Indoctrinate, Don’t Educate

Why is it that as we become increasingly modern, have more access to information than ever before, the number of Americans who rather dramatically reject clear science, from man-induced greenhouse global warming to the fact that the world was not created 10,000 years ago as suggested from the Old Testament, is exploding? Polarization is at every level, but the biggest American “us” versus “them” appears in driven Evangelicals versus down and dirty secularists. We are a Christian nation that tolerates Jews (promulgating Armageddon requires this “tolerant” exception), they tell us. Everyone else is unacceptable “other.” Immigrants are extreme and unacceptable “other.” Why is this happening? Where do so many people get such amazingly distorted views? Our public schools?

First, these views are focused almost entirely in areas with strong rural values. Second, they emanate from groups who simply do not trust anyone who does not share their extreme Evangelical views and most certainly do not trust their children to public schools where “theories” inconsistent with their Biblical interpretations are taught. The modern religious right was born in a nascent movement via home schooling, which in turn has prompted religious-affiliated schools to push to the right in order to keep more students with mistrusting Evangelical parents. Sure, there’s lots of home schooling for other reasons, but the tremendous growth in this movement has been motivated heavily by the Evangelical movement.

As home-schoolers push against state certification requirements and testing, with increasing success, to many, education has morphed into indoctrination. The result is a rather intolerant, black and white, good (us) versus evil (everyone else) view of the earth. The commitment to a “true vision” of God’s mandate is a single path, one true way, and anything that deviates from that path is wrong and completely unacceptable. No compromise is possible from this perception of God’s truth. Not in the state assembly, the House of Representatives or the Senate. No matter the consequences, stay the true course.

Frank Schaeffer grew up as Evangelical home-schooling accelerated in the 1970s and 80s to the levels we are experiencing today. That was his early education. But over time, Frank began to learn that what he was exposed to was not education; he was being drawn into a very harsh, narrow and judgmental view of the universe. His father was an Evangelical preacher, and his world was very much an “us” versus “them” universe. As he opened to the empirical world, where provable facts determine knowledge and wisdom, he saw the total inconsistency between what he spent his life to date learning… and reality.

Writing for the January 20^th Salon.com, Frank explains that today’s Tea Party is the ultimate expression of that movement, away from facts into blind-faith religious indoctrination. “[B]elieve me when I tell you that the Evangelical schools and home school movement were, by design, founded to undermine a secular and free vision of America and replace it by stealth with a form of theocracy.

“This happened because Evangelical home-schoolers were demanding ever-greater levels of ‘separation’ from what they regarded as the Evil Secular World. It wasn’t enough just to reject the public schools. How could the Christian parent be sure that even the Evangelical schools were sufficiently pure? And so the Christian schools radicalized in order to not appear to be ‘compromising’ with the world in the eyes of increasingly frightened and angry parents…

“The Evangelical home school movement was really founded by two people: Rousas Rushdoony, the extremist theologian, and Mary Pride, the ‘mother’ of fundamentalist home-schoolers. I knew them both well… Until Rushdoony, founder and late president of the Chalcedon Foundation, began writing in the 1960s, most American fundamentalists (including my parents) didn’t try to apply biblical laws about capital punishment for homosexuality to the United States. Even the most conservative Evangelicals said they were ‘New Testament Christians.’ In other words, they believed that after the coming of Jesus, the harsher bits of the Bible had been (at least to some extent) transformed by the ‘New Covenant’ of Jesus’ ‘Law of Love.’” Schaefer in Salon.com

Indeed homosexuality, gay marriage, abortions, recognizing women’s equality in the mainstream workplace, banning school prayer, teaching evolution and not accepting Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior were morally reprehensible, and any government that did not adhere to their Evangelical views was evil incarnate. There is no freedom of religion, and the Second Amendment absolutely allows Americans to have as many weapons as they want and to use them to take back America from non-believers. It’s not particularly subtle if you read what they write and freely publish everywhere.

“Ironically, at the very same time as Evangelicals like Dad, Mary Pride and I were thrusting ourselves into bare-knuckle politics, we were also retreating to what amounted to virtual walled compounds. In other words we lashed out at ‘godless America’ and demanded political change—say, the reintroduction of prayer into public schools—and yet also urged our followers to pull their own children out of the public schools and home-school them.

“The rejection of public schools by Evangelical Protestants was a harbinger of virtual civil war carried on by other means. Protestants had once been the public schools’ most ardent defenders. For instance, in the 1840s when Roman Catholics asked for tax relief for their private schools, Protestants said no and stood against anything they thought might undermine the public schools that they believed were the backbone of moral virtue, community spirit and egalitarian good citizenship.

“New Evangelical universities and even new law schools appeared, seemingly overnight, with a clearly defined mission to ‘take back’ each and every profession—including law and politics—‘for Christ.’ For instance, Liberty University’s Law School was a dream come true for my old friend Jerry Falwell, who (when I was speaking at his school in 1983 to the entire student body for the second time) gleefully told me of his vision for Liberty’s programs: ‘Frank, we’re going to train a new generation of judges to change America!’ This was the same Jerry Falwell who wrote in ‘America Can Be Saved,’ ‘I hope I live to see the day when, as in the early days of our country, we won’t have any public schools.’

“Recently, Gordon College asked President Obama to exempt them from laws protecting gay civil rights. To understand why the old-fashioned conservative mantra ‘Big government doesn’t work,’ the newly radicalized Evangelicals (and their Roman Catholic co-belligerents) added, ‘The U.S. government is evil!’ And the very same community—Protestant American Evangelicals—who had once been the bedrock supporters of public education, and voted for such moderate and reasonable men as President Dwight Eisenhower, became the enemies of not only the public schools but also of anything in the (nonmilitary) public sphere ‘run by the government.’

“In the minds of Evangelicals, they were re-creating the Puritan’s self-exile from England by looking for a purer and better place, this time not a geographical ‘place’ but a sanctuary within their minds (and in inward-looking schools and churches) undisturbed by facts. Like the Puritans, the post-Roe Evangelicals (and many other conservative Christians) withdrew from the mainstream not because they were forced to but because the society around them was, in their view, fatally sinful and, worse, addicted to facts rather than to faith. And yet having ‘dropped out’ (to use a 1960s phrase), the Evangelicals nevertheless kept on demanding that regarding ‘moral’ and ‘family’ matters the society they’d renounced nonetheless had to conform to their beliefs. ” Schaefer in Salon.com

When the wealthy realized that they could never convince enough Americans to vote against their own economic interests (lower taxes and less regulation for the rich at the expense of the vast majority) – evidenced by the defeat of fiscal conservative GOP candidate, Barry Goldwater, in 1964 – and knowing that unless they could defeat the Democratic political machine that controlled everything in the South, they had to find a bigger power. A light bulb went off. It was staring them in the face. The Evangelical church!

So they usurped that religious fever, and slowly blended a belief that regulations and taxes were part of that inherent evil with social conservatism. It worked beyond their wildest dreams… so well, that today they are dealing with a faction of uber-social conservatives who now seem to be driving the GOP wagon. Compromise is gone. It’s their way or the highway.

However, it’s looking as if the Republican Party now faces some irreconcilable differences within its own ranks, suggesting a big split may be down the road. Moderate House Republicans are beginning to rebel against what they see as Tea Party-placating anti-woman, harsh-remedy anti-abortion bills and exceptionally limiting and anti-Latino immigration bills, forcing a pull-back from these extreme positions in recent legislation passed by the new House. The mega-wealthy faction will appease the extremists just to get their taxes cut and regulations banished. They don’t care. They’ll pass anything to protect their wealth, damn the consequences.

Schaeffer brings it home: “The Evangelical foot soldiers never realized that the logic of their ‘stand’ against government had played into the hands of people who never cared about human lives beyond the fact that people could be sold products. By the 21st century, people were still out in the rain holding an ‘Abortion Is Murder!’ sign in Peoria and/or standing in line all night in a mall in Kansas City to buy a book by Sarah Palin and have it signed. But it was the denizens of the corner offices at Goldman Sachs, the News Corp., Exxon and Halliburton who were laughing. As for the likes of the Quiverfull people [the Quiverfull Movement was an Evangelical group dedicated to early marriage and huge families] — the Koch brothers weren’t having babies or not educating their daughters … but they found the religious right useful.

“And that is what the Koch brothers know and most Americans don’t: the religious right have been useful pawns. And that is why there is a Republican majority in both houses of government: They have tapped into the energy of the religious right and their hatred of ‘sinful’ America exemplified by the paranoia of the home-schoolers. Taken together the GOP and the religious right are still fighting a religious war against their own country.” Salon.com.

In the secular world, people with such astounding “irreconcilable differences” get a divorce. In this tough world of “us” versus “evil,” where compromise is dead, how does a nation divorce within such conflicting constituencies? Will there be enough of a counter movement to reverse this horrific polarization… or is this just the beginning of the end of the United States of America. Will the 2020 Census, pulling in more urban modernists, marginalize this movement and provoke a new revolution? Or will there be a reunion of Americans with each other with emotions softening over time?

I’m Peter Dekom, and in the great cycles of history, can such extreme movements be counted on to the fade away or must the United States splinter violently first?