Southern Baptists are moving to open their own schools, offering an alternative to public schools that would educate a new generation about biblical principles instead of popular culture.

As the traditional school year begins on today, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest is sponsoring a two-day workshop designed to train church leaders to open private schools.

“In the public schools, you don’t just have neutrality, you have hostility toward organized religion,” said Daniel Akin, president of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest. “A lot of parents are fed up.”

Southeastern is leading the push, sponsoring a Christian School 101 workshop Monday and Tuesday. The program is designed to train church leaders to open private schools.

“Southern Baptists see the new religious establishment in this country as secularism,” said Bill Leonard, dean of the divinity school at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem. “It dictates pluralism and diversity of values relative to doctrine, politics and sexual values.”

Southeastern seminary is fighting back.

Ten years ago, it started a masters degree program in Christian school administration to help train principals.

“Are we going to be satisfied with the thousands of hours children spend in an environment with the absence of support for what we hold dear, and in many cases, hostility to it?” asked Ken Coley, a professor at Southeastern who runs the masters program for Christian school administrators.

The approximately 40 people who signed up for the workshop are church leaders primarily from small towns where there are few private Christian schools. They include the Rev. Ed Rose, pastor of Central Baptist Church in Wendell, who sees an opportunity in fast-growing eastern Wake County.

“All our studies show the demand is off the charts,” he said.

North Raleigh Christian Academy enrolls 1,290 students in kindergarten through 12th grade. About 55 percent are Baptist, said Superintendent S.L. Sherrill. Many of these schools bear little relation to those founded after the desegregation battles of the 1970s, when many Baptists took their children out of public schools to avoid forced busing and integration.

At North Raleigh, 5 percent of the student body is black, and its nondiscrimination policy is prominently displayed on its Web site.

Some say private schools are more academically rigorous and benefit from lower teacher-student ratios. Most of their graduates go to college, making the schools even more attractive. Southern Baptists want to train their children to compete in today’s culture while embracing their faith.

“Most evangelicals are biblically ignorant and uninformed,” said Edward E. Gamble, director of the Southern Baptist Association of Christian Schools, a Florida outfit hosting this week’s workshop. “We think it’s time we took ownership of the education of our children.”