Activist says its time for 'exodus' from public schools.
March 19, 2002 - 10:07
Activist says it’s time for ‘exodus’ from public
schools
The Washington Times - August 30 – September 5, 1999
By Robert Stacy McCain
Christians weary of efforts to reform public schools are now
spreading a new message: Get out. “Christians have got to
come to grips with the fact that the government is not going to
fix the schools. The government is causing the problem”,
says Rev. E. Ray Moore Jr., national director of Exodus Mandate,
an organization formed in 1997 to encourage parents and churches
to choose Christian Education instead of public schools. “Each
effort to fix [public education] makes things worse”, says
Mr. Moore, an Army Reserve chaplain who served in the 1991 Persian
Gulf war. The problems of the “government school” system,
as Mr. Moore calls it, are “terminal, and the quicker Christian
people realize it, the quicker they’ll be able to take action.”
Exodus Mandate – taking its name from the Bible book that
describes the Israelites’ journey out of Egypt – uses
the slogan “Every Church a School, Every Parent a Teacher.”
Based in South Carolina, the organization has a web site [www.exodusmandate.org]
and has made headlines in publications ranging from the Wall Street
Journal to the Dallas Morning News. Last year’s shootings,
which left 15 dead and 23 wounded, form the introduction of “Let
My Children Go,” a new video produced by Exodus Mandate and
California-based Jeremiah Films. To order the video call 1-800-828-2290.
“We had just finished the video when [the Columbine massacre]
happened, and we had to go back and add that on,” says Mr.
Moore. “If you were to look at the speakers all through the
video, you’d think the speakers all knew about Columbine,
but it was completed before that happened.” Jeremiah Films
co-founder Caryl Matrisciana, who narrates the introduction said
the Colorado shootings “bring out the whole atrocity [of
how] schools can be the killing fields.” Mrs. Matrisciana
and her husband home school their own children she said, and “the
biggest marketplace” for their Christian videos “is
the disillusioned parents who have been working within the home
schooling movement for the last 20 years.” The video features
conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly, authors John A. Stormer
and Judith Reisman, and the Rev. Joseph Morecraft, a Presbyterian
minister. It quotes 16th-century Protestant reformer Martin Luther:
“I am much afraid that schools will prove to be great gates
of Hell unless they diligently labor in explaining the Holy Scriptures,
engraving them in the hearts of youth.” “We hope over
the next three to six months that several million Christians will
see this video,” Mr. Moore says, explaining that about 80
percent of evangelical Christians still send their children to
public schools. “That’s 12 to 15 million children. If
they were to leave and go… to Christian schools and home
schooling, it could seriously cripple the grip that secular humanism
holds over our culture now.” Exodus Mandate is one of a growing
number of groups and activists who are calling for Christians
to abandon a public school system they see as beyond hope of reform.
Among them: · Rescue 2010, a project of California-based
Citizens for Excellence in Education (CEE). Its goal is to remove
20 million children from public schools by the year 2010. Christian
activist Bob Simonds founded CEE in 1983 to encourage Christians
to “take a stand” in public schools, but now has begun
to call for them to leave the schools, where he says their children
are being “spiritually raped.” · Paul Lindstrom,
founder of the nondenominational Christian Liberty Academy in
Illinois, who argues thet the “very concept of public education
is fatally flawed.” · The Exodus Project, led by Brannon
House, president of the American Family Institute who co-authored
the “Emergency Education Resolution of 1997” declaring
that the problems of American education can only be solved by
parents withdrawing their children from public schools. ·
The Seperation of School and State Alliance. Headed by Marshall
Fritz, who appears in the “Let My Children Go” video,
this libertarian organization was founded in 1994 and aims to
eliminate all government involvement in K – 12 education.
Exodus Mandate has gained support from Dr. James Kennedy’s
Coral Ridge Ministries in Florida and other Christian groups,
but Mr. Moore admits his movement faces challenges. One of the
biggest obstacles he says, is that Christian parents believe sending
their children to public school fulfills the traditional “salt
and light” doctrine, based on Jesus teachings that his followers
should testify to others as “a light unto the world.”
Among the groups that continue to seek opportunities for Christian
outreach in public education is James C. Dobson’s Colorado-based
Focus on the Family, which made “Rebuilding Hope for Public
Schools” the cover story of the August issue of its magazine.
The article by Cheri Fuller said that “as more and more Christian
parents get involved and pray, rebuilding is taking place in public
schools.” But Mr. Moore cites a 1998 study by the Kentucky-based
Nehemiah Institute showing that public schools substantially erode
the faith of Christian Students. He says public education has
become “thoroughly humanistic, pagan and anti-Christian”
in recent decades, and that attempts to reserve the trend are
doomed. Christians “haven’t won any important battles
over the public school system. It’s time people get smart,”
Mr. Moore says. That belief has recently gotten a boost from the
Southern Baptist Convention, the nations largest Protestant denomination.
Glen Schultz, director of Christian school resources for the SBC,
told the Baptist Press, “We’re fooling ourselves to
think we can overcome what’s done [in public schools] in
six hours a day, five days a week, in one Sunday-school class.”
Mr. Moore says Exodus Mandate is only “saying publicly what
a lot of people are thinking privately. We’re giving voice
to the secret concerns, anxieties and hopes of many Christian
people and pastors.” So far, Mr. Moore has promoted his ideas
mainly through talk shows an Christian radio stations, and is
“trying to build a national field organization” that
he says is active in about 15 states. “I do believe we’re
having impact,” he said. “We should have done this years
ago.”
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