The Lives of Your Children at Stake

Religious Goals of Humanism

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Education

Genre: Speech

Lesson: 4 of 5

Track: 69

Dictation Name: RR146B4

Date: 1960’s-1970’s

[Rushdoony] As we continue our analysis of the religious goals of humanism it is important for us to realize that the concern of John Dewey with religion is very often overlooked. Because as Christians we so often identify religion with a belief in God we fail to see that Humanism is religious. But John Dewey himself criticized this identification. He was most insistent that he was teaching religion. In fact very early in his book A Common Faith his Yale lectures of 1934 Dewey declared that his position was in root and branch a religious one. He declared that in terms of his faith truth is not revealed but is a product of observation, experiment, and thought. He began and ended with Humanism. Now Saint Anselm one of the great, truly great, Christian thinkers of the Medieval era who was very definitely in his thinking a forerunner of the reformation declared, and this was basic to his faith, to his philosophy “I believe in order that I may understand. I believe in order that I may understand.” Then he went on to say “I cannot understand unless I first believe.” Now subsequently of course Abelard reversed this whole position as Thomism did also and said “I understand in order that I may believe.” The primacy of understanding, of reason; but Anselm was right. And of course this was the position of the reformation, you began with faith. And Dr. Cornelius Van Til whose thinking I follow in this regard has demonstrated that basic to every scientific position, to every philosophy, to every point of view is a basic faith. It’s either humanism or it’s Christianity or it’s something else. But there is a basic faith that man cannot think without pre-theoretical pre-suppositions which are a bundle of faith.

Now Dewey has a basic faith, it is humanism. He doesn’t prove humanism he begins with humanism. He speaks against doctrine, and dogma but only Christian doctrine and dogma, not monistic doctrine and dogma. John Dewey declares that the search for God is invalid. Why? Because to believe in God denies mans intelligence and his primacy; if man is your God you certainly can’t allow another God, such as the God of scripture, to enter into your thinking. So that Dewey does what all these men do, he doesn’t say that there is no evidence for God, but he says “I refuse to accept any evidence for God.” Now this is the implication of everything they say. The death of God school did not say “God is dead” but that “God is dead for me, I refuse to acknowledge His existents.” Dewey said, and I quote “dependence upon external power is the counterpart of the surrender of human endeavor.” In other words, if I to any degree acknowledge the existence of God and depend on him, or say the universe depends on him I surrender my Godhead, myself. John Dewey was a through and through fundamentalist in humanism. Now perhaps that conjunction of words surprises you, but this is what you’re dealing with; humanistic fundamentalism. Now you’d better be genuine fundamentalist or their going to plow you under. They are consistent to their faith; you had better be consistent to yours.

The unity of mankind for John Dewey is an unquestioned article of faith. Anything which divides men is for him an evil. Hence for John Dewey there can be no distinction between good and evil, the save and the lost, the good and the bad, heaven and hell, the sheep and the goats. All of this he calls divisiveness. And this kind of divisiveness is for John Dewey the ultimate sin. John Dewey is dead but I say is because it is his mind, his thinking that’s governing the schools around us. Dewey says for example in A Common Faith and I quote, “spiritual aristocracy.” What does he mean by that? Let’s pause for a moment. Now he’s talking about you, you’re all aristocrats. Why? Because you believe in a distinction between the saved and the lost, and you declare yourself to be the saved. You believe there is a distinction between heaven and hell, good and evil. That’s being an aristocrat in the worst possible way. He says “Spiritual aristocracy as well as laissez faire with respect to natural and human intervention is deeply embedded in its tradition. I cannot understand how any realization of the democratic ideal as a vital moral and spiritual ideal in human affairs is possible without surrender of the conception of the conception of the basic division to which supernatural Christianity is committed.”

Now unless you grasp that point in John Dewey you will never understand what it is the public schools, the state schools, are trying to teach and why they are against you. They are for democracy. As the Ohio standards say “without respect to race, creed, or color.” Your creed cannot say that it is the truth; we cannot say to God “Thy word is truth. Every word of man is truth. You cannot say that adultery is wrong because you are creating thereby a spiritual aristocracy. Democracy you see means the leveling of all things, all things are equal. The goal of history is the New Jerusalem which he calls the great community, the prelude to the great community is the great society; a term first coined by Graham Wallace, one of the Fabian socialists of England. Basic to progressive education and by now you should remember that it was basic to President Lyndon B. Johnson’s program, it was to usher in the great society which was to be a prelude to the humanistic New Jerusalem, the great community. Scripture has another term for it, Babylon the great.

Now, whatever your faith, whatever your philosophy, one way or another you’re not going to get away from the doctrine of grace. You may use another word for it, or you may still use the word grace but one way or another you are going to use that term, that idea. There is grace in John Dewey’s world but it comes not from God but from the human community. In a common faith he says, and I quote, “The things in civilization we most prize are not of ourselves. They exist by grace of the doings and sufferings of the continuous human community in which we are a link.” Grace from the human community, the one world order. That term is Dewey’s, but it’s interesting and this is again parenthetical to what I am developing, that at the same time Dewey was writing this there was another humanist, Kenneth Burk, editor at the time of The New Republic, so you can see he was a genuine humanist and a good card carrying liberal, wrote another book in which he said that “all such ideas of grace were an impossibility.” But he said “man cannot live without grace. Man will find it impossible to exist on his own resources. And so” he said “having abolished grace from above we will seek grace from below.” And so Kenneth Burke writing in the twenties and early thirties predicted that in due time there would be a tremendous outburst of occultism, Satanism, demonism, magic and witchcraft, all of which would be concerned with a problem of grace. Seeking grace, seeking power, no longer from above but from below; and Kenneth Burke was right. Men cannot live by the grace of the UN or the world human community. They need some kind of power from outside of man. And because we are not witnessing to the grace of God and the power of God, and because we’ve withdrawn into our convents and monasteries why the world is seeing an outpouring of demonic grace.

After John Dewey one of the great expositors of this humanistic gospel was James Bryant Conant. Conant was a distinguished scientist, he was president of Harvard I believe for about twenty years or so, he was I think some of you may correct me, a Nobel Prize winner in chemistry, he was also high commissioner over Germany after the war and subsequently he went to work for the NEA; surveying American education as a great champion of state schools and writing thereon. In his autobiography published not to long ago he says, and I quote “my book education in a divided world published in 1948 was full of good words about American public schools. I have become convinced that the hostile and vocal critics were either misinformed or proponents of a dual system of schools” By a dual system of schools he’s talking about you, about any type of school system which is outside of the public or state schools. Of course I was very early one of those critics, and for years I carried around a Xeroxed copy of one page of that particular book by Conant because I had, when I spoke at various meetings, school principals and superintendents of schools get up and denounce me as a liar and tell me I was fabricating this quotation from Conant. Well when I would show them the Xeroxed copy it didn’t make them retract anything, they wouldn’t admit that I had told the truth.

So I just gave up on that because they had such a fanatical faith they would not change, but let me read this quotation to you from Conant’s Education in a Divided World now remember, here he a follower of Dewey’s principles and Dewey has said “we cannot have the aristocracy of supernatural Biblical Christianity, it has to go or we cannot recognize the democratic ideal.” Now Conant takes the same ideas and applies it further, and I quote “wherever the institution of the family is still a powerful force (as it is in this country) surely inequality of opportunity is automatically and often unconsciously a basic principle of the nation. The more favored parents endeavored to obtain even greater favors for their children. Therefore when we Americans proclaim an adherence to the equality of opportunity we face the necessity for a perpetual compromise. Now it seems to me important to recognize both the inevitable conflict, and the continuing nature of the compromise.”

Well what he is saying, although he will not come out directly and say so, is that not only must the church, Biblical faith, supernatural Christianity, not only must it go, but the family. Cause every parent wants the best for his children, and how can you have democracy if you are feeding and clothing and educating your children better than the Hottentots? This he says is wrong and, so he says, there is an inevitable conflict. You had better believe him, they mean business. That’s why I said in the first meeting it is a war unto death. You are either going to destroy them or they’re going to destroy you. You’re either going to occupy in Christ’s name or you’re going to live in occupied territory on their terms. They are already talking about campus schools, meaning boarding schools. They’re saying we’ll take them at the age of three, we’ll start with these ghetto children to break the evil pattern that exists there, but they have all children in mind. Why else of course did they try in a state, Ohio you’re familiar with it, to separate children from their parents. Why else do they want to command the Christian schools with their minimum standards, and the minimum standards say “Give me your life and I’m satisfied, give me your child’s life, that’s all I’m asking.” What else does it mean except precisely this philosophy of democracy and equality which says there can be no heaven and hell, no God and Satan, no good and evil, no right and wrong.

Conant spoke on April 7, 1952 on unity and diversity in secondary education. IN that address he said, and I quote “but what I am more concerned with in the year 1952 is to make the hostile critics of the public schools and in the United States show their colors.” That’s us. “One of the most vocal of these is a protestant clergyman who reveals himself when he writes “the communist is not as a matter of fact much of a revolutionist, the communist would only substitute the logical secularism of Karl Marx for the pragmatic secularism of John Dewey.” If this clergy many would start off all his attacks on modern education by stating that for him secularism and communism are equal dangers the reader would be in a better position to evaluate what he was about to read, or he might decide to skip it altogether. There are many sincere Protestants, Jews, and Catholics who believe that secondary education divorced from a denominational religious core of instruction is bad education. They erroneously assume that the tax supported schools are not concerned with moral and spiritual values.”

But of course they are concerned with moral and spiritual values, humanistic values; and those are not Biblical values. Like all humanist Conant is given to misrepresenting our position. We will not deny, we dare not deny, that the state schools are concerned with moral and spiritual values. We must insist that they are teaching religion, that they represent and establishment of religion and it is an alien persecuting religion which is aiming at our live, our faith, and our children. The logical humanism of Karl Marx says let us destroy Christianity and all Christian schools. The pragmatic humanism of John Dewey and James Bryant Conant says “we will go a step at a time” but their goal is the same.

Conant says concerning the role of the state schools, and I quote, “By organizing our free schools on as comprehensive a basis as possible we can give to our children an understanding of democracy by practicing it in school. Religious tolerances, mutual respect among vocational groups, belief in the rights of the individuals are among the virtues that the best of our high schools now foster.” Well I don’t regard it as a virtue to feel that Humanism and Christianity and Buddhism and Islam are all equal. I don’t regard it as a virtue to exult the rights of the individual and to deny God’s existence or the right of God to govern us. So they do define virtue there for moral values, but those moral values are death to our faith. For Conant you see you can have faith in Christ. But as David Gibbs remarked yesterday, the kind of rights they give to us are just a few inches and are between one ear and another. You have the right to your opinion, but keep it to yourself. Don’t teach it in a Christian school. For him the Catholic faith is Humanism, it is the only truly universal faith with rights over every man.

Now such a faith will not long permit the existence of Christian schools. All of this of course is part of a widespread trend in the modern world. One scholar, Birchin {?} Wright the Second, and educator and sociologist says that we are in process of seeing a widespread secularization or a desacralization and I quote “the elimination of religion (but of course we should substitute there Christianity) as a symbolic representation of social integration. In other words religion, (meaning Christianity per se) is no longer the force that binds a society together. Instead a modern society is held together by a mutual interdependence of the parts of that society, including its institutions.” But as you read him you recognize that it is “humanism” he says that which now must bind society together rather than Christianity. So we must desacralize Christianity and sacralize humanism. Well of course this is going on all over the world. And we must remember that it is a very easy way to identify the faith of a people, or their God. The God of a society is the controlling force in society. Where your law comes from there is your God. Where your education comes from there is your God. Those two things will identify the God of a society, law and education.

Now there was a time in this country when a journey was made up of men who knew the word of God and the decision came out of the word of God, instead of statue law you had common law and that common law was scripture. It was then possible to say that ignorance of the law is no excuse. At that time everybody knew the word of God, therefore they knew the difference between right and wrong, they knew what God required. Now ignorance of the law is inescapable, it’s totally arbitrary. It is a law that depends on the will of man; it doesn’t strike a responsive chord in our being. Our being is the product of God’s creation therefore His every word is written into every fiber of our being so there is no one in any jungle, or in any remote isle who has never heard the witness of God. Paul makes clear in the first Chapter of Romans that the invisible things of God are made manifest to every creature, but they hold, or very literally in the Greek they hold down, the suppress the truth in unrighteousness. This is why ignorance of God’s law is inexcusable, it is written into every atom of our being.

But how can you know the law of man? Is there any way that you can instinctively, intuitively know what congress passed yesterday? Or what the Ohio state legislator has passed in the last month? No. It has no responsive chord in your being. The law and the education of a society come from its God. We either are governed by God’s word and are educated in terms of God’s word or we have other gods before us. The God of scripture you see controls from within by His regenerating power. The state God, this Baal we’re confronted with controls from without through coercion, and he says “You either do what I say or I’ll take you to jail.” Coercion as against regeneration.

Frank L. Field a contemporary educator in his most recent work deals with the psycho paths, or as some call them now the sociopaths. Anyone who deviates from the norms of society, that’s us. And he says that education quote, “Will have to employ powerful controls upon individual freedom in order to break existing anti-social sets. Habitual patterns, value systems (such as Biblical faith) and the beliefs underlying them; the task will be to accomplish radical personal changes.” Now of course he then goes on to say these will not be concentration camps because we will allow these children or these adults to talk back to us and argue with us so that we can find out what they are thinking and thereby change their perspective. And it won’t be a concentration camp because by definition we are good, and if we are good what we are doing is good; we have a missionary concern. Remember that when they put you in jail.

Bible believers are all ready classified by some educators as social deviants and sociopaths. In the Soviet Union of course this is commonplace. Christians are sentenced to terms in mental institutions to be subjected to electroshock therapy and to brainwashing. Field concludes, and I quote “In summary with regard to current educational needs I am proposing 1.) That powerful control over individual behavior is not necessarily evil or anti-democratic. 2.) That we already employ great controlling power in education. But 3.) We do so very ineffectively because we try to hide the fact even from ourselves, and finally 4.) That when we clearly understand the need for power we will gradually require less of it because its application will be overt, direct, timely, and hence necessarily more efficient.” In other words when we start slapping people into a concentration camp there will be less resistance. Men will need less force.

Of course this is the democratic world of George Orwell’s 1984. Or you can also say it is the world depicted by Roland Huntford in his book The New Totalitarians; if you have not read it I urge you to read Roland Huntford The New totalitarians. I believe the publisher is Stine and Day. It is a book about Sweden but in writing about Sweden he is writing about the wave of the future as it is planned for the whole Western world. Huntford says we have had two types of totalitarians, one is the terroristic variety as in the Soviet Union and other Marxists countries, but he says this is not as fearful, and it has not been as successful in eliminating Christianity as the new totalitarianism which requires altering the mind and the thinking of people through the schools.

A pattern imbibed from John Dewey, put into application in Sweden and being applied throughout the Western world and increasingly in use in the Soviet Unions. And he said its results in Sweden have been much more successful in wiping out Biblical faith than the terroristic tactics of the Soviet Union; and he says this is the pattern for the future. It proposes he says, very soon in Sweden to begin education of all children from the age of three onward. It purposes to separate them more and more, the children from their families, to make them more and more the children of the state, less and less given to being persons and more and more members of a group so that their faith will be in the group and the power of the state, and they will be group directed rather than conscious directed. This he says is the new model for democracy, and the school is its instrument. He is right, and his book is a very telling indictment.

We can understand from his book as well as from those of Field and Dewey and Conant that it is a war to the death, it is either the great community of humanism – Babylon the great and its schools, or it is Jesus Christ as Lord, the Christian church, the Christian school, the Christian family, the Christian community. One or another must occupy. You cannot go into that battle with Saul’s armor, but only in the power of the Lord [amen’s]. Let us pray.

Almighty God our heavenly Father we have to long been encumbered with the armor of Saul, and we have come unto Thee now that we might take off these encumbrances and go forth in Thy power and by Thy spirit to conquer in Thy name. We thank Thee oh Lord that Thou hast summoned us to battle and made us Thy soldiers, given us so great a calling and so great a reward in Jesus Christ. Now make us bold and resolute in this our most holy faith, that in the name and power of Jesus Christ we may prevail. Bless us to this purpose in Jesus name, amen.