God in the Classroom: A Manifesto

Sshhh! Let’s conspire.

People complain that the Supreme Court banned God from the classroom in the 1963 case Murray v. Curlett. But there’s a way to get him back.

It’s real simple. It’s real subversive.

See, God dwells in the hearts of those who love and fear him.

See where I’m going with this?

So it’s simple. In our homes, in our churches, teach our children to love and fear God. Then send our children to school. When our children enter school, God goes in with them, carried in their hearts.

It’s so simple!

The problem is that people sometimes talk like we need teachers to lead Christian prayers and read the Bible in classrooms, in front of students who are Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim, Hindu, atheist, and agnostic. That, apparently, will install God in the hearts of the students, so the students can carry God back to their homes and churches.

But these people, in their complaints, have it all backward. It’s supposed to work the other way around.

True, my plan has at least two problems. The first problem is that it takes effort by parents and pastors. Because to really, really work, this plan demands that children learn to be little Christs. To really, really work, our Christian children must go into schools and act in a way that the non-Christians see a difference in them that they want for themselves.

And that calls for discipleship. That calls for study, prayer, and meditation – by the parents, by the pastors first, then by the children.

That’s because Christlikeness does not arise in the lazy Christianity that glories in being saved but makes no effort to deepen a relationship with the saver. That relationship – like any good relationship – demands time. And it demands time from the parent and the pastor before they can reproduce it in the children.

And here’s the second problem: the success of this plan is not guaranteed by the efforts that parents and pastors make. This Christian Normandy Invasion of the classroom is no more guaranteed to succeed by our efforts than that other Normandy Invasion. There’s something else that this plan requires, and it’s something that we have no control over.

That’s grace.

Study, prayer, and meditation don’t automatically lead to Christlikeness. Online, you can listen to sermons from the Westboro Baptist Church (they who celebrate the deaths of our soldiers). They know their Bible. They know it well. They just have a flawed understanding of it. It defies my understanding of the in-dwelling Christ to say that Christ dwells in them.

The South went to war against the Union to preserve the institution that permitted them to eat their bread by the sweat of other men’s faces – Black men’s faces. They were a praying, preaching, Bible-reading people.

The overwhelming majority of Germans were Christians. But they followed Hitler into World War II and the Holocaust.

So study, prayer, and meditation lead to spiritual wastelands without the grace of God. And nobody can make God give grace.

But nobody can stop us from praying for grace.

So pray for grace, for yourselves and for your children. Then study, meditate, and continue to pray, and teach your children to do likewise.

Then nothing but God himself can keep God out of our schools.