The Messianic Character of American Education

The Messianic Character of American Education
Author: R. J. Rushdoony
Publisher: Chalcedon Foundation
Total Pages: 328
Release: 2014-08-26
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1879998068

Rushdoony's study tells us an important part of American history: exactly what has public education been trying to accomplish? Before the 1830s and Horace Mann, no schools in the U.S. were state supported or state controlled. They were local, parent-teacher enterprises, supported without taxes, and taking care of all children. They were remarkably high in standard and were Christian. From Mann to the present, the state has used education to socialize the child. The school's basic purpose, according to its own philosophers, is not education in the traditional sense of the 3 R's. Instead, it is to promote "democracy" and "equality," not in their legal or civic sense, but in terms of the engineering of a socialized citizenry. Public education became the means of creating a social order of the educators design. Such men saw themselves and the school in messianic terms. This book was instrumental in launching the Christian school and homeschool movements.

Religious Fundamentalism and American Education

Religious Fundamentalism and American Education
Author: Eugene F. Provenzo
Publisher: SUNY Press
Total Pages: 158
Release: 1990-01-01
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9780791402177

For the past twenty-five years, 'ultra-fundamentalist' Christians have put increasing pressure on American public education to conform exclusively with their own philosophy and vision of education and culture. Eugene Provenzo considers and addresses the impact that the fundamentalist movement has had on such issues as censorship, textbook content, Creationism versus Evolution, the family and education, school prayer, and the state regulation of Christian schools. In exploring both sides of the debate, however, the author concludes that many fundamentalists' concerns are justified, due to a basic inconsistency between the rights guaranteed under the First Amendment and the position that many public schools have legally assumed.

Intellectual Schizophrenia

Intellectual Schizophrenia
Author: R. J. Rushdoony
Publisher: Chalcedon Foundation
Total Pages: 133
Release: 2009-11-23
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1879998297

The title of this book is particularly significant in that Dr. Rushdoony was able to identify the basic contradiction that pervades a secular society that rejects God's sovereignty by still needs law and order, justice, science, and meaning to life. Secular man wants to use the thinks of creation while denying their creator. As Dr. Rushdoony writes, 'there is no law, no society, no justice, no structure, no design, no meaning apart from God.' And so, modern man has become schizophrenic. He wants to assert his autonomy while rejecting the divine order that gives meaning to life. To the humanist, the aim of living is something he calls the 'good life.' For the nihilist, it is violence and death. Dr. Rushdoony saw cultural schizophrenia as a split between thought and feeling, a withdrawal from the reality of God and a flight into fantasies of world government achieved through an unattainable unity. Utopians are undeniably schizophrenic. They want a heaven on earth, which can only be achieved by coercion and enslavement. But perhaps what they really want, as depraved human beings, is coercion and enslavement, and use utopian idealism to deceive and entrap the gullible. Nor is it by accident that the government schools now lavish so much time on death education, which has been marbleized throughout the curriculum. As Dr. Rushdoony writes: 'For man to turn his back on God, therefore, is to turn towards death.' And this is exactly what the government schools have done. Add to this, multiculturalism, transcendental meditation, sensitivity training, explicit sex education, drug education, evolution, behavioral psychology, humanism, whole language, and other such programs, and you get a curriculum that is so profoundly anti-Christian that one wonders how any Christian parent or minister can condone putting a Christian child in a government school from the forward by Samuel L. Blumenfeld

Survival and Resistance in Evangelical America

Survival and Resistance in Evangelical America
Author: Crawford Gribben
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2021-02-23
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0199370230

Over the last thirty years, conservative evangelicals have been moving to the Northwest of the United States, where they hope to resist the impact of secular modernity and to survive the breakdown of society that they anticipate. These believers have often given up on the politics of the Christian Right, adopting strategies of hibernation while developing the communities and institutions from which a new America might one day emerge. Their activity coincides with the promotion by prominent survivalist authors of a program of migration to the "American Redoubt," a region encompassing Idaho, Montana, parts of eastern Washington and Oregon, and Wyoming, as a haven in which to endure hostile social change or natural disaster and in which to build a new social order. These migration movements have independent origins, but they overlap in their influences and aspirations, working in tandem to offer a vision of the present in which Christian values must be defended as American society is rebuilt according to biblical law. This book examines the origins, evolution, and cultural reach of this little-noted migration and considers what it might tell us about the future of American evangelicalism. Drawing on Calvinist theology, the social theory of Christian Reconstruction, and libertarian politics, these believers are projecting significant soft power. Their books are promoted by leading mainstream publishers and listed as New York Times bestsellers. Their strategy is gaining momentum, making an impact in local political and economic life, while being repackaged for a wider audience in publications by a broader coalition of conservative commentators and in American mass culture. This survivalist evangelical subculture recognizes that they have lost the culture war - but another kind of conflict is beginning.

The American Model of State and School

The American Model of State and School
Author: Charles L. Glenn
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2012-04-26
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1441119728

State and Schools argues that the American educational model represents a third way of organizing the provision of schooling, and that this accounts for some of its strengths as well as some of its weaknesses. Charles L. Glenn looks closely at the tradition of democratic localism in the management of schooling, and the powerful and anti-democratic effect of the emerging education 'profession,' which has in some respects the characteristics of a religious movement more than of a true profession. A sweeping chronological survey, State and Schools includes chapters on the colonial background, schooling in the New Republic, the creation of an education profession, and the progressive education movement, among others. Glenn's primary purpose, in this authoritative and thoroughly researched book, is to illustrate the deep roots of ways of thinking about schools that have made it difficult for policy-makers and the public to do what needs to be done to enable schools to function as they should, for our society and for future generations.

The Scientific Spirit of American Humanism

The Scientific Spirit of American Humanism
Author: Stephen P. Weldon
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Total Pages: 318
Release: 2020-10-06
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1421438585

Significantly, the book shows why special attention to American liberal religiosity remains critical to a clear understanding of the scientific spirit in American culture.

The Mythology of Science

The Mythology of Science
Author: R. J. Rushdoony
Publisher: Chalcedon Foundation
Total Pages: 188
Release: 2009-11-16
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1879998262

The "mythology" of science is its religious devotion to the myth of evolution. In evolution, man is the highest expression of intelligence and reason, and such thinking will not yield itself to submission to a God it views as a human cultural creation, useful, if at all, only in a cultural context. Views of origins are dependent on faith, and one's position speaks much as to one's religious tenets. Evolutionary faith, however, cannot tolerate any view of the natural world or science that places it under another faith, such as the Christian belief in a sovereign causative God. Darwin gave an ostensibly scientific justification for man's rebellion against God. He put men at the top of the evolutionary ladder, allowing them to believe they had realized Satan's lure to Adam and Eve and become "as gods, knowing [determining] good and evil" (Genesis 3:5). We can attack the science of evolution all we want, but the battle for our faith, true science, and our culture is a religious one over the nature of truth. Evolution is a religious faith that has become entrenched as a presupposition of modern thought. For Christians to argue about the "unproven" nature of the evolutionary hypothesis or the circular reasoning of its thought is of some value, but the essential issue is that two opposing religious faiths are in conflict. Evolution is popular because it is such a useful paradigm to sinful men; it dispenses with God as a prerequisite of all things. But Christianity as a religious faith depends not on proofs that are constructions of man's fallen mind, but on the reality of an almighty God who reveals Himself to us by grace. Christianity, too, depends on circular reasoning: we even begin and end with faith in God and His revelation. The purpose of this book (first published in 1967) is to define the nature of the opposing religious systems of thought, Christian creationism and Darwinism (in its various forms). It is a call to urge Christians to stand firm for Biblical six-day creationism as a fundamental aspect of their faith in the Creator.