Teaching Christianity in Schools for the Common Good

The following article was first featured in the Affinity Social Issues Bulletin (Issue 51 – November 2022). Download the whole issue for free.

The concept of the common good has engrossed philosophers since ancient times. It was an abstract much pondered by the Greeks: Aristotle, in pursuit of the definition for a good life, concluded that it isn’t simply about a life well lived through pursuing good purposes. Rather, it is about orientating that good life to the benefit of wider society. He defined a life lived for the common good as ‘more divine’ than that lived only for personal good and this spiritual dimension has echoed down through centuries of Christian thought.

Common good in Christian thought and teaching

God gave humanity its first blueprints right from the beginning. He looked at his creation and declared it to be good. The first humans were given dominion over the created world to both enjoy and steward it for the good of all. God also created man and woman to live together in relationship with each other and with him. The relationship of marriage is special. For it to flourish and provide a healthy environment for children to be raised, each person sometimes needs to forgo their individual wishes for the good of the family as a whole. A strong family is the building block of a thriving, stable society. Time after time in the biblical narrative and throughout history, people suffer because that foundational relationship gets broken. 

The book of Acts tells us that people in the first church sold their possessions to ensure that everybody had enough (Acts 2:44–47, 4:32–37). Presumably, as they ate in each other’s homes, they kept some of their homes and sold everything they didn’t need. This wasn’t a compulsion, but it was clear that building personal wealth just for your own wellbeing was seen as a spiritual issue.

Writing to the church in Corinth, the Apostle Paul says, ‘Now to each one the manifestation of the Spirit is given for the common good’ (1 Corinthians 12:7). We are given various gifts for the benefit of the whole church community and yet it is in exercising those gifts that we also grow personally, as the body of Christ becomes stronger than its individual parts.

Early Christian thinkers extended that principle beyond the community of the church and into society. The Epistle of Barnabas, written between AD70 and 132, says, ‘Do not live entirely isolated, having retreated into yourselves, as if you were already justified, but gather instead to seek together the common good.’ Writing in City of God nearly 300 years later, Saint Augustine asked himself whether individual human wellbeing was found in the good of a whole society – his answer was a resounding yes.

Look forward another 800 years and we find that for Thomas Aquinas, the common good was expressed through the double commandment recorded in Mark’s gospel, to love God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength, and also to love our neighbours as ourselves (Mark 12:30–31).

Extending that principle into society creates an imperative for Christians to engage in public life and political discourse at every level. Through the prophet Jeremiah, we are exhorted to ‘seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper’ (Jeremiah 29:7).

This is nowhere more vital than in education. Our country has a long history of church engagement in education – the church was providing schools for the nation’s children as a form of public service decades before the state got involved. Why? Because Christians understood the vital role that education plays in human flourishing. More than a quarter of all children in the UK currently attend a church school and the Church of England’s continuing vision for its schools was explicated in its 2016 document, Deeply Christian, Serving the Common Good. 

Teaching Christianity in schools

Contemporary education is a battleground for the minds of our children and young people. Woke culture dominates. Secular liberal ideologies underpin much of what is taught. In 2013, the word ‘selfie’ was named word of the year by Oxford Dictionaries and self-values as a key to personal development are woven through every discourse: self-worth, self-esteem, self-confidence, self-concept, self-image, self-love, self-assurance, self-defence.

Yet according to the 2020 Children’s World Project, children in the UK are the unhappiest in the world. Often children give the trauma of their broken family as the reason for their unhappiness, with all the attendant distress of moving home, losing friendships and often losing contact with people they love.

The Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) programme – much vaunted as the solution to social evils – is now statutory in all our schools, regardless of religious ethos or independent status. It teaches children about abuse and how to deal with it; how to say no to drugs; how to react to the deluge of child-on-child sexual abuse that is sweeping through our schools. This is education at its worst – teaching children and young people how to spot and defend themselves against the common bad.

Tolerance and respect are the buzzwords of the current zeitgeist. But tolerance has no answer to the ugliness of racism or the brutality of abuse. Tolerance cannot feed starving people or prevent us from destroying the beautiful world that God created for us to enjoy. Nor can it tame an insatiable desire to feed the beast known as The Economy.

Christianity speaks into all of this in a variety of ways. Many churches build relationships with local school communities and are welcomed in to lead assemblies and after-school clubs. Religious Education (despite sustained attempts to downgrade its status) remains a statutory subject in the school curriculum and Christianity is the core religion taught in most schools. Where churches have built a bridge into a school, Christians are also often welcomed in to teach RE. This is an amazing opportunity to teach (within the curriculum) biblical perspectives on marriage; identity; social engagement; care for others; wealth creation; care for the created environment, and God’s love for each of us, uniquely created in His image. And, for the moment, this opportunity remains legally protected. 

Christianity as the only sustainable path to the common good

The concept of the common good resonated, too, with secular Enlightenment thinkers. John Locke’s 1689 Two Treatises of Government argued that we are all born free of God’s dominion, with equal opportunity to determine our own outcomes. We can therefore choose to set aside personal ambitions for the greater good. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s treatise The Social Contract, written in 1762, suggested that in order for a society to function, not only must the common interests of all those in a society be recognised, but that the end goal of those who govern must be the realisation of the common good. 

But despite the best of humanist intentions, we cannot do this in our own strength, because at the core of the Christian gospel is the inescapable fact of sin. 

On 8 June 2020, hundreds of people protesting against police brutality after the death of George Floyd set up the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest (CHOP) – an autonomous police-free zone. They planted community gardens, offered free medical care and held screenings of films. The city’s mayor hoped that it would usher in a ‘summer of love’. A visitor to the zone enthused that:

It was absolutely astonishing. There was a food co-op, as well as a full medics corner with actual doctors from around the city that had volunteered and had their own ambulance. There were classes, lectures, speakers, poetry, lots of live music, huge works of art… It was really beautiful.

The BBC reports that it all came to an end on 1 July, after four shootings and allegations of assault within the community. Why such violence in an intentional community set up for the promotion of peace? The Bible tells us that ‘The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure’ (Jeremiah 17:9) – older translations used the phrase ‘desperately wicked’ to describe our human hearts. No matter how altruistic our intentions are, sin will always spoil human endeavour.

So it is this message that lies at the very heart of Christian teaching in schools. We live in a fallen world full of sin and its consequences. It is only through forgiveness in Christ that we can be free from the power of sin in our lives. And that freedom, given to us as a free gift from God, is what motivates and empowers us to work for the ultimate common good – communities where God is honoured as the creator and sustainer of our lives.

The mission of Crossteach is to teach about the Christian faith in schools. Our vision is for pupils to develop spiritually through understanding, engaging with and responding to the Christian faith. Find out more at https://www.crossteach.com/about-us/