Doug Wilson vs. Public Schools: On the Freedom of the Gospel

Doug Wilson just threw down a gauntlet over public school. Without nuance, he argued in a “No Quarter November” video that Christians who have their children in the “government school system” sin against God. This sin, Wilson avows, is not small; it is considerable. Here is the fuller quotation from Wilson:

Millions of evangelicals still have their children in the government school system. Get them out now. Having Christian children in the government school system is what theologians of another era would have called “sinnity sin sin.” Not a little smidge of “sinnity,” either. Not really a debatable matter. Stop it. Crash the system.

This is a significant stand to take. In what follows, I will briefly evaluate Wilson’s position, considering the strengths of his argument as well as its weaknesses. I do so in a spirit of friendly disagreement, not angry combat, and under the strong conviction that we need a fresh recovery of the gospel—not legalism—in our time.

What Wilson Gets Right

I appreciate that Doug Wilson speaks his mind. He does not dance around issues; he does not leave you wondering what he thinks. Wilson is a creative thinker; he does not seem to have an overly systematic temperament, but rather has a talent for seeing things that others do not. He promoted classical Christian education, for example, long before almost anyone else, even as adoption of this model proliferates in our day.

Further, Wilson is right that “government schools” can pose real challenges to the discipleship of children. We fathers and mothers need to handle the education of our children with great care, and a good number of us have concluded that public school will not work for us. There are indeed many bad secular ideas taught in a good number of public schools, including wokeness, radical gender ideology, pagan sexuality, a Marxist vision of America and the West, climate change, and much more.

It is not only what such schools teach that matters, though. It is also what some schools today feature in terms of the student body. In numerous locales, the American family is not in a good place today, and thus children tragically live in chaos and act accordingly. Their influence on the children of Christians can be very significant indeed, and this should not be taken lightly by any godly father or mother.

This is true even when a godly couple desires to train their child to be a light in a dark place. I applaud such an instinct; Christians are not here to huddle up in our self-created communes, fearful of the world, antagonistically apart from it. However, just as we do not send out foreign missionaries without a tremendous amount of training, careful preparation, and accountability, so I think we should be careful about burdening our precious boys and girls with a missionary call as an 8-year-old.

What Wilson Gets Wrong

At this point it will be clear that I have considerable concern about what public education looks like in different places in America. My own children do a blend of home-schooling and “hybrid” classical education, and my family enjoys this model. I recommend it—enthusiastically—to others. At the same time, though, I cannot say that it is clearly “sinnity sin sin” for believers to send their children to public school.

This mindset has troubled me for some time, in truth. While I agree with the real concerns many Christians have about secularism and paganism, I have long thought that this mentality lacks context it greatly needs. America is not monolithic, after all. (Isn’t this what conservatives not only recognize, but value—the unique nature of different places?) Rural Tennessee is not the same as urban Massachusetts which is not the same as heartland Illinois which is not the same as desert New Mexico which is not the same as college-town Idaho.

Nor is a given school district, or a given school, the same as another in a specific area. Many Christians serve in public schools with a gospel focus. So too are there Christian principals (and superintendents and school board members) who seek to love their neighbor in the public school, a worthy calling. The Wilsonian critique of American culture suffers from a lack of texture and depth, then. It paints all schools (and teachers) as the same, when this is simply not the case.

Does Christ vs. Chaos Apply to the UPS Store?

This is part of what happens with the overly broad-brush mentality represented by Wilson’s “Christ vs. Chaos” mindset. Wilson’s approach is basically to try and take down all secular systems (or at least any you can), erecting formally Christian institutions in their place. But though I understand the appealing simplicity of this model, I do not believe it does justice to the way our world works, nor of the mission of the church.

The Book of Acts does not feature Christians taking over communities and nations, but rather plunging into them as gospel-driven salt and light. Nor, aside from the Great Commission, does “Christ vs. Chaos” actually hold up as a workable approach. Yes, we long for the Lordship of Jesus to claim all the earth as it will when Jesus returns. But until that day, do we need to Christianize the UPS Store? Our local Planet Fitness? Is that the mission of the gospel in our time?

Can our kids participate in a youth basketball league in our town that is not expressly evangelical? Can we patronize the businesses of unbelievers? Can we go to non-Christian colleges or universities? Can we work at secular jobs? (In a duality mindset, aren’t believers who work in secular places amplifying Satanic “chaos” in their vocation?) Can we run for the local school board, and work alongside unbelievers on it for the good of children?

The answer to all these questions is, I believe, yes. The Lordship of Christ does not mean that we eject from the world and create a parallel Christian universe. The Lordship of Christ means we engage our world with God’s grace and truth, doing so not from a posture of fear or antagonism, but faith and love.

The Freedom of the Gospel

We have stretched into “mission of the church” conversations to this point, and necessarily so. But at this point, we need to go back a bit. At the core of my critique of Wilson’s case is this: he does not have the authority to do what he tries to do. In the simplest terms, Scripture nowhere labels going to a public school sin.

I state this, then, in a spirit of love: Wilson’s counsel wrongly binds the conscience. The Scripture teaches us a different principle: it teaches us that when we come to gray areas, as we often will, we should embrace the freedom of the gospel, serve our weaker brother where we can, and show charity on matters that are not lined out in the New Testament (see 1 Corinthians 6 and 10, Romans 6, and Galatians 5 for more).

After all, the banner over our Christian life is this: for freedom Christ set us free (Galatians 5:1). We are not under condemnation any longer as Christians (Romans 8:1). Further, we are not under law, but under the reign of grace (Romans 6:14). This glorious gospel theology works against our innate legalistic instincts. We all have an inner law-giver, it turns out; we can all see areas in which we have spoken too strongly, and colored outside the lines of our jurisdiction (I know I have).

How Gospel Freedom Helps Us (and Our Kids)

It is not wrong, of course, for a pastor to have a position on a gray area. For my part, I believe that he is free to share his view and counsel others by it. But he needs to do so humbly, charitably, and carefully, leaving room for godly disagreement. As with all of us, he needs to remember that he is not the Lord of the church. Only Jesus is.

The pastor who serves the congregation entrusted to him by Jesus thus takes pains—even decades into his ministry—to never confuse his people. It is not his voice that they should follow, ultimately; it is the voice of Jesus found in the Word of God (John 10:27). Christ alone is Lord of the conscience.

There is great freedom in this reality. We innate legalists are liberated from trying to whip others into shape. But this gospel freedom is also hugely helpful for our children. Instead of fitting our kids into a single model, we can tailor our kids’ education to best fit them. (Like culture, after all, children are not monolithic.) One child of ours may thrive with a tutor, as their autism demands special attention; another might flourish in a co-op alongside seven other children; still another might do well in a public school populated by Christian leaders and teachers.

The point is this: there is not one perfect model that works for everyone in the same way. This is true of education, of childraising more generally, and of the Christian life. Instead of the One Perfect Model that we must labor to put everyone under, we have a better option before us: we can live in the freedom of the gospel.

Conclusion

The conversation over childhood educations reminds us: today, we need a recovery of the gospel. This may sound rather basic. But it actually goes against the grain of our age. In our time, it seems common to call for the recovery of the law. This is true theonomistically, as some seek to put society under the old covenant law, and it is spiritually, as leaders promote their own opinions as authoritative for all God’s people.

While the law is good (and our society surely needs a recovery of law and order), we are not under law today as believers. The ministry of Jesus was in no way the ministry of recovering the old covenant law, and imposing it on everyone within earshot. No, the ministry of Christ—unlike Moses’ ministry of law—was and is the ministry of grace and truth (John 1:14, 17). This is not a lesser ministry than the ministry of law; this is a far, far, far greater ministry (Hebrews 4-8).

Today, when there is so much law and so little gospel, we need a robust recovery of the gospel. Where we disagree over gray areas, let us disagree in gospel love, and let us not think that the church is structured by our own dictates and opinions. No, the church has only one Lord—the Christ who bought us with his blood, and who alone has the right to call us to obey his loving voice in his perfect Word.

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If you love the gospel, and if you want to drink deeply from it, I invite you to join us for the inaugural One Gospel conference. It’s being held from April 30-May 2, 2026. The conference is not for pastors alone, or men alone, or women alone, or young adults alone. It’s for all of God’s people. Consider yourself warmly invited, one and all.

We will feature one gospel-driven message after another from convictional and gracious Bible teachers like Costi Hinn, Jonny Ardavanis, Jon Benzinger, and Jeremy Vuolo. We will enjoy exultant worship of our great God, led by the writers of the majestic song “Behold Our God.” Beyond this, we will have a lot of fun in all this, gathering across denominations and networks in a visible display of the gospel’s power. Join us!