Public schools were created explicitly to reinforce
the dominant religious beliefs of American culture. Those beliefs used to be
Protestant, but are now secular. Both are religions.
Religious indoctrination is an important function of American
public education. The main reason most Americans don’t know this is that the
religion of the public schools reflects the religion of the wider American
culture. It has been this way from the beginning.
In the decades leading up to the Civil War, the mainstream of
American culture was actively and devoutly Protestant—much more so than it had
been at the time of the founding. The eighteenth-century Enlightenment had
somewhat tamed American colonial devotion to Christianity with an emphasis on
reasonableness.
Then the revivals of the early nineteenth-century Second Great
Awakening placed piety front and center again in American religious life. The
faith preached from the pulpit became woven with the American spirit.
Public Schools Were
Created to Reinforce Protestantism
During that time, numerous American cities began supporting
“common schools,” another name for public schools. One of the goals of the
movement was to counter the budding influence of Catholic schools formed to
educate the growing populace of Catholic immigrants from Europe.
American Protestants saw Catholicism as anti-freedom and
anti-American. Catholics were not trusted, and neither were their “sectarian”
schools. So the common school movement received eager support in part to
maintain Protestantism’s dominance.
Common schools included “nonsectarian” religious exercises, which
essentially meant Protestant exercises. These included Bible readings (which
Catholicism then taught should not take place without the interpretation of a
priest) from the King James Bible (a Protestant translation). Protestant
exercises were nonsectarian only in the eyes of a culture dominated by
Protestantism.
The American Religion
Becomes Secular Atheism
The religious tenor of the country shifted in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries. Secular beliefs, such as naturalism and
especially progressivism, gradually penetrated the culture. At the same time,
Protestant exercises in public schools slowly began to be removed because they
were seen, rightly, as sectarian. We may see this as a victory for religious
freedom, but it was mainly just a reflection of cultural change.
After World War II, as secular progressivism became dominant among
the elite in our halls of justice and education, secular beliefs were labeled
“neutral.” Of course, those beliefs were neutral only in the eyes of secular
culture, in the same way that Protestantism had been seen as nonsectarian by
Protestant culture a century before.
The Supreme
Court even held so in 1961,
because it noted that secularist atheism teaches certain things about the
ultimate purpose of man and existence of God, which are religious beliefs that
can never be proven by science or any other mechanistic means of knowing. Such
religious beliefs directly contradict other religious beliefs, and
affect teaching methods, curricula, and school policies. Schools simply
cannot function without teaching some sort of cohesive set of belief, since
this provides the context and direction for every human life and every child’s
maturity.
If You Don’t Share
Public Schools’ Religion, Do Something
That trajectory has continued to today. Secular progressivism has
metastasized into an absolutist worldview with a religious fervor that brooks
no compromise. Gay history, transgender locker rooms, social justice crammed
into every aspect of the curriculum, great thinkers from Aristotle to Madison
despised as nothing more than dead white males—all of this comes courtesy of
progressivism. It is the dominant worldview of the most dominant institutions
in our culture. Our public school children are, quite simply, the objects of a
mass movement of progressive worldview indoctrination. That is, religious
indoctrination.
American conservatives simply cannot afford to let this happen to
our children. America’s future is truly at stake. When choosing a school for
our children, we must take into account not only the quality of the education
our children will receive, but the worldview in which they will be immersed.
Private schools and homeschooling can be great alternatives, but
they’re costly and aren’t necessarily for everyone. Charter schools and
vouchers for private schooling can help. There are also short courses and books
designed to expose progressivism for what it is. By whatever means we can
afford, we must protect our children’s minds from the religious indoctrination
of our nation’s public schools.
Dr. Russell
Dawn is associate professor of history and political thought at Concordia
University-Irvine. Follow him on Twitter @RussellDawn1.
