Christian education is free to experiment and institute large scale changes. To be Christian, we must celebrate excellence and virtue. The culture has sanctified vice and equality. Long term you cannot have both virtue and morality based on personal preference and excellence in a system that prizes equal outcomes above all.
In the short term, the decay in our culture will be hard to see. Like an inexperienced gamer who buys a character with high XP that he does not know how to handle, we will seem impressive. We can still strut the world like a power because our grandparents and parents left us strong, but unless we rise to meet the challenges of our time, we will fail.
These are not worse times than other times. Our vices are, if anything, less serious than early times, an excessive love of liberty turned libertine is less immediately serious than slavery and our treatment of First Nations, but our type of moral decay makes revival harder. We are becoming too soft in the middle to exercise strong measures. We are too complacent with superficial prosperity to feel alarm.
We are sure that this time will be like other times and some Lincoln, Eisenhower, or King will save us. The difficulty is that the foot soldiers of the Union, World War II, and the Civil Rights era might be missing. A strong leader without strong followers will fail or become a tyrant.
So these are dangerous times for the Republic with education seemingly incapable of producing moral clarity.
Christian education can fill this void. Many of our graduates will not endure with Christian values, but despite all temptations, some will choose wisdom. What must we do? We must adopt the Constantine Strategy.
The Constantine Strategy recognizes that we can no longer defend old institutions (such as Rome at the time of the Emperor Constantine) and builds new ones (Constantinople). These educational institutions have a different design than those made for a happier era.
We need schools that are easy to defend.
Constantinople began as a haven for education . . . a Minas Tirith for Greek, Roman, and Christian libraries and academic study. We must begin by designing schools with a maximum of legal and cultural protection. This means locating in regions that are friendly to our values and organizing around groups (like the Orthodox Church) with a clear and consistent witness on the cultural issues of our time. Our schools must be deeply connected to such groups to be as safe as possible.
Quality must be as high as we can make it. Strong positions deter attack.
This must include moving past the grifters of the Christian Media Complex. We cannot afford fabulists like David Barton, frauds like the television evangelists, plagiarists, or those who confuse education with money making. Instead, we must double down on education as a ministry and the vocation of teacher as important. We can do this by putting control in the hands of trustworthy Christian professors and teachers and out of the hands of administrators or fund raisers who do not teach.
Doing this will also require jettisoning any desire to be “respectable” in terms of the spirit of our age. We must defend moral reality. We refuse to let ideology masquerade as science. We will love our enemies knowing love will often make them more angry than hate. They know how to deal with cartoonish protests, but not genuine piety.
Our goal is to win hearts and minds.
We are not imperialists. We hope to persuade, but as a result we must speak up. Constantinople was defensible, but it was not hidden in a corner of the world. Instead, we will build in the city and engage barbarians in our midst. The weapons of our warfare are not physical, but sharp arguments, beautiful art, and a happy community.
It is necessary to stay in the fray in part to avoid cultic withdrawal. Nothing gets weirder than a group that will not engage the “outside.”
We must be willing to lose and appropriate the best ideas from our “enemies.”
The Constantine Strategy will not rebuild a culture in an election. We will lose early on more than we will win. The key is to build a strong community that is not ingrown and is confident. When our intellectual foes have better ideas, we should borrow them. All truth is God’s truth! When someone outside our community makes beautiful art, we must celebrate it: all beauty comes from the common image of God.
The good news is that we can be free of the husks of the old order. Like Constantine and the citizens of his City, we can take the best of the old order and preserve it for the future in our new city. If we can save Rome, the old American order, we will. If we cannot, we will take the best of that wonderful nation and bring it into the next centuries. We don’t need one “savior figure,” that era has passed, but hundreds of Christians making hundreds of new communities.
I am unsure of the future. Will enough little Constantinople projects be created in the next decade to bring a revival of the old Republic over the next one hundred years? Will the old Republic drag on a decadent shell of her former glory with a vibrant Christian counter-culture? Will the old Republic become tyrannical as she declines and try to strangle the Constantine Strategy?
We shall see, but I cannot wait for the future. Christ was born in a manager, but He will return as King. Let’s get ready.
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