Sarah Potter-Smith, a sophomore at Calvary Chapel Christian School, can’t understand why anyone would think that learning any subject from a Christian perspective is inferior to a secular education.<\/p>\n
“We learn just as much as the public schools around here do and, actually, we learn more. For example, we have to learn about evolution on top of creationism too,” said the 15-year-old.<\/p>\n
Calvary English teacher Shannon Jonker, 26, said the Christian perspective helps students identify the many religious and biblical themes in literature. “We’re reading ‘Frankenstein’ right now, and there are allusions to the creation story,” said Jonker, a 2002 graduate of University of California, Riverside.<\/p>\n
The Christian perspective is why people send their children to a Christian school, said Robert Tyler, head of Advocates for Faith and Freedom and Calvary’s lawyer in a controversial case against the University of California system.<\/p>\n
In an unprecedented lawsuit that opens yet another front in the nation’s culture wars, an association of Christian schools, including Calvary, charges that the admissions policy at the university unconstitutionally discriminates against them because they teach from a religious perspective.<\/p>\n
The case offers a window into the deepening conviction of many conservative Christians that there is hostility to their faith in the public square and particularly in public schools. “This is just another example of what’s happening on a much larger scale,” said Tyler, who maintains that the university is attempting to secularize private Christian education.<\/p>\n
The outcome of the suit could affect not only the college plans of thousands of students at California’s some 800 religious high schools but the way curricula are developed and taught at religious secondary schools around the country. The case could go to trial in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles before the end of the year.<\/p>\n