If you’re a Christian parent, you’ve probably asked yourself: Is my child’s education neutral, or is something else at work?
The answer might surprise you. What many of us were taught to see as “neutral” education is actually grounded in a specific worldview—one that has quietly shaped American schools for over 150 years.
When Education Stopped Being Neutral
In 1963, the Supreme Court ruled in Abington School District v. Schempp that school-sponsored Bible reading and prayer were unconstitutional. This landmark decision didn’t just remove religious practices from schools—it marked the culmination of a philosophical shift that had been building for centuries.
That shift is called secularism, and understanding its history helps us understand what our children are learning today.
A Brief History: How Secularism Became the Default
Secularism didn’t appear overnight. It grew through the work of influential thinkers over several centuries:
The Enlightenment philosophers like Baron d’Holbach and Denis Diderot argued for a purely materialistic view of the universe—one that didn’t need God to make sense.
Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) gave intellectual ammunition to those who believed life could be explained without a Creator. Karl Marx seized on Darwin’s work to build economic and political theories that explicitly rejected religious foundations.
Friedrich Nietzsche declared “God is dead,” not as a theological claim but as a cultural observation: Western society was increasingly living as if God didn’t matter.
The “New Atheists” like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris didn’t just argue against belief in God—they became openly hostile to religious people themselves.
George Holyoake, who coined the term “secularism” in the mid-1800s, defined it as a system “intended for the guidance of those who find theology indefinite, or inadequate, or deem it unreliable.”
In other words: secularism doesn’t claim neutrality. It claims to replace a theological understanding of the world.
Why This Matters for Your Kids
Here’s the key insight from theologian J. Gresham Machen in 1923:
“While truth is truth however learned, the bearings of truth, the meaning of truth, the purpose of truth, even in the sphere of mathematics, seem entirely different to the Christian from that which they seem to the non-Christian.”
A math problem might have the same answer whether taught by a Christian or non-Christian teacher. But the framework matters. Does math reveal the order and beauty of God’s creation, or is it just useful information in a purposeless universe?
Every subject—science, history, literature, ethics—is taught within a worldview. And in most public schools, that worldview assumes God is irrelevant to how we understand the world.
