Most Christian schools failing worldview test, but some excel  

The Christian worldview is under attack, and most Christian schools aren’t doing enough to strengthen it.

That’s the latest from the Nehemiah Institute, which has been tracking whether Christians have a biblical worldview for the last 36 years.

Its PEERS test, which stands for Politics, Economics, Education, Religion and Social issues, measures whether a person’s views line up with the Bible or socialism/Marxism in each of those areas. Currently, less than 10% of high school-aged students from Christian homes score as having a sufficiently biblical worldview.

Dan Smithwick, president and founder of the institute and the test’s developer, is deeply concerned.

“If 90% plus of our kids are going secular (and) heading towards socialism year after year, I’m saying this is the church’s biggest problem in America because we’re losing our next generation,” Smithwick told The Lion. “We really want to reach the Christian community in America with what this chart is saying because that’s bad news.”

Christian, Homeschool or Public

As of 2023, students in both traditional Christian schools and public schools fared poorly on the test. Ranked on a scale of 0-100, with 70 being considered a sufficiently biblical worldview, Christians in public schools scored in the single digits, and those in traditional Christian schools were just in the low teens, or a solidly “secular” worldview.

Homeschool youth scored about a 50, or “Moderate Christian” worldview, and only students from “Biblical Worldview” Christian schools consistently scored 70 or better.

The “worldview” schools include members of two groups: the Association of Classical Christian Schools and The Foundation for American Christian Education (FACE), which publishes The Principle Approach curriculum.

Together they total about 600 of the more than 8,000 Christian schools in the U.S., Smithwick says, yet their fruit is visible. He believes their results stem from teacher training that ensures the educators themselves hold a biblical worldview.

For traditional Christian schools, “adding a Bible class and having a chapel service and teachers that profess to be a Christian (hasn’t prevented) results from going down over 30 years,” Smithwick said. “The difference is who’s training the teachers? Where are they getting their teachers?”

Teachers are the Key

Smithwick explained that most teachers are educated in a university system that has been heavily infiltrated by Marxists since the early 1900s. His institute even published a book about the takeover called Marxifying America.

“The socialists have taken control of education,” he says. “These Christian schools, most of them are just hiring teachers who profess to be a Christian, putting them in a classroom, giving them some books and saying ‘here, teach this.’

“But the teacher makes the difference far more than the curriculum. What that teacher holds to as how the world should work is what’s going to come out in their classroom.”

Max Lyons, director of teaching services for FACE, says the Principle approach is successful because it emphasizes thinking and reasoning, using primary sources and encouraging students to “own” their education, not simply fill in blanks or meet an adult’s requirements.

A biblical worldview is woven into every subject, he says, but there is a strong emphasis on teacher training – or retraining – that sets it apart from traditional Christian schools.

“You don’t get it in secular college. You don’t get it in Christian college. You don’t get it anywhere except (through deliberate) training,” Lyons says, adding there are several organizations that do it well. “We have a systematic training program at FACE to bring a teacher through and retool them.”

Typically, schools hire a teacher and tell them, “Make sure you inculcate a biblical worldview on your students,” says Lyons, who taught 15 years in traditional Christian schools and 19 years in a FACE school in Virginia. “They may bring in a speaker for a day of training, but that’s not enough. It takes four years or more to get your education. If you haven’t been properly trained (in worldview), it takes time to retool.”

Freedom or Marxism?

Smithwick says a recent trend is Christian youth are “absolutely buying into the entitlement idea of ‘I’m here and I’m owed these things, and they want the government to make sure that they’re getting what they’re owed.’

“That is truly against our Judeo-Christian heritage. That’s a pathway to dictatorship.”

His institute is actively trying to reach pastors and Christian adults to alert them to the crisis. It’s launching a marketing campaign this month to raise awareness of the test and the need for Christians to focus on worldview.

Smithwick believes America is undergoing judgment much like ancient Israel did when she went astray, but is hopeful for a comeback.

“We are unabashedly saying what’s going on in America is a worldview war,” he says. “Somebody is going to run this country either by Christian principles, which we claim going back to our Founding Fathers and earlier, or it’s going to be Marxist ideas. That’s where we’re heading.”