Humanism and public education

By Dr. Samuel L. Blumenfeld

Back in 1849, when the organized Protestants of Massachusetts debated whether or not to support the public school movement, which was then being strongly promoted by the Unitarians, they decided in favor of support, but with some very thoughtful reservations.

"The benefits of this system, in offering instruction to all, are so many and so great that its religious deficiencies -- especially since they can be otherwise supplied -- do not seem to be a sufficient reason for abandoning it, and adopting in place of it a system of denominational parochial schools," they wrote.

"If after a full and faithful experiment, it should at last be seen that fidelity to the religious interests of our children forbids a further patronage of the system, we can unite with the Evangelical Christians in the establishment of private schools, in which more full doctrinal religious instruction may be possible."

No one can doubt that for the last 150 years the public schools have had that full and faithful experiment, and that the spiritual effect on Christian children has been disastrous. In several schools around the country, Christian children have even been murdered by fellow students possessed by satanic beliefs. How much worse can it get?

In fact, during the last 20 years, thousands of Christian parents, without knowledge of the debates that took place in 1849, have removed their children from the public schools and have either placed them in private Christian schools or are home-schooling them. They have done this despite the fact that many well-known Christian leaders have not yet sounded the alarm and, in many instances, have urged Christians to stay in the public schools and work to reform them.

But the simple fact is that the present government education system has as its foundation an anti-Christian philosophy known as Secular Humanism. All one has to do to confirm this is read the two Humanist Manifestos. The first, written in 1933 by young Unitarian ministers, asserted that the spiritual power of orthodox religion was in decline and that it should be replaced by a rational, man-centered, non-theistic religion.

"Humanism asserts that the nature of the universe depicted by modern science makes unacceptable any supernatural or cosmic guarantees of human values," they wrote. "Religious humanism considers the complete realization of human personality to be the end of man's life and seeks its development and fulfillment in the here and now. ...

"Religious humanism maintains that all associations and institutions exist for the fulfillment of human life. The intelligent evaluation, transformation, control, and direction of such associations and institutions with a view to the enhancement of human life is the purpose and program of humanism. Certainly religious institutions, their ritualistic forms, ecclesiastical methods, and communal activities must be reconstituted as rapidly as experience allows, in order to function effectively in the modern world."

In other words, humanism is the only religion in America that has as its purpose and program the reconstitution of the institutions, rituals, and ecclesiastical methods of other religions. This is an overt declaration of war against biblical religion.

Forty years later, Humanist Manifesto II stated, "As non-theists, we begin with humans not God, nature not deity. We can discover no divine purpose or providence for the human species. ... No deity will save us, we must save ourselves."

In the January/February 1983 issue of The Humanist magazine, a young scholar by the name of John J. Dunphy expressed the aim of humanists in education with these very blunt words:

"I am convinced that 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: a religion of humanity that recognizes and respects that spark of what theologians call divinity in every human being. These teachers must embody the same selfless dedication as the most rabid fundamentalist preachers, for they will be ministers of another sort, utilizing a classroom instead of a pulpit to convey humanist values in whatever subject they teach, regardless of educational level -- preschool day care or large state university. 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, resplendent in its promise of a world in which the never-realized Christian ideal of "love thy neighbor" will finally be achieved."

Mr. Dunphy did Christian parents a great service by telling them exactly what humanists want to accomplish in the public schools. Humanists are forever paying lip service in asserting the separation of church and state when it comes to keeping Christianity out of the schools. But when it comes to humanism, they are strangely silent. As a result, humanism has become the establishment religion in our schools, and no one in the federal government or the Congress has seen fit to do anything about it.

Obviously, from a Christian point of view, the experiment of government education has been a colossal failure. In place of God, the public schools offer evolution, multiculturalism, transcendental meditation, situational ethics, drug education, death education, sex education, sensitivity training, gay studies, condoms, whole language, behaviorism, magic circles, and other humanist teachings.

These programs are creating the new nihilists, the amoral barbarians and the followers of Satan that are devastating the lives of thousands of families. There is hardly a Christian family that has not had to cope with a child lost to drugs, promiscuity, abortion, venereal disease, and pure unadulterated devil worship.

What will it take for the majority of Christian parents to realize that the public schools have become a spiritual danger for their children? Those Christian children who are strong in their faith still have to contend with the Satanists among the student body who may wish to harm them. The parents at Columbine could not conceive of the notion that perfectly normal American kids could become murderers, killing for the sake of pleasing Satan. That sort of stuff is supposed to belong in horror movies, not in middleclass, suburban families.

This is something that has never happened before in America, and it is the result of a spiritual disease called moral relativism which teaches that everyone is entitled to their beliefs, no matter how weird or anti-social, and that no one can judge anyone or anything else. That is why no one at Columbine High felt morally obligated to stop the future killers from expressing their views as wildly and openly as they wished. No one at Columbine took them seriously, because no one there believed that the pure power of evil could take hold of the lives of normal kids.

The lesson is painfully simple: When a nation abandons moral absolutes, it opens the door to unbridled evil.