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by David Odegard

Secularism is the official religion of America. Public officials do not question the preeminence of the secular worldview. Court cases are decided based on whether the ideas are secular or “religious.” But the secular worldview has just as many religious tenets as any other system of beliefs—and they are beliefs since they are non-falsifiable.

Secularism in America demands that religion not be supported with government funds (even though those funds were seized from religious people). Religion is then defined as belief that cannot be quantified by measurement, and hence not rising to the level of knowledge. But secularists exempt all the non-measurable faith statements made by themselves.

“We can’t know scientifically if there is a God, or if the cosmos is all there is” are religious tenets of secularism that we Christians can prove to be untrue. William A. Dembski has proven that random chance cannot produce the complexity we observe in the universe, therefore the universe must have a designer. Even though his theory is mathematically true, secular schools are not allowed to teach his theory because it disproves one of their own religious tenets, that the world evolved from nothing.

Secularist groups like the ACLU sue school boards to make sure that their religion of secularity is the only religion taught (for instance, Kitzmiller vs. Dover Area School District). In this particular case, the courts took the ACLU brief and used it as their opinion, while completely dismissing parental concerns. These colossal court battles have been fought to decide who gets to control the schools, and hence the ideas of future citizens. They are deciding the question of who owns the children.

Secularists build all of their systems around human knowledge. Denying God his rightful place always produces a skewed view of the sovereignty of human beings. It is called humanism. Man is the measure of all things, the highest authority. They believe that we must find all solutions for ourselves as though we were alone in the universe. This the defining rationale behind the theory of evolution, and it has evolved into its own worldview. Secular American society demands that all children be taught this worldview, and one of its components is that they are owned by the state, not unlike what is practiced in China.

But there are some secularists who believe the children are owned by the parents. They believe that children can be aborted because they do not have an intrinsic right to life within themselves. These secularists appeal to the state to decide who is a person and who is not. The state assumes that it has the right to decide who is human, and the secular parent complies because the state holds the power, so it must be right—there is no higher authority to appeal.

Also, secular parents believe the children are theirs to raise in the way they choose and that God has nothing to do with it. As one woman wrote in an article posted on cnn.com and related in Reasonable Faith (read it here): “I am a non-believer, and for years I've been on the fringe in my community. As a blogger, though, I've found that there are many other parents out there like me. We are creating the next generation of kids, and there is a wave of young agnostics, atheists, free thinkers, and humanists rising up through the ranks who will, hopefully, lower our nation's religious fever.”

Those who control the government schools emphatically agree. Together the secularists are shutting out everyone who does not share their view of the world.

But the Christian must reject both the arguments that the parents or the state owns the children, because . . . (drum roll) . . . God owns them! He is their creator and has entrusted children to their parents. “Children are a heritage from the Lord; offspring a reward from Him” (Psalm 127:3). Christianity is non-secular; that cannot be changed. We MUST start and end with the Bible. When the state claims ownership of the children we say, “No, God entrusted them to us to raise, not you.”

Equally true is that when the secular parent claims ownership of a child and wants to teach it a worldview without God, we also have to say no. God is there, and to properly educate a child is to teach him or her what is really real, what is good and true, and what is morally right according to God. We are only stewards of the children, so we have to give an account to God about what we teach them. Furthermore, when Christians acquiesce to a secularist education for their children, they cease to be salt and light (Matthew 5:13-14), allowing the secularist to throw us out and trample us. Christians fail to resist evil and combat the decay of the society they live in when they do not train up the child in the way he should go.

There are 6 things to take away from this article:

1. The government does not own the children and they are not sovereign over God. So, they are accountable for how they exercise power. God does not make them a steward over the child.
2. The parents do not own the children and they cannot do whatever they please with them.
   • They cannot abort them.
   • They cannot abuse them.
   • They cannot teach them falsehoods like evolution.
   • They must teach them what is true about God and the universe according to the Bible, what is morally right, what is good and bad in all areas of life.
3. God is sovereign over nations and individual parents. He is the one who creates children and prescribes what their education should consist of.
4. Secularism assumes certain ideas are “truth” even though they are adamantly opposed to the Bible. These assumptions are unprovable so they are held by faith, which makes secularism a religion.
5. Christianity becomes worthless and faithless when it synthesizes with secularism.
6. Christians must allow themselves to be accountable to God’s Word when it comes to educating the children they are stewards of.

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