Yesterday, The Evangelical Outpost linked to this post “How To Turn Your Daughter Into A Whore In Two Easy Steps”. Step one is enroll your daughter into a public school. Step two is kick back and watch. According to the self-proclaimed public school math teacher, “[d]ay in, day out, I stand in the halls of my high school and wonder why half the girls are even trying to get a high school diploma–they would have such a promising career as street walkers” and that there is “no way in you know where my daughter would ever go to public school beyond elementary school.” He sums up his stance with a small confession: “I have a problem–I have values.”
Let’s start with step two first. I teach literature, so I’m going to adopt the idea of in media res for this post. His step two is a disaster for anything one’s child does. The conversations and arguments about what is and is not appropriate apparel, behavior, food, drink, friends, music, literature, spending, or worldview are part of parenting. Doing anything as step one and then kicking back to watch is going to lead to disaster.
On a more important level, the math teacher seems to have missed a metaphor. Isn’t it possible that the reason the girls in his school dress like provocatively is that too many Christian girls are in Christian schools? It’s tough to function as the salt of the earth if the salt is in a shaker on the shelf. The whole idea of being the light of the world is that the light isn’t hid under a bushel. Christian schools are the most effective bushels that I have ever seen. Let’s face it, it’s virtually impossible to replace Britney Spears with Rebecca St. James (or whoever the CCM pop starlet of the moment is) if no one except Christians knows who Rebecca St. James is.
On a more general note, the whole public schools cause prostitution, drug use, and foot fungus cant that certain elements of Christianity continually use is tired and useless. On the clothing question, many public schools have dress codes and do their best to enforce them. More importantly, how do the clothes teenagers wear to school differ from the clothes that they wear to the mall or a restaurant or any other public place? Unless one locks up one’s daughter like Rapunzel, I doubt that there’s any way to keep her from seeing her peers dress in ways that this guy disapproves of. By the way, in case the math guy isn’t familiar with the fables, the tower thing didn’t work so well for Rapunzel’s father.
Finally, what’s with the “I have a problem–I have values” snark? I admit that I did only a cursory check of the Bible sites on the web, but I didn’t find any translation that said “by your snark shall all men know you are My disciples.”
I promised myself that I was going to let this bit go, but I can’t, so here comes one more finally. When the people who “work in corporate America, or some job where you’re just in contact with middle and upper-middle class people” are exempt from society’s problems because “you have no idea . . . [that] our society [has] sunk to the level of pond scum, and it shows in the way our kids dress and comport themselves,” I get pretty irate. Aren’t the people who work in upper and middle class
Christians are called to be in the world not of the world. All posts like this do is give the world the impression that we want out and nothing to do with them. If we all get out, the only faces of Christianity that will be left are the Jerry Falwells and the Pat Robertsons among us. I don’t think they look much like Jesus. Instead let’s do the tough job of working on love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance in our own lives.
