SBC Caves: No ‘Exodus’ from California Schools

Once again, the Southern Baptist Convention has failed to stand up for Christian children.

Once again, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination has agreed to leave Christian children in anti-Christian schools.

At the SBC’s annual meeting last week, the church’s Resolutions Committee stifled a resolution calling on the SBC to urge the removal of Christian children from California public schools. The resolution was not allowed out of committee for a vote on the convention floor.

The SBC has rejected similar resolutions at recent annual meetings. But this time the resolution addressed specific circumstances in a specific state.

Under a new state law, SB 777, California public schools are now required to teach the moral equivalency of all forms of sexual behavior, including homosexuality, transgenderism, etc. (for details, see “Now It’s the Law! California Schools Must Push Homosexuality). Schools are not given any options. They are forbidden to say or do anything that might imply that one sexual “lifestyle choice” is morally preferable to another.

Amendment Shot Down, Too

The SBC did pass a resolution “supporting a ballot initiative in California that will define marriage as only between one man and one woman” (see http://www.onenewsnow.com/Church/Default.aspx?id=137062)—but even in that action, rejected an amendment calling on California’s Christians to remove their children from the public schools “which are the main training ground for the teaching of same-sex marriage.”

The amendment was defeated, said church leaders, because the Resolutions Committee was “trying to stay focused” on the marriage issue and did not want to be distracted by “the corollary issues of the education system at this time.”

It is hard to imagine anything more pusillanimous.

What Will the Children Think?

By leaving the children in the public schools, where they will be taught—starting in kindergarten—that Christian morality is wrong, the SBC has pulled its own teeth.

What are children to think, when their church and their parents say “gay marriage” is wrong, yet leave them in schools where they are taught “gay marriage” is right? If Christian teachings are supposed to be authoritative, are not the schools in the wrong for teaching the opposite? But if the schools are wrong, will not the children eventually have to ask, “Then what are we doing here?”

If the schools were forcefully teaching Islam or Hinduism, would the SBC insist that Christian children remain there? Is one form of anti-Christian teaching to be preferred to another?

We cannot understand the SBC’s actions. What is the point of opposing “gay marriage,” if a whole generation of children is to be left in the public schools and taught that “gay marriage” is right? These children are the future of the church—and yet the SBC has abandoned them to an explicitly anti-Christian education.

What Is the Church Afraid Of?

If a church is afraid of offending people by preaching an unpopular position, it might as well go out of business: for such a church has lost its soul.

For the first time, state law has been passed to place the schools in direct conflict with the church—and the SBC leadership has caved. It has chosen to please man rather than obey God. Its surrender will certainly encourage the forces of Organized Sodomy to get similar laws passed in other states.

We can do nothing for an institutional church that has sold its birthright for a mess of pottage.

But we can encourage individual Christians, in California and everywhere else, to go where their church leaders will not go, to dare what their church leaders will not dare, and choose the path of obedience to God by pulling their children out of public schools. These are Christian children, and they need a Christian education. They must not be brought up on two sets of mutually contradictory worldviews!

“No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other,” says Our Lord Jesus Christ (Matthew 6:24).

Some of these California children will surely grow up to despise the teachings of the church.

If some, instead, learn to despise the teachings of their schools—well, then, how are their parents and pastors to explain themselves to them?

Either way, the SBC has made the wrong decision.