Exodus Mandate Project

Since the 1970s, a number of conservative Christian leaders and advocacy groups, sometimes dubbed the Religious Right, have been involved in the public school battlefield of the larger “Culture Wars.” Organizations such as Focus on the Family (1977) and Concerned Women for America (1979), for example, have attempted to reform the public schools by combating “secular humanism” and/or reintroducing Christian practices and perspectives. Since the late 1990s, however, several organizations of a Christian persuasion have eschewed efforts to “reclaim” public education and have urged Christian parents to remove their children from government schools. One such organization is the Exodus Mandate Project.

Founded in 1997 by E. Ray Moore, Jr., a retired Army Lieutenant Colonel and chaplain, and headquartered in Columbia, South Carolina, the Exodus Mandate Project is part of Frontline Ministries, a nonprofit ministry that endeavors to influence American culture with the Christian faith. The Project encourages Christian parents to remove their children from “Pharaoh's school system”—that is, the public schools—and place them in the “Promised Land” of Christian schools [Page 359]or in homeschools. Leaders of the Project hope that educating children according to “Biblical mandates” will facilitate revival of Christian values in families, churches, and the nation. In sum, rather than trying to “take over” the public schools by political means, Moore urges an exodus.

Like some other conservative Christian groups and leaders, such as the late D. James Kennedy and James Dobson on occasion, Moore's organization views public school education as academically deficient, saturated with secular humanism, and incapable of providing a biblically based education with moral absolutes for Christian children. As Moore put it in his book, Let My Children Go, “With God almost nowhere to be found in public schools, morality was left with the false foundations of secular humanism which offers only various forms of relativism.” In addition to its concern about secularism, the Project often warns Christian parents about the promotion of homosexuality and “dogmatic Darwinism” in the public schools. Indeed, concern about recent legislation touching on “gender” issues in the Golden Bear state's public schools (no doubt exacerbated by the controversial 2008 California Supreme Court decision legitimizing same–sex relationships), prompted the Project to launch “California Exodus 2008,” a campaign to energize conservative Christians and like–minded organizations in the state and with the goal of causing as many as 10% of Christians in California to remove their children from the state school system. Efforts in 2009 to reverse a California voter initiative (Proposition 8: “Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California”) that in effect nullified the California Supreme Court's ruling will likely provide the Project with more reason to believe that reforming American culture and the public schools by political means is futile.

Given its commitment to the belief that parents, not the state, are responsible for the education of their children, the Project eschews vouchers and tuition tax credits as means for promoting educational choice. Such mechanisms, Moore believes, will lead to government interference with the educational prerogatives of parents and subvert the independence of Christian schools. On this and related educational choice issues, the Project is closely aligned with the position of the Alliance for the Separation of School & State and several activists within the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), who have attempted since 2004 to get the SBC to pass a resolution at its annual meeting urging parents to remove their children from the public schools. One of the major figures in this effort, Bruce N. Shortt, serves as a member of the Board of Directors of the Exodus Mandate Project.

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