Morris Chapman Encourages Public School Exodus

According to Ethics Daily, Morris Chapman, Executive Director of the Southern Baptist Convention, is promoting a plan to expand and extend a network of private Baptist grade schools and secondary schools throughout the South. He envisions at least one such private school in every Southern Baptist association in America. The vast majority of Southern Baptist associations are in the Southern states.

Robert Parham, Executive Director of the Baptist Center for Ethics, who has closely monitored anti-public school sentiment in the Southern Baptist Convention, observes:

Of course, abandoning public schools will in fact abandon the biblically mandated responsibility to care for all God's children—the poor, the immigrant, the special-needs children.

Abandoning public schools is really about retreating from the larger culture, from the public square, in order to "protect our own" from racial, religious, cultural and economic diversity. It's also about shielding children from science.

Nonetheless, Chapman's surprising move drew cheers from the extreme right, which has been calling for the exodus from public schools since 2004.

One of their leaders, Houston attorney Bruce Shortt, called Chapman's statement "the first step in the 'exit strategy.'"

"All Christians should note this sea-change in sentiment within the SBC," said Shortt. "The spiritual, moral and intellectual pathologies of the government school system are now obvious even to casual observers. Christian parents and pastors need to ask themselves just how much longer they intend to render our children to Caesar's spiritually dark, morally decaying and physically dangerous government schools."

At a time when Southern Baptist leaders are blaming the free-fall in baptisms on family planning, it appears that Baptists are shifting their strategy for church growth from evangelism to education.

After thirty years of fundamentalist dominion, the Southern Baptist Convention has become a by-word for the failure of theological hegemony and political activism as a means for sharing the gospel. Neither the affirmation of inerrancy, nor the purging of moderates from the convention, nor the alliance with a right-wing political movement, produced the growth that SBC fundamentalists promised.