The murderers at Columbine were evil, not insane. They invited Satan into their hearts, not God. Their government-run "public" schools nurtured this sin.

Government schools teach students ? for 180 days each year for 13 years ? that eternity is so unimportant that it's not worth mentioning. Schools tell students to respect everyone's "truth," even if contradictory. They teach children to be true to their feelings and let those feelings out.

Government schools accelerate the failing culture in undermining Christian parents. They eradicate hope. They maximize alienation.

Modernism's 160 year grip on America's government-run "public" schools was exposed for all who care to see in the hollow wails of experts after the Columbine Public High School massacre. The experts blame the bullets, the guns, the Internet. They blame the utensils of death rather than the culture of death.

The constant exposure of school children to a message that the eternal meaning of life is not worth mentioning leads some to conclude that murder and suicide are rational acts. The number of children feeling this way is on the rise.

We see two trends. The good trend is parents reasserting their God-given parental authority by homeschooling. The evil trend is the slide into Postmodernism. That is, if the Modernist says that truth exists without God, the Postmodernist claims that truth itself does not exist.

Now let's follow some education trends of the last two centuries. In the 1810s, the Prussians confiscated the Lutheran schools and began a long march to avenge their defeat at the Battle of Jena. Any doubts that this led to the Third Reich are removed by looking at a county-by-county map of 1930s vote totals for Hitler vs. percentage Lutheran of the population. When Lutherans lost their schools, they lost their children. When they lost their children, they lost their faith. As they lost their faith in God, they replaced it with faith in man and the state.

In the 1840s in America, many Protestants succumbed to a tempting offer from Horace Mann and the Harvard Unitarians: Convert their church schools into "free" government schools, then use them to rescue Catholic immigrant children from their Catholic faith. Lutherans, Episcopalians, and Presbyterians refused the bait, but enough others agreed that the "common school" was born.

Immigrant Catholics escaped by setting up their own parish schools. They ran them well for two lifetimes. Then, in the 1960s, after it was clear that the Protestants had utterly lost control of the government schools, Catholics joined their Protestant brothers in handing over their children to the secularists in state schools. Over the next 25 years, Catholic school population fell from 6.5 to 2.5 million.

While not yet as complete as the German debacle of the 1940s, American modernism in education has also gotten ugly. Witness Columbine as a watershed moment.

Today in schools, we see police outfitted with shotguns, metal detectors, censorship of even honorable mention for Creationism, union calls for what could be only described as "sodomy appreciation month," and girls taken for secret abortions. Serious evangelical Protestants and traditional Roman Catholics are bailing out, either to Christian schools or to home schooling.

Where will this children's exodus lead? Only a fool predicts the future, so we two fools for Christ will limit ourselves to admit what we are praying for: Ten million Christian children to leave government schools, resulting in public support for the repeal of all federal and state legislation respective to school attendance, content, accreditation, and financing. At the same time, we pray for a $300 billion tax cut and a $25 billion increase in contributions to private K-12 scholarship foundations to allow the poor to go to better schools than they attend today.

All this results in fathers having to decide where to send their children to school, leading "fathers to turn their hearts to their children" (Malachi 4:6). From this, we pray for a renewal of the family resulting in a Great Resurgence of Bible-believing, God-obeying Christians in America.

When will this happen? God will decide. Our job is to be faithful to His education mandates such as Deut. 6:1-9 and Matthew 28:18-20. We need a fresh obedience and application of the Great Commission to our own children concerning their schooling.

Our people need a vision of all Christian children in Christian schools and homeschooling. Without that vision, more will perish. Satan has no brakes. He wants more Columbines. Please pray, ponder, and if appropriate, contact us. We need more workers in this vineyard for the children's exodus.

Slightly edited from original published in Current Thoughts & Trends (July 1999) by The Navigators.

Marshall Fritz is the founder of the Alliance for the Separation of School & State, and Rev. Moore founded the Exodus Mandate (formerly Exodus 2000).

This article is copyrighted by the Alliance for the Separation of School & State. Permission is granted to freely distribute this article as long as this copyright notice is included in its entirety.

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