Robert Kunzman is an associate professor in the Indiana University School of Education, and the author of Write These Laws on Your Children: Inside the World of Conservative Christian Homeschooling. He maintains a web site focused on homeschooling research and scholarship, and in an essay for the June 14 edition of Religion Dispatches titled Conservative Christian Teenagers Prepare for Politics, he describes how Generation Joshua, a program run by homeschooling advocates, aims to get young people working to “help America return to her Judeo-Christian foundations.”
For most of the essay Kunzman simply outlines the basics, but then he delves deeper: “…as a training ground for future citizens and leaders, GenJ seems to be missing something vital. Rather than framing democratic citizenship as a shared endeavor among a diverse people, where compromise and accommodation are not only necessary but often desirable, GenJ promotes a vision of adversarial political engagement informed by narrow ideological boundaries.”
It’s a thoughtful look at a subset of homeschoolers whose self-proclaimed leaders are often in the news, but, as Kunzman observes, they are “…not the centerpiece of conservative Christian homeschooling more generally. On the whole, parents seem far more concerned with raising and educating their children ‘in the nurture and admonition of the Lord’ than creating foot soldiers for a theocratic takeover of government.”