Godless Educrats?

The Atlantic's 150th Anniversary issue arrived at my house last week, and I've been leafing through the selection of short essays at the front about "The Future of the American Idea." The quality varies a lot--Edward O. Wilson's 400 words are a model of economy and clarity, the policiticians, not so much. One of the contributors is Tim LaHaye, minister and author of the best-selling "Left Behind" series. Given the chance to say anything he wanted about religion and America, he decided to focus his scarce resources by writing about($) ...vouchers, concluding:

Until we break the secular educational monopoly that currently expels God, Judeo-Christian moral values, and personal accountability from the halls of learning, we will continue to see academic performance decline and the costs of education increase, to the great detriment of millions of young lives. This could easily be changed if parents were empowered to spend their tax dollars at schools of their choosing—and not at schools chosen by anti-God, anti-Christian humanist educrats, like those who now control public education from kindergarten through graduate school.

It's not so much the ideas themselves that are noteworthy (other than how extreme they are), but the choice of topic. I'm guessing LaHaye has a wide range of grievances when it comes to American laws, society, and culture. I had always assumed that choice and school prayer issues were relatively far down on that totem pole, more the thing you say when you have to say something about education than a core part of the ideological agenda. But maybe I was wrong.