The religious right is the branch of Christianity most interested in turning public schools with children of every faith and ethnicity into "Christian schools" and is the branch of Christianity that is most at odds with what Christianity should be all about--the Gospel message of Jesus.
How is preaching the Gospel to children at odds with the Gospel message of Jesus?
Having the Gospel at a young age can save children a lot of misery and bad choices. The Holy Spirit has more time to work on them before the burdens of full adult responsibilities hit.
I'm sorry, but I didn't really intend this thread to be about the difference between Christian and public schools. While I used my time in public school to evangelize and present the Gospel to many of my fellow students and teachers, I still needed to receive a proper Christian education. I was fortunate enough to attend a Bible-teaching church and an AWANA ministry which took the spiritual education of children seriously. They had elders and pastors of the church teach us. During my first two years in high school, an elder of the church met with all of the AWANA high school students for a separate meeting on Monday afternoons to discuss deeper theological facts and principles. He was taking us through a systematic theology and timelines for lives of early biblical characters. Unfortunately, I had to move away, but I still have my notes from that experience. It's something I'm never ever going to forget.
One can argue that care for the poor is important, but there is an intellectual depth and focus to Christianity that cannot be denied. Should we address practical problems? YES.
James 2:15-16 said:
15 If a brother or sister is naked and destitute of daily food, 16 and one of you says to them, “Depart in peace, be warmed and filled,” but you do not give them the things which are needed for the body, what does it profit?
As James points out, faith without works is dead. (James 2:17) But without a Christian intellectual education, I wouldn't be able to pull out that verse and tell you that. I wouldn't be able to defend your ministry from those who would attack it and say that it is a waste of time. That is the point of the intellect, to go back to the Hebrew and the Greek. It is a defense. Children should defend their faith from those (in public school and otherwise) who would attack it.
But besides all of that, it's the treasures of wisdom and knowledge that are to be found in Christ, walking deeper and deeper into the knowledge of God. It's deeper enjoyment of who God is that allows us to resist worldly temptations and pleasures. It's more protection on that level, but it is also deeply valuable.
And some believe that this Christian education needs to be integrated into the study of reading, writing, mathematics, science, and history. Christianity was kind of the source of widespread literacy in the first place, as without it people could not read their Bibles in any language, let alone their own. Which goes against Catholic history, the denomination that has historically conducted services in Latin and has fought to keep Scripture out of the hands of the laity. Which turns this whole thing into a Catholic versus Protestant issue. The Protestant approach is blatant: if you don't explain the Gospel, Scripture, and theology to people, they won't accept it. Which leads the Protestants to believe that many Catholics don't even know what the Gospel even is, let alone have the chance to accept it. I'm not saying that this thought process is correct, but once you get people telling you this, I'll admit that this mindset is hard to shake, especially if you've never been to a Catholic mass ever (that would be me, lowly uncultured human that I am). And yes, I know that the Masses are said in English these days.
Anyway, Protestantism is kind of responsible for the subject education in the first place and so they want to hang onto it through the education system of the Christian school. After all, we have to manage church budgets with math and keep people alive with science and tell the history of America to defend our democratic system and protect our religious freedoms by getting our children to vote properly.
But then the government co-opted the system to produce obedient factory workers. Conformists. Obedient children. This enrages the artists, the designers, the creatives, the writers and poets. It's easy for a government to subdue an obedient and conformist population rather than a nation of individual freethinkers. When government takes over education, the result is obvious. It has nothing to do with religion, and the Protestants are just irritated that their system of training missionaries got co-opted and is being used how it wasn't intended.
One of the advantages of Christian school is actually that you learn to pursue the economics interests of Christianity, rather than the economic interests of the state. This lack of integrated knowledge has actually caused me difficulties as an adult because I want to serve the Lord. I would argue that there is some value to it. On the other hand, you can argue that an integrated "Christian school" education isolates children from the reality of the world outside, and that creates spiritually weak people who cannot stand up to the harsh realities of the world. A cloistered child might decide to walk away from Christianity because they feel betrayed over information that was hidden from them. The advantage of my upbringing is that I knew what I was being saved from and had the luxury of choosing truth. My vision is clear.
Anyway, that was too long. The point of this thread wasn't to critique various types of denominational education systems, it was to ask whether Christian economic interests ever align with the U.S. economic ones. I'd appreciate it if we could try to get back on topic, though I do concede that the lens of education is a compelling way to examine this problem that I didn't consider.
(What are Christian economic interests, anyway? Serving the poor is one, but there may be others my mind may be blanking on.)
What I was thinking more about was, when you're poor, cash becomes a resource, not an implicit need-to-have transaction mechanism. You can have EBT, cash, gift cards, or even things like clothing, shoes, furniture, etc that you get from OfferUp or various donation sources. If you're in that situation long enough, you start to notice where you get cash from as opposed to other things. All cash sources involve selling your time and/or conforming to a standard or system. Working a government job, getting government financial aid to go to college, EBT that's measured in dollar amounts - all the purest forms of this. You need cash to pay for government services like vehicle registrations and vehicle insurance, buying from the government the privilege of driving your car on a public street. You use cash to pay for property taxes, which is the privilege of owning land in the United States that the government has to secure from terrorist invasions and supply roads and the same public school system to teach kids to conform and be good little citizens of the USA all over again.
Eventually, you start to notice what the system is all about. The corporations all provide services to United States' citizens. They do it by making their workers conform to their vision. Cash is all about the Government, and the U.S. Government's better interest. Placing money in the hands of companies in the form of stocks makes you more money (potentially) because you are putting your money back into the system. The cash system, under fiat currency, is not about collective human economic survival. It's about the interest of government. Those who do not conform or obey, who want to stand up with their own individual voice, economically suffer until they give up the goal and find a YouTube algorithm to conform to in the interest of Uncle Sam.
Which brings me back to my title question.
