Government Schools Vs. Christianity   – Liberty Sentinel

Government indoctrination masquerading as “education” has deliberately waged war on biblical religion, and the fruit is devastating America and its children by turning them away from God and Truth.  

From chanting to the Aztec deities of cannibalism and human sacrifice in California to forcing children to denounce their “Christian privilege” in front of the class in North Carolina, government schools across America have become hotbeds of anti-Christian extremism. Highly controversial religious views and rituals from Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism, humanism, and even human-sacrificing paganism are now ubiquitous. Christianity, meanwhile, when it is mentioned at all, is denigrated and mocked. Welcome to America’s 21^st century public schools, where a full-on war against Christianity is the order of the day.  

Despite the myth of religious “neutrality” and “secular” schooling perpetuated by the government-school establishment and its apologists, all education is fundamentally religious in nature. That is just as true in government schools across the United States as it is in Islamic madrassas of Pakistan. The only question is what religion and what worldview are being taught? Parents and even pastors would be shocked to know the truth. But the facts are there for all to see, unless one chooses to be an ostrich.  

Education in America for the first 250 years was mostly private and home-based, and it was thoroughly saturated with Christianity. In fact, the very first education act ever passed in North America, the 1647 Old Deluder Satan Act in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, warned that one chief project of Satan was to keep men from knowledge of the Scriptures. Families and churches were largely responsible for schooling in those days, and everything typically revolved around the Bible. That foundation led to the freest and most prosperous nation in human history — a “shining city on a hill” where biblical principles reigned.  

Even though non-Christians and anti-Christians with communist leanings were primarily responsible for the government takeover of education in America beginning in the mid-1800s, there was a time when even government schools in America could have been arguably described as “Christian.” Children in public schools nationwide prayed, read the Bible, learned the Ten Commandments, used books that were heavy on Scripture, and were generally educated by teachers in a biblical worldview. Those days are long gone, though, with the final nails in the coffin coming from the Supreme Court in the early 1960s. More on that in a moment.  

But if the schools are not Christian, what religion are they actually teaching? The short answer is anything and everything except biblical religion.  

How Christianity Was Ousted  

The gradual replacement of Christianity in the public schools began early on in the history of government-run education. It started with Communist Utopian Robert Owen, the first serious advocate of a total government takeover of education in America. In Owen’s view, only government training of children in collectivism from a young age could produce people ready to dispense with private property and live for what he viewed as the greater good of the collective. After the failure of his communist “New Harmony” commune in Indiana, Owen formed what whistleblower Orestes Brownson described as a “secret society” modeled on the Carbonari to work toward that goal.  

On the surface, Brownson revealed (after repenting of his involvement in Owen’s secret society and trying to blow the whistle) that there were two primary objectives for this society. The first was convincing the public to support a government takeover of education. The second goal was to get men elected to the legislatures who would help advance that mission. But there was an even more ambitious goal as well: Setting up a national system of compulsory government schools that would exclude all religion. “The great object was to get rid of Christianity,” Brownson warned.  

Owen’s then-radical ideas, some of them similar to Plato’s ramblings thousands of years earlier, did not take root in the United States at first. But according to Owen’s autobiography, the Prussian ambassador took his essays advocating for government schools back to Prussia. From there, the Prussian ruler “so much approved” of these ideas that he ordered them adopted in his realm. Eventually, this statist Prussian education system would inspire Horace Mann, a Massachusetts Utopian who also rejected Christianity, to import it back into the United States.  

Among other goals, Mann wanted to get Bible out of education under the guise of stopping “sectarianism.” By turning the training of teachers over to government as well, he began introducing pseudo-science and quackery such as “phrenology” into classrooms across Massachusetts in place of biblical truths. He believed training children in government schools — rather than biblical religion — would “equalize all men” and render obsolete “nine tenths of the crimes in the penal code.” Of course, he could not have been more wrong.  

Although Mann was unsuccessful in completely excising the Scriptures from education in a nation that was so thoroughly Christian, Mann’s effort did lay the foundation for secular government “education” to eventually make great progress. After finishing his work in Massachusetts, he traveled America like a traveling evangelist, preaching the alleged good news of government education controlled by the state, for the benefit of the state.  

By the end of the 1800s, another anti-Christian Utopian, John Dewey, would land on the scene with a goal of taking over the educational architecture that Mann had helped put in place. Dewey, who visited the Soviet Union and wrote glowing reports about the supposed wonders of communism, is today almost universally regarded as the founding father of America’s government school system. Aside from his political and economic views, his “religious” views were at the center of his efforts.  

Backed by Rockefeller money, Dewey was an avid foe of Christianity. In fact, he was one of the authors and signers of one of the most brazen public attacks on the Bible of the early 20^th century. Dubbed the Humanist Manifesto, it was a total assault on Scripture, starting with the very first words. “Religious humanists regard the universe as self-existing and not created,” Dewey and his cohorts wrote in the first tenet of the manifesto. Contrast that with the first words in the Bible, Genesis 1:1: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” Both cannot be true.   

Humanism is basically a retread of the satanic Genesis 3:5 lie that man can be his own god. But even for the non-religious, Dewey’s religious views have profound implications. Consider that America’s Founding Fathers viewed as a “self-evident” truth that all men were “created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” That was not a religious statement, but a summation of a self-evident truth. And yet, if children are indoctrinated to believe in Dewey’s humanist religion, there can be no God-given rights, because there is no God to grant any rights. There are also no objective and eternal moral standards.   

Beyond that, much of Dewey’s manifesto reads like warmed over Communist Party propaganda, blasting the “profit motive” while calling for a “radical change in methods, controls, and motives.” “A socialized and cooperative economic order must be established to the end that the equitable distribution of the means of life be possible,” the manifesto continued, sounding just like the endless parade of mass-murdering monsters who butchered tens of millions of innocent people in the 20^th century.   

Another Dewey cohort involved with the manifesto was Charles Francis Potter. And like Dewey, he recognized the critical role government “education” would play in propagating the new religion. “Education is thus a most powerful ally of humanism, and every American school is a school of humanism,” Potter wrote in his 1930 book Humanism: A New Religion. “What can a theistic Sunday school’s meeting for an hour once a week and teaching only a fraction of the children do to stem the tide of the five-day program of humanistic teaching?”  

Contemporary humanists hold the same view of education. Writing in “The Humanist” magazine in the January-February 1983 issue, John Dunphy echoed Potter. “The battle for humankind’s future must be waged and won in the public school classroom by teachers who correctly perceive their role as the proselytizers of a new faith,” he argued. “The classroom must and will become an arena of conflict between the old and the new — the rotting corpse of Christianity, together with its adjacent evils and misery, and the new faith of humanism.”  

Even though humanists were proudly declaring that their views were a religion, the Supreme Court practically established their religion as the national religion of the United States. In 1962, the high court ruled against a non-denominational prayer used in New York in the infamous Engel V. Vitale case. The prayer simply acknowledged dependence on God and asked His blessings on parents, teachers, and America. The following year, the Warren court went even further, banning the Bible itself in Abington School District v. Schempp.  

According to the court, the First Amendment, which prohibited Congress from passing laws respecting an establishment of religion, required the bans on prayer and the Bible. The fact that such a nonsensical argument could even be made offers valuable evidence about how far the dumbing down had already proceeded by the early 1960s. In reality, when the First Amendment was written and ratified, numerous states had established churches. The idea that it was meant to prevent prayer or Bible reading at school is simply preposterous.  

At least one judge, Justice Potter Stewart, however, had the foresight to warn about what was really happening. “A refusal to permit religious exercises thus is seen, not as the realization of state neutrality, but rather as the establishment of a religion of secularism,” warned Justice Stewart in his 1963 dissent against the majority opinion holding that Bible reading in school was somehow “unconstitutional.” He also noted how ironic it was that the First Amendment, intended to protect states’ rights to “go their own way” on religion, “should now have become a restriction upon their autonomy.”  

In short, the Supreme Court did exactly what Congress was banned by the First Amendment from doing — it established Dewey’s humanism as the national religion. By doing that, it forced parents to pay taxes to indoctrinate their children in compulsory government “schools” with this dangerous false religion, a belief system that is completely at odds with every founding principle of America. The fruit is now obvious.   

At the same time, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) was similarly promoting humanism in education, following the lead of its first leader, Julian Huxley, who served as the first president of the British Humanist Association. Huxley was also a proud globalist and eugenicist, even serving as the president of the British Eugenics Society from 1959-1962. The UN continues to proudly advocate that government schools shape the “spirituality” of children — against biblical views.  

Assault on the Church  

Polling data show the anti-Christian indoctrination of government schools has been incredibly successful. As recently as the 1970s, well over 90 percent of Americans still described themselves as Protestant or Catholic Christians. According to a survey by Pew Research, however, millennials have now become the first generation in American history where self-described Christians are officially in the minority. Today, less than two thirds of Americans describe themselves as Christian when asked, and the numbers are still plummeting. An astonishing 70 percent of millennials also revealed in a poll commissioned by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation that they would vote for socialists going forward.  

When looking at worldview, Arizona Christian University Cultural Research Center chief George Barna just released a study showing that only 6 percent of Americans hold a biblical worldview. About 88 percent hold views described as “syncretism,” said Barna defined as a “disparate, irreconcilable collection of beliefs and behaviors that define people’s lives.” Other worldviews identified by Barna include secular humanism, postmodernism, moralistic therapeutic deism, nihilism, Eastern Mysticism and Marxism (and the related “Critical Race Theory”.)  

Absent major changes in the way Americans are educated, or direct intervention by God, the proportion of Christians in the U.S. population will continue to dwindle further.  

The reason for this rapid decline in Christianity, which dominated American life for centuries, is simple: Parents handed their children over to anti-Christian indoctrination centers run by government. Indeed, a relatively recent report from the American Enterprise Institute confirms this. The report, headlined “Promise and Peril: The History of American Religiosity and Its Recent Decline,” examines the other oft-cited culprits such as urbanization, more education, the progress of “science,” more welfare spending, and so on. But it concludes that those were not to blame. Instead, the thorough de-Christianization of America and the rest of the Western world is due to almost entirely to public education.  

Indeed, the historical record shows that the more tax money a secular government spends on “education,” the more quickly and completely the public turns away from God. “Childhood religiosity was heavily affected by government spending on education,” wrote AEI researcher Lyman Stone in his report, perhaps stating the obvious. “Thus, while more educated people were not less religious, societies that spent more public money on education were less religious… It is not educational attainment per se that reduces religiosity, but government control of education.”  

According to Lyman, who cites many other researchers and studies in the report, secularized education provided by government that banishes any mention of God “can explain nearly the totality of change in religiosity.” As he put it, “increasingly secularized government control of education … can account for virtually the entire increase in secularization around the developed world.”  

This is exactly what Scripture warns of repeatedly. “Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it,” reads Proverbs 22:6. Jesus warned in Luke 6:40, “A disciple is not above his teacher, but everyone when he is fully trained will be like his teacher.” And yet American Christians continued to send their children to anti-Christian government schools where they know that even Christian teachers are under a total gag order when it comes to mentioning God. Under the guise of having their children be “salt and light,” they are sending their untrained boys and girls to be discipled by haters of God as child soldiers in a raging spiritual war.  

Anything But Biblical Religion  

Today, religious humanism still permeates the schools. But so do occultism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and many other alien religions that are being forced on students nationwide. Only Judeo-Christian moral principles, it seems, are not welcome in government classrooms.  

In April, for instance, the California State Board of Education voted unanimously to approve a new “ethnic studies model curriculum.” Among other abominations, elementary-school children are ordered to literally chant to the demonic Aztec deities of human sacrifice, cannibalism, and war. As part of the “In Lak Ech Affirmation,” the program instructs teachers to lead young children in a “community chant” to the Aztec gods Tezkatlipoka and Huitzilopochtli, the “god of war” to whom hundreds of thousands of human sacrifices were offered.  

The chanting allegedly will give the youngsters the power to become “warriors for social justice,” as well as “healing epistemologies,” “critical consciousness,” and a “revolutionary spirit,” the text promises. One of the key authors behind the program argued in a book that after decolonization of the Americas there should be a “counter-genocide” against “white Christians” who supposedly perpetrated “deicide” against the Aztec gods.  

Paganism is increasingly being normalized nationwide. In keeping with the religious views of Black Lives Matter co-founders such as Alicia Garza and Patrisse Cullors, who claim to communicate with and even offer sacrifices to “ancestor spirits,” BLM education programs have promoted similar rituals. A BLM training course for teachers caught on video from Howard University, for instance, featured the trainers teaching the teachers to have children chant to their “ancestors.” After the chanting, the BLM trainers even asked participants to summon the “spirits” of their ancestors into the classroom. The Bible vehemently condemns such practices and even warns that those “spirits” are actually demons.  

Eastern paganism is also becoming increasingly popular in government schools. All over America, children are being forced to participate in Yoga rituals and “Transdendental Meditation.” Both of those activities come from Hinduism, a religion known for worshiping an enormous array of deities and even for offering human sacrifices to those supposed gods. And both are “gateways” to even more alarming New Age practices, experts say. Aside from Alabama, which banned Yoga and Hinduism in schools, such religious rituals have become commonplace in government “education.”  

The Chicago Tribune highlighted some of these practices in Chicago public schools in July of 2019. According to students subjected and forced to participate in the rituals, candles and incense were lit, the windows were closed, everybody was given flowers, instructors “chanted in a foreign language,” and then “threw rice, seasonings, and oranges in a pan in front of a picture of a man.” Students were also told to place flowers in a pan. The ritual even involved a “secret mantra,” students were quoted as saying.  

New Age Buddhism has also invaded classrooms nationwide under the guise of “meditation” techniques and “mindfulness” education. In fact, peddlers of these programs openly boast of teaching this supposedly “secularized” Buddhism to government-schooled children across America. In a video on “Mindfulness in Education” by expert Amy Burke, the very first quote comes from an Indian guru and so-called “World Teacher” by the name of “Jiddu Krishnamurti,” from his book “Education and the Significance of Life.”  

The decision to quote this particular character guru offers significant insight into what this is all about. This guru, who was adopted and trained by the head of a Luciferian cult known as the “Theosophical Society,” was blunt about his pagan agenda. “You want to have your own gods – new gods instead of the old, new religions instead of the old, new forms instead of the old – all equally valueless, all barriers, all limitations, all crutches,” Krishnamurti explained.  

Islam is very popular in government classrooms too. All over the country, including some of the most conservative states in the union such as West Virginia and Tennessee, government schools have been caught forcing children in middle school or before to declare their submission to the Islamic deity Allah. It is part of an exercise that has surfaced nationwide in which students are instructed to write and speak the Islamic conversion prayer known as the “shahada,” in which they declare that Allah is the true deity and that Mohamed is his messenger. As far back as 2015, thousands of Tennessee parents complained that their children were forced to write that Allah was the only true deity.  

A document funded by the U.S. Department of Education on how to excise alleged “Christian privilege” from America’s public schools and “Empowering Muslim Identities” offers some troubling insight. One recommendation: “Infuse curriculum and school activities with intellectual traditions that originate in the Muslim World.” The document also called for “annual equity audits” to ensure compliance. From Michigan to Texas, as part of these efforts, teachers have been forced by their districts to sit through days of Islamic indoctrination from highly paid Muslim activists during which Islam is praised and Christianity demonized, lawsuits show.  

Interestingly, at least several of the key creators of education “standards” and curricula in the United States and worldwide have been deeply involved with the occult. For instance, Dr. Shirley McCune, who helped begin the process of formal federalization of education under the George H.W. Bush administration, was a co-author of the book “The Light Shall Set You Free.” Among other elements, the book includes insight from supposed spiritual entities dubbed “Ascended Masters.” Supposedly all “beings” will need this insight to eventually enter what is referred to as the “Fifth Dimension.”  

In a speech to the nation’s governors at a 1989 education summit convened by then-President Bush, McCune, who was under contract with the U.S. Department of Education, noted that there was an ongoing “total restructuring of our society.” At the forefront of bringing in the changes, she said, were public schools, boasting of the “social change function of schools” through what she described as “anticipatory socialization.”  

Another key occultist whose ramblings inspired some of the “spiritual” developments being manifested in education today was Alice Bailey, the founder of the Lucifer Publishing Company (now renamed Lucius Trust). UN Assistant Secretary General Robert Muller, who wrote the “World Core Curriculum” for UNESCO that he said should be taught in every school on the planet, was a fervent disciple of Bailey. In fact, in the forward to the Teachers’ Manual of the World Core Curriculum, Muller admitted that his educational philosophy was based on the teaching of Bailey and her “Ascended Master” Djwal Khul also known as “The Tibetan.”  

Despite being almost entirely unknown by normal people, Bailey and her “Ascended Masters” come up again and again in the world of education. Consider, for instance, the “Social-Emotional Learning” (SEL) craze — basically a new toolkit for indoctrinating children with radical leftwing ideology — that has infected every public school and even many private schools in recent years.   

According to the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL), the leading outfits promoting SEL, the very idea for SEL came out of meetings at the Fetzer Institute. That shadowy “New Age” organization was created by John Fetzer, a fervent devotee of Bailey who regularly hosted groups at his institute to recite Bailey’s “Great Invocation” prayer supposedly given to her by her Ascended Masters.  

Added to this mix of paganism and false religion are strategies specifically designed to break down children’s existing views. One of the key tools on this front, known as “Values Clarification,” has been used by government schools since the 1960s to undermine children’s belief in right and wrong. Imagine, the children are told, being on a sinking ship, and then 11 people climb into a life raft meant for 10: a doctor, a lawyer, a teacher, and so on. “Which one would you throw overboard to save the rest of the passengers?” the children are asked.   

The obvious answer would be that instead of killing somebody, each capable person could take a turn swimming alongside the raft until rescuers arrive. But naïve children, trapped in the exercise, begin to think — because they are led to do so — that their parents, their pastor, and their Bible must all be wrong. Morality and ethics, they conclude, depend on the situation. This shatters a child’s worldview and drives them into moral relativism almost immediately, while discrediting their parents and the Bible forever.   

What the Bible and church leaders have said  

All of what is taking place in government schools today is a radical departure from the ubiquitous Christian education that reigned in America from the early 1600s until the mid 1800s. In fact, America’s descent into full-blown paganism and even child sacrifice (abortion) has eerie parallels with ancient Israel, a nation that knew God but then regularly went “whoring” after other gods and even began sacrificing its children to demons. Inevitably, it was a precursor to judgment and disaster for ancient Israel. A similar fate awaits America absent a dramatic course correction.   

Data compiled by the Nehemiah Institute since the late 1980s on the worldview of children from Christian homes is astounding. Using the “PEERS” test, which measures worldview in “Politics, Economics , Education, Religion and Social issues,” the Institute classifies people into one of four categories. These include Biblical Theism, Moderate Christian, Secularism and Socialism. The test has been taken by around 125,000 youth from Christian families who either attend Christian school, government school, or are educated at home.   

Homeschoolers and those attending Christian school often emerge with a biblical worldview. However, more than 90 percent of those in government schools end up in the lower end of secularism or even full-blown socialism — despite being involved in church and youth groups. “The great danger for Christian families in choosing to send their children to state-run secular-based schools is having their youth graduate with statist views which will make the Christian faith seem irrelevant if not hostile, to ‘proper’ polices regarding the five PEERS spheres of life,” warned Dan Smithwick, president of the Nehemiah Institute.  

“It is my contention that it is precisely the statist education system which has resulted in over two-thirds of youth from Christian homes leaving church within one year of graduating from high school,” he told The New American magazine. “Church is simply not valued. It is time for church leaders and Christian parents to make decisions for assuming full responsibility and control of education for k-12 education of their children.”  

Indeed, the Bible places the responsibility over the education of children squarely on parents—not Caesar. In Deuteronomy, for instance, parents are instructed to teach God’s law to their children all the time, not just when the children are not being discipled by Caesar. In Ephesians 6:4, God tells fathers — not Caesar — to bring up their children in the discipline and admonition of the Lord. And in Mark 12:17, Jesus says that people should give to Caesar the things that are his, and to God the things that are Hiss. Do your children belong to Caesar?   

From various popes to Martin Luther and other reformers going all the way back to the early Church fathers, all have emphasized clearly the role of parents and the church in education. Luther warned that schools that did not diligently teach the Scriptures would be “great gates of hell.” Pope Pious XI, meanwhile, warned that any “education” that rejects or neglects with God’s help the right formation of the Christian life was “false and full of error.”  

The Bible also speaks clearly on what education should look like. For instance, Proverbs informs readers that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, and the beginning of wisdom. And yet, the Lord cannot even be mentioned in a government school. Put simply, if one believes the Bible, it follows that there will be no genuine knowledge or wisdom in a government school.   

Ultimately, there are only two options for those who believe in the Bible: True education or false education. In fact, in two of the Gospel accounts, Jesus puts an even finer point on it: “He that is not with me is against me.” (Matt 12:30) Nobody today would or could seriously argue that the schools today are with God. That leaves only one option. Parents and pastors: You can only have one master. Decide this day whom you will serve.