The schools that cried wolf

Plus: my school photo from 1994, $7 billion wasted, and more

Good morning! It’s Wednesday, and here’s this week’s post.

---

A take I haven’t written elsewhere

The schools that cried wolf

By now Christianity Today’s May-June issue should have made it to every print subscriber’s mailbox, which means an article I’ve had in the works for literally years is finally, finally out in the world. It’s called “The schools that cried wolf,” and it’s about the history of segregation academies in America and our schooling debates today.

This is an important story to me on several levels. One is simply the length of time it took to get it to print—and to do it right. I’d developed a pitch for something fairly close to this by 2022, but I also found an email to my then-editors at The Week that suggests I was already circling the idea as far back as January of 2019.

In retrospect, I’m glad the article happened the way it did. I’ve mentioned here before that one thing I like about working at CT is the ability to take time for deeper research and longer thinking about stories that matter, and this was one of those stories.

I bought nine books for this piece, skimmed all of them and read the most useful ones partly or all the way through. I searched the CT archives for relevant coverage from decades past. I interviewed six sources, some as conversation and thought partners and some to be quoted in the piece. And, as with all these bigger print pieces, I had the input of multiple colleagues who helped me consider how each argument and turn of phrase would land.

This piece is also important to me because it was a true research project—because I was, as I tried to signal in the piece, grappling with these questions in real time as I read and wrote.

Often I’ll go into an article with a very clear idea of what I want to say and how I want to say it, and research in those cases mostly consists of digging up half-remembered facts and quotes to make sure I’m not out over my skis. Here, though, I’m taking you along with me. The arguments I ultimately make about fear and insularity were not in my mind when work on this story began in earnest in December.

One issue that came up along the way but could only be briefly treated here—perhaps something I’ll explore at greater length in a future article—is about sanctification:

Often, the racism [at segregation academies] was overt. An enrollment application from Mississippi for the 1975–76 school year, for example, dispensed with all subtlety:

It is the belief of the Board of Directors of Council School Foundation that forced congregation of persons in social situations solely because they are of different races is a moral wrong. . . . Council School Foundation was founded upon and is operated in accordance with this fundamental ethical and educational concept. . . . The curriculum of Council School Foundation is designed solely for the educational responses of white children.

Others affected innocence. “We have had some blacks apply from the area,” a Christian school headmaster said in an Associated Press report in 1972, “but the pathetic situation is that they cannot make the preliminary testing.”

It may be tempting to brush this history away, to say, “Oh, but they weren’t really Christians.” Alas, they often were. As God with Us documents, they believed they were defending orthodoxy and Scripture itself against real threats to the faith.

“Christian theology contributed both to the moral power of the civil rights movement and to the staunch opposition it encountered,” [historian Ansley L.] Quiros wrote. Segregationists “felt they were acting out of the same impulses that motivated them to sing hymns, entreat the Almighty, and worship. They were upholding the sanctity of the Bible and the fundamentals of Christianity against Northern liberals.”

They were Christians, and they were wrong, and they left a stain on Christian education in America that has only partly faded.

I can’t remember the context of the conversation, but earlier this year—around when I was writing the piece, so this stuff would’ve been front of mind—I was talking about long-lingering sins with friends from church. One friend expressed a reflexive horror at the idea of doggedly racist Christians, suggesting that the two categories should be mutually exclusive: If they’re really racists, they’re not really Christians.

I understood the instinct. Honestly, I share the instinct, for racism is a grotesque sin. No true Christian, surely!

But the thing is: Christians sin. We don’t just stop sinning at the point of conversion. Not even the Wesleyans think that. Sometimes—oftentimes, if we’re honest—we repeat the same sins for years and years and years (and years). And sometimes—alas, I must interject oftentimes on this one too—we do it without any particular desire to recognize that what we’re doing is sinful, let alone to stop doing it.

I know that’s true of socially acceptable sins like pride and vanity. (I know it firsthand, as I wrote in another new article I have at CT.) As much as I don’t like it, I think it’s true of sins like racism, too. You do hear stories of people who experience sudden, radical transformation in Christ. They encounter God and just know, entirely and at once, that their racism (or whatever other sin) is wrong, and it becomes instantly abhorrent to them, and they never touch it again. But that is not a universal pattern for Christians.

Thus, absent specific evidence to the contrary, we unfortunately have every reason to think that the Christians who built these educational institutions for the express purpose of defending their own sin and inculcating it in their children were, in fact, Christians—many even evangelicals, per most classic definitions of the word.

And that brings me to the final reason this story is important to me, which is the personal connection. As I mention in the piece, my first school, where I attended for kindergarten through second grade, is a former segregation academy.

My yearbooks from this school aren’t accessible to me right now, but I have my school photo from one of my years there: 1994. It’s either kindergarten or first grade, with bangs I cut before church one Sunday morning.

I can’t remember when I learned of that history. But whenever and wherever I first read about segregation academies, it wasn’t hard to do the math: This school is well below the Mason-Dixon Line, and it was well-established by the time I attended in the 1990s. Everything is online now, so I easily found the school’s website, which I discussed in the article:

[M]any Christian schools now publish racial nondiscrimination statements, it can be difficult to untangle the history and intent behind those pronouncements. Some were first issued defensively after the infamous Bob Jones University case of 1983, in which the Supreme Court held that the “government has a fundamental overriding interest in eradicating racial discrimination in education.” […]

[My first] school has gone above and beyond the standard procedure of posting an affirmation of racial equality. Its statement is also confession, a frank recognition and repudiation of the circumstances surrounding the institution’s founding.

The websites I’ve browsed of other former segregation academies tend to paper over past sins with pictures of smiling Black students in monogrammed polos. To my school’s credit, it laments and repents.

Bigger than my own education history, of course, is the core question of the piece: Is the recent rise in interest in Christian education an echo of a prior generation’s sin? But this too has a personal element: As I’m choosing Christian school for my kids, is that echo in my life too?

Here’s an unlocked link for you to read the full piece, and then:

---

Intake

• Why Christians Should Be Leftists, by Phil Christman, to review (I said I was starting this two weeks ago, but that turned out to be false)

• “Noem incorrectly defines habeas corpus as the president’s right to deport people,” by Michael Gold for The New York Times

• “On AI pastors and ministries,” by O. Alan Noble for You Are Not Your Own Substack

I don’t think it’s wrong to use A.I. to come up with games for youth or ice-breakers for small groups. But I do think it’s a little sad.

• “The $7 billion we wasted bombing a country we couldn’t find on a map,” by Nicholas Kristof for The New York Times

After taking office, Trump ramped up pressure on Yemen. He slashed humanitarian aid worldwide, with Yemen particularly hard hit. I last visited Yemen in 2018, when some children were already starving to death, and now it’s worse: Half of Yemen’s children under 5 are malnourished—“a statistic that is almost unparalleled across the world,” UNICEF says—yet aid cuts recently forced more than 2,000 nutrition programs to close down, according to Tom Fletcher, the U.N. humanitarian chief. The United States canceled an order for lifesaving peanut paste that was meant to keep 500,000 Yemeni children alive.

• “The ‘extroverted’ north and ‘introverted’ south: How climate and culture influence Iranian architecture,” by Mahsa Khanpoor Siahdarka for The Conversation

Also, repurposing this section this week for an invitation: If you’re in Pittsburgh, please come to my friend’s art show, ideally the opening reception on July 4.

It’s medieval stuff. You’ll love it.

---

Output

New work:

• Confessions of a striver | Christianity Today (unlocked link)

• The schools that cried wolf | Christianity Today (unlocked link)

• Strategic scattershot | Defense Priorities (newsletter)

Newly relevant work:

Why we’re choosing classical education

---