My job as a lead pastor and a parent is simple: teach people how to think, not what to think. I have the immense privilege of pastoring a church that believes doubt, questions, and even some misalignment with orthodoxy are healthy elements of genuine faith development. As I parent four daughters in a world that regularly minimizes and dismisses women’s voices, I recognize the gift I give my children when I encourage them to push back on my parenting.
We are a country that was, theoretically, built on principles of free expression and speech. So why is the Texas Education Agency referring social media posts to its Educator Investigations Division following the assassination of Charlie Kirk?
In a recently released letter to school district superintendents, Mike Morath, the Commissioner of Education, writes, “While the exercise of free speech is a fundamental right we are all blessed to share, it does not give carte blanche authority to celebrate or sow violence against those that share differing beliefs and perspectives.” Morath also references “the more than 5.5 million impressionable young minds” who make up public school classrooms across the state.
This letter comes fresh off a public statement made by Baylor University: “We are aware and greatly disappointed by a social media comment from a Baylor graduate student regarding the fatal shooting of Charlie Kirk. To make light of the death of a fellow human being is completely inappropriate and completely counter to Baylor’s Christian mission. Baylor strives to be a community in which every individual is treated with respect—in life and in death. This student does not represent Baylor University in any capacity. He is not a member of the faculty, nor has he been part of the intercollegiate athletics program.”
After posting, the middle school where he was student-teaching separated him from the students. The irony of this lies in a picture and an email I received from my 15-year-old daughter on Monday. No context, just an image of one of the whiteboards in her classroom.
A few hours later, a follow-up email that simply read, “In every class.” She was referring to the black poster of the Ten Commandments now hanging in the classrooms of her high school.
I responded just as simply, “I’m sorry. I love you. You deserve better.” She does.
She and her schoolmates deserve better. They deserve a world where they are taught how to think, how to read a social media post and recognize it as satire, rhetoric, or AI-generated.
They shouldn’t have to tolerate a nation where leading government officials spout misinformation at an ever-increasing rate, but a grad student in Central Texas isn’t allowed to express his personal views outside of his work. Our kids deserve a world where not every profession fancies itself as one that is held to a higher standard, as Mr. Morath has stated is true of educators, effectively allowing personal and political leanings to become fodder for discipline under vague codes of misconduct.
Scratch that—let’s reframe and hold our educational institutions to higher standards: the standards of separation of church and state, the standards of upholding constitutional amendments, and the standards of allowing our exhausted educators to have opinions that might be in poor taste but are not dangerous.
Given all this and perhaps despite us, the kids are alright.
My daughter told me about a conversation she had with her friends after the hanging of the Ten Commandments posters this week. Their primary concern? Their teachers.
They asked, “What if a teacher isn’t Christian? How would that make them feel? It’s not like they can break the law; they’d lose their job! I can’t believe they are doing this to them.”
With all the discourse around empathy this week, I’m delighted to report that it is alive and well in the lives of at least some of our teens. However, we have a wildly serious problem on our hands if we allow the overreach of non-specific morality codes to censor and censure educators and other professionals who aren’t falling at the feet of racist, sexist, and homophobic ideologues—living or dead.
It is incumbent on those of us who see the infiltration of political indoctrination and silencing in our schools to point out the hypocrisy of this current moment.
If our kids are old enough to see Charlie Kirk’s death on TikTok and to hear his hate speech en masse, then they are certainly old enough to read the social media post of their student teacher who refused to mourn the impact left by such a man.
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Senior Pastor, University Baptist Church in Waco, Texas.
