Exodus Mandate: Beginnings
Exodus Mandate
-- or as I then called it, Exodus 2000 -- was born on
February 12, 1997, the day I attended a Goals 2000 briefing in
Washington presided over by Phyllis Schlafly of Eagle
Forum and Congressman Henry Hyde.
This briefing was sponsored by a number of Christian
groups including the Family
Research Council, Concerned
Women of America, the Home
School Legal Defense Association, the Heritage
Foundation, the Christian
Coalition, the American
Family Association, the American
Association of Christian Schools, the American
Conservative Union, and the Traditional
Values Coalition, all in addition to
the Eagle
Forum. These Christian groups are the
main organizations responsible for maintaining a conservative
Christian presence in both education and public life.
The main topic was the danger posed by Goals
2000 and the new School-to-Work agenda working to undermine
Christian faith and freedom. There was a lot of "wailing and
gnashing of teeth," and calls for "conservative reform of
the public schools," but no real plan except to fight the Goals
2000 legislation and try to have it repealed. The problem was that
Christians -- even Christian leaders -- were operating reactively and
not proactively.
I listened to speaker after speaker all day and
realized that no one had a plan to deal effectively with the problems
raised. I left that meeting intending to create a plan that would be
proactive and not simply reactive. It would be called Exodus 2000 --
a name I chose deliberately as a counterpoint to Goals 2000. (I would
change the name to Exodus Mandate in January of 2001.)
The plan would be to remove as many Christian children
as possible out of public (government) schools. It already was
obvious that public education, so called, could not be
"reformed," and that Christians shouldn’t try. It was
clear from my studies of Scripture that God had intended education to
be in the hands of families with assistance from the Church, and not
under the control of any branch of government. This became the
touchstone proposition of Exodus Mandate that distinguished it from
any other Christian education movement.
Securing the Escape of Millions of Christian Students
What I wanted to do was nothing less than secure the
escape of millions of Christian children and youth from the yoke of
government schools. Remember our Old Testament history from Exodus?
"Now there arose a new king over Egypt, who did not know
Joseph" (Exodus 1:8). This Pharaoh took power over the
Israelites. And so it is in our own day. A secular education
establishment has take power over our children. It has the backing of
legislation and the court system. This establishment barely even
acknowledges the existence of our rich Christian heritage in law,
government and education.
The public schools long ago abandoned many traditional
practices such as teaching pure phonics and basic math, and have
substituted programs such as the look-say method and the so-called
"new math" -- both notorious failures. Seriously flawed
theories of reading, such as the look-say and whole-language methods,
became standard decades ago, and have produced levels of illiteracy
higher than at any time in the modern era.[5] As a result, not only
are children being harmed spiritually and morally in the government
schools, they are very simply not being taught how to read, write and
do basic arithmetic at the same levels of earlier generations!
The secularization of public schools has a long
history, as seen in the next chapter. The U.S. Supreme Court was a
primary culprit in taking this secularization into high gear during
the past half-century. In 1962, with Eagle v. Vitale, the
Court banned prayer in public schools, citing no law or precedent,
under the misguided reasoning that prayer in public schools
constituted an unconstitutional endorsement by government of
religion.[6] (What the First Amendment actually banned was the
establishment of a state church by the federal government along the
lines of the Church in England.)
The next year, with Abingdon School District v. Schempp,
the Bible was removed. The highest court in the land wrote, "If
portion of the New Testament were read without explanation, they
could be, and had been, psychologically harmful to the child."[7]
In 1980, the Ten Commandments followed. In this case, Stone v. Graham,
the court opined:
"If these posted copies of the Ten Commandments
are to have any effect at all, it will be to induce the school
children to read, meditate upon, perhaps to venerate the Ten
Commandments; this is not a permissible objective."[8]
With God almost nowhere to be found in public schools,
morality was left with the false foundations of secular humanism
which offers only various forms of relativism. The primary values in
public schools have become the tragically false concepts of
self-esteem and tolerance, with the latter having application for
every belief system except Christianity. Even witchcraft is permitted!
In this environment, youth crime is widespread at
schools and neighborhoods. With a variety of forces working against
the best interests of strong families, including both parents often
having to work to make ends meet, many children are growing up
without the kind of moral and spiritual guidance they need.
The Reform Effort that Failed: The Greenville,
S.C. Story
Buy why should Christians abandon the public schools?
Wouldn’t that leave them entirely in the hands of secular
humanists? Indeed it might. The important point is that our mission
is not to throw secular humanists out of public schools. It is to
remove ourselves from the public schools and our children from the
influence of the secular humanists. This removal, we shall argue
throughout the book, is the only viable alternative.
"Reforming" the public schools simply will
not work, and efforts at "reform" may deal the cause of
Christian education tremendous setbacks with the waste of time and
the waste of many young Christian children’s futures.
Christians attempting to work within this system to
initiate "reform" face enormous barriers. One such example
involved the school board in Greenville County, South Carolina, in
November of 1996, when three Christian incumbents for the school
board, Julie Hershey, Joe Dill and Bill Brooks, were defeated in
their bids for re-election. This case is worthy of consideration
because it points to the real direction the future of education in
that state, in other states, and the nation itself, is probably headed.
The Greenville County School System had maintained a
statewide reputation as an island of educational and moral sanity
amidst a statewide public school system characterized by education
reform in the wrong direction: Outcome-Based Education, radical sex
education, stagnant SAT and BSAP test scores and a general
educational malaise that seemed almost irreversible. Many Christians
looked to Greenville County as a model of what could be done to
correct the decades-long liberal educational misadventures and
experimentation on our children by working within the system.
The Campaign Against Christian
Candidates...and Krystallnacht
In the school board election of November 1996, and
incredible campaign against Julie Hershey, Joe Dill, and Bill Brooks
occurred. It was unlike anything ever seen in South Carolina for
normally routine school board elections. Liberals had invested huge
amounts of money and time in their efforts to defeat the Christian
incumbents. There was also significant coordination between media and
other liberal interest groups, including even some in the business community.
These incumbents must have been either awfully bad --
or awfully good. I suggest that they were doing something very right
and very good, and had become a serious threat to the domain of
darkness and the pall of grief that has fallen over our precious children.
Jesus said as he was being escorted to the Cross,
"...Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for Me, but weep for
yourselves and for your children. 31 For if they do these things in
the green wood, what will be done in the dry?" (Luke 23:28b, 31).
If the left can do this in Greenville County, one of
the most conservative and Christian counties in South Carolina, which
in turn is one of the most conservative states in the nation, it can
savage the Christian community with impunity anywhere. Greenville
County is home to a large body of informed and courageous
conservative Christians willing to lay their energy and resources on
the line.
They had made progress in implementing models of
conservative Christian reform capable of serving as models for school
districts everywhere. In most districts Christians are allowed to
complain but not to govern: in Greenville County, voters had allowed
them to govern. The results were obvious to all.
I believe this election might have been a test that
was similar, on a much smaller scale, to Krystallnacht
(Crystal Night) in Nazi Germany in 1938. Nazi and Nazi sympathizers
went on a rampage throughout Germany, breaking windows in
Jewish-owned shops. More than 100 Jewish German citizens were killed;
thousands of others had their businesses destroyed.
It was an attempt to intimidate not just the Jews but
also the entire German public. The Nazis wanted to see if there would
be a public outcry -- if anyone would come to the defense of the
Jews. Almost no one did. A new threshold was crossed, and with this
event the campaign of hatred and terror against the Jews escalated.
I might add that many Jews realized the danger they
were in and emigrated to America and other secure places at that
time. Others remained in denial, and eventually paid the price in
concentration camps.
Am I calling the groups allied against Christian
conservatives in Greenville County "Nazis"? No. But two
things should be noted. First, it is clear to me that many with a
secular worldview do have a similar mindset. In their own minds, they
believe they know what is best for our children and out culture. They
will stop at nothing to dominate both. Second, this is because they
and the Nazis who came before them share the secular humanist belief
that man can be substituted for God, and a functional man-centered
society can be created.
Why People Easily Accept Lies and Why
Placating an Enemy Never Works
These truths about secular humanism are not easy to
assimilate. People will believe lies about good men before they
will believe the truth about evil ones. Hitler openly practiced
that if someone tells a lie often enough, people will believe it.
This is because man is a fallen creature with an innate tendency
toward sinfulness. He does not naturally accept the truth, especially
about his own nature. If we are able to seen any truth at all, it is
only by God’s grace.
Some Christians failed their Lord in the school board
races. Other Christians believed the lies and calumny spread against
Hershey, Dill and Brooks. And of course, any errors they made were
magnified, while their excellent service and results were overlooked.
Others were afraid of the controversy that had arisen
die to their heroic efforts to protect our children. Many decent,
God-fearing people even supported their opponents, thinking that the
controversy would then go away and that the attacks against
Christians would cease.
Such efforts to placate the enemy always fail. The
attacks on the Jews didn’t cease when a few protested the
destruction of Krystallnacht. They only intensified -- for the Nazis
had further plans for the Jews.
The children of Israel faced a similar crisis in
Egypt, as recounted in Exodus. Pharaoh was not willing to change. He
was not going to give up his humanist agenda (It was humanist in that
Pharaoh had set himself up as the human equivalent of a
god), Pharaoh was determined to make humanist Egyptians out of godly
Israelite children. He was going to convert them even while he forced
their godly parents into the bondage of becoming makers of mortar and
brick for humanist sites and institutions.
Finally, the protective shield provided by the heroic
leadership of Hershey, Dill and Brooks has been removed. The children
of Greenville County are exposed and vulnerable again. Remember in
Exodus, God said He hardened Pharaoh’s heart so that the
Israelites would have no choice but to escape Egypt. The humanists in
Greenville County showed the Christians the door, and they kicked the
Christian leadership out of the public school system.
With the rejection of Christian school board members,
could Christian teachers and administrators be far behind? The same
God who delivered Israel from bondage to Pharaoh and thereby set the
Israelites on the path to the Promised Land has providentially, set
us up in similar fashion.
The humanists have hardened their hearts; and perhaps
God has hardened their hearts. Thus they cannot be placated. It is
important to realize: the secular humanists are not going to change.
They are only going to get more intolerant of Christians. Our very
existence convicts them and provokes them. This should be a watershed
moment when pastors and Christian leaders of our communities finally
rise up and say to our modern humanist Pharaoh, "Let my
children go!" As I would phrase it later in the Exodus
Mandate vision statement:
“Exodus Mandate is a Christian ministry to
encourage and assist Christian families to leave Pharaoh’s
school system (i.e., government schools) for the Promised Land of
Christian schools or home schooling. It is our prayer and hope that a
fresh obedience by Christian families in educating their children
according to Biblical mandates will prove to be a key for the revival
of our families, our churches, and our nation.
The Birth and Goals of Exodus
Mandate
In short, the goal of Exodus
Mandate is to solve the problems
created by Outcome-Based Education, Goals 2000, the School-to-Work
movement, and other government-school initiatives, not by reforming
them or trying to repeal legislation but by taking as many Christian
children as possible out of the reach and placing them in the safe
sanctuaries of Christian schools and home schooling.
I first announced this plan during the week the
Promise Keepers met in Washington in October of 1997. Out of my list
of contacts, including a number of people I met at that meeting, I
started to organize a volunteer network. It was centered in South
Carolina where I live (in Columbia), but soon expanded to include
other states. Within a fairly short period of time, a new movement
was born, and it started receiving favorable coverage.
The Wall Street Journal, the Washington Times,
the Dallas Morning News, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution,
and The State, based in Columbia all published stories on
this movement when it was still called Exodus 2000. The
Southern Baptist Convention gave it more that a passing look.
I took to the radio circuit and gave hundreds of
interview broadcasts by networks on some 4,500 radio stations all
across the country. Soon, Exodus Mandate was receiving support from a
number of highly visible Christian leaders, including Dr. Jerry
Falwell of Liberty University and Dr. James Kennedy, president of Coral
Ridge Ministries, which reaches
several million people every month.
The Burden of David and Ann Drye: An Exodus
Mandate
In Early 1999, Exodus
Mandate came to the attention of
David and Ann Drye, at the time among the leading Christian educators
promoting home schooling and Christian schooling in North Carolina.
Based in Concord, N.C., David Drye had founded Classical Covenant
School of Concord.
He was a successful Christian businessman, owner of
the David
Drye Company that built apartment complexes
and extended-stay hotels in the Southeast. Moreover, he and his wife
Ann had followed a path of homeschooling similar to Gail’s and
mine. He was the kind of Christian who quickly acted on the truths he
discovered in the Word of God and followed the paths of obedience
wherever they might take him. He was also a man with a strong prayer
life. I had met him years before and knew his reputation for
Christian service in North Carolina.
In the spring of 1999, David heard me speak about my
vision and agenda for Christian families and churches, and invited me
to address the staff, faculty and upper grade levels of his Classical
Covenant School. This was the beginning of a new Christian
friendship, and I grew to admire David’s bold aggressive manner
and financial support for projects and ministries that helped build
the Kingdom of God.
One of the most important results of our friendship
was David’s offer to supply the funding for the Jeremiah
Films video Let My Children Go.
Because of his business successes, God enabled David to give large
sums of money to support Christian schools, missionary projects, home
schooling, the pro-life movement, and other Christian projects that
built the Kingdom of God.
He financed the entire development and production of
the Let My Children Go video. God
has used this video all over the nation in the last two years to warn
Christian families of the dangers of government-run schools. Without
his financial support, guidance, and encouragement, this video would
not exist today. David himself speaks in the video several times
expressing his concern about Christians allowing their children to
attend state or government schools.
Because David and Ann had a great burden that
Christian families become obedient to Biblical mandates in the
education of their children, they thus strongly supported both
Christian schools and home schooling.
David and Ann fully practiced what they preached, and
home schooled or provided Christian schooling for their own children
and 12 grandchildren. He was, to many, "Mr. Christian Education
in North Carolina." He would promote and talk about Christian
education every opportunity he got. No one could be with him long
before he would ask about that person’s own family and
children’s education.
David and Ann Drye were also people of prayer. They
were indeed intercessors. David was known to sequester himself for a
day or two and fast and pray in some secluded place. How a
businessman with a large company of over 300 employees could afford
the time to do so causes one to wonder. But David had his personal
priorities in order. He knew his tremendous success in business was
due to God’s blessing. So he could find time to get alone with
his Lord and Savior just to talk, worship and pray.
His burdens were heavy for revival in the churches and
in the entire nation. This was such a strong burden of concern that
he took parts of two summers with his family and drove to each state
capitol in the 48 contiguous states to beseech God for each state and
its people from the state’s capitol city. He asked God to bring
revival in all the states, to help the churches, and turn back the
forces of evil that had become so prevalent.
He was asking God for a fresh "Great
Awakening" in the nation when he was suddenly taken away on June
14, 1999. The tragic loss of David and Ann Drye occurred when their
plane crashed in Concord on a business trip. They were both killed
along with a coworker and their pilot. It has been two and a half
years since this sad moment, and the Christian community would do
well to consider the lives of this notable couple again.
"Beloved and Pleasant in Their Lives"
King David (2 Samuel 1:19-27) lamented the loss of his
friend Jonathan. We could paraphrase this text in similar fashion
about David and Ann Drye: "The beauty of Israel is slain on your
high places. How the mighty have fallen. David and Ann Drye were
beloved and pleasant in their lives and in their deaths; they were
not divided; they were swifter than eagles, they were stronger than
lions... How the mighty have fallen in the midst of battle."
In one of my last visits with David Drye, he said in
his characteristic fashion, "Ray if you would pray more, more
would happen." So simple, yet so profound. It was one
of those times when I knew I had received a word from the Lord.
I have grown in my faith as a result of our short
friendship and association, and I will remember them. "How the
mighty have fallen in the midst of battle..."[9]
Taking the Exodus Mandate
to the Public Forum
The Exodus
Mandate Project has continued to
grow, and its mission has continued to spread. Just this past year I
participated in a forum on Beacon Hill at the State Capitol in
Boston, entitled "Can Christians continue to use the Public
Schools?" Dr. Ron Crews of the Massachusetts
Family Institute, who also
participated in the forum, argued that each set of parents needed to
answer for their particular children and their particular situation,
on where to send their children to school. He agrees that standards
of decency and righteousness are under sustained attack in the public
schools, but believes that Christians should remain present as salt
and light of the earth in whatever arena God sends them.
I see the situation very differently. I told The
Massachusetts News, which covered the event:
"You’re facing some rather serious questions
here in the Massachusetts area with the crowding in of the homosexual
agenda into the public schools. Society seems to be helpless to
prevent it. The families are desperate, and they can’t seem to
forestall it. So we think that Christian people should be looking at
Christian education as the only Biblical option for educating their
children at the K-12 level."[10]
The salt and light of
the earth theology is laudable, but misapplied in education
because small children simply don’t have the experience to be
evangelicals for the Christian faith, given the onslaught of secular
humanism, political correctness and the demand for conformity in the
public schools.
Confronting humanist adults is work for Christian
adults. Christian families should not be sending in children as
surrogate evangelists before they are old enough and mature enough in
their own faith to handle the pressures of the hostile environment
now represented by the pagan school system.
The difficult point for conservative Christians is
that the choice to send their children to public schools is based on
a theological mistake. It follows naturally that Christians are not
going to be able to "fix" the secular public schools.
The Path Ahead
It has been 25 years since Gail and I first started
home schooling our first-born son in West Lafayette, Indiana, on the
banks of the Wabash River when I was finishing up at Grace
Theological Seminary in 1977. We were told at that time by the State
Department of Education we were the first home schooling family in
Indiana in the modern era.
We describe those early experiences as taking our
little first-born son and placing him safely in his little home
school papyrus basket down at the river. One day some years later we
came to check on him and saw thousands of little papyrus baskets
floating in the river. Other families were discovering this wonderful
way to care for and educate their children. Gail and I look back on
our early discovery of home schooling and God’s giving us the
grace to carry it forward for 17 years and the subsequent provision
of Christian schooling for our children in the upper years as one of
the most soul-satisfying experiences we have had.
The prospects for home schooling have never been
brighter in the USA than now. In some regions we are seeing
15-percent growth per year. Two to three percent of all children now
being educated at the K-thru-12 level are being educated at home and
70-percent of those are evangelical Christians. Most of the rest are
traditional Catholics with whom we have many shared views. Estimates
indicate that there are 1.8 to 2.0 million children now being
educated in home schools at the K-12 level.
We are getting favorable articles on the front page of
the Wall Street Journal, making Peter Jennings’ World
News Tonight, winning both the National Spelling Bee and
National Geography Bee in back-to-back years, and seeing our children
selected for some of the top colleges in the USA on full
scholarships. Two hundred thousand former home schoolers are now
enrolled in colleges or universities in the USA.
Acceptance of home schooling is increasing even among
some who were previously skeptical. We have won most of the legal
battles, thanks to the Home
School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA).
Although we must be forever vigilant about our rights any time a
legislative body meets anywhere, we have cause for optimism about the
future of home schooling in America. We have finally come of age!
Greater opportunities for excellence and service await
Christian home schooling families. We still have the children, the
teachers and the facilities to organize a bona-fide, Bible-based
school system at a national level. We have the financial resources as
well. In the past, we have lacked the vision -- and the nerve. Many
of our churches are not used five days a week. It’s not too
late. We can do it. The Lord will be with us as He was with the
children of Israel.
The Lord’s Command
The Lord has commanded that we "... bring them up
in the training and admonition of the Lord" (Ephesians 6:4).
This means more than Sunday School. What it means is building up a
new educational system consisting of networks of home schooling
parents and private, Christian schools, imparting a Christ-centered
education to their children. Leaving aside the possibility of
Christ’s Second Coming, such an effort alone can reverse the
moral and educational decline of the nation. A Christ-centered
educational system will contrast markedly with the secular humanist one.
In the next chapter we will review how secular
humanism came to control public schools, and why. We will also see
how we were warned very shortly after the takeover began. Then, in
ensuing chapters we will develop the various aspects of our Christian
alternative. We will show how home schooling or placing children in
Christian schools is a Biblical and spiritual requirement.
It is still not too late to heed the warnings and
reverse the threat to our children by removing our children from
Pharaoh’s school system!
Source Notes
5. See e.g. Rudolf Flesch’s classic Why
Johnny Can’t Read (New York: Perennial Library Press, 1966)
and the more recent Why Johnny Still Can’t Read
(New York: Harper Trade, 1983).
6. 370 U.S. 421 (1962).
7. 374 U.S. 203 (1963).
8. 449 U.S. 1104 (1980).
9. E. Ray Moore, Jr., "A Call to Service in the
Memory of David and Ann Drye," Raleigh World, June 8, 2001.
10. Ed Oliver, "Should
Christians Stay in Public Schools? Debate on Beacon Hill Shows
Differing Views," The
Massachusetts News, June 2001, p.7.
Exodus Mandate Vision Statement:
Exodus
Mandate is a Christian ministry to
encourage and assist Christian families to leave Pharaoh’s
school system (i.e., government schools) for the Promised Land of
Christian schools or home schooling. It is our prayer and hope that a
fresh obedience by Christian families in educating their children
according to Biblical mandates will prove to be a key for the revival
of our families, our churches and our nation.
How To Order Let My
Children Go
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Greenville, SC 29609
Phone: (864) 235-2434
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Toll Free (800) 209-8570 for orders
E-mail: info@emeraldhouse.com
Internet: http://www.emeraldhouse.com
Click Here -->> Let
My Children Go, if you would like to order
this book at the Ambassador-Emerald,
Intl. web site.
Title: Let My Children Go
Pages: 352
by E. Ray Moore, Jr., Th. M.
ISBN: 1-931600-16-3
Price: $14.95 (single copy)
Please inquire about discount prices
for multiple orders:
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Copyright (c) 2002 by E. Ray Moore, Jr.
Chaplain (Lt. Col.)
U.S. Army Reserve Ret.
All Rights Reserved. Used on CEANet with permission.
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