All Education Is Religious!

There was a time in my life when I, like the majority of Christians, thought that there were some aspects of education that were spiritually neutral.  That has changed!  After being in professional education for over 52 years, I now know that there isn’t the smallest part of education that is spiritually neutral.  If fact, all education is religious.  This is true whether it takes place at home, church or school.

I am absolutely astounded that Christians will still put their children in secular schools when one considers the indoctrination that is taking place in these schools today.  I know; I have heard it over and over again.  “Our schools are good.”  Usually the person saying that is defining good by the level of academics, fine arts, technology or extra curricular activities offered by a school.  However, there is still an underlying “religious” worldview that permeates every school.  It is the worldview that will end up shaping the hearts and minds of the children and youth who attend there.

Education has always been a tool that has been used to shape society.  This was true when Nebuchadnezzer tried to educate the Hebrew young men that he had captured.  It is also seen in how Marx and Hitler viewed education as a means to control the populace.  Hitler once said, He alone, who owns the youth, gains the future.

There are some common threads that were behind past government’s efforts to shape the minds of its youth and what we see happening before our very eyes today.  First, there is always an attack on the family.  Both Marx and Hitler knew that the key to controlling the future was to weaken or destroy the home.  Erwin Lutzer points out that this was because these men knew that children without family roots can be more easily directed toward secular values and state benefits.

Second, there is always an effort to control what is taught to the children.  Chuck Colson made this clear when he wrote,

One of the first actions taken by revolutionary governments is to place all educational agencies under the direct control of the state, giving schools a central hand in building a new society.

When the home is weakened and the government controls the education of the majority of the children, then future generations will become disciples of the society’s worldview.  Again, read carefully the words of Hitler,

The most striking success of a revolution will always have been achieved when the new philosophy of life as far as possible has been taught to all men, and, if necessary, later forced  upon them.

He explained this further in a replying to an opponent of his ideology.

When an opponent declares, ‘I will not come over to your side’, I calmly say, ‘Your child belongs to us already… What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community.”

William Foster (1881-1961) was an American Communist leader who wrote, Toward Soviet America.  In this book, he predicted how socialism would take over the country with these words.

 Schools, colleges and universities will be coordinated and grouped under the National Department of Education…The studies will be revolutionized, being cleansed of religious, patriotic and other features of the bourgeois ideology.

Today, we are seeing how the education of our children and youth is reshaping our country in dramatic ways.  Dr. Everett Piper recently asked and answered a very thought provoking question.   Wondering why our country is collapsing before your very eyes?  Answer:  What’s taught today in our classrooms will be practiced tomorrow in our culture.  Toby Sumpter recently tweeted, If religion is primarily about making disciples, government schools are the established religion of America.

Unfortunately, many parents today are not aware, or not interested in, what is being taught in secular schools today.  Even when the consequences of this indoctrination hits, many seem to simply shrug their shoulders and go on with their daily routines.  Here are just a few of the examples that have come across my desk in a matter of a couple of weeks.

• In 2002, Canadian Pastor Mark Harding was found guilty because he opposed the promotion of Islam in the schools in his district, a privilege not given to Christianity, Hinduism, or Buddhism. His punishment was two years of probation, and he was subjected to more than three hundred hours of indoctrination by an imam as punishment.
• In 2015, TN middle school students were required to write, “There is no god but Allah; and Muhammed is his prophet.”
• In one sex education program, children as young as four or five are taught that parts of their bodies feel good when touched…this is called masturbation and they should always masturbate in private…By the second grade, they learn that the same act can be performed with a partner.
• It has been reported that requiring students to use correct grammar when writing and/or speaking is oppressive and needs to stop.
• Teachers have reported that they have been told to refer to students by their preferred gender names unless talking to parents when they are to use the students’ biological names.
• A teacher in one public school asked those who were in favor of same-sex marriage to line up on one side of the room, and those who were opposed were to line up on the other side of the room.
• A NC school system conducted teacher training on equity where they were told that the district’s “whitewashed curriculum was doing real harm to our students and educators.”  Teachers reported that parents should be considered impediment to social justice and teachers have an obligation to subvert parental wishes and beliefs.
• Kindergarten students in a public school system in Western NY had to participate in a  lesson on “racist police and state-sanctioned violence.”
• The Oregon Department of Education encouraged teachers to get training that was designed to “dismantling racism in mathematics.”  In this training a list of ways that “white supremacy culture infiltrates math classrooms” included “the focus on getting ‘right’ answers and students being reared to ‘show their work’.”
• A Canadian father was recently arrested for protesting his daughter being given testosterone.  The daughter was advised by a school official to do so without informing the parents.
• A group of current and former teachers in a Virginia school system compiled a list of parents suspected of disagreeing with the system’s controversial CRT teaching with the purpose to “infiltrate” them in an effort to silence these parents.
• A NYC school encouraged students to stop saying ‘Mom’ or ‘Dad’.
• A proposed ‘ethnic studies’ curriculum in CA urges students to chant to an Aztec Deity of Human Sacrifice and Cannibalism and engineer a ‘counter-genocide’ against whites.
• A 2008 report by The American Textbook Council showed ten of the most widely used middle school and high school social studies textbooks “present an incomplete and confected [falsely constructed] view of Islam that misrepresents its foundations…in a 7th grade text “Islam is featured as a model of interfaith tolerance; Christians wage wars of aggression and kill Jews.  Islam provides models of harmony and civilization.”

  Parents—and I include most Christian parents—no longer raise their children. Rather,culture does.

These are just a few of what I have read about over the past few weeks.  Some others were so graphic that I couldn’t include them in this post.  Dr. Erwin Lutzer has summed this up with this warning.

The radical secularists demand that “schools must change their curricula to reflect this alternate view of society”…Parents—and I include most Christian parents—no longer raise their children.  Rather, culture does…Parents clothe their children, feed them, and send them to school, but the hearts of their kids are being stolen and molded by a world that many of us don’t understand.

These false religious worldviews are also creeping into Christian education.  Natasha Crain wrote an article for Cross Examined that challenges parents to be very careful about their choice of schools for their children. Crain had homeschooled her children for pre-K and then she enrolled them in a local Christian school.  She had decided to go back to homeschooling them when the middle school years arrived.

In this article, she wrote, Make no mistake: Curriculum is rarely worldview neutral. She went on to explain how the curriculum throughout secular schools is based on a humanistic, secular worldview.  Then she shared that in Christian schools “in many cases, they use secular textbooks and expect teachers to compensate in the class by talking about the subject from a Christian perspective.”

Then she said something that put a chill up my back.

Many teachers are simply not equipped themselves with this kind of understanding in order to fully counter what secular curricula teaches.  You end up with a tug of war between worldviews of the text and the teacher.

It is critical that all Christians address the issue of education biblically.  We must make some major changes if we are going to be able to stand against the onslaught of the radical secularists of today.  That is why I am encouraging schools to become a KEM Prime Member and provide your staff and parents with important worldview training.

It is also why I want to encourage school and church leaders to register for the Kingdom Education Summit this July.  This is one of the most important events that I have ever been a part of.  Register Today!!