Grandma's House

Southern Baptists are moving more steadily toward removing their children from public school systems, where they are being taught material opposed to the teachings of the church.

"What has happened is not so much that the Christians are leaving the public schools as that the public schools have left the Christians," said Ed Gamble, executive director of the Southern Baptist Association of Christian Schools. The group, based in Orlando, Fla., supports the more than 600 Southern Baptist chools created in the past eight years.

The number of conservative Christian schools grew nearly 11 percent from 1999 to 2000 and 2001 to 2002, to 5,527, according to the U.S. Department of Education's latest statistics. At that rate, Christian schools are growing faster than private schools as a whole and have increased their share to nearly one in five private schools in the country.

And is it any wonder? You can’t even sing “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer” in school these days, because the word “Christmas” is in the lyrics.

Earlier this year, a resolution proposed at the national meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention -- which guides the nation's largest Protestant denomination -- urged parents to withdraw their children from "officially Godless" "government schools" in favor of religious education.

While the measure was rejected, interest in faith-based schools has continued to spread among Baptists at the state level, particularly in Tennessee, Missouri, Florida, South Carolina, Illinois, Texas, Virginia, North Carolina, California and New England, according to Exodus Mandate, a Columbia, S.C., group that promotes private, Christian and home-school education.

A recent resolution promoting Christian schooling easily passed the Missouri Baptist Convention but was quashed in committee at the Tennessee Baptist Convention meeting in Sevierville last month. The Missouri resolution talked about the "inherent dangers of secular educational philosophies that now permeates America's public education system" and affirmed "the importance of systematically training ourselves and our children in the ways of authentic, biblical Christianity." That means teaching creationism over evolution, that life begins at conception, and that homosexuality is immoral, as is sex outside marriage.

All radical ideas in today’s society. I only wish this option had been available to our children when they were in school.