The Power
of Words
By Victoria Cobb
Verbal Arts in Biblical Worldview Training
I
AM A LOBBYIST. My husband is a lawyer. We tell people
you could buy tickets to our arguments because they are
so entertaining. But on a serious note, the art and skill of
persuasion play a critical role in the success (or failure) not
only of our marriage but of our careers.
In my job, I use persuasion to advocate for the unborn,
marriage as God designed it, and religious liberty in the
Virginia General Assembly and occasionally, at a national
level. My husband served as the Deputy Secretary of Health
for our Commonwealth. In that role, his job was to utilize
persuasion to align approximately 13,000 employees with
the agenda of the governor.
Both of us learned the importance of words early on. We
worked hard to achieve precision in writing and eloquence
in delivery. My husband had a professor who deducted
points if he used the same adjective twice in a ten-plus-page
paper. I enrolled in Toastmasters, a public speaking club, to
overcome stage fright. My angst over public speaking was
so bad that I once spilled a cup of water on a state sena-
tor sitting next to me because my hands were shaking so
violently after getting up to speak.
Given this background, one might think we chose our
children’s classical Christian school because it focuses all
aspects of its curricula on rhetoric. Of course, we were
thrilled to know our children would memorize speeches
and writings from so many greats throughout history. We
were also excited about how much weight the educational
philosophy puts on learning the logical thinking required to
formulate persuasive arguments.
However, the emphasis on rhetoric wasn’t our reason for
sending our children to a classical Christian school. Instead,
we selected it because the school is steeped in a biblical
worldview. While rhetoric is important, we knew that
having the right worldview was vital. Recently, I’ve come to
30
understand the unique value of an education in the verbal
arts coupled with a biblical worldview.
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN CHILDREN ARE NOT TRAINED
TO COMMUNICATE A BIBLICAL WORLDVIEW?
I saw the alternative to my children’s education and the true
value of what they are learning. It all started in an Aveda hair
salon. Having a captive audience in her chair, my hairdresser
shared her outrage about the walkout her child’s Catholic
private school had planned in response to the tragic school
shooting in Parkland, Florida. She is married to a hunter
who doesn’t just have a gun, he has lots of guns and a pack
of hunting dogs too. I suspect they don’t support any restric-
tions on the Second Amendment.
She shared her disappointment that this school would
take up a position on a political debate that deeply divides
our country and forces her child to comply. That night, I
looked online and discovered that many public schools
would be staging a walkout. While arguments could be
made that schools were merely standing with the victims,
much of the nationwide walkouts were directly coordinat-
ed with organizers of the liberal Women’s March and was
intended to be anti-gun. Any participation would be inter-
preted in that light.
That same week, I heard more about what parents in Fair-
fax County, Virginia, were experiencing when battling newly
proposed changes to its Family Life Education curriculum.
In this locality, and many others, plans are coming into
fruition to redefine one’s sex as being arbitrarily assigned at
birth rather than determined by biology.
Watching these things, I silently patted myself on the back
for selecting a school that did not use my children as pawns
in a battle to spread a political agenda. But this simultane-
ously prompted questions.