Thursday, May 1, 2025

Part I

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Can Religious Schools Be Publicly Funded Charter Schools? SCOTUS Hears Major Religious Liberty Case from Oklahoma

Very interesting oral arguments yesterday at the Supreme Court of the United States. And the case has to do with whether or not a Catholic organization can organize and run a charter school in the state of Oklahoma. And the state of Oklahoma has said no, and the case has now gone to the Supreme Court of the United States, where yesterday in oral arguments, it does appear that most of the conservatives on the court are likely to rule that indeed it is unconstitutional for the state of Oklahoma to say that the only type of group that may not operate a charter school is a religious organization. I stated that very carefully. It’s not to say that the court is likely to rule that religious organizations should run charter schools, but rather that the state cannot discriminate and say the one group that cannot run a charter school is a Christian or religious organization.

There’s a lot behind this. First of all, you have the definition of a charter school. And honestly to me, I think this is one of the most important issues. What in the world is a charter school? The bottom line is that the majority of states have them, 47, so the vast majority of states have them. Also, the District of Columbia charter schools allow for private initiative in terms of the founding and organization and culture of a school that is still funded with taxpayer money. And so at this point, they are clearly defined, certainly explicitly in most states as public schools, they are an extension of the public school movement. The innovation in charter schools has been one of the big stories.

But I also want step back as a Christian and say there are situations in which some of these charter schools have genuinely represented educational innovation and recovery in a very good way to be celebrated by conservatives. Conservatives should look at the charter school movement and say at least in part, it has allowed in many cases, at least for some amount of time, the public schools to be redefined in ways that are outside the control of the mainstream blob of the public school movement.

But the other side of that is that at least at this point, the charter schools are defined as public schools and thus legally, that puts them under all kinds of restrictions. And that’s where this story could get really interesting because at this point it appears that the Supreme Court is going to rule on a fairly narrow question. And as a Christian, I want to divide the question into two different questions. 

The court is looking at one question, and that one question is whether it is unconstitutional for the state of Oklahoma to deny the right of an organization to establish St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School as a faith-based charter school there in Oklahoma. And the state of Oklahoma, which let’s just point out, is not a liberal state, it’s one of the more conservative states, it’s a deep red state, nonetheless came back and said that according to Oklahoma law, it really isn’t possible for a religious organization to start and to administer a charter school.

So the Supreme Court, I think just based upon the oral arguments yesterday, is likely to rule that that is unconstitutional. If the singular question is can the state of Oklahoma discriminate on one basis and one basis alone? And that is religious conviction, religious identification, I don’t think that’s going to stand muster. I don’t think it should. I’ll go so far as to say, I think the Supreme Court should find that the state of Oklahoma’s prohibition of this school at this time is unconstitutional. It’s an unconstitutional discrimination against a religious organization. 

But as a Christian, and particularly I’ll just say, I’ll put it all on the line here. As a Baptist, I have grave concerns about entangling the educational process with the public schools and with the funding that comes will also come control, eventual control. And here’s where looking at the charter school movement in the United States as a conservative Christian, I want to say we have grave concerns about what has taken place because in a lot of cases we have these charter schools that began with a great deal of promise and the question is, are they going to be able to maintain that promise? 

The other thing to note is that you have groups that are, well, let’s just say far more progressive in terms of their understanding of education. They too have the right to establish these charter schools. And when it comes to licensing these schools, legally defining these schools, I’ll just say I think there’s a lot of danger of encroachment from the Left. But beyond that, there is the danger of encroachment from the state. And as I say, this is a very interesting case because it is after all St. Isidore Seville Catholic School that is intended here as a charter school and it’s the state of Oklahoma, not a liberal state, not a state hostile to religious expression and certainly to Christianity.

It’s a state where this has happened. And that’s also a backstory in the midst of all of this, going back to what are called the Blaine Amendments. After the Civil War, when you had the United States consider an amendment to the constitution that would prevent any such use of public money and what you might call a strict separationist position between church and state, that amendment failed at the national level, but a majority of states adopted state-level Blaine amendments. And by the way, at least a part of that was to prevent taxpayer money going to Catholic schools and also basically to try to use pressure to shut down Catholic schools. Very much the ambition of at least some people in the 19th century. So history is replete with ironies and what goes around often comes back. And now you have conservative Christian evangelical Christians siding with this Catholic organization seeking to establish a Catholic charter school because if the religious liberty of this group can be infringed, our own religious liberty can be infringed.

But as I said, the courts are really considering one central question and that is the question of constitutionality. As Christians, I think we need to consider two questions and you could divide them this way. Should the state be allowed to prevent this? I say no. I hope the court’s majority follows through in saying no. Should Christian organizations look to establish charter schools as an alternative to other Christian school movements? I would say no. More provisionally, it’s not an absolute, but I would say there is the danger that when you do anything that is within the reach of the government, the government will reach and then it will overreach.

But it’s also interesting that Justice Amy Coney Barrett recused herself from this case. She is not going to be involved in this ruling, otherwise it might be a six-three decision or something close to that. And she did so following the rules of the court because she has had a professional relationship with the law firm representing the school. So that’s another reminder that ethics will be an important issue at every level and this is a case of a Supreme Court justice doing exactly what she should do in recusing herself from this case. However, that could be a matter of lament mathematically if the case goes down by one vote. So it’s one of those situations we will have to watch, and the decision is almost assuredly going to come down sometime in late June or perhaps even early July before the court’s summer recess.

Part II

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Pronatalism as Policy: The Trump Administration Grapples with a Falling Birth Rate and the Definition of the Family

Now I want to turn to a more fundamental issue and a bigger issue. I felt like we needed to talk about the Supreme Court oral arguments because that is a very important case and it happened yesterday, but I want to talk about a far longer term problem of far larger significance, and that is the question of America’s birth rate and the fall off in America’s marriage rate. And what we’re looking at as a redefinition of human life and a redefinition of the good life and of adulthood without marriage or children.

And this is now catching the attention even of the secular world. And right now even has the attention of the Trump administration because the fall off in the birth rate in the United States is now so precipitous that over time it is going to lead unquestionably to a population crisis. And that crisis is not going to be having too many babies but too few. And that means not having too many citizens, but too few. And here’s where also in the modern age, a highly secular age disconnected by intention from religious authority and particularly from biblical foundations, this is where the secular world can look at this and given its own key central principles, it really can’t say much. Even in the face of looming demographic disaster, the secular mind has virtually nothing to say.

Now, there are some headlines in recent days that frame the situation, at least in part, but this is a far larger issue. We talked about it before. I’m writing about it in a big project right now. 

We’ll be back to it again because it’s hard to imagine a more pressing story for our Christian worldview consideration. But the recent headlines include the fact that the secular media and others have caught on to the truth that the Trump administration is actually considering the government’s role in encouraging women to have more children. Now, that’s the headline in The New York Times. Caroline Kitchener is the reporter, the headline, “White House Assesses Ways to Persuade Women to Have More Children.” Before we go any further, I want to point to a huge problem. And that huge problem is in our day, just gigantic but missed. People, even many Christians, I think miss the problem. I read the headline again. “White House Assesses Ways to Persuade Women to Have More Children.” What is the signal word there? It’s the word women. To persuade women to have more children.

Back in the 1970s, in the years that Jimmy Carter was President of the United States, a huge moral shift was indicated when the White House changed the name of a conference from the White House Conference on the Family to the White House Conference on Families in the plural, indicating that there is no objective right order to the family. It’s just families. Now you can’t say “the family,” instead you have to say “families.” That was a wake up call for an awful lot of Christians who said, wait, “We just gave away creation order as the basis of our entire society. That’s a huge problem.” And I think for a lot of conservative Christians, it was a wake up call that this couldn’t have come out of a vacuum. Similarly, that headline, rather than persuade married couples to have more children, to persuade women to have more children. I’m not saying that it’s absolutely wrong. I’m simply saying that the use of that headline tells you part of the problem.

Now, of course, the secular left and in particular the media, they’re just aghast that the White House could even have this as a concern. I’ll just put a footnote in here. Almost every society has had this as a concern. This was a concern in the United States in the 19th century. It is a concern in other nations right now. Nations like Japan and South Korea have devastatingly low birth rates far in advance of the decline here in the United States. This isn’t just a recent, it’s not just an American preoccupation here, and certainly not just a preoccupation of the American right, of the conservatives conservative Christians in the US, although it is interesting that the secular media appear to basically identify the situation that way. And as I began, I think a part of that is because we’re among the few people who see it and are talking about it and are willing to talk about it at the level of reality.

The New York Times article begins with these words: “The White House has been hearing out a chorus of ideas in recent weeks for persuading Americans to get married and have more children, an early sign that the Trump administration will embrace a new cultural agenda pushed by many of its allies on the Right, to reverse declining birth rates and push conservative family values.” We could take weeks just looking at that sentence. Don’t worry, we won’t, but we will have to come back to this issue time and again. What could be more fundamental?

Here we have The New York Times warning its readers that the White House is hearing out numerous ideas for persuading Americans to get married and have more children. Okay, number one, I appreciate the way that phrase was written, to get married and have more children. And I appreciate the fact that that is at least what is being contemplated by the Trump administration, but that’s different than the headline. That was merely persuade women to have more children. Now, we are told to persuade Americans to get married and have more children. That’s not a slight difference. Just like the shift from the White House Conference on the Family to the White House Conference on Families, that wasn’t a small shift. That’s an entire revolution, moral revolution right there. The same thing is true in the difference in this article between the headline and the first paragraph.

But you’ll also notice something else, and that is that only crazy people on the far right, only Christians and others on the right could be concerned about such a thing. But let me tell you, everybody’s got to be concerned about it. And that means big corporations have to be concerned about it. The government has to be concerned about it. Higher education has to be concerned about it. Higher education, right now, America’s colleges and universities are worried about what is called a demographic cliff, that is a fall off in the birth rates, that will affect college enrollments as early as this academic year, certainly in the next two or three years. And by the way, if you’re doing the math, that means that the fall off in pregnancies was 18 years ago. But there’s a sense in which the larger society is just in explicit denial about this because of the society’s prior commitments to personal autonomy and sexual liberation. Because if you’re going to talk about getting married and having more children, you’re going to have to back off of all that talk about sexual liberation and personal autonomy.

But on the Left, at least right now and even more widespread in American culture, the idols of personal autonomy and sexual liberation are winning out over the babies. It’s very interesting to look at the sectors of society where that isn’t true. According to The New York Times article, the White House is considering, for example, giving a $5,000 cash baby bonus to every American mother after delivery. And I’m going to stop there because that sentence is exactly as it is written. “A $5,000 cash baby bonus to every American mother after delivery.”

So let me talk about one of the failed projects of the late 20th century. It was the failed project of Progressivist ideas about how to do social engineering through, for example, federal spending and the federal spending when it came to child support ended up subsidizing children born outside of marriage. There’s just no question about that. And if you put it this way, a $5,000 cash baby bonus to every American mother after delivery, well, that just sounds like another failed great society program because it excised having children, it separated having children from the context of marriage. And this is something you just can’t do, at least in that first paragraph, the motive imputed to the White House seemed to recognize that we have to hope it’s true.

Okay, we are told that the issue of a falling birth rate has become something of a fixation for the Trump White House and including Vice President JD Vance. And we can see why. We can see why. I think President Trump just has to be motivated by a simple understanding that fewer babies means a smaller economy, period. If you don’t know anything else, you do know that. And furthermore, as a nation, a shrinking population affects everything from not only the size of the economy and the strength of the workforce, but it also comes down to the ability, for example, to muster an army in the field, to muster a military. This is one of Russia’s big problems right now. Russia is using soldiers from North Korea and elsewhere, and that’s not because of the giant birth rate in Russia. It’s because of the declining birth rate in Russia.

Okay, The New York Times then says this later: “Much of the movement is built around promoting a very specific idea of what constitutes a family, one that includes marriage between a man and a woman, and leaves out many families that don’t conform to traditional gender roles or family structures. In contrast to the intense emphasis on cost-cutting so far during Mr. Trump’s second term, this focus on families could result in spending more money to back a new set of priorities.” So I warned you, it’s coming. Here it is right in black and white. The New York Times is telling us that the idea that the family includes marriage between a man and a woman, and the children that will come to that marriage. The fact that that is some far right strategy in the eyes of The New York Times tells you how far we have gone into an absolute rebellion against creation order and a giant experiment in self-delusion about whether society can survive without thriving families. And yes, that means husband, wife, mother, father, and children.

You can see how the subversion has worked here when The New York Times finds it absolutely necessary, if it’s going to mention that the family would include marriage between a man and a woman, and obviously include their children, “leaves out many families that don’t conform to traditional gender roles or family structures.” In other words, The Times can’t even talk about the family as it has been normatively defined in terms of its molecular structure without apologizing for it and saying, “but of course we can’t define the family that way anymore.” The movement behind this is often described as pronatalism, and natal means birth in this case. And so pronatalism means being pro birth. And by the way, pronatalism is one of the primary themes of scripture. Pronatalism. Within creation order and the structures of creation order, the first command given to the man and the woman was “to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.” So Pronatalism has its beginning in Genesis one.

Now, this article also includes some discussion of, for example, the government’s potential role in educating women about the reproductive cycle and even increasing the likelihood that a woman would be able to successfully conceive. And then you have this, “Leading medical associations have been skeptical of this approach, calling it political and not based in science.” Well, the next sentence quotes Dr. Eve Feinberg, little irony there, a medical director of fertility and reproductive medicine at Northwestern University who said, “These ideologies have been around for a long time and they’re always rooted in religion. She went on to say it’s not actual medicine.” I don’t have time to dissect all of this fully, but you can pretty much do the math yourself. Here’s another use of a word like “medicine” or “science” in order to push an ideology and in order to push out any notion of normativity when it comes to the definition of the family and the relationship of marriage and the family to having children.

And so these kinds of approaches mentioned here we’re told aren’t medicine, “it’s not actual medicine.” And again, I just can’t help pointing to the irony that the doctor’s first name is Eve. I do want to go on and say that Dr. Feinberg is cited in the article as being for increased spending for infertility and related issues, describing them as a wonderful idea. So on that we are in agreement. But here again, you get to another problem, and this emerges from recent publicity having to do with a conference that was held in Texas. And at this conference there was a discussion about pronatalism and NPR, National Public Radio, reporter Lisa Hagan, looked at this conference in particular, and some of the arguments made at this conference. The conference held recently in Austin, Texas, was known as Natalcon Natality Conference. And we’re told that at the meeting, “The mood was exuberant. Many there see this movement as a chance to advance their agenda through perceived allies in the Trump administration.” And it is really interesting.

And by the way, I have seen so much press coverage on this, and because of my intense interest in the issue, I’ve been trying to look at all of this press coverage. And there’s a couple that has come to mind several times, and that will be Malcolm and Simone Collins. They’re being held up as kind of the model of this pronatal movement pro-birth movement. And yet they’re also pushing back at the fact that this is a conservative movement. It is interesting, they’ve named their children thus far, Industry Americus, Titan Invictus, Octavian George, Torsten Savage, “in hopes of launching them towards impressive careers.” Well, there you go. The article refers to them as Techno-puritans, even down to the way they dress. “It’s a religion they’ve invented in part to maximize fertility, mental health and social good.” And you look at these and say, wow, there’s a lot going on here. I think at least a part of what’s going on here is intense media strategy and publicity. It turns out this couple are not coming from the right at all. They’re coming from a very different place. “The couple uses and advocates for in vitro fertilization and claims the embryos of their four children were screened for illnesses, mental health issues, and potential intelligence.”

Part III

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Not Every Pronatalist Argument is Christian: The Mandate is Clear in Genesis, But Eugenics is Anti-Christian

This is a warning to Christians that even though our posture must be pronatal, not everything done in the name of Pronatalism is compatible with the Christian worldview, is compatible with biblical truth. Having designer babies through IVF, and I’ve dealt with that very extensively in terms of the ethical and theological problems, but they’re certainly made clear when you see the eugenicism, the demand for good babies, healthy babies coming out of this, good genes even, when you see that their four children came by in vitro fertilization and were screened for again, illnesses, mental health issues, and potential intelligence. Well, that’s a big list. And just consider how soon it comes athletic ability and potential to be a chess grand master and the right color hair and eyes and all the rest. This is not compatible with the Christian biblical worldview.

But it’s not just this particular conference. It’s not just this news coverage. We will at a later time talk about that Newsweek cover story about the increase of singles and the decrease of marriage.

Part IV

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The Ripple Effects of Record Low Birth Rates: We Should All Be Concerned About the Plummeting Birth Rates – Universities and Toy Manufacturers Undoubtedly Are

We as Christians understand all these things are tied together. They have to be, they’re tied together in Genesis one and Genesis two. You can’t untie them without horrifying social and personal consequences. But the big thing here is the fact that right now, in terms of the place we are in this culture, at the present moment when you talk about these things, you represent some far-right religious agenda. But on the other hand, it is interesting to see that almost at the very same time, a major article emerged in the mainstream media, in this case, The Wall Street Journal, and it’s not about the conference at all. It’s rather about the economic background for the country. The headline is this: “Birth rate edges higher but stays near record low.” And this article, just simply a news article about the birth rate in the United States warns that there are going to be consequences to this severe and continuing fall-off infertility.

As I said earlier, you just have to think about, for example, that colleges and universities are feeling this already. The competition for students is only going to become more intense, as are some of the patterns that show up on these campuses. And not only that, if you’re a toy manufacturer, if you’re a manufacturer of baby equipment, yeah, you’re going to have to notice all of this. If you are a big school system, I guarantee you, you are going to know this, which is why in large part, you have so many major metropolitan school districts looking at how they close or consolidate schools. It’s not a real estate issue, it’s a birth rate issue.

One final word, just in thinking about all that will take place with the decline in the birth rate, that is as precipitous as what we’re watching now around the world. I mentioned South Korea and Japan as two standout nations in terms of the problem. Japan’s falling birth rate has been a problem now for decades, and it is already showing up with big pathologies and problems in the society. This isn’t just something you might see out there somewhere in the future. This is happening in Japan and South Korea right now. So NPR, again, National Public Radio, not a conservative news source, just recently ran a report headline, “Japan’s Traditional Crafts are Struggling to Survive the Country’s Population Decline.” Later in the article, NPR tells us that a similar situation is playing out across Japan, “Where decades of declining birth rates are resulting in a crisis for tens of thousands of family-owned small businesses. Everything from restaurants and garages to repair shops and small factories are going under at an alarming rate because there is no one to take over from the aging owners.”

And I remind you quite soberly that this is not a warning about the future. This is an indication of what’s happening in Japan right now. Ideas have consequences. One of those consequences in our time is a falloff in the birth rate. The decline in the birth rate is going to come with its own dramatic consequences. And as we as Christians look at this, we need to recognize far more than the secular demographers. This is indeed a giant problem. It is a civilizational problem. It is a worldview crisis.