Public Schools are Churches and Teachers are Preachers

Placing the Ten Commandments in government schools has gained the attention of the usual subjects. The state of Louisiana has mandated their display:

Louisiana has become the first state to require that the Ten Commandments be displayed in every public school classroom, the latest move from a GOP-dominated Legislature pushing a conservative agenda under a new governor.

The legislation that Republican Gov. Jeff Landry signed into law … requires a poster-sized display of the Ten Commandments in “large, easily readable font” in all public classrooms, from kindergarten to state-funded universities. (NPR)

As a result, Leftist secularists—I repeat myself—strenuously reject the mandate.

Only secularists are permitted to post commandments of their choosing. Does anyone believe public schools are devoid of religion? Everything is religious in today’s government schools. Every edict comes from on high, from the Federal Department of Education, special interest groups, courts, and teachers’ unions. Listen to the over the top Elmer Gantry-style preaching from Becky Pringle, president of the NEA: https://rumble.com/v560g5m-this-articulate-orator-is-president-of-the-national-education-association.html

“These power-hungry control freaks think they own your kids. They’re in a cult that worships government and detests parents. It’s time to defund teachers unions and allow the money to follow the child,” Corey DeAngelis told Fox News Digital.

Whoever Controls the Schools Rules the World

Education has been used as a vehicle for social change from Karl Marx and Adolf Hitler to secular humanism and radical Islam. Our worldview opponents understand that education is where the war of ideas is fought. If Christians are serious about securing the future for our children, they must understand the nature of the war we are fighting. If you have children, want children, or know someone who has children—you need to get this book and read it before it becomes too late to save the generation to follow us from the ruins.

Buy Now

The following meme appeared on Facebook:

The classroom is a five-day-a-week church requiring attendance for at least six hours each day. Teachers are preachers who must preach (teach) from approved secular holy books called textbooks. Unlike churches, students are forced to attend. An imposed tithe in the form of taxation is confiscated from everyone to fund the secular religion. The religion of secularism is taught every day in public schools. Don’t believe me? Consider the following from Chester M. Pierce, Harvard psychiatrist, who spoke as an expert in public education at the 1973 International Education Seminar.

Every child in America entering school at the age of five is mentally ill, because he comes to school with certain allegiances toward our founding fathers, our elected officials, toward his parents, toward a belief in a supernatural Being, toward the sovereignty of this nation as a separate entity. It’s up to you teachers to make all of these sick children well by creating the international children of the future.[1]

As an atheist who cannot account for morality within an evolutionary worldview John J. Dunphy denounces a Christian worldview but must borrow moral capital from the Christian worldview to maintain the “Christian ideal of ‘love thy neighbor’” and wants to use government-controlled education to accomplish this goal. His is a religious crusade:

The battle for humankind’s future must be waged and won in the public school classrooms by teachers who correctly perceive their role as the proselytizers of a new faith. Such teachers will be utilizing a classroom instead of a pulpit to convey humanist values in whatever subject they teach, regardless of the education level. Classrooms, must and will become an arena of conflict between the old and the new—the rotting corpse of Christianity and the new faith of humanism, resplendent in its promise of a world in which the never-realized Christian ideal of “love thy neighbor” will finally be achieved.[2]

Where Jesus had been considered the foundation of all knowledge, believing in “a supernatural Being” now constitutes mental illness. Dr. Pierce understood the importance of education; it is to mold “the international children of the future,” in terms of a man-centered worldview. The humanists have captured the vision many Christians have abandoned.

In Judge W. Brevard Hand’s 1987 decision in the Alabama textbook case, humanism was described as a religion. “The most important belief of this religion is its denial of the transcendent and/or supernatural: there is no God, no creator, no divinity. By force of logic, the universe is thus self-existing, completely physical and hence, essentially knowable.” Secularists claim that such a faith—that’s what it is—is not biased against religion. Logic states otherwise. Modern secular education is fundamentally religious.

God and Government

With a fresh new look, more images, an extensive subject and scripture index, and an updated bibliography, God and Government is ready to prepare a whole new generation to take on the political and religious battles confronting Christians today. May it be used in a new awakening of Christians in America—not just to inform minds, but to stimulate action and secure a better tomorrow for our posterity.

Buy Now

Rousas J. Rushdoony described government education as “messianic” in his 1963 book The Messianic Character of American Education. For example:

The question again remains basically a religious question, and, to its credit, progressivism has been essentially a religious movement, as indeed has been the whole of the movement from Horace Mann to the present, to liberate man by means of a universal system of state-supported schools (page 2).

Gary North offers the following observation about Rushdoony’s classic work:

In his book, Rushdoony refers to the public school establishment as America’s only established church. He called the teachers a priesthood. In the same year, liberal church historian Sidney E. Mead made exactly the same comment. It is not random that the last state to abolish tax funding for churches was Massachusetts. It did this in 1833. Within four years, the state created a statewide governing agency of public education: the Massachusetts Board of Education. Horace Mann became the first representative of this transfer of funds.

*****

The centrality of the public schools is basic to the replacement of both church and family by the state. There is no other institution that has comparable authority in both realms. This is because it claims jurisdiction over the minds of children. It claims jurisdiction over the input of facts and interpretations.

*****

The Messianic Character of American Education was the first academic treatise to provide a detailed look at the theology of America’s only established church. No subsequent treatise has matched it for both conciseness and its comprehensiveness.

Teaching the Bible in public schools, something the state of Oklahoma is planning to do, and posting the Ten Commandments will do little because their interpretation and application will be in the hands of teachers who hold to another religion. The biblical approach is to remove our children from the Babylonian and Roman schools and put them directly under the control of parents (2 Tim. 3:14-17). See my article “French Kissing Secularism.”

[1] Chester Pierce, Professor of Education in the faculty of Medicine and Graduate School of Education, Harvard University.

[2] John J. Dunphy, “A Religion for a New Age,” The Humanist, 43:1 (January/February 1983), 26.

American Vision’s mission is to Restore America to its Biblical Foundation—from Genesis to Revelation. American Vision (AV) has been at the heart of worldview study since 1978, providing resources to exhort Christian families and individuals to live by a Biblically based worldview. Visit www.AmericanVision.org for more information, content and resources