The events of a week ago today were a terrible tragedy.
The nation is rightly aroused, and we need to take effective action. We mourn
for the slain and we pray for their families. Yet having said that, evaluated as
a long-term threat and in numbers of lives destroyed,
the tragedy I want to discuss with you dwarfs, literally dwarfs, the attacks on
the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon.
We are losing our children. Research indicates that
70% of teens who are involved in a church youth group will stop attending church
within two years of their high school graduation. Think about that statement. It
addresses only teenagers who attend church and participate in the youth group.
What does that suggest about those teens who may attend church but do not take
part in the youth group, or who do not go to church at all?
In a talk at Southwestern Seminary Josh McDowell noted that
less than 1/3 of today's youth attend church. If he is right and 67% do not go
to church and then we lose 70% of those who do, that means that within two years
of finishing high school only 10% of young Americans will attend church.
We are losing our youth. Why is this happening? Many strands
go into weaving a tapestry, and surely there are many reasons this tragic
departure of our youth from Christ is taking place. However, I believe the
evidence clearly indicates that the primary reasons are, first, our failure as
Christian parents and churches and, second, the intentional, persistent, and
highly effective effort by anti-theists to use public schools to lead children
away from their parents and from the church.
A Bit of History— About 1830 a group of wealthy
Unitarians in Boston became unhappy with the locally controlled, parent-run,
church-influenced schools then prevalent. They decided to try to establish a
system of state-run, secular schools. They sent two young scholars abroad to
study the main European school systems in order to decide which system to use as
a model. After a two-year study the team recommended and their sponsors adopted
the Prussian system as their model. Why? Because in that system the state had
complete control, parents had no influence, and children were entered at the
earliest age.
With that decision made, the group designed a three part
plan: (1) compulsory attendance, (2) a state teacher's college degree
prerequisite to certification as a teacher, and (3) state owned and operated
schools. This was the plan they proposed to the Massachusetts legislature.
Among themselves they agreed that if they could not at first
get all three elements approved, the most important part was the required
teacher's college. This was their priority because they agreed that “If we
teach them what to teach, they will teach what they have been taught.”
The first year's cost to establish the teacher's college was
$50,000. The Massachusetts legislature balked, saying the cost was too high. So
the wealthy Unitarians made them an offer they could not refuse; they put up
$25,000 if the state would match it. They did, and in 1837 the first state
public school system in the United States was established. Soon other states
followed suit.
The Philosophical Foundation of Governmental Schools— Just 14 years
after the Massachusetts state school system was established, Auguste Comte wrote
the following in his System of Positive Polity (vol. I, 1851, pp. 35-6):
“The object of our philosophy is to direct the spiritual reorganization of the
civilized world. ... [W]e may begin at once to construct that system of morality
under which the final regeneration of Humanity will proceed.”
His “spiritual reorganization” was a long-term plan, and
it has been steadily progressing right up till today. And you will recall that
Darwin's great mythology, Origin of Species, was published in 1859.
Of course Comte was not alone in this vision of a future without God, of
humanity without individuality, of rule by the self-defined most capable over
the less capable. In 1918 Benjamin Kidd published in London a book, The
Science of Power. On page 309 he wrote: “Oh you blind leaders who seek to
convert the world by labored disputations. Step out of the way or the world must
fling you aside. GIVE US THE YOUNG. GIVE US THE YOUNG and we will create a new
mind and a new earth in a single generation.”
Ten years later in 1928 Ross L. Finney, Ph. D., published in
the United States A Sociological Philosophy of Education. On page 118
Finney wrote, “Everything depends on passing out the expert opinions of the
social scientists to the masses of the people; and the schools, particularly the
high schools, are the only adequate agency available for this function.”
And on page 117 he had just said, “It is the business of
teachers to run not merely the school, but the world; and the world will never
be truly civilized until they assume that responsibility.”
Another interesting quote comes from The Reconstruction of
Religion by Charles A. Ellwood, Ph. D., Professor of Sociology, University
Of Missouri, 1923, page 177: “Human institutions, sociology shows, are in
every case learned adjustments. As such, they can be modified provided we can
obtain control of the learning process.”
And the American Humanist Association understands the
importance of capturing the children for they have written: “In order to
capture this nation, one has to totally remove moral and spiritual values and
absolutes from the thinking of the child. The child has to think that there is
no standard of right and wrong, that truth is relative, and that diversity is
the only absolute to be gained.”
Everyone has a worldview, a perspective of the world around him. [It is] a
framework within which you place events and individuals, which determines your
values, which values in turn guide your actions and reactions to events and
people.
Although there are many worldviews designated by many exotic
or not so exotic terms, they all boil down to just two types: your worldview
will be man-centered or God-centered.
We are all familiar with Deuteronomy 6:7-9: “And thou shalt
teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou
sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest
down, and when thou risest up. And thou shalt bind them for a sign upon thine
hand, and they shall be as frontlets between thine eyes. And thou shalt write
them upon the posts of thy house, and on thy gates.”
Yet we seem to have forgotten or ignored God's commands about
education:
Most Southern Baptists and most Southern Baptist churches are
failing to obey God's commands regarding our children. Yes, we take them to
Sunday worship and Sunday School. Yes, they may also attend AWANAs or another
church-centered youth program. They may even have Bible study at home.
But two or three hours on Sunday and 20 minutes or so of
Bible study at home are overpowered by 30 or more hours a week in anti-Christian
government schools and the constant pagan media bombardment which may add up to
another 10, 20, 30, or more hours per week.
Now of course many schoolteachers are Christians. And may God
bless them as they do what they can. But they are strictly limited by school
policy, humanist textbooks, programs teaching the validity of homosexuality, “make
up your own minds” approaches to morality, “safe sex” instruction, and on
and on.
