The Supreme Court ruled on June 21 that state education budgets can’t discriminate against Christian schools — but the most significant aspect of the case came more than six months earlier. In a revealing exchange during the oral arguments of Carson v. Makin last December 8, an attorney for the state of Maine essentially confessed that the government wants to discriminate based on religion, because politicians have “values they want to instill” in public schoolchildren. Multiple Supreme Court justices then explained precisely how they wish to discriminate against traditional Christian and religious believers.
The state of Maine maintains public high schools in fewer than half of its school districts. Instead, Maine’s Town Tuitioning Program allows parents in rural districts without a public school to send their children to a neighboring public school district or to a private school of their choice. But the state began excluding “sectarian” (read: religious) schools from the program in 1981. As we shall see, the state seemed most interested in excluding religious schools, because it wishes to teach religious principles of its own.
Carson v. Makin
Chief Deputy Attorney General Christopher Taub, who represented Maine at the Supreme Court, defended the religious exclusion on the grounds that “Maine has determined that, as a matter of public policy, public education should be religiously neutral.” But the court’s conservatives immediately ripped through his façade.
Justice Samuel Alito asked Taub if there were a church that didn’t “really have any dogma,” but its “salient religious beliefs are that all people are created equal and that nobody should be subjected to any form of invidious discrimination … and that everybody has an obligation to make contributions to the community and engage in charitable work.” Taub replied, “That would be very close to a public school. Public schools often have a set of values that they want to instill: public service, be kind to others, be generous.”
“You really are discriminating on the basis of religious belief,” replied Alito, who said he had outlined the basic beliefs of the Unitarian Universalists. What Taub really wants, Alito exposed, is to choose which religious beliefs that state will allow schools to inculcate in children: “That religious community … can have a school that inculcates students with their beliefs, because those are okay religious beliefs, but other religious beliefs, no.”
“Unless you can say that you would treat a Unitarian school the same as a Christian school, or an Orthodox Jewish school, or a Catholic school, then I think you’ve got a problem of discrimination among religious groups,” Alito concluded.
Justice Neil Gorsuch agreed during arguments that the law would “discriminate against minority religious viewpoints” and “favor religions that are more watered down,” churches that teach “what a bureaucrat in Bangor might say.”
We should begin by listening to what one bureaucrat in Bangor did say: “Public schools often have a set of values that they want to instill,” said Taub. Public school officials see teaching “values” — their values — as part of their mandate for your child.
Some of the justices exposed which beliefs they want taught, and which they want excluded. Retiring Justice Stephen Breyer groused that Bangor Christian Schools and Temple Academy “have admissions policies that allow them to deny enrollment to students based on gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, and religion, and both schools require their teachers to be born-again Christians.” That is, Christian schools require their teachers to believe the faith and do not allow students to rebel against it openly.
“Legislators did not want Maine taxpayers to pay for these religiously based practices — practices not universally endorsed by all citizens of the [s]tate — for fear that doing so would cause a significant number of Maine citizens discomfort or displeasure.” He then cited a Maine senator who opposed funding religious schools, because “public funds could be used to teach intolerant religious views.” Likewise in her dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor called it “irrational” and “perverse” for the Supreme Court to “protect against discrimination of one kind” while requiring Maine “to fund what many of its citizens believe to be discrimination of other kinds.”
In other words: You’re intolerant; that’s why we’re excluding you. But if the government is giving out a benefit to everyone except Christians — while forcing Christians to pay for it with their taxes — who’s discriminating against whom?
Read More

As Europe was facing the onset of war in 1939, Lewis preached a sermon in the Church of St. Mary the Virgin in Oxford. With many other academics and students in attendance, the issue of how we should now live was certainly a pressing concern for all those present. So Lewis entitled his address, “Learning in War-Time”. What the academic community was thinking about learning while on the verge of total war was a most pressing matter indeed. Lewis gave those in attendance some very helpful advice. 

How we live in peacetime is often quite different from how we live in wartime. How people were living in Ukraine a few years ago for example was quite different from how most are living today, with their homes being destroyed, their very way of life put on hold, and many millions being forced to flee the country.
I have often spoken about these matters in terms of the Christian life. Especially during these dark days where the faith is under such sustained attack and where the culture wars seem to be threatening the very existence of the church, we need to think about living in times of war. As I said in one piece in this regard:
In a time of war not everyone stays true. Many surrender, or go over to the other side, or go AWOL. And individual believers risk doing the same thing. In the battles we face today there is no place for sitting on the fence, or trying to stay in the middle of the road.
When warfare is all around us, the only proper response is to engage in the battle. With faith, freedom and family all at risk, this is no time for business as usual. This is not the time to live a normal life. It certainly is not a time to have the fear of man, or a time to seek to please men. Let’s try pleasing God instead, even if it means ruffling a few feathers. billmuehlenberg.com/2017/03/22/wartime-not-business-usual/
And one quote I have often used to ram home this point is also worth repeating here. In a 2014 essay called “A Time for Heroism” American Catholic philosopher Melissa Moschella said this:
Perhaps there are times and places in the history of the world in which it is possible to go through life as just an ordinary, good person—a faithful spouse, a loving parent, a concerned citizen, a regular church-goer, an honest and industrious professional—leading a normal, quiet life, not making waves or standing out in any way. Perhaps. But the United States of America in the year 2014 is not one of those times and places. Rather, in our contemporary society, the only way to be good is to be heroic. Failing to act with heroism inevitably makes us complicit in grave evils.
I of course still agree with all those sentiments that I have so often shared. But there is another way that Christians can look at all this. It is perhaps more accurate to say that we are in a state of warfare not just during times of great crisis or upheaval, or when the days are getting especially dark and evil, but ALWAYS.
That is, the Christian will always be in a state of war with the world around him, with the powers of darkness, and with this present evil age. Sure, sometimes the battles seem more intense than other times, but the Christian is never fully living in peacetime.
Even when most of the surrounding culture was Christian or at least fairly sympathetic to Christianity, the true Christian was always a bit of a misfit in this world. Indeed, we will never fully be at home here. We will always be in some sort of warfare – certainly always spiritual warfare.
Thus the practical question is this: how should we then live? When Christians are being heavily persecuted, rounded up into prison camps, and being killed, such a question takes on real urgency and significance. But we always need to be asking these sorts of questions.
And the issue is, do we just drop everything we are doing, head for the hills, and prepare for the end of the world? Or do we just go on living more or less normal lives, but with an eye always on eternity, and an awareness that this is not really our home, and battles will always be with us?
Christians can take differing approaches here. Some simply pull out of the world altogether, either to live as monks or as end-time survivalists. But some Christians live as if there is no war going on, and have very happily made themselves quite at home in this world.
Somewhere in between these extremes might be the biblical way to proceed. And to help me discuss this further, I once again simply draw upon the insights and great wisdom of English academic and Christian apologist C. S. Lewis. 
Read More
Related Posts:

Theoretical inerrancy is killing the church in America. It is spreading like stage 4 cancer. Only God can stop it. If He does, it will be through the Spirit-empowered preaching and teaching of His Word. If He does, there will be deep repentance among pastors, leaders, and churches where sin is confessed, new resolve is given, and new patterns of living and ministering are embraced.

One of my growing concerns about American Christianity (and I include myself and the congregation that I serve in this analysis) is that we have been blessed with ready access to the Bible for so long and have seen reaffirmation of its full authority so boldly declared by many of our pastors, churches, and institutions that we have made the affirmation of its inerrancy almost meaningless. I am not saying that a full-throated affirmation of biblical inerrancy is unimportant. On the contrary, I contended for that very thing in the so-called “Conservative Resurgence” in the Southern Baptist Convention during the last two decades of the twentieth century.
I enrolled at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in May 1979, having been convinced by a prominent member of that faculty that inerrancy was at best unimportant and that the “Fundamentalists” were storming the walls with the intent of firing all of Southwestern’s faculty and turning it into backwater Bible College intent only to indoctrinate and not educate.
So I showed up to my first class loaded for bear with reassurances for my professors that I would lead my church and our ten messengers to Houston in a few weeks and would vote against that “young man from Memphis” (Adrian Rogers) who wanted to fire them. By God’s grace, my first class was a survey of church history with Tom Nettles. Early in the term I offered him my reassurance in his office. He cocked his head, got a consternated look on his face and asked me, “Who have you been talking to?” When I told him and explained how I understood the situation in the SBC he got up from his desk, walked to his door, and closed it. The moment he sat back down marked the beginning of my real theological education.
As I grappled with the nature of Scripture, its authority, power, and sufficiency, and the implications for my life and ministry, my world was rocked. I had been raised by a godly mother who taught her children to believe the Bible but I had never thought deeply about the nature and implications of divine revelation. As I did, I found myself coming to see the simple, clear testimonies of Scripture concerning itself such as Paul makes in 2 Timothy 3:16-17,
All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.
Once convinced, I did my best to contend for this doctrine and to lend my small voice to those calling the SBC back to an unashamed affirmation of biblical inerrancy. I did so because I believe it to be true and vitally important for healthy Christianity. Consequently, I rejoiced to see the SBC turned around such that now all of the Seminary presidents, entity heads, seminary professors, and denominational leaders unashamedly affirm inerrancy. In fact, no self-respecting Southern Baptist pastor or leader would dare deny it.
Read More
Related Posts: