics can be settled, but not science.

Think, for example, of the sheer number of animal and plant species which are still being discovered each year. Think of the geological realities and chemical reactions and pandemic viruses that we’re still figuring out. In light of all of the uncertainty that drives our scientific exploration, is it really plausible to think science is certain about where everything comes from and how it got here?

To explore this question further, courtesy of a wonderful bit of storytelling, check out the wonderful documentary from Exploration Films called “The Master Designer – The Song.” Not only does the film explore the specialized designs of some fascinating animals, including the honeybee and the elk and the wolf to name a few, but it connects their intricacies to key stories in history. In other words, the film describes the providence and design of God from the smallest biological details to historical developments that would have been quite different without those details. For example, do you know which insect helped prevent America’s defeat in the Revolution?

The film is fascinating, and it’s beautifully done. Think: the beauty and excellence of a nature documentary without the evolutionary assumptions throughout… And, by the way, if you have an HD screen and a good sound system, even better. Turn the lights off and the volume up, especially when the crickets sing.

Each animal studied in the film reveals a genius of design. Honeybees carve their comb into hexagons, the shape that mathematically ensures the highest possible volume of honey. The stomach of a bison contains four compartments that not only work seamlessly together but allow it to digest even the most difficult-to-eat substances. Wolves’ paws are padded to allow them to travel long distances over ice without freezing. Camels can lose hundreds of pounds but, thanks to their humps of fat storage, remain healthy in the desert. 

Given the complex world as revealed by this film, the theory that life evolved through natural selection proves too simplistic. If bees had to learn slowly, over millennia, how to store honey, how did the middle generations survive? If bison stomachs gradually evolved to the highly effective, intricate systems they are now, where are the fossilized examples of all the failures? Their “steps along the way”? There are none. 

Towards the end of “The Master Designer,” there’s a long list of scientists whose study was built on a foundational belief that God had created the natural world, including brilliant minds like Galileo and Sir Isaac Newton and astronomer Johannes Kepler, who famously said that his work was not discovering something for the first time but rather “thinking God’s thoughts after Him.”

Between the interesting stories and the incredible images and footage, this is a film for people of all ages. Although I personally enjoy the gritty, food-chain blood and gore you might find on Animal Planet, there’s none of that here to scare little eyes. Instead, the thrust is on describing the intricate design of each animal, which ultimately points to the wisdom of the Designer. You can pick up a DVD of “The Master Designer – The Song,” or it’s also available to stream on various platforms, including Amazon and ChristianCinema.com.

In a drawing that illustrates an article in the most recent Harvard Magazine, a sad homeschooled girl sits imprisoned in a house made of books labeled “reading,” “writing,” “arithmatic,” and “Bible.” Outside, children happily play, skip rope, and run races. The image must have seemed strange to the many homeschool families who, unlike the editors, know how to spell “arithmetic” and who, unlike many educational professionals, tend not to separate out-of-class activities from learning.

The article, on the other hand, in which Harvard Law professor Elizabeth Bartholet calls for a presumptive national ban on homeschooling, should be alarming.

The article summarized the arguments from a recent Arizona Law Review paper in which Bartholet argues that homeschooling not only violates children’s rights to a ‘meaningful education’ and their right to be protected from potential child abuse, but may keep them from contributing positively to a democratic society.”

To argue her first point, Bartholet must (and indeed does) reject studies, such as the 2010 study published in the Widener Law Review, that conclude homeschooled children reach “levels of academic achievement similar to or higher than their publicly schooled peers.” She singles out the research of Dr. Brian Ray, who’s conducted some of the most extensive studies on homeschooling to date. Ray’s 2009 survey of standardized test results from more than 11,000 homeschooled students over 25 years from all 50 states, led him to conclude that, on average, “Homeschoolers are still achieving well beyond their public school counterparts—no matter what their family background, socioeconomic level, or style of homeschooling.”

Bartholet dismisses Ray’s research as “advocacy dressed up by science.”

In response to the Harvard article, recent Harvard grads Melba Pearson and Christian author Alex Harris wrote articles dismissing Bartholet’s claims as ideology dressed up as advocacy, pointing out how growing up homeschooled prepared them not only to attend Harvard, but excel there.

What of Bartholet’s argument that the lack of oversight of homeschooling families can conceal child abuse? Nowhere does Bartholet mention that according to the most widely-cited research, nearly 1 in 10 public school students in the U.S. will be subjected to sexual misconduct by school employees. Of course, public schools are filled with many good and dedicated teachers and workers, but homeschool families are filled with good and dedicated parents.

Let me be clear: Every single case of abuse is horrific, and anyone anywhere who perpetuates such abuse should be stopped and prosecuted. What’s unclear is why, for Bartholet and Harvard Magazine, the outliers in one arena disqualify it, but not in the other.

The reasons behind Bartholet’s highly selective criticism are laid bare when she admits what she thinks to be the real bogeyman of many homeschool families: “a majority of are driven by conservative Christian beliefs, and seek to remove their children from mainstream culture.” Well, there you have it.

Our response to such “extreme religious ideologues,” she suggests, should mirror Germany, where homeschooling is illegal. And, apparently unable to hear herself talk, Bartholet concludes “I think it’s always dangerous to put powerful people in charge of the powerless, and to give the powerful ones total authority.” So, giving the powerful government authority over the education of children will solve the problem of powerful parents having authority over children?

And therein lies the fundamental confusion, one that’s been debated in various cultural contexts throughout history and, that, when gotten wrong has destroyed lives and human flourishing. Does government have unlimited authority, or does it function best by preserving the inherent authorities possessed by other institutions throughout society, especially the authority of the family?

As Princeton professor Robert George pointed out, this article isn’t so much an argument against homeschooling as it for the compulsory secularization of America’s children. This kind of power grab, for which Bartholet advocates and against which George warns, is only made easier when parents surrender their God-given authority and responsibilities to the state. Outsource is one thing. Surrender is another.

This article is just one indication of growing challenges to parental rights everywhere. There are others, including the Summit on homeschooling to be held at Harvard this summer, where Bartholet will be a featured speaker, as well as William and Mary Law professor James Dwyer who once said, “…the reason parent-child relationships exist is because the State confers legal parenthood.”

At root, this isn’t a debate about better or best educational environments or practices. It’s a debate about where our most fundamental rights come from. Those who think the State grant rights, seek a legal monopoly on the minds of the next generation. Those who think the State’s job is to recognize rights and protect them, look elsewhere for the source of those rights. Who are the real ideologues again?