September 21, 2002 Dear Subscriber: Earlier this week, I visited Stanford University's book store. It is magnificent. It is huge -- on the scale of a large Barnes & Noble store. Students can select from tens of thousands of academic titles. Visit any Christian college book store. There will be a rack of LEFT BEHIND novels, half a dozen biographies of Billy Graham, and assorted examples of trinkets for Christ. There is nothing that points out more clearly the overpriced, overrated nature of Christian higher education than a visit to a Christian college book store. Christian parents, themselves poorly educated, don't recognize this. At Stanford, students read serious books, and lots of them. At Piddly Ridge Bible Baptist College, they don't. But that's not the whole story. In the downstairs area of Stanford's book store is the textbook section. It is small, and the books are mediocre, when not actually third-rate propaganda, which in the social sciences is often. Stanford's professors are assigning Leftist puffery that is not up to the academic standards of the books upstairs. The problem is, the textbooks are probably the same in the Piddly Ridge campus book store. Anyway, the textbooks at Piddly Ridge are just as liberal, though maybe dumbed- down. There is not one publishing house that publishes textbooks for Christian colleges. Even if there were, you would not be able to tell much difference between its textbooks and the standard humanist ones. The higher you go in Christian education, the more expensive it gets, and the less difference there is between the secularists and the Christians. Christian parents shell out 15,000 after-tax dollars a year for four years to tiny Christian colleges with poor libraries, so that their children can be assigned secular textbooks without negative comment in the classroom. These secular textbooks are taught at face value by humanist university-certified Ph.D's who still believe 90% of what they were taught in grad school -- or, more accurately, 90% of what they remember being taught, which isn't much. Now let's drop down one level. THE CHRONOLOGY TEST Here is my challenge. Pick up any Christian high school textbook in world history. Go to the chapter on Egypt, or maybe the chapter on the Fertile Crescent: Babylon, etc. See what date it begins with. I offer you a challenge: is there any date earlier than 2300 B.C.? Of course there is. This is a warning sign of the problem at hand. Now get your Bible. Let's do a little spade work. Begin with I Kings 6:1. And it came to pass in the four hundred and eightieth year after the children of Israel were come out of the land of Egypt, in the fourth year of Solomon's reign over Israel, in the month Zif, which is the second month, that he began to build the house of the LORD. When did Solomon start building the temple? Around 950 B.C., give or take a decade. So, add 480 years to 950. You get 1430. That was the date of the Exodus, give or take a decade. Next, consider Galatians 3:16-18. Now to Abraham and his seed were the promises made. He saith not, And to seeds, as of many; but as of one, And to thy seed, which is Christ. And this I say, that the covenant, that was confirmed before of God in Christ, the law, which was four hundred and thirty years after, cannot disannul, that it should make the promise of none effect. For if the inheritance be of the law, it is no more of promise: but God gave it to Abraham by promise. The law was given in the year of the Exodus. When was the covenant of promise established? This probably refers to God's promise to Abram just before Abram entered Canaan (Gen. 12:1). So, add 430 to 1430. We get 1860 B.C. When did Abram enter Canaan? Shortly after the death of Terah, who died at age of 205 (Gen. 11:32). So, to determine when Terah was born, add 205 to 1860. We get 2065 B.C. Add up the chronologies of Genesis 11:10-24. These chronologies are exact. There are no gaps. From the birth of Shem's son, Arphaxad, two years after the flood began, until the birth of Terah, was 222 years. Add 222 years to the birthdate of Terah: 2065 + 222 = 2287. That was the year of Noah's flood, assuming that Solomon began construction of the temple in 950 B.C. This means that no social artifact remains that was created earlier than about 2300 B.C. unless the item somehow survived the flood, which is highly doubtful. If the Bible is true, then all dates for any dynasty or events that are older than about 2250 B.C. are fake. Look at any ancient history textbook written for Christian schools. See if you find a reference to this chronology of Noah's flood. Then see if there is a discussion of its implications for our understanding of ancient history. See if there is a revised chronology offered to counter the standard humanist textbook chronology. How many Christian parents ever apply the chronology test to see how consistently biblical their children's ancient history textbook is? Not many. Not any, I suspect. This never occurs to them. Sadly, this includes the textbook writers, who use standard textbooks to writer their knock-off versions for the Christian school market. This is baptized education. It's the one example of baptism where the Baptists who write the curriculum materials use sprinkling rather than immersion. QUEER STUDIES FOR JESUS Christian promoters of something they call Christian classical education have offered what they claim is a pure form of classical education. It isn't, of course. It's a whitewashed version. It's as phony as a three-dollar bill -- in more ways than one. Any mother who decides to adopt Christian classical education for her children should first read Robert Flaceliere's book, Love In Ancient Greece (New York: Crown, 1962). Chapter 3 is titled, "Homosexuality." Here, we read: Many Greeks, moreover, did not feel in the least ashamed of admitting that homosexuality was held in more honour among them than anywhere else in the world (p. 63). Uneducated mothers, desperate to give their children the education that, by the grace of God, they never received, are rushing to adopt airbrushed classical education programs that indoctrinate their children in the wonders of a society built forthrightly on constant warfare ("The Iliad") and homosexuality. Not only are their children never exposed to the history of the religious and philosophical war between Athens and Jerusalem, they are taught to love Athens. They are given a dumbed-down nineteenth-century humanist education in the name of Christ. Nobody in the Christian curriculum business tells mothers the truth. Mothers are being provided with what ought to be called "queer studies for Jesus," but this is not the best advertising slogan to sell mothers on the benefits of a classical Christian curriculum. The promoters palm off queer studies as Christian, and the naive, trusting mothers buy it. I ask: How can a Christian worldview curriculum be taught on the basis of awe-inspired respect for a pagan society built on homosexuality? If there really is no neutrality, as Christian worldview educators like to say (but don't really believe or understand), then why was classical Greek thought and culture so terrific? If the classical Greeks are worth studying for their own sake, then why aren't queer studies worth studying, too? It's the same academic discipline. The level of confusion in Christian education is matched only by the level of outright deception. From classical Greece to the phony painting of George Washington praying on one knee in the snow at Valley Forge, Christian students are the victims of one long deception. (The Valley Force event never happened. It's pure mytho-history for Christians.) Things are better than they were in 1961, when Rushdoony's Intellectual Schizophrenia was published. While most seminary professors today are as committed to neutral education, accreditation by pagan humanists, and the benefits of Christians' staying in the public schools as their predecessors were in 1961, millions of laymen have begun to catch on. Epistemologically, these laymen are way ahead of most Ph.D-holding academics in clerical robes. Home school mothers have begun to figure out what the intellectual war is all about. There were no Christian home schools in 1961. The Thoburns' Fairfax Christian School had been open only for one year in 1961. Today, parents are pulling their children out of the public schools by the millions. These parents are well-intentioned, but Christian curriculum writers keep returning to Greece, like a dog to its vomit. They just can't stay away. Like moths drawn to a flame, so are Christian curriculum writers drawn to Greece and Rome. "You just gotta give your kids a little culture. Don't let them grow up like you did, a slave to the narrow worldview of the Bible. Get some culture!" This sales pitch has been selling classical Greek queer studies to Christian parents for over 1,800 years. They keep believing this sales pitch because they have not read the primary sources of classical civilization. In the late 19th century, those humanist educators who translated the classics left the sexual perversion passages in the original languages. No need to ruffle the perceptions of the masses! Also, no need to get the translations suppressed by the censors, which would have happened, so gross were the Greeks. What we need is a Christian anti-classical curriculum. But Christian parents have been seduced by the peddlers of airbrushed classical culture. "My boy needs some culture!" He does, indeed, but not that culture. However, the blind continue to lead the blind into the academic ditch. CONCLUSION We have come a long way over the last 40 years. By "we," I mean Christian Reconstructionists, who have broken with the pietist-humanist alliance, and home school parents, who have broken with the public schools. But the home school curriculum materials are still pushing the pietist-humanist alliance: the right-wing Enlightenment baptized by a layer of phony history, e.g., George Washington praying in the snow. For the truth about Washington's religious views, We should not expect our children to be told the truth We also should not expect the defenders of the It takes time to reverse 1,800 years of compromise. I have written an eighth grade curriculum: history, |
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(Dallas, Texas: Southern Methodist
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