"Worldview training for all the World"
........ Psalm 50:12

Premier Worldview® Center
                800-948-3101

The top 10 articles from Nehemiah Institute


America’s Worldview



By:
10/03/2016


The fountainhead of our miseries.

When one scans the fabric of America today and compares what is seen with the America developed by the Puritans and Pilgrims, and lived during the colonial era of the new nation, it begs the question: What happened?

We have gone from 85% church attendance 200 years ago to 25% today. In the process we have jettisoned fundamental principles of marriage, family, decency, self-governance and reverence of God.

It is our conviction that the primary sphere where we lost our way is education. In the early 60's we, in essence, told God, "Not welcome" in the classroom. Since then, many well-meaning Christian organizations have made attempts to restore our Judeo-Christian heritage. Organizations such as Moral Majority, Eagle Forum and Promise Keepers made valiant efforts to bring God back to America. However, their work primarily was an attempt to clean the river but failed to stop the filth at the fountainhead. Each passing year brought new and more filth to remove from the stream of life.

It seemed that almost no one paid attention to the source of pollution that was destroying marriages, families and reverence for God. That source, in our view, is the state-run public school system where academics is steadily being weakened at the expense of social engineering, especially in disciplines such as sex education and multi-culturalism. But this change in focus of public schools began much earlier, a hundred years earlier in fact.

Atheist John Dewey (1859-1952), signer of the Humanist Manifesto, was the chief architect of a secular school system with the intent of removing the “myth” of the existence of God and an inerrant Word of God (the Bible) from the classroom. The following statements are found the Humanist Manifesto II: We believe, however, that traditional dogmatic or authoritarian religions that place revelation, God, ritual, or creed above human needs and experience do a disservice to the human species. Salvationism, based on mere affirmation, still appears as harmful, diverting people with false hopes of heaven hereafter. Do we, as Christians, want our children schooled in a system with those foundations? John Dewey labored a lifetime in de-Christianizing America’s classroom. Unfortunately, the Church was looking in another direction.

Perhaps chief among Christian groups failing an opportunity to influence the Christian community in the area of education was Focus on the Family. No one had the ear of Christian families like Focus had. Yet, it was a rare FOF program to hear a call for Christian families to remove their children from the ever-weakening state school system and either enroll their children in Christian schools or home school them. This is not to say that every teacher and every administrator is working to undermine the Christian faith in the public school. No doubt many are working to be a witness for Christ, but the system as a whole, steered by the NEA and the Department of Education, in conjunction with text book publishers, is systematically working to further Dewey's humanistic pedagogical plan. 

In 2006 FOF released a major education project for churches called The Truth Project. It was well done, providing excellent biblical worldview understanding in several key areas of life including, Veritology: What is Truth?, Theology: Who is God?, Science: What is True? And History: Whose Story? The presentations were made by Del Tackett, VP- FOF.

Due to our work with the theme biblical worldview, I was invited to preview the course prior to its release and offer comments. I met with Mr. Tackett and the project manager for the Truth Project in 2005. There was little that I felt could be improved upon. But I asked the question, “Why no lesson on the sphere of Education?” While excellent historical overviews were given on each of the 12 subjects covered, there was virtually no instruction on the history of education in America or on the current status of schools. 

The answer I was given was: (paraphrase) Calling for our Christian audience to abandon the public school system would be difficult in that the great majority of our listeners have their children in public schools and many work in the school system. Dr. Dobson felt that such a call would be risky.

It is my view that Dr. Dobson made a mistake by being silent on this matter. The river of culture is now more polluted than ever and yet 85% of the Christian community still uses the state school system to educate their children. And yet study after study shows that upwards of 70% of youth from Christian homes attending public schools cease attending church after high school.

The Kingdom Seminar makes the argument that after 50 years of efforts by professing humanists to de-Christianize the classroom (and culture), it is time to walk away and educate our own.

In fact, why not work to educate their children too!