Dr. Everett Piper (born 1959), a radio host and former university president, recently wrote a commentary titled “What happens in Israel will not stay in Israel,” with a subtitle “Higher education in the U.S. has lost its moral boundaries.” The article makes a connection between Hamas militants in Gaza and the vacuous, sordid shape of American education.
Barring a few, all of the nation’s first 123 colleges and universities in America were established as distinctly Christian by nature, origin and purpose.
Piper writes:
This sad display of moral nihilism [in American education] should surprise no one. It’s been coming for decades and is a sobering reminder of how far our educational system has fallen.
It may be a surprise to the elites in the media, but American higher education, from its inception in the 1600s until the end of the 19th century, operated within the context of a Christian ethos. The guiding philosophy was to propagate knowledge and to prepare upright leadership within a Christian society.
The academy’s mission at that time was to promote moral development and civic responsibility. Theoretically and ideally, higher education was considered critical in maintaining our country’s moral order.
Seven of the eight Ivy League institutions were founded in like manner. Dartmouth’s purpose was to “Christianize” the American Indian tribes, and its motto, even to this day, is Vox clamantis in deserto: “The voice of one crying in the wilderness.” The University of Pennsylvania’s motto was Leges Sine Moribus Vanae: “Laws without morals are useless.”
The Founding Fathers’ lofty goals included Christian community, biblical teaching and moral education, a derivative of Proverbs 1:7 (NKJV), “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and instruction.”
The sapiential building of the inner man, personal integrity and morality in culture as the norm, coupled with an intense pursuit of scriptural wisdom, were prioritized as paramount in early American educational concepts, with at its core the premise that virtue is quintessential to freedom.
Spiritual wisdom, however, must be acquired as it is neither hereditary nor intrinsic. “Prize her, and she will exalt you; if you embrace her, she will honor you,” Solomon urges his sons in Proverbs 4:8 (BSB). Proverbs 8:15 (NKJV) informs us that exalting spiritual wisdom, with its virtues of knowledge, shrewdness, discretion, counsel and resourcefulness, equips “kings [to] reign and rulers [to] decree justice.” As per Bruce K. Waltke, it equips those who have submitted themselves to wisdom’s teachings to “high station,” “societal status” and “public square authority.”
Unfortunately, for modern America this is no longer the case as our entire educational enterprise, in the words of Piper, “has lost any moral boundaries that confirm common sense, natural law, and intellectual sanity.”
Biological boys competing against girls at state track championships and swimming events are just the latest woke whim-wham of Inside-the-Beltway education bureaucrats. They publicly give pompous precedence to the sinister staples of cultural Marxism, including embittering America’s youth with Critical Race Theory, hailing homosexual and gender dysphoria, fomenting race division and instilling into children hate of America and for each other.
Last week it was announced that high school ACT scores have fallen for the sixth straight year, notwithstanding the National Education Association’s $800 billion bureaucracy.
Wouldn’t Christianization of the NEA be a better use of taxpayer money?
A general examination of the state of education shows that the NEA is driven by the fiendish pursuit of embedding feral values into the nation’s future: its youth.
We might contemplate Jesus’ Parable of the Unclean Spirit in Matthew 12:43-45 to get a sense of what we believe ails contemporary secular education. To spell it out: the Warren Court (1953-1969) secularists banned Jehovah God from public education in 1962 (Engel v. Vitale) and 1963 (Abington School District v. Schempp), discarding biblically based edification that was established by the American Founders throughout the 17th to 19th centuries.
As a result, the morally blemished spirit of religious secularism entered the (now idolatrous) institution and brought with it seven spirits more vile and wicked than itself.
At what point is enough enough?
Regarding the subject of what happens in Israel will not stay in Israel, we like to add the following: In August 2005, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon traded land for peace with the Palestinians with a goal to improve Israel’s security and international status in the absence of political negotiations to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Hamas won the local elections in 2006 and has since then been in charge of the Gaza Strip and West Bank. What Israel received instead of peace were thousands upon thousands of missiles launched from nearby sites, and both Gaza and the West Bank turning into breeding grounds for terrorists.
Hamas took a flourishing section of land that the Israelis had built in addition to the tens of billions of dollars gifted by the United States, the United Nations and the EU. While meant for improvements based on codes and regulations, Hamas spent the money on armaments.
Wouldn’t Christianization of Hamas be a better use of taxpayer money?
Prior to Hamas, Gazans led normal lives under Israeli rule. Gaza and the West Bank in the 1970s “constituted the fourth fastest-growing economy in the world—ahead of such wonders as Singapore, Hong Kong, and Korea, and substantially ahead of Israel itself.” Medicine, electricity, schools, literacy—all flourished. They benefited from refrigerators and running water. However, as recently as 1967, Gazan school books taught arithmetic with problems like, ‘You have 5 Israelis. You kill 5 of them. How many Israelis are left to be killed?'”
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said last Sunday on “Face the Nation” that “Palestinian Arabs should go to Arab countries; the U.S. should not be absorbing any of those. They teach kids to hate Jews; the textbooks do not have Israel even on the map. They prepare very young kids to commit terrorist attacks. It’s a toxic culture, and I think if we import large numbers of [Palestinians] to the United States, it [will] increase antisemitism [and] anti-Americanism.”
We concur.
America is entering a period where God’s wisdom conjoined with knowledge, discernment and compassion will be required if we are to sustain freedom for our children and theirs. There will be much opposition, with American Christendom over the last 100 years shirking its responsibility and ignoring Christ’s assignment found in Luke 19:13b (KJV): “Occupy until I come.”
We pray for spiritual leaders now entering the public square of America that they will “love Christ and the souls of men to the point of willingness to die for the glory of the one and the salvation of the other. But they will fear nothing that breathes with mortal breath.”
Gideons and Rahabs are beginning to stand. {eoa}
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David Lane is the founder of the American Renewal Project.
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