"I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect." (Romans 12:1–2)

The passage above from Romans 12 is a masterful summary of what it means to live a Christian life. It is also the charter verse of LCCS’ new mission – Transformational Learning Through Christ. In this famous passage, the Apostle Paul explains that Christians are to resist conformity to the world and seek transformation through mind-renewal.

World Conformity - The Education of Hannah Montana

In addition to being enrolled at LCCS, it is imperative that we recognize that our students are simultaneously enrolled in an alternative educational environment that engages them in profound ways and presents very stiff competition to LCCS. Contemporary pop culture constitutes just such a parallel, simulated educational or academic program that is very real and very powerful. We’ll call it the ACC: the Academy of Contemporary Culture. The ACC is one colossal classroom in which our students are being taught and in which they are learning what the culture wants them to know about reality and what it wants them to be as persons.

The most salient feature of the ACC is its exclusion of God and its thorough-going secularism. This secular denial of God eliminates the single most significant component of reality and guarantees that nothing will be understood completely or correctly without Him.

Furthermore, the academy of contemporary culture is extraordinarily powerful, pervasive, and corrupt. It is administered and communicated effectively by virtually omnipresent and omnipotent media outlets — especially social media, the film industry, the television industry, the music industry, the video gaming industry, magazines, and the internet.

The ACC faculty is essentially a faculty of celebrities with celebrity cool, celebrity notoriety, and celebrity influence. Leading media figures and celebrities have incredible sway with our students as role models, and have incalculable influence in forming the dreams, shaping the attitudes, and motivating the pursuits and behaviors of our students.

The curriculum of the ACC comes in many forms. The “classics” constitute tried and true pop culture mass media such People, US Weekly, Teen Vogue, The Twilight Series, Goosebumps, Captain Underpants, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Harry Potter, Dungeons and Dragons, Pokemon, Nickelodeon, and the Disney Channel. The more contemporary curriculum involves social media outlets such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, Pornhub, 4-Chan, Tinder, Blendr, Tumblr, and Whisper. Then there is the ever-reliable television screen, the “Trojan horse of Western civilization,” whose programs combined with the highly addicting habit of binge-watching streaming digital services such as Netflix and Amazon Prime, contain stories with tacit assumptions and/or explicit content that shape students’ moral imaginations, and directly or indirectly influence their inner attitudes and outward behavior. Then you have the music and film industries that represent the aural wallpaper and visual mythmaking power that preaches secular sermons to the eyes and ears of students. Finally, and most insidious of all, the whole enterprise of contemporary popular culture is led, fed, and supported by commercial advertising which not only sells products, but shapes identities by presenting alternative gospels.

The assessment process of how students are graded in the ACC only deepens the impact of the teaching of this secular curriculum. Students are evaluated not on the basis of how well they master this material, but primarily on how well this material masters them. It isn’t the faculty that administers the grade, but the fellow students: if you fit into the culture by which you are taught, you pass. If you don’t fit into the culture by which you are taught, you fail. The system of rewards and punishments for passing or failing determine a student’s popularity both socially and personally.

The first way the Academy of our Culture influences its students is by language. It teaches students a distinctive non-transcendent vocabulary and way of naming the world that conveys a misunderstanding of reality and perverts the meaning and purposes of life. What the Bible calls murder, our culture calls a “choice.” What the Bible calls greed, our culture calls the American Dream. What the Bible calls blasphemy, our culture calls freedom of expression. What the Bible calls vanity, our culture calls high fashion….and on and on it goes.

The second way the ACC educational environment impacts students is through liturgies; the various habits, practices, patterns of behavior, and rituals of formation that confer a particular identity upon students and transform them into certain kinds of persons. Liturgical formation is a fact of human experience, and the liturgical practices that our culture as educator fosters are at work, shaping consciousness and behavior and the outlook and actions of students. From shopping to attending concerts and sporting events, secular liturgies are constantly shaping the identity of our children and transforming them into certain kinds of people. The ultimate question we have to ask is what kinds of students and what kinds of lives will 24-7 enrollment in the Academy of Contemporary Culture actually produce? If God is left out of our culture’s educational vision, then the book of Proverbs would say its final products would be fools who fail to fear the Lord and consequently despise wisdom and instruction (Prov. 1: 7). Similarly, St. Augustine would argue that the loves and lives of the graduates of a system of education that negates the love of God will be unhappily disordered. C. S. Lewis referred to those deprived of an education in objective moral truth as people “without chests,” “urban blockheads” and “trousered apes.”

While there is no way to withdraw our children from the Academy of Contemporary Culture, this only underscores the importance of the mission of LCCS to provide an alternative education that pushes back against the shallow secularism of our contemporary culture. This mission is vital to the survival and preservation of a faithful Christian witness in our culture.