Daniel 1:3-4 “The king brought young men whom to teach the language and literature of the Chaldeans.”
“Every child in America entering school at the age of 5 is insane because he comes to school with certain allegiances toward our founding fathers, toward his parents, toward a belief in a supernatural being, toward the sovereignty of this nation as a separate entity… its up to you teachers to make all of these sick children well by creating the international children of the future.”
Sounds like something you’d hear in a communist country like North Vietnam or North Korea. This is a quote from Chester M. Pierce, former Professor of Education and Psychiatry at Harvard University, in his April 1972 address to the Association for Childhood Education International. We are shocked when we hear of our teenagers and young adults walking away from their Christian upbringing. We continue to ignore the focused effort of our secular education system to actively and purposefully make this their goal.
Harvard Biology Professor Richard Lewontin, although openly critical of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution by natural selection, minces no words in 1997 when he declares why it is critical to continue teaching it in the classroom: “It is not that the methods and institutions of science compel us to accept a material explanation of the world but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive… Materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.” His point is that our atheist educators, to whom we trust our children, do not have faith in evolution because it is true, but because of their atheist commitment.
In his March 2011 article ‘Academic Hatred of Religious Parents’, National Review’s David French gives more evidence of academia’s focused efforts to “re-educate” our young people: “The late American philosopher Richard Rorty, in describing his assessment of the role of the university professor, wrote: ‘When we American college teachers encounter religious fundamentalists, we do not consider the possibility of reformulating our own practices of justification so as to give more weight to the authority of the Christian scriptures. Instead, we do our best to convince these students of the benefits of secularization.
The re-education imperative is one that he, ‘like most Americans who teach humanities or social science in colleges and universities, invoke when we try to arrange things so that students who enter as bigoted, homophobic, religious fundamentalists will leave college with views more like our own.’
Rorty explains to the parents of his students: ‘we are going to try to discredit you in the eyes of your children, to strip your fundamentalist religious community of dignity, to make your views seem silly rather than discussable.’
He says that ‘I think those students are lucky to find themselves under the benevolent domination of people like me, and to have escaped the grip of their frightening, vicious, dangerous parents.’”
This deconversion of our Christian youth, to overturn their belief in God, has been going on throughout history. Adolf Hitler once famously said in his 1920 book ‘Mein Kampf’’: “Whoever has the youth has the future.” In the Old Testament book of Daniel, after Babylon has defeated Israel, the King separates out their young adults: “King Nebuchadnezzar instructed to bring some of the children of Israel and some of the captured king of Israel’s descendants and some of the nobles, young men in whom there was no blemish but good-looking, gifted in all wisdom, possessing knowledge and quick to understand…” (Daniel 1:3-4).
The king understood that to assimilate a captured people group into the Babylonian culture, he must begin with their youth. He wanted to eliminate their Israeli worldview by immersing them into Babylonian culture. This re-education was done by placing the young Israelites in Babylonian schools: they were “to serve in the King’s palace, so they might be taught the language and literature of the Chaldeans” (Daniel 1:4).
The growing Socialist movement we are experiencing in our culture today, combined with the decline in Judeo-Christian beliefs, is the product of decades of secular, materialist, atheist teaching, even before Pierce’s 1972 speech. The focus of our secularized schools has been, and continues to be, deconversion.
How can the church of Jesus Christ in America stand up to the onslaught of secularization and socialism? We also must train and equip our young adults. The book of Daniel was written by a young adult named Daniel, who refused conform to the Babylonian culture:
Daniel purposed in his heart that he would not defile himself…
(Daniel 1:8)
Next week, we’ll learn how Daniel was used by the Lord in a godless culture.
The Evidence of Faith’s Substance – Article #388
FSE University 