There are several memes I’ve seen on social media positing that the reason why we are having all the school shootings is that we’ve kicked God out of the schools. I’ll be honest and say that my gut response to these memes is to disagree. I wholeheartedly agree with the words of Aaron Earls:
It’s not a defense of God to say He couldn’t stop school violence because He’s not allowed in schools.
Yes, this “gets God off the hook” for shootings, but we end up with a God that bears no resemblance to the God of the Bible.
A god that is incapable of entering a school due to a government regulation is an impotent god without the ability to stop any evil, much less a school shooting. (Source)
Listen, you cannot kick an omnipresent God out of anywhere. Nor can we say that it’s because God is such a gentleman and won’t go where he isn’t asked. If my house is burning down I don’t wait for my kids permission to barge through and rescue them.
So these memes, though an attempt to help God out, aren’t really doing that. But I suspect there might be another point in there somewhere too. It’s a wish that we’d go back to a by-gone era when teachers led kids in prayer each morning. It was an era when a certain form of Christianity reigned in our culture.
But that wasn’t the glory days either. Studies have shown that what was really produced for several years wasn’t a vibrant and robust Christian faith but moralistic therapeutic deism. If what we mean by “get God back in the schools” is moralism and coercive religion I don’t want much of that either. Sterile Christianity is just as deadly as atheism.
So on one hand I don’t believe those memes are helpful. But there is something being said in those memes which is true. While it is true that you cannot kick an omnipresent God out of schools, it is also true that ideas have consequences. You cannot wholly embrace naturalism and evolutionary psychology and be surprised when life is no longer valued.
Morality based in a Christian-worldview has been expelled from our schools and replaced with a dogged naturalism. This naturalistic view of the world is still scrambling to figure out how to be consistent and develop a system of morality. In the meantime our children are being taught a philosophical system of belief which has yet to be pushed to its logical ends. But the devaluing of the sanctity of human life is a natural outgrowth of this philosophy. And school shootings are consistent with the worldview.
So maybe in one sense we have kicked God (or at least a Christian worldview) out of schools…and maybe there are consequences to this.
