Christians v Education (and why they’re wrong)
My goal this year is to post at least once per week. Alas, I don’t always have that much to say. Bad news for a writer, perhaps. But I do have a thought that’s been bouncing around in my head for a while now, and I meant to make a YouTube video about it, but I haven’t (yet—I might still). So I’ll sketch it out here.
I grew up… Well, we were Catholic when I was young. Both my parents were raised that way, and I went to CCD (I think they call it something else now), and didn’t think as much about it as I was probably meant to. But then one of my mother’s friends “saved” her, and the next thing I knew, no more CCD and I was instead expected to go to a smaller, louder church every Sunday morning, Sunday evening, and Wednesday night. My mother—who some would call “social” although “world-class meddler” is more accurate—also lost no time in becoming Sunday school teacher for the high schoolers. Since I was only about eight years old, I was spared having to sit through her lessons and got to watch Gospel Bill during Sunday classes for the elementary-aged kids.
All of this is intended to establish my credentials, such as they are. I ended up at a private Christian school where my mother was the admin. I sang solos for the congregations—plural, as we bounced from church to church, each one eventually fragmenting as people jockeyed for power. And as an undergrad, I joined what I would later categorize as a kind of cult, despite it being embedded in Christianity. (We can have the discussion about whether all religion is cultish another time.)
So. Here’s where we get to the meat of my recent thoughts. I recognize that I’m the poster child of fundamentalist fears: the once good, Christian girl who went and got “educated” and turned her back on God. Except, I didn’t really. I turned my back on other people trying to tell me what my relationship with “God” had to be, had to look like, how it had to be performed. I turned my back on the middle men who wanted me to believe they had some special insight, or a direct connection to [their] God, and therefore I had to listen to them, do as they said, and take their interpretations of the Bible as, well, gospel. And now I’m here to give you my interpretation of something very specific. But I’m not going to demand you listen or accept it. It’s just my point of view, and if it rings true to you, cool.
The issue: Fundamentalist/Evangelical Christians Attempting to Stifle Education
I know—I’ve lived it—how these Christians shelter their kids. It’s all about “not being worldly.” But now they want to extend that sheltering to, uh, everyone? All the kids, anyway… And uneducated kids grow into un- or undereducated adults (particularly if/when you discourage higher learning, and there are political reasons for this, too, but that’s another post). The ideal, for these Christians, is to create a world that… isn’t “worldly.” Step one: shelter kids from everything. How? By making it illegal to teach kids stuff you don’t agree with or don’t want them to know. (Spoiler: kids will figure out, find out, etc. And better they do that from educated authority figures than shady internet sites—better they feel comfortable talking to/asking you than sneaking info—but whatever.) Step two: continue to shelter kids as they grow into adulthood by, again, making stuff illegal. Once all “bad” things are criminalized and sent underground, these “good” Christian people will no longer have to look at or deal with all that ungodly stuff, and the world will be the way they want it. The way they say God wants it (though neither God nor Jesus ever showed any interest in remaking the world; they wanted individuals to remake themselves regardless of the world).
Ahem. So here’s the thing:
God Wants Us to Be Educated
Right from the start, we can see that God—this particular God—wants his* people to have knowledge. And here’s how we know:
He put a fruit tree in the middle of Eden. He’s supposedly infallible and omniscient, so he knew what was going to happen. He could have put that tree on a mountaintop, or made it barren, or not have had a tree at all. He wanted Adam and Eve to eat from that tree.
Go ahead and fuss about how, no, he told them not to eat from it. But didn’t he also create that serpent? Go ahead and say, no, he was testing Adam and Eve and they failed. But why test them at all?
Here’s why:
God wants his people to choose him.
A person who knows nothing but God cannot choose him. That person merely accepts what is. There is no glory to God in a person who has no other options. There is no genuine praise if it is simply a fact of life.
There is no love of light in a world with no darkness in it.
If anything, a world like that causes people to take the light for granted. It is always there. It is nothing special. In fact, people might tire of perpetual light and come to curse it.
God wants us to know wrong from right, good from evil. He wants us to see all the world has to offer. He wants us to be tempted by it. Only then does it mean anything to give up that world and choose him.
So there’s my little “sermon” about why the so-called Christians who want kids to go uneducated are wrong, and why those who want some kind of “godly” world are actually going against God’s desire. God wants us to live in this messy world and make the conscious choice to choose him and his path. Doing so brings him glory, and is meant to bring us peace.
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*I know God has no gender, but it is easier (for me) to fall back on the familiar and use masculine pronouns. I do not, however, feel the need to capitalize his pronouns as some do.