Notes from day one are here, this is now day two of the conference of the Association of Classical Christian schools. I did not take a conference photo today, so have a photo of surprisingly beautiful Pittsburgh.
It was certainly not the only talk, but because it might be of greatest interest to y’all (and was also the easiest to take notes for), today I am just going to share notes from Al Mohler’s talk. He was the winner of this year’s Boniface Award and, although there was no title for his talk printed in the program, it might’ve been called “Resisting the Regime”, so we will go with that.
Al Mohler: Resisting the Regime
The classical Christian schooling movement may be the singular most hopeful movement he knows of right now. He himself has two grandchildren in a classical Christian school.
This conference is called “Repairing the Ruins” - today, part of repairing the ruins is resisting the regime.
In a sense, Biblically, in both the Old and New Testaments, it is always necessary to resist the regime to some extent. But there are also times, in the Bible and in human history, when the need for that resistance is excruciatingly true. We live right now in one of those times.
Today, being at peace with the regime means denying the gospel.
Interestingly, historically in America, “regime” was a word typically used for someone else’s government, some place that didn’t have constitutional order. But today it is accurate for the United States.
And “regime” means the entire set of powers. Our attention is often grabbed by the government, but it is not just the government.
This is one way in which it is entirely appropriate to speak about the “elites” in the culture.
Though America is odd in that our elites like to deny that they are elites. And in a sense they aren’t “elite”, they are ideologues, driven by a certain moral agenda.
Today they have powers far beyond any that Caesar could have imagined. Powers that are so great you may not even notice them, they blend into the landscape.
Our responsibility is to bear witness to the gospel of Christ.
In our day, that also means celebrating the order of nature - and Protestants need to get comfortable appealing to the order of nature.
And then he gave ten answers to the question, “what does it mean to resist the regime?”.
It means believing that truth is real.
The war on truth isn’t really a new thing. The idea in post-modernism is that truth is socially constructed.
In the US, it was connected to the growth of pragmatism. “Truth happens to an idea.” Truth is just what we call what apparently works.
As an aside, critical theory would have made in nowhere in the United States if it wasn’t tied to identity politics here.
We believe in epistemic realism. We believe that truth is real, because God created the heavens and the earth.
Theism may be the last defense of epistemic realism.
It means believing than man is not a thing.
The great chasm between classical Christian schools and public schools today is that the latter think man is just a thing.
If by assumption there is no imago dei, no creation of the cosmos, then we can be nothing but a thing.
There is concern about what artificial intelligence might do to humanity today, but what would that be from this perspective but one new thing replacing an older thing.
It means believing that a boy is not a girl.
We face a war from the regime now on ontology and biology.
Public school biology teachers right now are using textbooks that cannot be updated quickly enough.
We live in an age of total revolt. This is a war on the creation order.
The Bible is astoundingly clear on this topic from the beginning.
Men and women were given an assignment - fill the Earth. You cannot do that if you deny certain things.
Watch the professions. We have judges today invalidating bans on sex change operations citing the American Medical Association as if that’s the only thing that matters now, we can overturn millennia of human knowledge just like that. Capture the professions and then you can just have the judges cite the “professional” judgments.
Morality is not a mere interest.
Everything has been redefined into therapeutic categories.
It’s not just moral relativism now, it’s the assertion that morality is just a matter of claimed interest.
Foucault now reigns in American public school textbooks.
We Christians may be the last people on Earth who know that right and wrong are theological categories.
The transcendentals endure.
We’re sunk if the good, true, and beautiful are not real. They exist, and they exist in a unity.
(Some) people are attracted to this. You (classical school movement) are bigger than you once were. Classical education is growing because people are converted to the movement and… reproduced by the movement.
Wisdom is necessarily linked to character.
You can only make that argument in a context where character is defined in Biblical terms.
Learning is superior to entertainment.
A child is more naturally attracted to education than to entertainment.
The very little one with no teeth, watching the mouth of her parents chew food - she is ready to learn what it means to chew.
We are made in God’s image to want to learn. We parents and teachers need to lean into that with confidence.
Joy is infinitely greater than happiness.
Joy means leaning into truth, something transcendent, not Earthly. Happiness is cheap, joy is precious.
Education is not neutral.
The great conflict of our age is the great conflict of the ages.
There is no neutral book, no neutral reader.
We should lean into that - not in an identity politics way, but from a Christian perspective.
Every human brain is drawn into a great conflict.
Jesus Christ is Lord.
Athanasius [the theme of the conference] knew that if you belong the Jesus, the world will hate you.
C.S. Lewis, in his introduction to Athanasius’ works, wrote “it is his glory that he did not move with his times. It is his reward that he remains when the times, as all times do, has passed away.”
Understand the providence of God in preserving his church that we are sitting here, in Pittsburgh, in 2023, still talking about these people.
Don’t move with the times. Move the times.
And then, some final comments from the Q&A.
We are in the thick of the battle still. For the moment he expects more intensity, he doesn’t expect things to relax during his lifetime.
Nothing will stay tied down for long now, especially anything connected to sex and identity, without contest.
The worst thing conservatives can do is say, OK, we won that one, we can relax now.
But seeing these wonderful students in these Christian schools, he is encouraged. There is a war on the creation order, but reinforcements are coming.