Will Protestant Church Schools Become a Third Force?

The most exciting development in education today is the rise of the Protestant church school. A rarity three decades ago, Protestant schools are now being organized at the rate of 225 per year. If the enthusiasm does not wane, they will soon take a place of equal importance alongside the public schools and the Roman Catholic parochial schools. The First Baptist Church School of Charleston, South Carolina, is an example of this new force in elementary and secondary education. In 1949, First Baptist offered kindergarten and first grade. Then each year it added a grade, until now there are 670 students in kindergarten through twelfth grade.

In 1937 there were about 2,000 Protestant schools in the United States, most of them Lutheran, Episcopal, or Seventh-day Adventist. The next fifteen years brought about 1,000 more. Then between 1952 and 1959 there arrived 1,800 new schools, and total enrollment doubled. In the next three years, 900 new schools were started. Since 1962 the growth rate has leveled off at 4 per cent per year.

There are now more than 5,700 Protestant schools with a total enrollment of half a million. By comparison, there are more than 10,000 Roman Catholic schools with 5,570,000 pupils. However, enrollment in Catholic schools dropped 58,000 in 1966, while Protestant schools continued their 4 per cent growth rate. If these trends continue, Protestant schools will match Roman Catholic schools in ten years.

What explains this rapid increase in Protestant church schools? To find out, we asked those who are now operating them this question: “Why did you start a church school?” The answers revealed concern for three things:

1. a superior academic environment,

2. a strong Christian influence,

3. a Bible-centered curriculum.

Many of the pastors also expressed a fourth, practical consideration: growth of the church through the operation of the school.

To consider these concerns as sharply separate would be artificial. They are intertwined, and they all are a part of the Church’s struggle with the secular order. The Protestant school exists in the interest of the Christian witness in the world; the school is an instrument for subjecting the secular world to the reign of Christ.

Many may be surprised to find academic excellence at the top of the list, and its place may reflect some rationalization on the part of the church-school administrators. But it is there. T. Frank Matthews, head of St. Paul’s Episcopal School in Selma, Alabama, states his purpose: “To provide a superior academic education in the context of Christian faith and worship.” He comments further that “it is very essential that small children realize that God is very much concerned with their academic education and ‘participates’ in their acquisition of it.” A. E. Holt, principal of the Lakeview Baptist School, San Antonio, Texas, links the three concerns together and places the initiative with the parents: “A … school was started at our church so that Christian parents could … see their children receive a strong academic education in a controlled moral atmosphere where God and the Bible were honored by teachers and the curriculum.” Holt concluded that “Christian parents can’t compete with the devil in educating children without Christian schools.”

Concern for a strong Christian influence is tied to the desire for academic excellence by Vincent X. Zanca, principal of mid-city Baptist High School in New Orleans. Zanca says his school, which offers kindergarten through twelfth grade, was started “to provide an excellent academic education to children in a Christian environment.” D. B. Spaulding, head of a Seventh-day Adventist school in Fullerton, California, says, “Children need a Christian education, and public schools have not been established for this purpose.” His church started a school to “establish our children in the Christian faith and stem the tide of influence of evolution and other non-Christian principles being taught in the public school system.” Another Seventh-day Adventist, H. Roger Bothwell of Waterloo, Iowa, advocates the education of the “whole” being and says his school was started “to provide our children with an education that does not require correction when they come to worship. Example: creation vs. evolution.”

The Amish, making no claims to academic excellence, have dramatized the struggle to maintain the peaceful pursuit of a simple religious way of life. They refuse to send their children to public schools and claim that the eight-grade Amish schools can teach their children what they need to know to live happily in the Amish community. The public school, they say, with its secular orientation, would damage the religious basis on which the Amish community is built.

Church-school advocates frankly affirm that their purpose is to teach the Bible. Speaking for the Westside Baptist School of Shreveport, Louisiana, the Rev. Bill McCormick says, “Our school teaches the four ‘R’s’: reading,’riting,’rithmetic, and religion.” The Second Baptist Church School of Houston opened in 1947 with Bible teaching listed as its primary purpose. Three years ago the Curtis Baptist Church in Augusta, Georgia, concerned over removal of prayer and Bible reading from the public schools, opened its own school and now has over 400 pupils.

Protestant reaction to Supreme Court decisions on prayer and Bible reading in the public schools has been sharply divided. Most churchmen agree that the state should not prescribe or require prayer. Many feel, however, that the court’s definition of religious neutrality encourages secularism and relegates the Bible to the limbo of inconsequence for public-school pupils. Dr. Duke K. McCall, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, argues that the court has deliberately left open one avenue: teaching about religion as one of the phenomena of life. Although he affirms that he is still an advocate of the public schools, Dr. McCall says that if they are officially delivered to a secular, godless philosophy, he will have to abandon support of them and advocate a Baptist parochial-school system.

Whatever may be the outcome of the court’s decisions, the men who start church schools are not teaching about religion; they are teaching religion. They are not teaching the Bible as literature; they are teaching it as the authoritative word of God. (It is our guess, of course, that in a Seventh-day Adventist School, it is taught with an SDA bias and in a Baptist school with a Baptist bias.)

Grow or diminish! Teach or die! This is the issue with many churches. Lee Thomas, head of the South Hills Academy in California, says, “We must be totally involved in the Christian day-school movement or run the risk of becoming a diminishing denomination.” A Florida pastor says, “My church has grown more from the school than from any other thing we have done.” Protestant churchmen are learning a lesson from Rome: The parochial school strengthens the church; it focuses parental concern and interest in the church; it keeps the children related to the church; and it supplies and trains the future leaders and workers for the church. Evidently, if a Sunday school is good for a church, a day school is five times better.

To achieve a strong, effective confrontation of the secular order, the Church must get its message across to children. As Vivian H. Andrews, principal of the high school of the First Baptist Church of Charleston, South Carolina, has said: “There is a need for the total Christian message, presented in the educational situation, hour after hour, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, until the growing child understands the magnitude and the challenge of the Christian life. The growing secularism of our world is making it imperative that today’s church take an active part in education.”

What is the future of the Protestant church schools in this country? Will they be able to support themselves, find and keep adequate teaching staffs, meet the constant need for housing, and grow into a significant force in the total educational picture?

Our research shows that the existing schools have enthusiastic support. They are adequately staffed with qualified teachers. Existing church buildings house them comfortably. Their supporters are evangelistic about the formation of new schools. The National Association of Christian Schools and the Christian School Service, Inc., are helping to organize, encourage, and unify the schools. There is no indication that the movement will be short-lived or inconsequential. On the contrary, we see it as a growing movement. However, it is destined to undergo some radical changes as it adjusts itself to an expanded operation and to government pressures in education.

Two recent developments in the educational realm will inevitably influence the Protestant school movement. By congressional acceptance of the “child-benefit theory” of educational support and by community endorsement of the dual-enrollment principle, the doors have been opened to an unlimited expansion of church schools, both Catholic and Protestant. At the same time, the financial aid being offered to the church schools through “child benefit” and “dual enrollment” will tend either to secularize the schools or to bring about a sharp cleavage along the traditional conservative-liberal lines.

Most of the Protestant school men who responded to our inquiries have spurned all government support. But these men represent mainly the conservative and evangelical churches. Besides, until recently, no aid was available. Now that federal funds are available, we expect two things to happen. First, there will be a movement into the church-school field by those churches now stressing “involvement” in the government’s social-welfare programs. Second, the bait will become more tempting each year to schools that have been holding the line against government aid. If this seems far-fetched, remember that four years ago there was no sign that Southern Baptists would consider breaching the wall between church and state to obtain support for their colleges. But now that the money is available, every state Southern Baptist convention is engaged in a bitter struggle between the “separationists,” who oppose federal grants and loans, and the “cooperationists,” who say that the very life of the Baptist colleges depends on taking the government money.

In our opinion, the “child-benefit theory,” which provides direct aid to the child attending a non-public school, is a circumvention of the wall separating church and state. It is, in effect, state subsidy of the church school. If accepted by Protestant schools, as it is being accepted by Catholic schools, it will reintroduce the secularizing element of government in the form of a benevolent paternalism that may work against faith in God’s providence.

“Dual enrollment” is different. Every child has the right to both the values of his religious tradition and the advantages of public education. If he wishes to enroll in two schools in order to get both, he does violence to neither the church nor the state. But “dual enrollment” fractures the basic tenet of the church school, that education should be a completely integrated operation permeated throughout with religious values.

A rapid and significant expansion of the Protestant school movement is now inevitable, because with one hand we have removed religion from the public schools and with the other we are offering public funds for the education of pupils in church schools. The American people will now have to decide whether education is complete apart from the values that underlie our way of life and the ideals that inspire us as a people. Obviously, we shall lose our way if the educational process studiously omits any reference to the means by which man has traditionally apprehended those values and ideals. Protestant schools will become a powerful force in the American educational picture because millions of Americans are unwilling to sacrifice their Christian values and ideals upon the altar of a secular society.

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