Baptists and the Public Schools
By Foy Valentine,
Retired Executive Director of the Southern Baptist Christian Life Commission and Founding Editor of Christian Ethics Today

Some notorious Fundamentalist partisans have recently been in the news with a scheme to trash the public schools and replace them with a Baptist parochial school system. Holding to an off-the-wall mindset of a few leading Radical Religious Right ideologues, these partisans would like to get Baptist churches to buy into their grand misadventure.

What a travesty.

Their proposed resolution brought to the recent Southern Baptist Convention was rejected as expected; but we may be sure that their idea is still alive and virulent, invasive and malignant.

The Roman Catholic parochial school system is now in dire straits because (1) their pool of essentially free labor, by teaching nuns and brothers who have taken vows of poverty has about dried up; and (2) because the American principle of separation of church and state has, up to now, denied them full access to public tax support. Lutherans in America, among a few others, have embraced a more limited approach to parochial schools; and, because of their comparatively small numbers, they have not been major players in this public school/parochial school face-off.

Baptists, however, are something else.

Historically Baptists have never been Anabaptists. That is, Anabaptists have tended to withdraw from the world, while Baptists have tended to jump in and join the fray, believing that any fight is better than no fight at all. From eagerly joining Cromwell’s army fighting to overthrow the king of England, to pressing James Madison and Thomas Jefferson to incorporate a guarantee of religious liberty and separation of church and state in the new American Constitution, to broad and nearly unanimous support for public education, Baptists have believed in being in the world but not of the world.

Most Baptists have strongly supported the public schools because we have perceived them to be (1) allies in our stand for religious liberty and church-state separation and (2) a major source of our American democracy’s robust strength. Baptists have not denied some painful deficiencies in public education but have nevertheless continued our involvement in the system not only to keep it alive but also to strengthen and improve it. Baptist public school teachers and administrators have “stayed by the stuff” in spite of carping criticism and vicious attacks on the public school system, especially by a small cadre of shrill Religious Right extremists. And most Baptists have been unwilling to withdraw from the public schools and join the chorus of those seeking tax money from Caesar to support their parochial schools for Christ, preferring rather to “render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”

Among today’s public school detractors, a few stand out—

1. The Roman Catholic bishops who persist in their un-American efforts to get tax money for their private parochial schools.

2. A sizable company of Religious Right leaders who hew the Roman Catholic line of seeking public tax support for private schools while trumpeting their opposition to what they call the “godless public schools.”

3. The voucher schemes designed to circumvent the constitutional principle of church-state separation which schemes of channeling tax money to church schools and private schools championed by sincere private school and home school supporters and by unprincipled politicians seeking to use the voucher issue for their political advantage; and

4. Certain business interests who seem to be keenly alert to great potential profits to be made through privatized schools to whom text books, school supplies, and school materials and facilities of all kinds could be hawked to make a few billion extra bucks. Surely, God expects better things from Baptists.

August 2004