God has ordained various institutions in society: the family, the Church and the State. The wise person wants to honour the things God has designed and made, to ensure he’s in harmony with God’s plan for all of creation and His people. As Gamaliel advised (Acts 5:38-39), the wise person doesn’t want to end up fighting against God.

But life gets challenging when institutions refuse to acknowledge the God-ordained limits on their authority. This has been a common thing historically.

Pharoah believed he was a god, and could take innocent lives. He told the Hebrew midwives, “when you are helping the Hebrew women to give birth and see them upon the birthstool, if it is a son, then you shall put him to death; but if it is a daughter, then she shall live” (Ex.1:16).

Herod was similar. He was threatened by the news of another king in Israel. His solution? Kill the child (Mat.2:16). Hitler said in 1937,

This new Reich will give its youth to no one, but will itself take youth and give to youth its own education and its own upbringing.[1]

In the context of the Hitler Youth, he also said in 1938,

These boys join our organisation at the age of ten…and they will not be free again for the rest of their lives.[2]

What was he doing? Violating God’s order, by usurping the role of the German family. But as Shortt said,

Nowhere in the Bible does God delegate the education of children to the state or to the disciples of other religions.[3]  

Education Departments are not in the Bible, but parental responsibility most certainly is. The sentiments of Education Departments around Australia are not the same as Hitler’s, but there is a similarity: they treat families as commodities for the Department’s good, and they lord it over them, rather than viewing themselves as being employed by taxpayers to assist families in their childrens’ education. This difference in attitude has important consequences.

What else do Pharoah, Herod, Hitler and Australian Education Departments have in common? They are all humanistic. They all concur with Pharoah. “Who is the Lord that I should obey His voice to let Israel go?” (Ex.5:2)

From Genesis onwards, God’s people have had to conclude that when governments move out of their God-appointed roles and become abusive and tyrannical, this requires great shrewdness and flexibility on the part of God’s people.

What strategy did Moses’ mother and his elder sister Miriam employ to protect Moses? (See Ex.2:1-10). The Bible tells us that Moses’ parents “…were not afraid of the king’s edict” (Heb.11:23), and you could only call theirs’ a sophisticated strategy of subterfuge. Jochebed even deceived Pharoah’s daughter into believing she was in no way related to the child (v.7-9), and she finished up being paid to breast-feed him.

When the Hebrew mid-wives (see Exodus 1) knew they were dealing with a baby-murderer, they were quite content to utilise deception, and lie to him.                  

Was this right on their part? Yes, because the Bible says that “you shall not murder” (Ex.20:13). It says that seven things are an abomination to God, and one of these is “…the shedding of innocent blood” (Prov.6:16-17).

The essential issue is this:

The illegitimate laws of a civil government may be legitimately skirted when they come into direct conflict with a fundamental Biblical principle.[4]

The Bible makes it very clear that the mid-wives “feared God” (Ex.1:17, 21), and that God subsequently “was good to the mid-wives… [and] established households for them” (v.20, 21). They preferred to lie to a murderous Pharoah (whom God later drowned in the Red Sea-Ex.14-15), than to kill innocent Hebrew babies, and God honoured their obedience and faithfulness to Him in giving them families of their own.[5]

Christians must conclude this fact: when government officials move beyond their God-given tasks and attempt to usurp the role of the family (as they have frequently done since Genesis), we need to know who we are dealing with, and determine how to respond. For a Department to implicitly claim that “We are responsible for the education of your child,” is a usurpation of parental responsibility that requires wisdom, prayer and initiative on our part.

In this, the Bible encourages us. It says that “When the wicked rise, men hide themselves…” (Prov.28:28), and that “a wise man scales the city of the mighty and brings down the stronghold in which they trust” (Prov.21:22).

What about today?

The New Testament’s position is replacement, not conquest. With this perspective, Christians in the fourth century captured the Roman Empire. Yet that empire had persecuted them for three centuries.[6]

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[1] Quoted in William Shirer, “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,” 1968, p.343.

[2] Quoted in A. Klonne, “Youth in the Third Reich,” 1982, p.80.

[3] Bruce Shortt, “The Harsh Truth about Government Schools,” 2004, p.55.

[4] Gary North, “Moses and Pharoah,” 1985, p.67.

[5] See North, “Moses and Pharoah,” ch.4: “Illegitimate State Power.”

[6] Gary North, “Ethics and Dominion,” 2012, p.237.

By Gary DeMar, May 3, 2019 

The films Get Out (2017) and Rosemary’s Baby (1968) are disturbing but not as disturbing as today’s government schools. Public schools are corrupting the minds of the next generation of voters and leaders and it seems that a majority of Christians don’t care. They continue to send their children to the schools of their enemies.

Then there’s this:

The state of California is poised to adopt a no-holds-barred K-12 health curriculum that teaches children as young as kindergarten about gender identity issues and talks explicitly with high school students about every imaginable sex act.

The solution? Allow students to opt out. Don’t opt out … Get out.

Others claim a form of factual neutrality where some subjects—science, geography, politics, mathematics—can be taught without any regard to religion since “facts speak for themselves.” This is most evident in education where a self-conscious sacred-secular divide is maintained and supported by Christians. Ninety percent of Christian parents send their children to government schools. Since these parents believe that math is math and history is history, the religious stuff can be made up at church.

But one hour of Sunday school and an hour at Youth Meeting each week and maybe a mission trip in the summer can’t make up for five days a week, six hours each day, 10 months of the year, 12+ years of a government-developed curriculum that is humanistic to the core. The humanists understand the importance of education in creating worldview shifts and control, so why don’t Christians? Charles Francis Potter, who founded the First Humanist Society of New York in 1929 and signed the first Humanist Manifesto in 1933, made no secret of the purpose of the American public schools:

Education is thus a most powerful ally of Humanism, and every American public school is a school of Humanism What can the theistic Sunday-school, meeting for an hour once a week, and teaching only a fraction of the children, do to stem the tide of a five-day program of humanistic teaching?¹

Rousas J. Rushdoony pointed out the Humanist design for education in Intellectual Schizophrenia (1961) and The Messianic Character of American Education (1963). According to Rushdoony, modern government education “is erosive and destructive of all culture except the monolithic state, which is then the ostensible creator and patron of culture. When it speaks of the whole child, it speaks of a passive creature who is to be moulded by the statist education for the concept of the good life radically divorced from God and from transcendental standards.”² Rushdoony was not the first to understand the goal of statist education. Robert L. Dabney (1820–1898) saw it more than 100 years ago:

[T]he Jeffersonian doctrine of the absolute severance and independence of church and state, of the entire secularity of the State, and the absolutely equal rights, before the law, of religious truth and error, of paganism, atheism, and Christianity, has also established itself in all the States; and still the politicians, for electioneering ends, propagate this State education everywhere. By this curious circuit “Christian America” has gotten herself upon this thoroughly pagan ground; forcing the education of responsible, moral, and immortal beings, of which religion must ever be the essence, into the hands of a gigantic human agency, which resolves that it cannot and will not be religious at all. Surely, some great religious body will arise in America to lift its Christian protest against this monstrous result!³

What would America be like today if the Church of Jesus Christ had heeded Dabney’s warnings and some “great religious body” had arisen to make the break from an educational system that was designed to be the indoctrination center for the State and its messianic motives?

The usual Christian response is to reform the public schools, to get more parents involved, sue to get a moment of silence, prayers at sporting events and commencement exercises, release programs, and pass laws to teach the Bible as literature as they’ve done in Georgia.⁴ There will be pressure groups in some cities to teach the Koran. Then there’s the question of how the Bible will be taught. Will the Old Testament be taught as myth? Will someone teaching on the Olivet Discourse point out that Jesus was mistaken about His coming? There is the larger issue of funding. Public schools are tax-payer funded. People who have no children are taxed to pay for the education of other children.

The First Church of Christian Gnosticism

Not long ago, I received an email from a woman who asked me if I could direct her to some information that refutes Gnosticism. She wrote that a friend of hers “claims to be on an extraordinarily intense spiritual ‘pilgrimage’ of ‘really pressing in to know God intimately’—but this guy has in effect divorced himself from the material world and from all relationships (including his wife and 10 children) which he views as a hindrance to his spiritual growth.”

Gnostics claim to have special knowledge (gnosis is the Greek word for “knowledge”) on how to live the Christian life that is not revealed to “ordinary Christians.” God’s revelation in Scripture is not good enough or sufficient to give direction on how to live the Christian life. Of course, this refutes what the Bible says when it states that Scripture is “adequate” and equips the Christian “for every good work” (2 Tim. 3:17). She went on to say that this friend, a farmer, “was putting up hay recently and needed to get it in as they were expecting rain. Before he finished, he remembered that he had scheduled a Bible study, so he left his hay in order to keep the ‘spiritual’ duty. The rain came and the hay was lost, but he felt justified that he had chosen the higher calling.”

Another feature of Gnosticism is the belief that there are two separate realms — “one spiritual, the other material. The spiritual realm, created by God, [is] all good; the material realm, created by the demiurge, all evil. Man [needs] to be saved, not from Original Sin, but from enslavement to matter.”⁵

A further expression of Gnosticism was expressed by someone who “doesn’t believe in voting because that is a ‘worldly affair,’ and he wants only to be engaged in truly spiritual activities.” For the Gnostic, the material world is on a lower plane. Only “spiritual things” are useful and profitable. A Gnostic-like belief might forbid marriage while advocating “abstaining from foods” even though “God has created these things “to be gratefully shared in by those who believe and know the truth” (1 Tim. 4:3). Godliness for the Gnostic is defined as a retreat from the world and despising the things of the world.

[The Gnostics] devised a dualistic cosmology to set against the teachings of the early Christian Church, which, they claimed, were only common deceptions, unsuited for the wise. The truth was esoteric. Only the properly initiated could appreciate it. It belonged to a secret tradition which had come down through certain mystery schools. The truth was, God could never become man. The Gnostic secret is that the spirit is trapped in matter, and to free it, the world must be rejected.⁶

For the Gnostic, life “must be escaped at any cost.”⁷ But if there can be no immediate material escape, then a spiritual escape is a good enough substitute. The Gnostic escapes from the responsibilities of history. But for the Christian, history is the realm of decision making, and, therefore, is anti-Gnostic. If we are not responsible for history, then we are not responsible for decision making. Even a casual reading of the Bible will show that our faith is to be lived out in the world so that “fruit,” good works, are manifested for the world to see and for Christians to judge (Matt. 7:15–23). No restrictions are placed on where this fruit is to mature.

One of the central issues that divided gnostics and orthodox Christians in the early Church was their understanding of the relationship between religion and politics. The Church Fathers accepted the political worldliness of the Jewish faith, contending that religion and politics are interconnected and inseparable. The early Puritans and even Jonathan Edwards, following classical Calvinism, would have been clearly orthodox in this regard. The world of politics, of human institutions, was for them an essential locus of God’s redemptive work.⁸

What is contemporary Gnosticism like? While it might not manifest itself in ascetic practices like pole sitting, it does reveal itself in an institutional escape. Institutional escape is not in the Protestant tradition, however. Our nation’s earliest Christian citizens did not view escape, eschatologically, ascetically, or institutionally, as being biblical. Education, publishing, law, science, medicine, and politics, to take just some areas, were to be governed by the Word of God as were ecclesiastical affairs. Modern-day Gnosticism thrives in a climate of escapism which means a retreat from this world and responsibility to do anything to change any part of it. If this world means nothing, then I am not responsible for its evils.

1. Charles Francis Potter, Humanism: A New Religion (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1930), 128. Quoted in David A. Noebel, J.F. Baldwin, and Kevin Bywater, Clergy in the Classroom: The Religion of Secular Humanism (Manitou Springs, CO: Summit Press, 1995), vi.(↩)
2. R. J. Rushdoony, Intellectual Schizophrenia: Culture, Crisis and Education (Vellecito, CA: Ross House Books, [1961] 1998), 10.(↩)
3. Robert L. Dabney, Discussions of Robert Lewis Dabney: Secular, ed. C. R. Vaughan, 4 vols. (Harrisonburg, Virginia, Sprinkle Publications, 1994), 4:548.(↩)
4. David Van Biema, “The Case for teaching the Bible,” Time (March 22, 2007).(↩)
5. Dusty Sklar, The Nazis and the Occult (New York: Dorset Press, [1977] 1989), 140–141.(↩)
6. Sklar, The Nazis and the Occult, 147.(↩)
7. Philip Lee, Against the Protestant Gnostics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 122.(↩)
8. Lee, Against the Protestant Gnostics, 123–124.(↩)

When families decide they wish to home school their children, they frequently find some opposition to the idea. Here’s a common one: “Your children won’t be well socialised.”

I respond to this superficial observation with this scripture: “He who walks with wise men will be wise, but the companion of fools will suffer harm” (Prov.13:20).

This text plainly teaches that people really are influenced by those around them, for good or for evil, and the bluntness of the text is a warning: “…the companion of fools will suffer harm.” This prediction is non-negotiable, so we’d better not argue with it, but accept and be warned by it.

The Psalmist wrote that “by them [the judgements of the Lord] Your servant is warned…” (Ps.19:9-11).

Thus the Christian parent is challenged to surround his children with wise people, with wise ideas. He should not let them have fools for their companions, or the results will be painful. Nor should he expose them to foolish educational material. It will harm them.

The Public School is essentially a place of foolish people; therefore it is not to be the place where the godly should be, for the bad company will harm them. This is not rocket science, but the plain teaching of scripture which the godly must obey, or be held accountable by God.

Separation is necessary, and there is nothing new about that. In order to teach and disciple someone, you have to have their full and undivided attention.  This is what God does. At the beginning,

God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness (Gen.1:4).

God separated Noah and his family from the ungodly with a flood, He separated Abraham from his family, then Israel from Egypt at the Exodus. Israel was responsible to have a separated life, unto the Lord.

When you enter the land which the Lord your God gives you, you shall not learn to imitate the detestable things of those nations (Deut.18:9).

The scripture makes it plain that Lot was a godly man (II Pet.2:7-8), but when he went down to Sodom and stayed there, he failed to ensure his family retained a godly separation, with disastrous consequences for his family (Gen.19).

This proved to be a common problem for Israel. Later, the Psalmist commented that

They did not destroy the peoples, as the Lord commanded them, but they mingled with the nations and learned their practices, and served their idols, which became a snare to them (Ps.106:34-36).

Many believers in Australia have taken the step of enrolling their children in a Christian school. This is clearly a step forward from the State School, but how much?

Once again, it depends on the morality of the children’s peers, the quality of the teachers, and the curriculum. And in all three cases, nothing should be taken for granted. I have a student whose parents I’m assisting, who was bullied by a teacher in a “Christian” school in 2018, before he was removed. That was not good.

An acquaintance of mine attended a “Christian” school for 12 years, but claims he never heard there, that God made the world in 6 days, some 6,000 years ago.

Twelve years of education, at 30 hours a week for 40 weeks a year, equates to 14,400 hours. This is a long time to influence a child, for good or for bad.

Most parents have some reservations about their ability to educate their children at home. Certainly, excessive self-confidence can get people into a lot of trouble. Parents need to think carefully and prayerfully about how they are going to do this, because this is a significant, long-term task to fulfil competently by both of them. Just like building a house, they have to have a plan.

But like any God given task, parents should embrace this responsibility willingly and confidently, knowing that “…He that began a good work in you will perfect it until the day of Christ Jesus” (Phil.1:6).

Later in this same passage, Paul encourages the Philippians, in a passage that has direct relevance to the education of children:

And this I pray, that your love may abound still more and more in real knowledge and all discernment, so that you may approve the things that are excellent, in order to be sincere and blameless until the day of Christ; having been filled with the fruit of righteousness which comes through Jesus Christ, to the glory and praise of God (Phil.1:9-11).

Conclusion:

For most of us, accepting the responsibility to educate our children was a new thing for our generation. But it’s not a new thing, Biblically. It’s what God’s people have been doing since Adam and Eve had children. Will they do a perfect job? No, but it’s a task that believing parents should accept, as a task given them by God. Will you accept it?

                 A History of Educational Humanism

Humanism is the world’s second oldest religion. Its origins were in Satan’s heart, described in Isaiah 14:12-14:

…you said in your heart, ‘I will ascend to heaven; I will raise my throne above the stars of God, and I will sit on the mount of assembly in the recesses of the north, I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will make myself like the Most High.’

The simple definition of humanism? A life apart from God, with the associated pride and self-exaltation; its all about me.

In the garden of Eden, Satan wanted his first human converts. He attracted them with the original humanistic promise – a lie: “you shall be like God, knowing good and evil” (Gen.3:5).

The message of the Old Testament prophets to Israel was always to abandon humanism’s lies and to return to godly obedience according to the Word of the Lord. Elijah’s confronting message to Israel on Mount Carmel was at root a religious and ethical issue: “How long will you halt between two opinions? If the Lord is God, follow Him, but if Baal, follow him” (I Kings 18). Elijah also “repaired the altar of the Lord that had been torn down” (v.30-32).

When Satan came to Jesus in the wilderness temptations, true to form he wanted Jesus to behave humanistically, defying God’s Word.  In the final temptation, Satan promised Jesus, “all these things I will give You, if you fall down and worship me” (Mat.4:9).

To serve God we are not called to choose self-denial or sacrifice, rather are we called to fulfill God’s purpose. The basic principle is not to choose the cross but to obey God’s will. Should the principle on which we work and serve include rebellion, then Satan will obtain and enjoy glory even through our sacrifices. Saul might offer sheep and oxen [I Sam.15], yet God never accepted them as sacrifices to Himself because there was a Satanic principle involved… man’s action… should be motivated by a sense of obedience.[1]

God directed in Deuteronomy that education was a responsibility of parents, not the state: “These words, which I am commanding you today, shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your sons and shall talk of them…” (Deut.6:6-7). But Christian parents have effectively resigned from this duty today, to our great loss.

While the Church slumbered in the nineteenth century, the enemies of God worked. Enter Charles Darwin and The Origin of the Species. Darwin’s book sold out to a Victorian intellectual population clearly impacted by Christian thought, but eager to live apart from God.  Darwin’s work not only seemed relevant in terms of human origins and biology; it was quickly applied to theology, ethics, politics, law, sociology and many other disciplines. The  Church had no real answer, and began to flounder.

Marx loved Darwin. Darwin’s work gave Marx’s evil political theories of class warfare, socialism and communism a great opportunity for propagation.

Marx’s legacy today?  Think of the deaths of 100 million people in the twentieth century throughout Soviet Russia, Communist China and Cambodia. When people who hate God gain influence in the world, the world is in for a sorry time.

I could go on to discuss Freud (who taught psychoanalysis), Dewey (who gave us an ideological blueprint for state education) and Keynes (the homosexual, child-abusing teacher of perverse economics). They all illustrated that a world opposed to God will gladly rush after almost any intellectual but persuasive Pied Piper.[2]

And where were we in the Church? With very few exceptions, we hardly knew what to make of all these, and so we thought it easier to bury our heads in the sand and hope the trouble would all go away. It didn’t.

History shows us that Christians over the centuries, have consistently under-estimated the religious intentions of our enemies. We have made the fundamental error for instance, of trusting in government and in bureaucracy, and found out the hard way, how political and bureaucratic power can be used against God’s people. This foolishness and naivete has been our fault, and to our shame. Hitler said of the German Protestants:

                                                                                                                                     You can do anything you want with them…they will submit…they are insignificant little people, submissive as dogs, and they sweat with embarrassment when you talk to them.[3]

This attitude of naïve trust on the part of Christians has consistently been reflected in our attitude towards State education. As early as 1930, humanists realised that education and in particular public education, would be a means of alienating students from Christianity. In that year, Charles F. Potter, a signatory of the first Humanist Manifesto,indicated that

education is thus a most powerful ally of humanism, and every public school is a school of humanism. What can the theistic Sunday School, meeting for an hour once a week, and teaching only a fraction of the children, do to stem the tide of a five-day program of humanistic teachings?[4]

Dewey had his way.

At present humanism has brought all things, including most churches, under the sway of man the lord. The purpose of state schools…was twofold: first, to establish centralism, the priority of the state over every area of life, and second, to eliminate Biblical faith. The founders of statist education in the United States were Unitarians.[5]

So what is the difference between Christian and humanistic education? Rousas Rushdoony (1915-2001) was a ground-breaker in exposing the humanism of state education. He had some excellent insights. The following chart from his book, “The Philosophy of the Christian Curriculum” (p.172-173) begins to lay it out:

               Christianity                                                           Humanism

1. The sovereignty of the triune                          1. The sovereignty of man and the state

God is the starting point, and                              is the starting point, and it is the word of

this God speaks through His                               scientific, elite man which we must heed.

infallible Word.

2. We must accept God as God.                         2. Man is his own god, choosing or

He is alone Lord.                                                determining for himself what constitutes

                                                                            good and evil (Gen 3:5).

3. God’s Word and Person is the Truth.             3. Truth is pragmatic and existential: it is                                                                                  

                                                                           what we find works and is helpful to us.

4. Education is into God’s truth in every           4. Education is the self-realization and self-

realm.                                                                 development of the child.

5. Education is discipline under a body             5. Education is freedom from restraint and

of truth.  This body of truth grows with             from any idea of truth outside of us.  We are

research and study, but truth is objective           the standard, not something outside of man.

and God-given. We begin by pre-

supposing God and His Word.

6. Godly standards grade us.  We must             6. The school and the world must measure up

measure up to them. The teacher grades           to the pupil’s needs.  The pupil grades the

the pupil.                                                            teacher.

7. Man’s will, and the child’s will,                    7. Society must be broken and remade

must be broken to God’s purpose.                     to man’s will, and the child’s will is

Man must be remade, reborn by                        sacred.

God’s grace.

8. Man’s problem is sin.                                     8. Man’s problem is society.

Man must be recreated by God.                         Society must be recreated by man.

9. The family is God’s basic                               9. The family is obsolete.

institution.                                                          The individual or the state is basic.

 Education in the hands of the state is coercive, compulsory, and a form of              humanistic predestination. In every sphere, the state is coercive because it is anti-God, anti-Christ. It insists on playing the potter with the lives of the people. But nothing is more evil or more deadly than a non-god playing god. We then have the triumph of the demonic.[6]

Conclusion:                                                                                                                                  

Believers must understand what it means to obey God in terms of education. We have given up a vast amount of territory, and it is no wonder that we find ourselves in the midst of societies in the western world that are generally indifferent or even hostile to God. All this must change if God is going to be truly glorified through Christian education. The present woeful state of the Church has come about over at least six generations, and it may take a long time to be turned around.

But without repentance and a picking up of educational responsibility amongst believers in obedience to God, the Church will continue to be an ineffective and stunted institution, prone to abuse by evildoers.

Repentance is the first bit of firm ground underfoot… Repentance is the only starting point for spiritual growth. For each and every individual. And every trend of social thought.[7]

Jesus promised us that “if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed” (Jn.8:36). Believers must lead the way for the world out of the morass of humanistic education, in pursuit of God’s truth for His people and for the nations.

It’s time for the foundations of godly education to be laid again, right back where they should be laid: in the family and in the Church, in obedience to God. Yes, it will take time, and it may also require our blood, sweat, tears and court cases.

But now it’s commenced, it’s exciting to behold.

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[1] Watchman Nee, “Spiritual Authority,” 1972, p.15, 21.

[2] See David Breese, “Seven Men who Rule the World from the Grave,” 1990.

[3] Found in Rauschning, “The Voice of Destruction,” p.54, quoted in William Shirer, “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,” 1968, p.329.

[4] Bruce Shortt, “The Harsh Truth about Government Schools,” 2004, p.54.

[5] Rushdoony, R., “The Philosophy of the Christian Curriculum,” 1985, p.172.

[6] Rousas Rushdoony, “Romans and Galatians,” 1997, p.178.

[7] Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, ‘Repentance and Self-limitation on the Life of Nations,’ in “From Under the Rubble,” 1974, p.108-9.