Why freaking out about Christian schools proves evangelicals’ irrational fears – Religion News Service
(RNS) — Everyone needs to stop freaking out about Christian schools.Though they made headlines in the past few weeks thanks to Karen Pence, wife of Vice President Mike Pence, these institutions are not nearly as interesting and exotic as the mainstream media supposes.Neither should they be controversial.Some people want a religious education for their children. The ones who can afford it will have it. Beyond that, most of what you’ve heard is bluster, and neither the subjects of news stories nor readers are better off for the brouhaha.Karen Pence taught art at Immanuel Christian School in a Virginia suburb of Washington while her husband represented Indiana in the U.S. House of Representatives from 2001 to 2013.When she returned to the school to take a part-time job a few weeks ago, The New York Times announced the move with a headline that read, “Karen Pence Is Teaching at Christian School that Bars L.G.B.T. Students and Teachers.”A spate of articles and commentary followed, portraying the school and its constituents as alternatively alien and sinister, a mostly hidden but very dark force that journalists and activists would have to expose.The truth, as anyone with even basic religious and cultural literacy knows, is that these types of private evangelical Protestant schools gather around faith commitments that include, among beliefs about God, Jesus, the Bible, etc., the view that marriage is between a man and a woman and that sexual relations outside such unions are sinful.
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