Western Civilization Is Not Our Home

Christian Education has always faced a fundamental question: What are we forming students for? What is the end goal that sits at the core of our purpose and guides the process?

In our current cultural moment there appears to be a growing impulse within Christian Education in the United States to pursue the preservation of Western Civilization as a central purpose. This impulse is what I would like us to consider here.

Christian Schools and Culture

I understand the concern behind this impulse. There is much about our cultural moment that should cause Christians to pay attention. Religious belief is declining, families are under pressure, institutions are increasingly contested, and many assumptions that once shaped our public life can no longer be taken for granted. Parents want their children to seek the truth, to embody love, and to have the courage to live faithfully in a world that does not always share their convictions. These are worthy desires.

But I find myself asking—What happens when we tie remnant theology to the preservation of Western Civilization as an end of Christian education? That vision leaves half the globe outside its frame and deprives the Western church of the vibrant witness of the global church. Making Western civilization and its cultural outcomes an ultimate good risks obscuring the profound harms that have been perpetuated through its institutions, ideas, and systems of power.

To be clear, culture matters … enormously. Christian education should shape people who engage culture. It should form people who create beautiful things, build trustworthy institutions, pursue justice, strengthen families, serve their neighbors, and contribute to the flourishing of their communities.

But there is a significant difference between saying that Christian education should shape culture and saying that preserving or rebuilding a particular civilization is its ultimate purpose. The first is an expression of Christian faithfulness. The second risks elevating a particular culture into a place that belongs only to Christ and his Kingdom.

When preservation of Western civilization becomes an end of Christian education, we diminish the global and cosmic nature of our calling to participate with the triune God in redeeming all things.

Here’s the thing: Western civilization is not our home.

This statement is not a rejection of culture. It is a confession about where our deepest identity lies.

Kingdom vs. Empire

Human beings are cultural creatures, and Christian education necessarily participates in culture-making. We receive an inheritance from those who came before us, and we should be grateful for the wisdom and traditions that have been handed down.

But Christian education should also give students the freedom to examine that inheritance honestly. Western civilization has produced extraordinary beauty … and extraordinary brokenness. It has contributed profoundly to human dignity, education, liberty, charity, and the rule of law … and bears the marks of slavery, colonialism, racism, sexism, exploitation, violence, and the abuse of power that continue to this day. Christians in the West have courageously confronted evils … and Christians have conceived, perpetuated, and accommodated them. Therefore, faithfulness requires more than preservation. It requires discernment, repentance, imagination, and the courage to continue the faithful and difficult road of making all things new.

Scripture gives us a view far larger than any civilization. Whereas God calls Abraham out of an ancient Mesopotamian culture, his blessing is intended for “all the families of the earth.” Israel is chosen, but its vocation is ultimately outward.

“Faithfulness requires more than preservation. It requires discernment, repentance, imagination, and the courage to continue the faithful and difficult road of making all things new.”

Jesus sends his disciples to “all nations” (Matt. 28:19). Paul describes Christ as reconciling “all things” to himself (Col. 1:20). Revelation culminates in a redeemed people from every nation, tribe, people, and language gathered around the throne of God (7:9). The biblical story is not the preservation or triumph of a particular civilization. It is the formation of a new and peculiar people, gathered across time and place, whose identity is found in Christ and whose calling is to participate with the Father, Son, and Spirit in the reconciliation and renewal of all things.

We must resist the temptation to confuse the Kingdom of God with the empire of humankind, which so often defines and pursues blessing in terms of wealth, security, military power, and comfort. The Kingdom offers a different vision of blessing. Its markers are love and truth, justice and righteousness, grace and mercy, servant leadership, sacrifice, hospitality, humility, and hope.

Belonging over Fear

When cultural dominion is conflated with the Kingdom, then anything perceived as different will itself become a threat: those who do not look, believe, or live like us are easily cast as problems to be overcome rather than neighbors to be loved—fellow image-bearers of God who have something to teach me about who God is.

Christian education should not be shaped by fear. Fear of secularism. Fear of public education. Fear of changing cultural norms. Fear of losing political influence. Fear that a particular cultural inheritance is disappearing.

Some of these concerns identify real challenges, and Christian educators should never be afraid to name what is false, unjust, or dehumanizing. But when fear becomes the organizing story, Christian education can start to imitate the very culture it is trying to resist. We can become more committed to protecting our children from the world than preparing them to love the world God has made. Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Fear of the world is the beginning of isolation and anger. 

We in Christian education have an extraordinary opportunity. We can learn from the past without being imprisoned by it. We can receive what is beautiful and true from the traditions that have shaped us while honestly recognizing the harm our civilization has caused. We have the freedom to lament and confess, and then build something new. 

And we should look beyond our own cultural borders to do this work. Christian education is not a Western project. Around the world, hundreds of thousands of children are being educated in Christian schools. An extraordinary movement of Christian education has long existed and continues to emerge across Africa, Latin America, Asia, and other parts of the Global South.

These are not simply places where Western ideas are being exported. They are communities from whom we have much to learn about faith, resilience, joy, sacrifice, community, and what it means to educate children for the flourishing of their neighbors and the rest of the created world.

I witness this reciprocal learning in the work of Bright Promise. This network of Christ-centered schools in Chicago does not exist as cultural enclaves insulated from a broken world, but as communities rooted within that world for its flourishing: schools that love each other and desire to embrace and reflect communities that have too often been excluded from the centers of power that formed Western Civilization.

There is a particular beauty in watching these schools choose one another, learn from one another, and work together so that students and communities can thrive not simply as an expression of what Christian education can be, but as a glimpse of the Kingdom we are called to embody.

We have an opportunity and an obligation to sincerely evaluate whether our schools are cultivating the Kingdom or preserving a culture. One way of doing this is to invite people among and around us who do not reflect the majority culture of our schools to hold the mirror up to us. Again, the goal is not to eliminate all culture, but to rightly order it so that one does not dominate another in a way that robs an individual or people group of their God-given dignity.

In John 16, Christ our Lord assures us that He has overcome the world. This blessed assurance gives us the peace to move freely toward the world, not with fear at the roots of dominion, but with curiosity and hope, wisdom and grace, justice and mercy and love, trusting that wherever we go, we are entering a world already claimed by the One we follow.

Western Civilization is not our home.  Christ is.