Today's Religion In Public Schools Teaches Your Child The Good News Of The Kingdom Of Democracy

Democracy is one of our great Western gods. We're in Iraq trying to establish one for Muslims. We've been to Vietnam and Korea trying to do the same for Buddhists. We pride ourselves in having its glory manifested all across America. We teach our children in public schools and colleges its inherent goodness; its merit worthy of reverence, and the fear of deriding it. This is in one word worship. In America we worship Democracy.

And to preserve Democracy — popular government of the people, for the people, and by the people — the masses must be educated, strengthened in their minds, so that they can "appraise the issues for themselves" to keep them from being "bamboozled" through relentless propaganda from those who stand against Democracy.

But is this not itself propaganda? Is it not instead an elitist attempt at self-preservation that college ideologues, school bureaucrats, media moguls and self-serving politicians propagate unremittingly to bamboozle the masses?

The Gospel According To Humanists

Freelance writer Lee Duigon put it well. The pretty picture of the most staunch proponents of Democracy depicts the utopia of an open and democratic society with a full range of civil liberties and a decentralized decision-making process that gives everyone a say in how things are done. In it there will be elimination of all discrimination based upon race, religion, sex, age, or national origin, and everyone who needs it will receive a minimum guaranteed annual income. It will all be part of an integrated community.

Yet those fine words all come from The Humanist Manifesto II 's section on Democratic Society. Because Humanism has dominated American education for over a century, most Americans have bought into the humanist campaign for Democracy and now worship at its feet, even though the Constitution of the United States guarantees us a republican form of government (art. IV, sec. 4) not a democracy.

Democracy is a humanist idea, and we would do well to understand what humanists mean by it before we're done sacrificing to it our most precious inheritance — our children — through compulsory education that forces this religion in public schools.

Whether our form of civil government were a democracy or a republic, it is not the state's function to support the establishment of a compulsory education system. Since the State is doing so, this would be equivalent to state-supported religious worship. How so?

The State in America mandates the worship of the humanist god Democracy by establishing a statist church, where Humanism is the state-sponsored religion in public schools, taxation is the State-required tithe to advance the Kingdom of Democracy, teachers and administrators are the State-ordained clergy, and our children are the State-targeted laity.

Establising The Kingdom's Church: Compulsory Education In Public Schools

The public schools have long been America's only established church. This has been recognized by liberal church historian Sidney Mead and by conservative scholar R. J. Rushdoony. In 1963, Mead wrote this brilliant analysis of the Christian dilemma over public schools — a dilemma that has yet to be resolved.

There was a time in U.S. history when churches were established (paid for) by the State. This ended in the 19th-Century. But when the churches gave up state support in order to secure religious freedom, they lost something very important, Mead says: power over the schools.

Perhaps the most striking power that the churches surrendered under religious freedom was this control over public education and the use of religion in public schools, for traditionally education of the public had been considered an essential aspect of the work of an established church. An established church needs control over schools if it is to perform its proper function of disseminating and inculcating the underpinning beliefs that are necessary to keep its religion from dying even within a single generation.

Religion In Public Schools Unavoidable

And who can deny that these beliefs are religious? Certainly this was clearly recognized even by early statist educationists. Prominent national spokesman Horace Mann, for example, argued in favor of "nonsectarian" religious teaching wherever the public met for educational instruction, that is, school houses, which today we know as public schools. But it was soon discovered that there could be no "nonsectarian" religious teaching in America, because religion had been poured into sectarian molds and had hardened into sectarian forms.

Thus Horace Mann's brand of education seemed to many evangelical Protestants back in the 19th-Century to be suspiciously "Unitarian" and, at best, what passed as "nonsectarian" religious teaching at public school houses seemed to many Unitarians, Roman Catholics, and others to have been evangelical Protestantism. Even the Bible was ruled out, for it could not be read in the public schools except in "sectarian" English translations. In a preponderantly Christian America at the time, there was no way to rid the school houses from religion, namely from Christianity.

Here lies the root of the dilemma posed by the acceptance of, on the one hand, the practice of separation of Church and State and, on the other, the general acceptance of compulsory education sponsored by the State.

In other words, 19th-Century public school reformers in the United States seized the basic responsibility that traditionally had always been assumed by an established church: the task of indoctrinating. And then they proceeded to make this a compulsory education policy; thereby, establishing the teachings dispensed through the public schools as the fundamental doctrine of the land, and superimposing it on the followers of other religious sects by forcing their children to report daily to the State-sponsored religious indoctrination centers, i.e. State churches a.k.a. public schools.

In this sense the public school system of the United States is the nation's established religious system. It propagates religion in public schools.

Who Won The Fight To Establish The Church Of America?

But the situation in America has been such that none of the many religious sects can admit without jeopardizing their own existence that the religion taught in the State schools (or in any other school for that matter) is legitimately true enough to require their supreme allegiance. This serves to accentuate the dichotomy that exists to this day between the nation's religion in public schools and the religion of the denominations that teach in private schools.

Can you now see that by keeping your children in a public school under compulsion you are being forced to accept the established religion of this land with all its State-sanctioned moral values, objectives and demands?

In that same year, 1963, Rushdoony wrote about the history of religion in public schools:

"The extensive emphasis on moralism and patriotism in State-supported schools was in fulfillment of this purpose in their creation, to become the 'catholic' [i.e. universal] church of the people of America and the moral identity of the body politic. This aspect of educational history is in abundant evidence; it has been neglected only because, while latter-day Puritans helped powerfully to make State support a reality, the schools fell steadily into the hands of the anti-Puritans. As a result, the school continues today as the true established church of the United States, dedicated to a catholic faith which is no longer semi-Christian moralism but social morality and social democracy."

But attendance to public school is mandated by the State. Compulsory education in statist schools under these conditions is equivalent to having to experience religion in public schools much in the manner that it is practiced in Muslim countries, where students cannot opt out from instruction.

Is this what American public education has come to?

Yes! It is.