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Today we have a critical conversation about education, discipleship, and cultural transformation with Pastor Jeff Wright.

We’ll unpack the generational impact of educational philosophies, the need for institutional bravery, and the importance of not just deconstructing problematic systems but actively rebuilding them on biblical principles.

Tune in to gain insights into classical Christian education, the true meaning of discipleship, and a compelling vision for raising children who understand Christ's lordship over all aspects of life.

Episode Transcription

Note: This transcription may vary from the words used in the original episode for better readability.

Marlin Detweiler:
Hello again. And welcome to another episode of Veritas Vox, the voice of classical Christian education. Today we have with us Pastor Dr. Jeff Wright. Pastor, welcome.

Jeff Wright:
Hey, thank you for having me on. I really appreciate the work of Veritas, and it's an honor to be on the podcast.

Marlin Detweiler:
Well, it’s fun to have you. It was fun to hear of your familiarity with our curriculum and the school that your kids have been to. That was kind of fun. Tell us a little bit about yourself. Where you live, your family, your education, your career.

Jeff Wright:
Yeah. Well, I'm sure your listeners and viewers can tell I'm a southern boy.

Marlin Detweiler:
Oh, no, we don't have any idea.

Jeff Wright:
Yeah. I am in Middle Tennessee. The closest area that anybody might have heard of is Cookeville. It's a small university town. I come from multiple generations of farmers. We do beef farming, we milk some cows. I've been pastoring now for 20-something years and teaching at a classical Christian school. I tell people that my life is not particularly wild, but it suits me very much.

I'm kind of an agrarian at heart, and the Lord's been kind to give me a vision of life that works really well with who I am.

Marlin Detweiler:
Very good. Tell us about your children and your spouse.

Jeff Wright:
Yeah. So my spouse, Christy, is a wonderful gift to me. She’s connected to classical Christian education. She's founding faculty and continues in administration at the classical Christian school I teach at. We have six children, ranging from 15 down to almost two years. My only regret there is that we didn't start earlier. Recently bought a big Ford Transit van to haul everybody around in, and I wish I could fill it up even more.

Marlin Detweiler:
Wow. Where'd you go to school?

Jeff Wright:
I did most of my education at Liberty University. Christy was at Knoxville. That's where we realized that modern education vision wasn't consistent with our worldview at that time. I didn't want to pull her out of that program. Liberty was offering the only accredited online program at the time. Rather than pull up stakes in ministry, I'd started there as well.

I did Liberty for a couple of different degrees. Keep thinking that someday, a PhD in church history, particularly Baptist church history, would be wonderful. But, you know, that's a funding matter for me. So when the money comes in, maybe I'll take a run at that.

Marlin Detweiler:
Sure. Yeah. Tell us about your career, in particular I’m interested in your work as a pastor.

Jeff Wright:
Well, I started as a pastor probably younger than I should have. I really thought that I had law in my future as a young man. Still, I'm interested in the field and try to stay as conversant with it as I can. But my local church identified some giftedness and told me I should consider that vocation. Ministry might be the Lord's provision for me.

The Lord blessed the times I got to teach and discipling relationships. I settled in on the idea that I wouldn't be happy if I wasn't helping a local church to be as healthy as she could be. I don't know that my thoughts at the time were quite that clear, but that's my summary as an older man looking back on those days.

The Lord just continued to open doors. Rural churches are very near and dear to my heart. I think they're too often neglected in denominational structures. My ministry has been in largely rural churches, blue-collar churches, and I'm very thankful for that. Even as a pastor and elder, the congregation has a powerful shaping influence on you, and the Lord has been particularly kind in the congregations he's let me work with.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah. You've become known to me and Veritas because of some of the things you've written, talking about public education or, as you like to call it—and I don't disagree—government education because that is a state-funded, government-controlled operation. Frequently, the things we find objectionable, at least on the surface, tend to be in more urban areas.

So let's talk a little bit about what you observe in more rural areas that might help us understand that maybe the problems are broader, deeper, and have gone on longer than we might be inclined to think.

Jeff Wright:
Well, that has been a powerful shaping influence on my thinking on the topic. Again, I come from a deep red state, an area that, like many areas, is experiencing a tremendous influx of new people. A lot of what you hear from the migrants coming in during the great sort is, “We really wanted a better school system.”

Marlin Detweiler:
People coming to Cookeville from? I'm curious.

Jeff Wright:
Tremendous amounts from California, Oregon, and New York state. Well, I'm thinking about even within our own church. My sister is in real estate. This is a broad phenomenon. Lots of farms I grew up on are now small subdivisions. It’s a tremendous influx.

There's sort of a gentrification in my community that's bringing some challenges along those lines. But it's hard not to be sympathetic to these people because they come and sound like refugees. They're desperate for a better community. As a product of the government school, for a big part of my education, I grew up before the great swords and moving into classical Christian education. I continue to hear this narrative from my neighbors that, well, it was good enough for me.

Government school system. Our schools aren't crazy like we hear about on the news. We've got people flooding in recently, kind of with a similar narrative. But something we talked about off air—one of the local high schools recently had a performance troupe of basically LGBTQ+ activists. It created a stink, but those people were given access to children for a prolonged period of time, encouraged to interact with them on social media.

And what it really boils down to is the system does what it's designed to do. I'm thankful for Christians in the public or government school system who are trying to be a positive Christian influence, but the idea that children are to be deployed to that arena in the formative years of their life is an atrocity, and we're seeing it play out on a societal level.

We've got to do something rhetorically to power through the idea that, well, it's better here, and therefore it's good enough. Christians that I love dearly and have helped me have too low a view of what they can provide for their children. Good enough isn't good enough. What's the best we can do?

Marlin Detweiler:
One of the things that really impressed me—and I thought that David Goodwin and Pete Hegseth articulated this better than anyone else had previously in my experience, anyway—was that what we have experienced in the last, let's call it ten years, has been nothing more than the acceleration of something that has been going on for 100 years.

Now this has been covered. So we're not going to belabor it here because it's been in other episodes. I understand that our listeners have heard that, but it's so important to realize that it only takes two generations for the norm and expectation to go from something to something completely different. That can be in a bad way or in a good way.

As I read Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning and saw a model for education that I'd never heard of, it resonated with me because I had enough insight to know there was something phenomenal about that. Without that book, and then without the Goodwin-Hegseth book Battle for the American Mind, I would have never known why my father and mother would be willing to expect that there is really no serious question about whether or not we use the public schools. What they're doing is part of the fiber of all they know.

Jeff Wright:
Absolutely. And that's one of the very dangerous places.

Marlin Detweiler:
If it only takes two generations, that's a very quick time period for us to lose the footing of what really could be if there was something radically better at some point in the past.

Jeff Wright:
Well, absolutely. Again, kind of returning to the maxim: the system does what it does, right? What it produces is what the system is for. Dewey, the father of modern education, was very clear about his aims, and he's been successful in that. I think you're talking about the decay of institutions and culture, right?

Institutions have a value in transmitting values generationally. I think probably the political side that I'm more sympathetic to has become very skeptical of institutions, but it would be a mistake to stop thinking that institutions have value. It's right to say, how do we make use of institutions to cultivate virtue and the right kinds of values?

In my own community, government education was seen as a ladder. There's working-class people who come from limited educational backgrounds. Their aspirations and their children's aspirations were built into this institution that was supposed to be a ladder into a better life. But for my entire adult life and before, it's constantly been aimed at betraying that.

Betraying the aspirations of the parents sending their children off. It's just hard to fight the Department of Education. It's hard for any local system, particularly when money is tied to ideological obedience, to overcome that, no matter how noble the aspirations of the people at the local level participating in it.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah. This is a common comment: education needs more money. In the public sphere, the question that's not ever asked is, what would it do with that money that would cause things to be different as opposed to just bigger but more of the same?

Jeff Wright:
Right. And particularly with so much of that money that is ever increasing, being sent to more broad administrative departments that are there primarily to push ideological social engineering programs. You mentioned Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning. That was instrumental in my own thinking as my family moved towards classical Christian education. And there's a passage in there where, at the time the book was published, we were spending more per student than had ever been spent in history on children.

The reality is, money is a resource. It's a tool to be used. But if you gave comparable kind of income outside of special education programs to your local private school, they would feel like Scrooge McDuck. They would cash it into coins and swim around in it. And it hasn't brought a substantial or measurable good, no matter how much we pile in.

The objective test scores are down. Virtue is clearly down. There's a raging sex abuse crisis within public school systems. It's just apparently working like gasoline on a fire.

Marlin Detweiler:
You know, buying more gasoline to burn the same fire only makes it burn brighter.

Jeff Wright:
Hotter, more destructively. I mean, you can take that metaphor a lot of ways.

Marlin Detweiler:
You've touched on a term that's been bandied about within classical education in ways that were new to me also, and enjoyable. Not that it was new when I first heard it from you, but you did have some insights in it that I thought were worth pursuing here. It's the term Paideia. And you defined it as a comprehensive way of life, thinking, and loving. Tell us about that definition and really unpack what Paideia is as we think about raising children.

Jeff Wright:
Well, I think maybe to use another metaphor, is to think of an ecosystem in which living organisms grow and develop and thrive. The only kind of ecosystem that leads to humanizing or becoming more fully human is one that is aimed at Christ’s glory and centers upon his lordship over all things. And this is sort of a personal drum that I beat in my own circles.

I hope Christians will increasingly understand that all education is discipleship. Scripture really doesn't talk about education the way that the government school system does. It's just a strict transference of knowledge or maybe skill. But it sees those as components of the humanizing project that the church is. Within that vision, thinking about a family, a church, a school—the different institutions that exist—there should be, in God's design, an alignment of each of these institutions towards the same goal, namely, to know Christ, to see him exalted, and to make him known.

And you really can't do what we call education apart from the central criteria that Jesus Christ is Lord. Once you remove that component, the entire thing collapses and becomes something very different. In fact, it becomes a dehumanizing engine.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah. Thirty years ago, you reminded me of something. Thirty years ago or so, I wrote an article called The Redundancy of Christian Education. It was just a play on the title by saying that education is about understanding what is, how it got to be, why it's that way, and how it works. And if we try to educate in a way that we don't think in terms of what we know is true—God created the heavens and the earth.

Jesus lived on the earth. Jesus was wholly God and wholly man. Jesus lived perfectly. We needed to be redeemed. He came to do that. If those things are not instrumental in the education of our children, they are learning on the foundation of something that isn't true or can't stand. And to me, what that meant in the writing of that article was to say, I want to give my children an education that doesn't allow for one that doesn't recognize those fundamental truths.

Jeff Wright:
Absolutely right. And to go back to an earlier theme in the conversation, the expressly materialist aims of government education are intentionally limited on this front. And so, by design, the thing can't do what is needed. I'm a fan of the idea of common grace. I think Aristotle had insights to offer.

It's not like pagans don't have anything to bring to the table. But nonetheless, if Jesus Christ’s lordship is the governing principle of reality—and it is—then removing the telos, not just the content of who Christ is, but even the purpose for which all things exist, you fundamentally get a truncated and inadequate system that is going to malform those who participate in it.

So I do think it's wise for Christians to intentionally start talking about discipleship more than merely education. We're about making disciples.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah. I remember a guest preacher coming to the church that we were at—we were living in Orlando at the time—talking about the fact that the Great Commission is about discipleship, which is far more than what we typically think of as evangelism. It's about learning in the context of all of God's provision and not just about becoming a believer.

Jeff Wright:
Sure. And that's an expansive, adventurous endeavor—to learn all that Christ has commanded and to teach it to the nations. What a compelling vision. It's the kind of thing I actually think young men are probably starved for in our day. Sort of a bold venture to take up for a noble cause. And again, the substitution of evangelism for discipleship has truncated that very unhelpfully.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah. We're filming this after the first Tuesday in November where there was an election. There were things that happened there that some of us hoped for, others feared. It was a dramatic change. There's conversation beginning about how that might affect a number of different areas.

Do you have any insights? Or if you don't have any insights, I'm not sure if anybody's calling you to tell you what's going on. It's not public, so I wouldn't expect you to be available to tell us that even if you did have those secrets. But do you have any insights or hopes of what might result?

Jeff Wright:
Well, I don't know if these are particularly unique insights, but it can't help but portend good things that Pete Hegseth, you've already mentioned wrote a book on Christian education, is now going to be part of the cabinet. I'm not entirely sure if it's public right now what President Trump is planning to do with the Department of Education, but he seems to have taken, and his people have taken, a very skeptical view, I think an appropriately skeptical view, to that department.

I have lots of hopes for that. Pete has his kids in a classical Christian school about an hour and a half from me. And so I'm hopeful that he's one of the voices at the table, not in the department he's assigned jurisdiction to, but sort of a wind-in-the-sails voice. And I hope that it will bolster whatever happens with the Department of Education.

One caution that I have in mind is something I learned from a mentor who was an early adopter of the homeschooling movement, sort of post-Rushdoony homeschooling family. Looking back on his own experience and the experience of the people he worked with, he said, I think we too quickly had an idea that if we could homeschool, it was going to be a panacea. It was going to fix all the problems. And that simply hasn't borne itself out. He was offering that to me, as a classical Christian education proponent, saying that this is good.

Marlin Detweiler:
It's like you solve all the problems.

Jeff Wright:
It's not going to solve all the problems. Right. And as we've talked about off air, there's something to learn about the incoming Trump administration along those lines as well.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah.

Jeff Wright:
That we're thankful for what the Lord has provided, but it's not a solve-all.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah, I like the phrase that, for those of us that have been living under a cloud of anti-Christian rhetoric, we've dodged a bullet. And even that is a very loaded term given recent history. But when we dodged a bullet, all we've done is survive something. We have not done anything proactively to move the culture forward in a way that is recognizing the lordship of Christ over today and tomorrow.

Jeff Wright:
Well, I think that's a profound insight. And I think it's another one of those things to be aware of as the new Right begins to assert itself politically. There's a lot of glee that I share about the idea of tearing down these corrupt institutions that have been weaponized against Christianity. But if you stop at tearing down those structures, you're basically still in kind of a Marxist framework.

That deconstruction will spontaneously generate a better order, which is a foolish idea. And so, again, gleeful at the prospect of seeing some of these things, to use a common term, deconstructed. But there does have to be a compelling, forward-looking return to the fundamental principles that govern reality. So the tearing down, as much joy as we may get in seeing some of that comeuppance that's well deserved.

If that's where our focus is and stays there, we're going to end up with something that's not substantially better in the long run. Order doesn't arise out of disorder. And so a vision of returning to the wisdom of Christ, the honor of Christ, the mandates of Christ, the program of Christ is required if we're going to actually live to see something better for ourselves and the generations we have ambitions for.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah. You used the term in a prior conversation that we had, institutional bravery. Sounds to me like that's what you're alluding to. Unpack that phrasing a little bit.

Jeff Wright:
Well, I gave a talk at an ACCS breakout session on this. I've given it a couple different places. The genesis was kind of agonistic, thinking about how do we end in a hostile culture because at the time, we didn't know what this election would bring. We knew much less even than we do at this juncture.

Marlin Detweiler:
They put a time frame in that. That would have been June, when the campaigning was hot and heavy, but obviously before November.

Jeff Wright:
Yeah. And even the thoughts that kind of formed it were watching Merrick Garland weaponized the Department of Justice, talking about going after Christians. Cancel mobs from the left were using public resources to destroy people's livelihoods. And what I was trying to call our institutions to do is the kind of spine that would let you stare that down and say, that's still what we're doing.

It doesn't matter. And so it was sort of that, if your listeners are familiar with anti-fragility, it's kind of an anti-fragile talk at its core that there has to be a commitment to ability that undergirds even, as classical Christian education participants, we value the life of the mind. We value the insights that others can bring into our understanding that help us better understand the things we study.

We're sort of a people who are bent towards enjoying the resources of institutions. But that can come with a snare. It can come with a snare that makes you seek after respectability. And the thing I was hoping to push my listeners towards is to say respectability has to be defined first, according to, again, returning to previous themes, honoring Christ rather than the accrediting institutions that are supposed to convey legitimacy.

And so what I was hoping for is basically a band of brothers and sisters who would be willing to say, I'm not really ultimately concerned about what the consequences of these actions are. They're right and good, and we're going to pursue them as far as we have to, to have the goods they offer.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah. And in some sense, we look at what needs to be done. We determine that which is good and true to do. But then, and this is where sometimes we make mistakes, we have to be rhetorically effective in our communication about why we do what we do and how we do it.

Jeff Wright:
Well, I couldn't agree more. And the reason I chose the title I did, Institutional Bravery, is that I think bravery, both rhetorically and in action, is a very compelling argument. You may not win the opponent, but the person observing the process can be fertile ground to bring allies in, to give encouragement to.

And so I think the idea of being brave is sort of, one of the gifts that God has given his people, that we can make use of that to draw new people into what we're trying to get done for the honor of Christ.

Marlin Detweiler:

Yeah, that's a wonderful place for us to bring this to a close. Thank you so much for joining us. It's been great to have.

Jeff Wright:

Well, thank you very much for having me on. I appreciate the work you're doing. Please keep up the good work.

Marlin Detweiler:

Yeah. Thank you. Very kind of you, folks. Thank you for joining us on another episode of Veritas Vox, the voice of classical Christian education. We hope to see you next time. Bye bye.