In education, the words secular, government, and public are not synonymous with neutrality. A public school is every bit as enmeshed in a system of ardently held, worldview-shaping religio-philosophical underpinnings as any religious school out there. It is not neutral because it is not possible to be neutral.

The claim that every school is intrinsically religious is hard to grasp at face value. The naked eye sees religious schools adhering to faith commitments and non-religious schools educating within a neutral philosophical landscape.
Neutrality is an attractive option for many; after all, isn’t it better to teach the curriculum without letting the monkey-wrench of theology jam the gears? Can’t we get on with the business of learning about maths, science, and history, without shoehorning in religious claims? That’s not as easy as it seems.
While at the level of 2+3=5, or spelling the word apple, it may be possible to operate with a species of impartiality. However, this sort of learning represents a narrow slice of the educational pie, the rest of the pie being filled with a chunky metaphysical stew.

What is the purpose of learning? What does it mean to be human? How should we treat others? How should we interact with the earth on which we find ourselves? A “neutral” education would have to navigate around these matters and, in doing so, would cease to be much of an education at all.
In education, the words secular, government, and public are not synonymous with neutrality. A public school is every bit as enmeshed in a system of ardently held, worldview-shaping religio-philosophical underpinnings as any religious school out there. It is not neutral because it is not possible to be neutral.

You don’t need a chapel to be religious.
The concept of a neutral school – or a neutral anything, for that matter – is born out of a narrow understanding of religion. If, by religion, one is speaking of priests, chapels, and ceremonies, then of course, there are non-religious schools.
Van Brummelen (1988, p2) argues for an expanded definition, stating that it is possible to “define religion in its broad sense as a system of ardently-held beliefs that undergird your worldview…” These beliefs are the eyes of the mind; you don’t look at them, you look through them at everything else.
As the saying goes, you can’t get anywhere unless you start somewhere. To think yourself in a straight line, you must start from a basic set of philosophical assumptions; these are not argued for, they are argued from.
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The point of the indoctrination, though, isn’t only to create more “gender-nonconforming” students. It’s to break down family structures and parental authority. The goal isn’t simply to teach and encourage transgenderism in our schools. It’s to lay claim to the students themselves, over and against their parents and families, for purposes that go far beyond the promotion of gender identity. After all, you can’t very well reshape society according to your utopian vision if something as solid as a family is standing in the way.

Evidence continues to mount that a concerted effort is underway between major hospitals and public school systems to indoctrinate children with transgender ideology and push harmful, sometimes irreversible, medical procedures on minors — sometimes without the knowledge or consent of parents.
The point of the indoctrination, though, isn’t only to create more “gender-nonconforming” students. It’s to break down family structures and parental authority. The goal isn’t simply to teach and encourage transgenderism in our schools. It’s to lay claim to the students themselves, over and against their parents and families, for purposes that go far beyond the promotion of gender identity. After all, you can’t very well reshape society according to your utopian vision if something as solid as a family is standing in the way.

The solution is to break down the family. Most recently, Christopher Rufo reported this week that the largest children’s hospital in Chicago has partnered with local school districts to promote a radical transgender agenda, including sexually explicit materials that push “kink,” “BDSM,” and “trans-friendly” sex toys for children.

In his customary muckraking fashion, Rufo has obtained insider documents from Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago detailing a collaboration between transgender activists at the hospital and public school administrators throughout greater Chicago. The primary training document, a presentation titled “Beyond Binary: Gender in Schools,” encourages teachers and school administrators to promote “gender diversity” in their districts by affirming students who mistakenly believe they are members of the opposite sex, teaching a “non-binary understanding of gender” in classrooms, and aiming to disrupt “entrenched [gender] norms in western society” in hopes of creating a more “gender creative” world.
Don’t laugh, though. As outlandish as this might sound to most people, the targets of all this are impressionable students, many of whom are susceptible to such messages for the simple fact that they are dealing with the turbulent — albeit altogether normal — emotions and angst that accompany adolescence.
It’s worth quoting Rufo at length to get a sense of how lurid this program is. At the end of the “Beyond Binary” presentation, which was circulated to teachers in at least two Chicago school districts…
the hospital recommended a “Binder Exchange Program” to assist teenage girls in binding their breasts, a “kid friendly website for gender affirming gear,” which sells items such as artificial penis “packers” and female-to-male “trans masc pump[s],” and an “LGBTQ friendly sex shop for teens” that sells a range of “dildos,” “vibrators,” “harnesses,” “anal toys,” “trans-friendly toys,” and “kink & BDSM” equipment. The links include graphic descriptions of sadomasochism, bondage, pornography, and transgressive sex.
In addition to these materials on gender theory, Lurie Children’s Hospital has also publicly released a policy guide for school administrators, encouraging districts to adopt a “gender-affirming approach” to the curriculum; provide “gender-affirming children’s books” in school libraries; and allow students to compete in athletic events, use restrooms and locker rooms, and sleep in bunks during overnight school trips in accordance with their “gender identity,” rather than their biological sex. The hospital also encourages school districts to designate special “Gender Support Coordinators” to help facilitate children’s sexual and gender transitions, which, under the recommended “confidentiality” policy, can be kept secret from parents and families.
Rufo rightly identifies part of the dynamic here is the creation of a “school-to-clinic” pipeline. A cynic might say the motive is simply profit, since every transgender patient represents a lifetime of medical interventions and surgeries.
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What is clear is that the situation now is more extreme than we usually allow ourselves to think and we need to get into the right frame of mind about who our friends and enemies are. As a Reformed guy in a currently independent Reformed congregation I recognize the major Reformed denominations, as a whole, must be regarded as hostile, even as individual people and congregations in them are friendlies. And the people and congregations of rival Protestant streams that hold fast to the common faith of our fathers (and that includes morality as much as theology!) are also friends fighting their own set of hostiles. I have your back, insofar as I can help you. I hope you’ll have mine.

Anglican, Baptist, Lutheran, Methodist, Presbyterian, or Reformed- it doesn’t matter. In 2024, wherever you look in Protestantism it is some variation of the same sad story. Apart from some micro or regional denominational iterations or independent congregations carrying on their respective traditions alone, all the nationwide, legacy denominations are fried or nearly fried, doctrinally and morally speaking. It goes without saying that this is true of the Mainline churches, and has been for decades. I am not primarily thinking of them, but more specifically have their “conservative” cousins in mind- the ones that likely exist because of some previous split with an apostatizing Mainline denomination and that were founded with the explicit intention of conserving the historic teachings and practices of their respective traditions.
I am prompted to make these observations after the latest betrayal of the faith by the bishops of ACNA, which unanimously selected a pro-women’s ordination and race woke archbishop last weekend, despite a significant internal division about the WO issue, and woke batshittery in general, throughout the communion. One observer commented:
“ACNA is unserious about the orthodox faith and traditional Anglicanism. Conservative resurgence is on a ventilator now. But maybe it always was. There are no ACNA based bishops. Knock it off.”
You could swap out ACNA/Anglicanism/bishops with almost any other denomination/tradition/top officers and the statement would be just as true. This is happening everywhere in conservative Protestantism. The Left advances within them inexorably, the conservative wing of leadership talks a big game about standing firm or taking it back, said leadership caves or fights incompetently, the faithful laity and less influential leaders are betrayed. At best, the orthodox might have a good year or two at synod, GA, or whatever, and the lurch seems to be stopped temporarily. But it always resumes because the troublemakers are never rebuked, discipline, or purged. They continue to plot and caucus and manipulate the levers of soft and hard power while the cucked conservatives refuse to sully their hands with such ungentlemanly tactics and box out the few based people in their ranks who would.
Yes, faithful minorities within each denomination hang on no matter how bad it goes. Yes, these churches are not all equally far gone. But the elite apparatus in them all is riddled with regimevangelicals and pretend conservatives that won’t really fight them, and the necessary resources and manpower to reverse the leftward momentum has already been eroded away. They are all of them living on borrowed time. The days of the major “evangelical” bodies in every Protestant stream are numbered. The orthodox parties within them will eventually be brought to heel and made to accept the current heresy, convincing themselves that it was a principled compromise and they will not allow any further drift next time, so that they can sleep at night. Those with more integrity will be driven out by disciplinary action or compelled to withdraw by conscience or disgust as dialogue becomes diktat and orthodox doctrine moves from the standard to just one option in a “big tent” to being proscribed altogether. And then these “conservative,” “confessional,” “traditional,” “Bible-believing” denominations will go full Mainline, joining the family of Regime-approved state denominations before their eventual demographic death.
Is this the end of Protestantism? No, I don’t think so. I believe the future of Protestantism is going to be orthodox believers of various traditions informally partnering and standing together against a hostile culture and a hostile set of state churches. Many congregations have already departed from these failed denominations. Some are going it alone for now. Others have found or formed new networks and alliances. I do not believe independency is any kind of ideal for church polity, but it seems to be an understandable necessity for many congregations in this time. Why join a legacy denomination when every option you have is currently sinking?
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