A teacher-union-funded organization called Pastors for Texas Children exists to oppose school vouchers in Texas . Using front groups is common in lobbying battles, and specifically, there’s a long and sordid history of using religious organizations to lobby for causes totally divorced from — if not antithetical to — their religious teachings.

For instance, gambling interests regularly rely on religious Right figures to lobby against their competing gambling interests. The National Black Church Initiative came out in support of AT&T’s proposed merger with T-Mobile.

Christian pastors opposing school choice is a bit of a tough pill to swallow, though.

Public schools across the country are dropping the pretense of value neutrality and are becoming, in effect, religious schools. The goal of many school administrators and teachers is to tear children away from the worldview and morality of their parents and instead inculcate a brand-new and ever-shifting-yet-never-tolerant worldview based on the centrality of oppression, resistance to tradition, and rejection of the divine or even of human nature.

Academia and the media are very upset that some parent, somewhere, is inculcating love of God and a Judeo-Christian anthropology.

Some conservatives are retaliating directly against this left-wing public school indoctrination, using the power of the state to remove books that range from pornographic to merely left-wing. There are some pitfalls with this method of using conservative centralized power to combat progressive illiberalism.

The more small-l liberal response to the radicalization of public schools is exit: empower parents to choose the best school for their own children. That’s what the school voucher fight is mostly about, and so, it’s very odd that pastors would oppose it. Add on the total failure of many urban school districts to educate poor children, and it becomes harder to understand why pastors would oppose school choice.

But when you see the worldview of this particular pastors’ group — and in particular their view of the human person — it makes more sense.

If you believe that the purpose of education is to “shape” children “for economic workforce & democratic society,” then you have a very different anthropology than the one implied by Jesus’s teachings and made clear by a couple of thousand years of Christian scholarship.

The pastors' tweet, which begins by opposing the commodification of children, ends up turning children simply into means to society's ends.

One tweeter had a terse and on-point reply.

From another perspective, Christians see humans as made in God’s image and deserving of love. “Love one another as I have loved you,” Christ said. That means we don’t see humans as a means for some worldly good, but we see humans as the most good thing on this Earth. We educate children for their own sake, and the subsequent benefit to society is a second-order benefit.

What's more, the most important second-order benefit from educating children is not their economic or political participation but what they add to the culture and the community.

These pastors see children as means to ends, and those ends are solely economic and political. No wonder they have bad ideas on education policy.