Written by John A. Sparks |
Wednesday, July 13, 2022
These three cases, because they widen the spectrum of parental educational choice, are especially important. Regrettably, many public schools and their boards have allowed their schools to drift into instruction that parents increasingly find runs counter to their convictions and values. This decision recognizes that parents desire and ought to have real educational alternatives.

In 2017, the Supreme Court decided a case that involved a school playground resurfacing program provided by the state of Missouri. Trinity Lutheran School sought a state grant, which was generally offered to other schools, but Trinity was denied funding solely because it was a religious school. The Supreme Court found in favor of the school, saying that it had every right, under the free exercise clause of the First Amendment, to participate in a government benefit program without giving up its religious affiliation.
In 2020, the high court continued efforts to return the free exercise clause to the strength the Americans founders intended. The case was Espinoza v. Montana. Montana gave tax credits to donors who created scholarships for private schools, but the state refused to allow parents who received scholarships to put them toward tuition at religious schools. The Supreme Court found against Montana, saying that requiring a school “to divorce itself from any religious control or affiliation” in order to obtain the scholarship monies “deters or discourages the exercise of First Amendment rights.”
Now the new decision in Carson v. Makin, the third case in that trilogy of cases, again finds that a state-instituted program (this time in Maine) which “operates to identify and exclude otherwise eligible schools on the basis of their religious exercise” violates the free exercise clause of the First Amendment.
Here are the details: The state of Maine is the most rural state in the union. In some school districts, that resulted in too few students to financially justify the existence of a public secondary school. Consequently, Maine permitted those districts to provide a program of “tuition assistance” to families in those locations. One of the options open to parents was to choose a private school to which the publicly provided tuition monies would be sent. The Carson family and another family chose religious schools to which to send their children (Bangor Christian Schools and Temple Academy) because they lived in districts where no public secondary school existed and desired religious instruction as part of their children’s education.
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Written by James E. Hanley |
Friday, September 17, 2021
CRT is just a sophisticated legal theory taught only in law schools and graduate schools. Others say that CRT is the simple factual truth about the history of race and politics in the U.S. and conservative opponents are trying to block teaching that in public schools. These two claims cannot both be true. A complexly sophisticated idea taught only in graduate school cannot simultaneously be a simple idea taught in elementary and high schools. One need not even critique CRT to agree to this. So why do its defenders contradict themselves?

In recent months defenders of Critical Race Theory have given two conflicting stories. Some tell us that the flap over critical race theory (CRT) in K-12 education is a strawman because CRT is just a sophisticated legal theory taught only in law schools and graduate schools. Others say that CRT is the simple factual truth about the history of race and politics in the U.S. and conservative opponents are trying to block teaching that in public schools. These two claims cannot both be true. A complexly sophisticated idea taught only in graduate school cannot simultaneously be a simple idea taught in elementary and high schools. One need not even critique CRT to agree to this. So why do its defenders contradict themselves?
In our search for a reason, we should look for an explanation that is both charitable and grounded. By charitable, I mean we assume CRT’s defenders are not consciously trying to deceive. By grounded, I mean one that easily fits known facts and theories, without need for special pleading. Collectively, these two principles are the foundation of Hanlon’s razor, which warns us to never assume malice when ignorance is an adequate explanation.
In the case of CRT, I believe we can explain its defenders’ confusion through the simple lens of costs and benefits. Put simply, acquiring knowledge is costly, and thinking logically is costly, but feeling morally righteous or smugly superior is psychologically valuable and attained at low cost. Just as any of us prefer a good meal we don’t have to pay for, we face a temptation to latch on to the feelings of moral or intellectual superiority without paying the costs of gaining real knowledge and engaging in careful thinking.
Let’s begin with those who say critical race theory is just a high-level academic theory. They clearly err, because no influential academic theory remains only at the law school and graduate school level for decades. Although CRT originated in law schools, legal scholarship is not hermetically sealed off from the rest of academia. Some social science and humanities scholars found the ideas of CRT useful for their scholarly pursuits and adopted them. Blossoming scholars then learned these ideas in graduate school and applied them in their own scholarly thinking, and then, when they got academic jobs, in their undergraduate courses.
That sophisticated scholarly ideas sometimes get watered down in undergrad courses is no secret. So the CRT a student learns in an undergraduate Sociology or African-American Studies course may be incomplete in the same way that undergrads get an incomplete version of Plato or Marx. That doesn’t make it not critical theory. And if some of these undergrads go on to teach in elementary or high schools, some likely will introduce some of these ideas, likely in an even more watered-down way.
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All sin is false worship. We worship what we love – and we become like it. We can become consumed and transformed by gluttony or envy or lust. We can make work or money or sex our god. And we worship these things. Our sinful desires really destroy the way we were meant to be: “Idols redefine reality and morality. But in so doing, they also redefine us. Partly, this is what we wanted: idols create a rewritten reality designed for us.” Today’s idols of sex, freedom and self are destroying all three of these things.

John Calvin once said that the human heart is an idol-making factory. If we do not worship the God who created us, we will worship anyone or anything else. And we inevitably become like these objects of worship. We love our sins and we love our idols, and we move further and further away from who we were meant to be.
Back in 2008 the American New Testament scholar Greg Beale released a volume on idolatry called We Become What We Worship (IVP). In it he said this: “All of us are imitators, and there is no neutrality. We should disabuse ourselves of the notion that we can be spiritually neutral. We are either being conformed to an idol of the world or to God.” And this is serious business, given how often we find in Scripture idols and idolatry related to the demonic.
The truth is, if we get God wrong, we get everything else wrong. Our understanding of who we are and why we are here gets fully distorted and twisted if the one true God is not our focus and our sole object of worship. Being image-bearers of God, our proper sense of identity and self-worth is fully bound up in him. When we worship false gods of any sort, our identity gets radically warped and disfigured.
Today in the West everyone seems obsessed with identity. But unless they are in right relation with the one who made them in his image, their identity will always become ever more messed up. We see this so clearly in the distorted (and yes, demonic) assault on human sexuality.
The radical homosexual and trans revolutions are a classic case in point. These folks are obsessed with identity, but it is all focused in the wrong place. Sexual identity becomes an obsession and an idol and takes us away from God and freedom and into satanic bondage.  
These matters are all covered very nicely indeed in a new book by Matthew Roberts: Pride: Identity and the Worship of Self (Christian Focus, 2023). Here in Australia, we just had the 46th annual Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras over the weekend in Sydney. They call these things “pride marches”. They are all about finding identity and meaning in one’s sexuality.
But as Roberts explains so well, the worship of anything other than God will NOT give us our real identity and will only further entrap us in a downward spiral. Idolatry always does that. This book is well worth quoting from, so let me offer a number of choice remarks found in it.
Early on he writes: “The argument of this present book is that Christianity provides an answer which secularism cannot; indeed, the fundamental tenets of secularism are the problem. Since who we are is defined by our duty to worship God, our crisis of identity is at root a crisis of worship.” p. 16
He continues:
We do not know ourselves by focussing on ourselves; we know ourselves by focusing on God, for we are created to display Him. In this sense, all of Christian theology has been about ‘identity’, but it is deeply Christian that Christians have not thought of it that way. Christianity has the answers to identity-obsession, but we will not find them by indulging in it ourselves. It is of our very essence to direct our minds and hearts towards God. The more our being is filled with the knowledge of God, the more God is imaged in us, and the more we truly are and know what we are supposed to be. pp. 19-20
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