A Letter to the Local Church

September 23, 2022

                                    An Open Letter to Church Pastors in Our Community

In re:    For God did not give us a spirit of timidity, but a spirit of power, of love and of self-discipline.  2 Timothy 1:7

Dear Pastor,

I am the mother of six children, five of whom currently attend Mead public schools.  As you are no doubt aware, our schools have become ground zero for the latest, and most pernicious, ideological battles.  Just a few weeks ago, the Mead School Board took a vote on policies that would have blocked the inclusion of Critical Race Theory in our classrooms, and books promoting gender fluidity in our elementary libraries.  Both votes failed, despite significant support from parents.  As these ideas continue to conquer our public institutions, including our schools, our children risk harm not just to their education, but to their overall well-being.  It is for this reason that I am writing to you.  Your help is urgently needed.   

Since a story is worth a thousand arguments, here is one from my own experience just last year:

In a 6^th grade Social Studies class with other eleven and twelve-year-olds, my son was shown a video about Stonewall, the gay club protected by the mafia, which was the site of a violent confrontation with police in 1969.  The students were also shown a music video which was used to bolster the teacher’s message that love is love.  The class discussion featured some students identifying as LGBTQ, and the teacher revealing his own sexual preference.  The majority of students remained silent throughout this lesson.

As you know, from surveying the educational landscape, this will just be the beginning.  Yet there are those who persist in a kind of denialism:  “It’s not happening here,” or “It’s not that big of a problem,” are common refrains.  There is no evidence to suggest, however, that our children are somehow insulated from the same forces that are transforming schools across Washington State and the nation. 

Then there are those who admit that these ideologies are gaining ground.  But they assure us, with a carefree manner, that Critical Race Theory and gender ideology are just the latest fads, and the pendulum will eventually swing back the other way, as it always does.  In addressing this attitude in the magazine The Critic, a liberal teacher, disillusioned after seeing woke ideologies up close, had this to say:  “The pendulum will not swing back because the woke movement is not a pendulum; it’s a steamroller.”

And finally, some of our fellow Christians have convinced themselves that they can go along with the new public morality and still retain their theology.  Even though they may not take seriously all of the new linguistic and political imperatives, they hope that by going through the motions demanded by woke secularists, they will be left alone.  This is an approach born of timidity, but one we’ve been conditioned to accept by the decades-long cultural reinforcement of political correctness.  It is in countering this spirit of timidity that your help is needed.

The Reverend Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, recently gave a speech at the National Conservatism Conference in which he called for “an unabashed ecumenical Christianity” in response to woke secularism.  The Reverend Mohler acknowledged the different theological arguments between Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox Christians, but stated that we’d better “get comfortable with each other in the social/cultural space, or we’ll have nothing left to conserve.”  Critical Race Theory and gender ideology are explicit in their intention to undermine the foundations of our institutions, and reorder our understanding of biological reality.  In doing so they will further diminish the influence of Christianity itself.  As Reverend Mohler concluded, our theology will not survive without the moral corollary.

As a Christian mother, I need you to make the theological argument against woke secularism.  My vocation is motherhood—yours is pastoral.  In order to fulfill mine, I need you to redouble your efforts in yours, so that together we can protect children from an ideology that seeks to harm them in body and soul.  I’m no theologian, but I sense that, at least on this issue, Cardinal Manning had it right when he said, “All human conflict is theological.”  When my children are being taught about white privilege, collective guilt for past injustices, and that their gender is fluid, we’ve just rapidly transcended the political, and even the cultural.  Now we’re on my theological front doorstep, because all of these discussions are ultimately about the faith I’m trying to pass on to my children, and the relationship I hope they will have with God.  

Christians and non-Christians alike need to be disabused of the notion that secular means non-religious. The secular space is not value neutral.  While we have been sold this idea of secular neutrality at least since prayer was removed from public schools, the truth is that over time something else was taking its place.  That something has taken on a religious shape and speaks in religious overtones.  It has its symbols and linguistic dogma; its creed is never to be questioned.  Woke secularism is the new public orthodoxy, and it’s hostile to the truth.  Parents need to realize that if their children are in a public school, their children are in a religious school—it’s just not for their religion.

Despite their outward antipathy for true religion, the woke ideologues don’t hesitate to co-opt religious language when it suits their purposes.  For example, it is demanded that we affirm the self-perceptions of those who identify as LGBTQ.  Further, we are told that we must not object to the pharmaceutical and surgical interventions that fulfill these perceptions, regardless of the lifelong consequences.  And should gender confusion befall our children, our role as parents has been relegated to enthusiastic support.  And how have so many accepted this?  Because the progressive left has successfully redefined “kindness” and even “love.”  But as Christians we are called to seek the good for the other, for the sake of the other.  For us, the meaning of showing kindness and love to those who are suffering can never be contorted into acquiescing to their harm.  Yet, that is what the purveyors of woke demand.

To counter the effort to seduce our children into the lie of gender fluidity, we need a robust teaching in our churches that our bodies are not external from our true selves.  Catholics will recognize this idea from the Theology of the Body; Protestants will know it from Scripture’s holistic treatment of the meaning of our physical bodies.  In essence, we were all made by God out of love and on purpose.  God created us in His image and likeness.  We are not just flesh, not just soul, but a body/soul composite.  What we do with our bodies matters, because, as Pope John Paul II said, “The body, and it alone, has the ability to make visible the invisible, the spiritual and the divine.”  In other words, the body expresses the soul.

Along these same lines, we need to address the ubiquitous catchphrase “love is love.”  For Christians, love is a much larger concept than a bumper sticker slogan.  We need pastoral teaching on love, marriage, and sex so that we can articulate the difference between eros, agape, and phileo—these biblical refinements on the definition of “love” and how they are to find expression in our lives.  Otherwise, the culture will have its way, and love will be reduced to desire, and desire will be its own justification.  

As Christians, we need to reclaim our language on original sin.  We are told, and our children are taught, that slavery is America’s original sin.  The acceptance of this premise has given the progressive left license to advance Critical Race Theory, which imposes collective guilt for past injustices.  From this collective guilt, woke progressives extract a rewriting of history and a re-ordering of education around race essentialism.  But as a political cudgel for the left, the concept of original sin is only useful up to that point.  For the Critical Race Theorist, America must remain irredeemably racist, so that the price for the sins of slavery and racism can never be paid.  As Nikole Hannah-Jones writes in her opening essay in The 1619 Project, “racism is in the DNA of America.”  To reject this reasoning, we need our religious leaders to teach that the evil of slavery was widespread across thousands of years, involving peoples of many races, ethnicities, and religions.  So even if Hannah-Jones is half right, and racism is in our DNA, then it must also be in the DNA of all humankind, not just Americans.  Rather than casting people today into the roles of oppressed and oppressor, perhaps the better exercise would be to examine why this moral failing was so widely accepted and persisted for so long.  This again, is at root a theological question, requiring insight into the human propensity toward evil.  As to original sin, there can be only one, for which there was a redemptive sacrifice for all time and for all people. 

As Christians we can’t go along with the unreality being enforced by woke secularism, passively standing by as biological reality is toppled, and a race-based ideology captures our classrooms.  We are called to be vigilant as to the curriculum and culture in which our children spend their days immersed.  We need Christian parents to vocally support curriculum transparency and increased parental oversight in our schools.  And we need you, as Timothy needed Paul, to address our spiritual weakness, and lead us to unabashedly proclaiming the Christian worldview.

A Christian Mother

Colbert, Washington