Watch the reaction to the primaries in New York last week and you will hear a word that would have ended a campaign a generation ago: socialism. Candidates now say it with pride. Commentators warn, accurately, that the platform beneath it, abolishing borders, defunding the police, seizing private property, is something far more radical than the politics most of the public grew up with.
Here is the question almost no one is asking: where did these ideas come from? They did not appear overnight on a ballot. They were taught. For two decades, they were cultivated, rewarded, and treated as obvious in American classrooms, first in our universities and then downstream into nearly everything else. The ballot box is the last stop, not the first. By the time an idea reaches an election, it has already won the lecture hall.
Recommended Stories
While that long campaign played out, much of the church and a great deal of faith-based education fell asleep. We told ourselves the classroom was neutral ground. We treated education as a transaction for a credential and forgot that education has always been about formation. It is about the kind of person a student becomes. Where conviction went quiet, ideology moved in. It did not ask permission.
JAMES TALARICO SAID HE ‘HATES CHRISTIANITY.’ HERE’S WHY
Look honestly at higher education today and you will find three kinds of institutions. There are schools that surrendered to ideology long ago and no longer pretend otherwise. There are schools that still stand for objective truth, whatever it costs them. And then there is the largest and most consequential group: the ones in the middle.
These are the schools that still use the language of faith and tradition in their founding documents, but have quietly stopped living it. They say the right things on their websites and make timid decisions everywhere else. They do not reject their mission outright; they simply fear what it costs to stand in it. They have convinced themselves that silence is prudence and that avoiding every controversy is the same as unity.
It is not. Mission drift never begins with betrayal. It begins with trembling, with silence rebranded as wisdom, and it ends in full surrender.
Part of what keeps these institutions quiet is a claim repeated so often it now sounds like law: that people of faith must stay out of the cultural conversation. The phrase “separation of church and state” gets used as a muzzle. But that principle was written to protect the church from the control of the state. It was never meant to protect the state from the moral voice of the church.
When a constitutional protection is twisted into a demand for silence, it has stopped being a legal principle and becomes a political weapon.
I wrote the book College Without Communism precisely because families needed a roadmap to navigate this cultural capture. The premise is simple. Education is meant to form people, not process them. It is meant to pursue truth rather than ideology and to pass on knowledge rather than indoctrination.
At Southeastern University, we made the choice to be unapologetically a place of Christian life formation. We stand with our parents instead of working around them. A student grounded in truth and conviction is far harder to capture than one trained only to comply.
None of this requires hostility. It requires clarity. We can disagree with the loudest voices in the culture without fear, and we can do it while treating every student as a person worth forming rather than a recruit for someone else’s cause.
The future of American education will not be decided by what the most radical voices do next. They have been clear about what they want for a very long time. It will be decided by the leaders in the middle. The question is whether they keep trembling or finally find the nerve to stand for the very truth their own mission already claims.
TRUMP MUST MANDATE HIGH SCHOOL ECONOMICS TO STOP SOCIALISM
The elections we are watching this summer are not the beginning of anything. They are the harvest of what was planted in our classrooms years ago. If we want a different harvest, we have to be willing to plant something different and to defend it when standing finally costs us something.
If we surrender the classroom, the future of our country is at risk.
Dr. Kent Ingle is the president of Southeastern University.
