Last night I saw, as I see every year, what I have long believed to be the last, best hope of the West: home schooling parents and children in action. Every year our local home schooling association has its Talent Night on the Friday nearest to St. Patrick’s Day, which of course this year was St. Patrick’s Day. This is one of the only yearly occasions, and the only indoor occasion (the other being a picnic), on which a large proportion of the members of this particular association are all together in one place. For the most part, our activities take place in smaller groups, formed on an ad hoc basis, and related to interests–sports, support groups for particular interests or parts of the town, and so forth. So Talent Night is where you go to see a bunch of us all together, to see what our kids are up to, to see what home schoolers are like in this Midwestern town.

As I am every year, I was struck by what wonderful children we are raising. As I am every year, I was moved and encouraged. And as every year, this year too I realized, “This is where it’s at. This is where a real generation is being raised to hold on to something, to hold on to Christianity, to carry the light into the future.” And if I’d been blogging in some other year when I felt more verbal inspiration than I happen to be feeling this year, I might have been able to convey something of this sense in greater detail.

But last night, I was struck by something else. The church that lets us use its premises for Talent Night is most decidedly Protestant. In every pew was a copy of the NIV Bible, a moderately contemporary hymnal found now in most evangelical churches, and several of those little rubber cup rings I remember so well from my childhood for the tiny plastic cups after you’ve finished drinking Welch’s grape juice for Communion. None of this came as much of a surprise. But off to one side, off the stage, was a large wooden object that had been moved as part of the stage-clearing for the various performances. A teenage boy–not, I think, a home schooler but a member of the host church, on hand to help with technical details of the sound system–was sitting perched on this wooden object, occasionally swinging his legs, throughout the performance. Suddenly I noticed, behind his legs, the words carved along the side: “In remembrance of me.”

It was the Communion table.

Well, yes, so what? Even from a sacramental perspective, this is just a wooden table, not an altar. They don’t have an altar, because they are memorialists and hence don’t have a Sacrament.

But I must say, it shocked me. Even the “real absence” Baptists of my childhood would not have shunted the Communion table off the stage and let someone sit on it while a concert went on. There was a kind of quasi-sacramental attitude toward the church premises in those days. It may have been inconsistent, but even though the church was not believed to be “holy” or “consecrated,” we kids were told not to run in “the sanctuary,” and the Communion table was treated with a certain care.

And then I realized in a new way how the future of the West looks. For sheerly demographic reasons, and even more especially because they are so very good at the Christian formation of their children, home schooling evangelicals and fundamentalists are carrying on. They are the ones raising the kids (sometimes large families of kids) who are most likely, more likely on average than anyone else’s children, to hold on to something in adulthood, to regard Christianity as a torch they are going to pass on to their own children. This group is held together entirely by their beliefs and by their commitment to them. That is not a weak thing. But there is no objective Sacrament to provide any glue beyond that.

Frankly, I’m not sure how important that is, from a purely sociological perspective. All else is rarely equal. If most of these people were Orthodox or Continuing Anglican or Roman Catholic instead of evangelical Protestant, would they have the vibrancy they currently have, with just a sacramental faith added on top? Would their children have (I say this without blushing) the valuable isolation they currently have from the horrific junk they would otherwise get from their peers, or would their parents send them to schools where they would be de-formed rather than formed?

So I’m not going to claim that things would be better, that the future of Christendom would be more secure, if the people in my local home school association believed in consecrated objects and spaces and, as I do, in the Real Presence, if they were held together by objective holy acts as well as by fervent faith. They’re doing a darned good job as it is.

But still, it struck me…It all hangs by a tough but slender thread.