Secular, Faith-Based, or Old Earth Christian? What Homeschool Curriculum Labels Actually Mean
Secular, faith-based and old earth Christian: what the labels actually mean in homeschool curriculum, where Letters & Devotion stands, and questions that reveal any publisher’s real position fast.
More than half of new homeschooling families now say academics, not religion, is their main motivation, and many go looking for a "secular" curriculum because it is the only label they have heard for "taught the way scientists actually teach it." It is not the only label. Here is the honest taxonomy, where Letters & Devotion actually sits in it, and how to check any publisher against it in ten minutes.
The kinds of curriculum
Faith-based curriculum teaches academic subjects through a religious framework, openly, the framework is a feature, stated on the box. Most faith-based publishers also teach a recent, six-day creation as science: a short, fixed timeline for the earth and its life, taught as fact rather than as one reading among several.
"Neutral" (sometimes "faith-friendly") curriculum avoids the topics where science and doctrine collide. It does not teach religious content, but it also quietly skips evolution, deep time, and parts of human biology, leaving the gaps for families to fill either way.
Secular curriculum teaches the academic consensus with no religious framing at all: evolution as the organizing idea of biology, an earth billions of years old, history from evidence rather than providence. It does not teach Bible, because it does not teach religion at all.
Letters & Devotion is a fourth thing, the label most families never hear named: a Christian curriculum that teaches the same evidence a secular curriculum teaches. Every science course follows the evidence where biologists, geologists and astronomers actually take it, an old earth, deep time, lineages that share ancestors, and every grade also carries a full year of Bible. Many Christians read Genesis 1 as telling who made the world and why, not as a scientific report of how, and this curriculum has taken that position on purpose. Christians disagree here, and the courses say so plainly rather than picking a side quietly.
Where the differences actually show up
Three places, reliably: biology (is natural selection taught as the central concept, or mentioned briefly, or avoided?), earth science and astronomy (real geological and cosmic timescales, or a short, fixed one stated as fact?), and history (are ancient civilizations dated plainly, and are religions taught as historical and cultural facts about people?).
A curriculum that keeps the evidence and keeps the faith also treats Genesis itself honestly: does it say plainly that Christians read it more than one way, or does it act as if there is no disagreement? Letters & Devotion says so directly, inside the science courses themselves, not only in marketing copy.
The ten-minute test
Ask any publisher three questions. One: show me the unit where you teach evolution, not a statement, the actual unit. Two: how old does your earth science course say the Earth is? Three: can I read the full scope and sequence of every course before paying?
The third question is the real filter. A publisher confident in its content publishes all of it up front; a publisher managing a constituency keeps things vague. Letters & Devotion publishes every unit, every skill and every learning objective of all 84 courses publicly, and you can try real lessons without an account. Ask us those same three questions and the honest answer is an old earth, evolution taught the way scientists teach it, and a Bible course every single year, right alongside it.