Educated Voting
It’s Election Day for many voters across the nation, despite the fact that it’s considered a “non-election year.” In truth, important elections are held somewhere every single year, and our nation depends on educated voters like you to show up at the polls.
But what does it mean to be an educated voter? Perhaps candidate research and knowledge of current affairs are the first qualifications that come to mind. But an educated populace means far more than that. It’s also about understanding American systems and ideals, and how they’re rooted in our history. It’s about logic and critical thinking, as well as wisdom and discernment. But of all the educational priorities for an American voter, there’s nothing greater than a citizen’s deep understanding of virtues like courage and love.
In this day and age, it’s almost startling to suggest that an educated person must have a deep knowledge of virtue. But this only proves how secularized we’ve become in our thinking about education. According to 1 John 4:8, “God is love,” so learning about God is essential to understanding the virtue of love. Colossians 1:16 says, “For by Him all things are created in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible.” If we believe these truths, then how educated can someone possibly be without knowledge of God?
When the first American schools started in the 1600s, the settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony established schools for the purpose of teaching their children Puritan values and the Bible. Likewise, the earliest American textbooks also prioritized scripture, theology, and virtue. According to literacy historian E. Jennifer Monaghan, “Reading in the colonies was above all a religious act; the [New England] Primer taught children to read so they could read the Bible.”
Additionally, the Founding Fathers believed that democracy could not thrive without an educated populace, and the Bible was core to their academic vision. Noah Webster, known as the father of American education, once said, “In my view, the Christian religion is the most important and one of the first things in which all children, under a free government, ought to be instructed.”
Author of Webster’s Dictionary of 1828, Webster included this statement in his definition of the word education: “To give children a good education in manners, arts and science, is important; to give them a religious education is indispensable; and an immense responsibility rests on parents and guardians who neglect these duties.”
I don’t think the Founding Fathers possibly could have foreseen a nation where virtue and the Bible were altogether stripped from public education. But a series of Supreme Court rulings in the 20th century eventually eradicated biblical instruction, prayer, and Bible readings from public schools. Since then, national identity itself has become increasingly splintered.
For most of American history, formalized civics education taught government structure, American ideals, and personal citizenship at varying degrees. But in the 1960s and 70s civics morphed into “social studies,” which absorbed history, government, and economics. According to an analysis of civics education by the Hoover Institution, this new discipline also folded in some psychology and sociology, while the study of virtue was replaced by “values education.”
Increasingly, social studies education emphasized an American way of life that prioritized tolerance, autonomy, and individualism over the biblical principles of virtue, citizenship, and unity. Hoover Institution research states that “the gradual de-emphasis on civic knowledge has paralleled and likely fed the deepening ignorance of today’s students with regard to the structures and functions of government and the norms and expectations of citizenship.”
It’s fascinating to see how the removal of Bible and prayer in schools correlated with diminished teaching about American systems and ideals. As Jesus said, when the foolish man builds his house upon sand, it will fall “with a great crash.” (Matt. 7:27) Though many of us have sung this children’s Bible song our entire lives, it's still shocking to see how one generation of foolishness could so seriously compromise the foundation of our great nation. Now multiple generations downstream from removing the Bible and biblical principles in schools, we see the devastating effects.
Samuel Eagle Forman wrote First Lessons in Civics for elementary students in 1898. He compiled chapters in ascending order, starting with self and working up to the federal government. He suggested that self-control is society’s core virtue. According to the Hoover Institution study:
Forman went on to define a functional American as one who maintains a healthy relationship with their family. He writes, ‘The law of the home is the law of love, service, and sacrifice.’ He then argues that this is foundational to community and government as ‘larger governments are simply a number of families bound together, and if all the families of a town or of a state were well governed, there is no doubt that the town or state itself would be well governed.’
That’s why it’s so important for us, as American Christians, to stay rooted in scripture and prayer, constantly inviting the Holy Spirit to penetrate our hearts and households. We entrust our lives to the God who cares for us, for the sparrow—and for the results from today’s election. As we look to the Lord, He will be faithful to teach us everything we need to know—from the loftiest knowledge of love to the most mundane knowledge of polling locations. He’s so gracious to put resources in our path, like iVoterGuide, to fill the gaps of our education at just the right time.
