Using Homeschooling to Wage Culture War is a Colossal Waste (And It Won't Work)

Many have tried. Many regret it.

A few days ago I saw someone on Twitter rejoicing about the increased numbers of homeschooling families over the past few years. This person said that this trend represented a surge in “discipleship” that will certainly bear fruit for the good of the church in the next few decades. I could show you dozens of tweets and articles that say basically this same thing: that homeschooling is intrinsically more faithful and more Christian than alternatives, and that it is a crucial strategy for Christians who want to see cultural renewal.

Before I explain why this is emphatically and manifestly not true, let me again flout my homeschooling bona fides. I was homeschooled K-12 in a pastor’s family. My curriculum was from an independent, fundamentalist Baptist organization in Florida. I got a conservative evangelical perspective on absolutely everything: science (six 24-hour day creationism), history (Great Awakening: good!), English literature (memorized Emily Dickinson, never learned about Dylan Thomas), even math (wasn’t allowed to use a calculator until high school!). I have no axe to grind about homeschooling; in fact, my single most successful moment as a writer was a defense of homeschooling. I love homeschooling and homeschoolers. I believe in both. Yay homeschooling!

And here’s the thing: my lifelong love and affection for homeschooling is precisely why I resent the weaponization of homeschooling as an instrument of culture war. People who say that homeschooling is synonymous with discipleship are showing off an impressive amount of ignorance. Nobody with serious experience within homeschooling circles would make this statement. In my own Kentucky corner of the homeschooling universe I know literally dozens and dozens of families who went all-in on conservative Christian homeschooling only to watch their college-aged children abandon the faith, often aggressively. I know of one particular homeschooling family that was well-respected and prominent in our community. The father was a professor at a seminary. Several of this man’s children have publicly disowned him, told horrifying stories about their childhood, and of course, have absolutely zero time for Christ or the church. I have no idea who, if anyone, is to blame for that. But I do know I have enough of these stories in my life experience to know that equating homeschooling with deep discipleship is a farce.

Let’s just get very real for a moment. What hurts the homeschooling movement more than liberal politics, more than the sexual revolution, more than Darwinism, is a widely shared aversion among many homeschooling families to the local church. I cannot even begin to tell you how many folks in this community have deeply dysfunctional relationships to actual churches. Home churches, where the dads are self-appointed elders and the kids are kept away from “worldly” youth groups are common. A lot of families don’t bother at all. The co-op, the cottage school, or the homeschooling network itself does double duty as education and spirituality, because the parents feel very in control of it. There are seriously worrisome dynamics within many homeschooling communities, dynamics which seem to be custom designed to invite the kids to deconstruct their entire faith at the first opportunity.

The dysfunctional relationship to the local church is a symptom, in many cases, of the homeshcooling-as-instrument-of-culture-war. When you view your children as little soldiers whose formative years are preparing them to parachute into politics or the economy and push the enemy back, the whole idea of spiritual formation through external institutions seems pointless at best, counterproductive at worst. The church, after all, is a horribly inefficient vehicle for culture war. It is a place where believers come to be reminded how unworthy we are, how much grace we need, and how much we need to find it in other people. This is not what a soldier needs. A soldier does not need a deep awareness of his own faults. He needs deep awareness of the sins of others. He does not need means of grace. He needs means of winning.

Homeschooling is precious exactly because, at its best moments, it is an unusually intense experience of grace. I cannot even begin to tell you how glad I am that I spent most of my childhood and adolescence near my mom and dad: watching them love each other, hearing them pray for us, seeing the way Jesus was real to them every minute. I’m grateful for my homeschooling curriculum, especially the way it pointed me back towards great books and stoked the desire for reading and writing that I carry today. There’s nothing I got in my homeschooling years that I could really use as a tool to reclaim American society for God. That’s not what it was for. And if it had been, I wouldn’t have been glad for it the way I am.

You can try as hard as you want to turn your family into a squadron. But anger and confidence don’t feed the spirit nearly as much as frustrated adults tend to think. Children choke on them. Homeschool your family if you want the difficult but real blessings that closeness can bring you, and lean on the local church to take care of you spiritually and keep your own instincts accountable. Don’t turn your house into a war room. You will regret it. So many have.