Anabaptist cultural engagement

[RZehr]

Jake Meador, editor at Mere Orthodoxy, and no one's idea of a 'Christian Nationalist, has some thoughts on what to do if something like what happened to his friend recently, befalls you:

Or better yet:
1. Pray.
2. Act like Christians in our personal interactions with everyone.
3. Don’t lie about the schools, teachers, or administrators.
4. If possible, get your kid out of that school.
5.

I'm curious about your rejection of "using political levers" - is there something wrong with attending asking a school board to review/change the curriculum, for example?

Well....There may be another layer beyond just four. So I'm happy to leave 5 open. But I'm not a fan of becoming involved in politics. I don't vote, donate money to politics, or run for public office such as school boards. I am involved in curriculum at our parochial school.
Whose fault is it that Christianity is losing influence in American society? Is it the Christians such as myself who practice a more extreme separation of Church and State? Or, is it the Christians who are part of the Moral Majority etc.?
I believe that the position I've adopted is better aligned with how Christ taught us to live.

You ask if there something wrong with asking a school board to review / change the curriculum. I would say no. But the anger and indignation that I've seen in a few video clips of parents railing at makes me doubt the efficacy of including the 5th point as a suggestion to the general public.

[Ken]

Or better yet:
1. Pray.
2. Act like Christians in our personal interactions with everyone.
3. Don’t lie about the schools, teachers, or administrators.
4. If possible, get your kid out of that school.
5.

I'm curious about your rejection of "using political levers" - is there something wrong with attending asking a school board to review/change the curriculum, for example?

Well....There may be another layer beyond just four. So I'm happy to leave 5 open. But I'm not a fan of becoming involved in politics. I don't vote, donate money to politics, or run for public office such as school boards. I am involved in curriculum at our parochial school.
Whose fault is it that Christianity is losing influence in American society? Is it the Christians such as myself who practice a more extreme separation of Church and State? Or, is it the Christians who are part of the Moral Majority etc.?
I believe that the position I've adopted is better aligned with how Christ taught us to live.

You ask if there something wrong with asking a school board to review / change the curriculum. I would say no. But the anger and indignation that I've seen in a few video clips of parents railing at makes me doubt the efficacy of including the 5th point as a suggestion to the general public.

Most of the videos I've seen of parents railing at school board meetings were about pandemic masking requirements. Which were generally state-mandates and not something school boards actually had authority over in the first place.

That said, parent pressure frequently does influence school board curriculum decisions. Here in the Vancouver area the Battle Ground school district recently went through a public fight about its sex ed curriculum and the board completely deferred (or caved depending on your point of view) to the conservative parents who were objecting. By way of background, Battle Ground is in a purplish county in a blue state. Here is local news coverage:

https://www.columbian.com/news/2019/oct ... quirement/

[barnhart]

...
Whose fault is it that Christianity is losing influence in American society? Is it the Christians such as myself who practice a more extreme separation of Church and State? Or, is it the Christians who are part of the Moral Majority etc.?.

Good question.

[ohio jones]

References to claims made in the Gender Confusion thread have been moved back to that thread, where they can be discussed (and were at the time) in context.

[Franklin]

Does anyone have some wisdom for Falco in regard to his initial question.

Jake Meador, editor at Mere Orthodoxy, and no one's idea of a 'Christian Nationalist, has some thoughts on what to do if something like what happened to his friend recently, befalls you:

Suppose you find yourself in a situation like the one facing one of my friends in their blue state context:

Your 7th grader in the local public school walks into her homeroom and is shown a video about “gender reassignment” that includes footage of a penis being cut off and “made into a vagina.”

Our response to this needs to be layered:
1.If possible, get your kid out of that school.
2.Use what political levers you can to try and challenge school curriculums that teach these things.
3. Don’t lie about the schools, teachers, or administrators.
4. Act like Christians in our personal interactions with everyone.
5. Pray

My response would be that this person deserves this for leaving their children in the public school system to begin with. Public school is the product of modern culture which is pure evil, so of course it has many problems. I think the worst problem is actually that public schools are designed to make children stupid, so children who go through the public school system generally become stupid adults. I think this is a worse problem than teaching sexual degeneracy in school.

[Josh]

My response would be that this person deserves this for leaving their children in the public school system to begin with. Public school is the product of modern culture which is pure evil, so of course it has many problems. I think the worst problem is actually that public schools are designed to make children stupid, so children who go through the public school system generally become stupid adults. I think this is a worse problem than teaching sexual degeneracy in school.

Of course, withdrawing from the public school is part of acknowledging that there is an irreparable rift between one's self and the current prevailing institutions and governmernt.

As a plain Anabaptist, that is something we acknowledged back in 1525, and it started with withdrawing from the government-sponsored institution of the Reformed state church in Zürich; in 1926, Canadian Mennonites withdraw from the government-mandated educational institution, recognising the threat it was to practicing genuine Christian faith. Mexico became a haven of educational freedom for Mennonites in the 1920s. The rest of the plain Anabaptist world did the same in the 1960s and 1970s, and America, too, became such a haven after the Wisconsin v. Yoder, amongst others.

Yet this also means we are less "culturally engaged" via the mainstream institutions of the polity. This is an irreparable loss, but it is a decision that has been made by wicked people who have conspired to remake government into a wicked, coercive, totalitarian institution. The scenario Jake Meador described is the same scenario those who faced the Bolshevists once faced; the only valid responses are either total war, or to accept being a persecuted, suffering church in the face of government & institutions that tell us they are lord, and Jesus is not.

[Falco Underhill]

...
Whose fault is it that Christianity is losing influence in American society? Is it the Christians such as myself who practice a more extreme separation of Church and State? Or, is it the Christians who are part of the Moral Majority etc.?.

Good question.

That depends on how much you defend secularism, the modern notion of separation of church and state, whether you provide theological justification for it, how indifferent you are to Marxist influences on society, and whether or not you think the spiritual realities of the Bible are irrelevant to public life and institutions, etc. Sadly, we probably all share some responsibility to some degree or another.

Protestant sectarianism in general is probably the main reason for secularism as we have it today. At least, all the different sectarian viewpoints and the wars to defend them are mainly what provide the philosophical and theological justifications for it.

[PetrChelcicky]

As for the debate about the early church - was it quiet or engaged? - I think that this deserves a "topic" of its own, and this should better be in the "general Christian" forum.