On Conference Saturday my husband and I attended an early breakfast
meeting at which one of the speakers was Utah State Representative LaVar
Christensen who spoke on the separation of church and state. Rep.
Christensen shared an insight about the thinking of early American
colonists as expressed by Roger Williams. Although the issue was
politics rather than education, I knew our homeschoolers would enjoy the
imagery of Roger Williams. Brother Christensen kindly gave me his copy
of the passages, which I will share with you in a minute.
Driving home we listened to Conference in the car. We were thrilled
to hear that David A. Bednar, President of BYU-Idaho, is one of our new
apostles. I had just read an address he had given at an August 31 BYU-I
Devotional and thought it should be one of our foundational Saintly
Education documents.
(You will find it here,
or do a search on byubroadcasting.org.)
In that address President Bednar compared BYU-I to an MTC
and called the university a DPC (Disciple Preparation Center). He said:
".
. . I began to think about the 17 missionary training centers that are
located throughout the world. It occurred to me that all of the
missionary training centers have the following characteristics in
common:
~ The missionary training centers are rather isolated geographically and
are few in number.
~ Missionaries reside and study in the MTC for relatively short periods
of time.
~ The nature of the instruction in the MTCs is focused and intense.
~ There are in the MTCs distinctive requirements for demeanor and dress.
"Now
please pay particular attention to this next characteristic:
~ Most missionary training centers are located near a temple.
"As I considered these similarities, I was struck by the fact
that Brigham Young University-Idaho in Rexburg possesses these same
characteristics.
~ BYU-Idaho is located in a rather isolated geographic area.
~ By and large, students are enrolled at BYU- Idaho for a relatively
short period of time.
~ The learning and teaching processes at BYU- Idaho are focused and
intense.
~ There is at BYU-Idaho a distinguishing standard of deportment and
dress.
~ And as was announced by the First Presidency last December, BYU-Idaho
will soon be adjacent to a temple."
This
imagery is wonderful, but isn't college a little late to train
Disciples? Wouldn't it be helpful to have elementary and high school
DPCs? In fact, President Bednar did make the point:
"Ultimately, the best Disciple Preparation Center is located
within the walls of our own homes."
So, if we made our homes DPCs, we might have these characteristics:
~ We would be isolated from the evils and distractions of the world.
~ We would recognize that we have only eight short years to form
character and faith, and a few years after that to develop scholarship.
~ Our learning would be focused on gospel perspectives in all subjects,
and we would be intense about each family member's personal life
mission.
~ We would have a distinguishing standard of deportment and dress.
~ Our home would be the closest thing to a Temple
Of course many folks do have Celestial homes of peace and beauty,
where prayers and blessings are offered, and where the Spirit is strong
-- but the children aren't there much. Instead, they must get their
education "over the wall" in the wilderness . . . which brings
us back to Roger Williams.
In speaking of Williams, Representative Christensen was quoting from
Stephen Carter's book God's Name in Vain about religion and
politics and the idea of separation of church and state. Here are some
quotes from that book:
". . . The sparationist ideal was brought into the American
dialogue on the proper roles of religion and the state by Roger
William's evocative seventeenth- century metaphor of the garden and the
wilderness. For Williams, a Baptist, the garden was the domain of the
church, the gentle, fragile region where the people of God would
congregate and try to build lives around the Divine Word. The wilderness
was the world lying beyond the garden wall, uncivilized and potentially
quite threatening to the garden. The wall separated the two, and the
reason for the wall was not that the wilderness needed protection from
the garden - the wall was there to protect the garden from the
wilderness. In particular, the garden needed protection from the
wilderness so that the people who joined in community within it would be
free to come to their understanding of God's will safe from coercions of
a society that might disagree.
"And yet, wrote Williams, if the wall was ever breached, it was
the responsibility of the people of the garden to go out into the
wilderness and try to civilize it - that is to make all the world a
garden. Thus, not only did the wall not protect the wilderness; the
metaphor, as originally understood, envisioned that the garden would
ultimately overwhelm the wilderness. . .
"Williams was not worried that the people of the garden might
have too much influence over the wilderness. His worry was the other way
around: 'The commonweal cannot without a spiritual rape force the
consciences of all to one worship.' Religious freedom, for Williams, as
for the later Protestant tradition, meant protecting the garden. True,
the people of the garden might be required to work for the betterment of
the wilderness (Protestants have long argued over just how much), but
the wilderness was never as important as the garden. The wall was needed
to keep the garden pristine. For the Baptist Williams, it was the
responsibility of the wilderness to stay out of the garden - not the
other way around.
"To use the separation metaphor as a device for disabling
religious groups from participating in public dialogue has nothing to do
with valuing religion and much to do with devaluing the people who
believe in it. Roger Williams, understanding both the risks of state
oppression and the risks of religious oppression, located his metaphor
in the domain of the probable. He knew what faith was. He knew its place
in the hearts and minds and lives of human beings, and he knew its place
in the larger world. And its place can be described simply:
Everyplace."
