Janie B. Cheaney: Homeschool doesn’t save

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Wednesday, July 19th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard. “Movements” of various sorts grip people, for good or for ill. WORLD commentator Janie B. Cheaney says Christians can fall for misguided movements, too.

JANIE B. CHEANEY, COMMENTATOR: I first heard of Bill Gothard in the late 1980s, when his Advanced Training Institute hosted a discipleship conference nearby and most of my homeschooling friends signed up to attend. ATI was the homeschool outreach of the Institute of Basic Life Principles, founded by Gothard in 1961. I was interested until I heard about the time commitment: three-hour sessions every night and all Saturday, amounting to 20+ hours. Outside of Christ himself, there was no one I wanted to listen to for 20+ hours. After the conference, my friends agreed that they’d learned some valuable points but were creeped out by other aspects of the program, in particular the emphasis on authority, with the ultimate authority assumed to be Gothard himself.

His name wasn’t well known outside Evangelical circles, but the Amazon docuseries Shiny Happy People recently brought Bill Gothard to the attention of a wider public. The four-part documentary examines the Duggar family, whose popular reality TV show ended in 2015 after their oldest son confessed to sexual molestation. I haven’t seen Shiny Happy People, but word is that it makes the Duggars, who followed Gothard’s teachings and whose smiley facade covered a vein of dysfunction, emblematic of Christian homeschoolers everywhere. Not true; homeschoolers have always come in a wide range of lifestyles, both religious and secular.

But one idea promoted by Gothard, and many others, haunted the Christian homeschool movement of the 1980s and 90s: that our children would have a profound effect on politics and culture. That they might even, in the words of at least one conference speaker, “save America.” Shielding our kids from the world’s enticements, giving them Proverbs-based instruction, inspiring them with a mission—that was the ticket. Vision Forum, Generation Joshua, and the Quiverfull Movement were hopeful developments that promised great things. Which made it all the more painful when some of their leaders revealed feet of clay.

I recall our shock when a popular conference speaker who promoted large families and a back-to-land lifestyle left her husband for another man. “If we can’t trust her, who can we trust?” one of my friends cried. Other paragons would fall, brought down by sexual improprieties like Bill Gothard, or financial mismanagement, or overbearing leadership. And in my own circle of eight moms, all of us had children who strayed, at least temporarily, from the “basic life principles” they were taught.

Who can we trust? Jesus.

The Kingdom of Heaven is not built on a foundation of life principles. It’s built on a Person who is less interested in saving America than in saving individual souls. Every Christian parent rightly desires to train up their children in the way they should go, but there’s no foolproof method. To overestimate our best efforts is to underestimate the power of sin in our own hearts, and in our children’s. That’s hard to accept. So is radical grace, but nothing else can save.

I’m Janie B. Cheaney.

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