The Patriot Post® · Empty Buildings: A Response to Chuck Colson

Chuck Colson’s latest post decrying New York City’s eviction of church communities from public school buildings, while well intentioned, exemplifies what I believe to be an incoherent apologetic for the church in modern life.

Colson appeals to the historical amnesia exemplified by 2nd Circuit’s decision, noting that “Public schools and churches in this nation have always shared space …” However, what seems to escape Mr. Colson is that the historic public schools to which he refers, whether the localized communitarian schools in colonial New England or those inspired by Horace Mann in the mid-nineteenth-century, belonged to a fundamentally different social order than do those of today. Historically, the power of the state was relativized by the Christian church, in that the state’s institutions, regulations and authorities were dependent on the certification and legitimacy provided by the church. All one has to do is peruse The New England Primer to see how public education received its legitimacy from the church. However, by WWI, this sacred social order had unraveled, and in its place, for the first time since the pre-Christian Roman Empire, stood the state without any institutional boundaries whatsoever. Today, it is the state, a territorial monopolist of ultimate decision-making, that certifies and legitimates. The very fact that the church subjects itself and its places of worship to the opinions of judges who are themselves an organ of an autonomous secular state is evidence of this social inversion. So it is absolutely misleading to assume a historical continuity between the public schools of yesteryear and the contemporary statist school system.

Moreover, the utilitarian appeal to how these churches help “alleviate budget shortfalls” appears particularly weak given the fact that statist teachers represent one of the strongest public unions in the country, the privileges of which entail the vast majority of them immune from layoffs.

Comparably anemic is Colson’s quoting Presbyterian pastor Tim Keller’s apologetic: “Family stability, resources for those in need, and compassion for the marginalized are all positive influences that neighborhood churches provide.” Again, how is ‘family stability’ relevant to this discussion when the ‘family’ today has no objective meaning? What resources for those in need does the church supply that can’t be subsidized (and turned into an entitlement to boot) by the state? And I fail to see how that institution which is considered increasingly the sole harbinger of homophobia and bigotry can be identified plausibly as having compassion for the marginalized.

Christians have to come to terms with the fact that the secular age involves a totalizing inversion of the sacred social order that gave rise to western education in the first place. The eviction of churches from public school buildings is but a microcosm of what the state has been doing incrementally to the church since the advent of the nation state and its intellectual offspring, the Enlightenment. Colson should not be upset with the decisions of the city and court; he should be upset with the social order that even allows such decisions in the first place. The best thing Christians can do today is not only leave the secular school buildings empty on Sundays but the rest of the week as well.

Stephen Richard Turley is a Professor at Eastern University and Teacher at Tall Oaks Classical School in New Castle, DE.