The Washington Post last week featured this arresting headline: “ ‘A breach of trust’: A preschool, a church and a change in mission.”
For a moment, we imagined that a local church preschool had chosen to practice the contemporary form of inclusivity by excluding religion from its program. It was exactly the opposite: The Rev. Susan Brown, pastor of the Concord-St. Andrew’s United Methodist Church in suburban Bethesda, Md., recently decided that, beginning next fall, the church’s popular preschool “will incorporate age-appropriate Christian lessons in [its] daily activities.” The church has operated its nursery school for the past five decades with what the Post calls “a secular approach . . . without including much, or anything, in the way of religious instruction.” Some parents are unhappy—really unhappy—about the change.
While The Scrapbook believes that religious institutions have every right to include religion in their mission, we can understand the dissatisfaction of nonreligious moms and dads with the new curriculum. What we didn’t expect was the virulence of their comments.
“Bridges have been burned,” declared one distraught dad. Added another parent: “Complete disappointment, that was my first reaction. And then disgust.”
The Scrapbook is prompted to point out that the great institutions of higher learning in early America nearly all had sectarian origins that, while now largely moot, seem to have done them no harm. The fact that Concord-St. Andrew’s has chosen to embrace its reason for being seems to be a welcome development, the very opposite of a “breach of trust.”
