R. L. Dabney Writes On Government Education circa 1873 … Is Proved Right in 2014

“Said Daniel Webster…‘In what age, by what sect, where, when, by whom, has religious truth been excluded from the education of youth? Nowhere never. Everywhere, and at all times, it has been and is regarded as essential. It is of the essence, the vitality of useful instruction’”

Robert L. Dabney (1820-1898)
“State Free Schools” and “Secularized Education” in Discussions Vol.4,
Ross House Books and Sprinkle Publications, 1979 [1897], pg. (219).

By now people well know my opposition to Government schools. Of course my opposition is only a reflection of my reading and observations. In what follows in this post I am combining my reading of Dabney with the observations of Bobbi Leigh Swagger, a person who is closely connected to Government schools and what goes on there. Knowing about Government schools is part of Bobbi Leigh’s vocation and career. Hopefully, the result of the combination of the abstract (my reading) with the concrete (real life accounts from Bobbi Leigh) will make a bigger impact on Christians to the end of getting their children out of Government schools if at all possible.

“We propose now…that tuition in Christianity is essential to all education which is worth the name…we mean in the fullest sense that Christianity must be a present element of all the training at all times, or else it is not true and valuable education…The human spirit is a monad, a single, unit, spiritual substance, having facilities and susceptibilities for different modifications, but no parts. Hence, when it is educated it is educated as a unit…it is impossible to separate the ethical and intellectual functions…knowledge is really valuable only as it is in order to right actions… The nature of responsibility is such that there can be no neutrality…‘He that is not with his God is against him.’ He who does not positively comply with the ever-present obligation does ipso facto violate it, and contract positive sinfulness. Hence as there cannot be in any soul a non-Christian state which is not anti-Christian, it follows that any training which attempts to be non-Christian is therefore anti-Christian. God is the rightful, supreme master and owner of all reasonable creatures, and their nearest and highest duties are to him. Hence to train a soul away from him is a robbery of God, which he cannot justify in any person or agency whatsoever” (220,221).

Robert L. Dabney (1820-1898)
“State Free Schools” and “Secularized Education” in Discussions Vol.4,
Ross House Books and Sprinkle Publications, 1979 [1897], pg. (220, 221).

“There can be, therefore, no true education without moral culture, and no true moral culture without Christianity” (222). R. L. Dabney

1. Just found out that a school in one of the former Cotton States just took down the walls of the bathroom stalls in the school because the kids were fornicating in the bathrooms. Oh, by the way this was a Middle School.

Bobbi Leigh Swagger

(I’m still working on understanding how it is that a child who would fornicate in a bathroom stall would suddenly find some scruples and modesty about fornicating without a stall.)

“Education is the nurture and development of the whole man for his proper end. The end must be conceived aright in order to understand the process” (230).

Is “a really secularized education either possible or admissible?…No people of any age, religion, or civilization, before ours, has ever thought so…Pagan, Papist, Mohammedan, Greek, Protestant, have all hitherto rejected any other education than one grounded in religion, as absurd and wicked” (230,231).

R. L. Dabney

“In one school district in which I operate they recently sent kids home with a test that said:

True or False: Christopher Columbus came to America and boiled the natives alive to make soap.”

Bobbi Leigh Swagger

“True education is, in a sense, a spiritual process, the nurture of a soul…Every line of true knowledge must find its completeness in its convergency to God, even as every beam of daylight leads the eye to the sun. If religion be excluded from our study, every process of thought will be arrested before it reaches its proper goal…[What if an unbeliever claims to be merely] teaching some purely secular course, without any such maiming of his subjects or prejudicing of Christianity? If his teaching is more than a temporary dealing with some corner of education, the fact will be found to be that it is tacitly anti-Christian; overt assaults are not made; but there is a studied avoidance which is in effect hostile. There can be no neutral position between two extremes, where there is no middle ground, but ‘a great gulf fixed’…The training which does not base duty on Christianity is, for us, practically immoral.”

R. L. Dabney (232-236)

In the Lone Star state I recently spoke with a parent who told me that her 9th grade daughter came home on Friday telling her mom that the teacher told them that Pocahontas married John Smith.

The child brought her own book about Pocahontas back to the school on Monday to show her that only in a Disney movie did Pocahontas fall in love with John Smith. The teacher said,

“I asked around, and none of the history teachers here agree with your version. They all think she married John Smith, so you must be wrong.”

Bobbi Leigh Swagger

The Christian creed of responsibility: “According to this, obligation to God covers all of every man’s being and actions. Even if the act be correct in outward form, which is done without any reference to his will, he will judge it a shortcoming. ‘The plowing of the wicked, is sin’ [Prov.21:4]…Our Savior has declared that there is no moral neutrality… The comparison of these truths will make it perfectly plain that a non-Christian training is literally an anti-Christian training” (238).

R. L. Dabney

In Connecticut I interviewed a Mother who told me her child was being summoned to the Dr. today for a psychological evaluation because her son had been cutting himself in 5th grade, stressed out over their new standardized tests.

Bobbi Leigh Swagger

(By the way folks … 5th grade means we are talking about a 9 or 10 year old.)

The “direction of the education of children…[is] properly a domestic and parental function…[God] looks to parents, in whom the family is founded, as the responsible agents of this result…He has also in the fifth Commandment connected the child proximately…with the parents, which, of course, confers on them the adequate and the prior authority…It thus appears that naturally the parent’s authority over their children could not have come by deputation from either State or visible Church…[But] the dispensation of Divine Providence in the course of nature shows where the power and duty of educating are deposited…No parent can fail to resent, with a righteous indignation, the intrusion of any authority between his conscience and convictions and the soul of his child. If the father conscientiously believes that his own creed is true and righteous and obligatory before God, then he must intuitively regard the intrusion of any other power between him and his minor child, to cause the rejection of that creed, as a usurpation…If this usurpation is made by the visible church, it is felt to be in the direction of popery, if by the magistrate, in the direction of despotism” (243,244).

R. L. Dabney

What “Protestant concedes therefrom that his religious rights were either conferred, or can be rightfully taken away, by civil authority?…The State or Church has no more right to invade the parental sphere than the parent to invade theirs…Did our republican fathers hold that any people have ever the right to subvert the moral order of society ordained by God?…So far is it from being true that the civil authority is entitled to shape a people to suit itself; the opposite is true, the people should shape the civil authority.” (245,246).

R. L. Dabney

In another case in the nutmeg state a Mom pulled child out after she showed up at the child’s school to get the child for a doctor’s appt…she had a doctor’s note/summons in her hand and they wouldn’t let her have her kid. Period.

Bobbie Leigh Swagger

Concluding with Dabney,

The State has no right to oppose the theological beliefs of Christians, but they do oppose these beliefs when they educate souls as they do, “because a non-Christian training is an anti-Christian training” (238).

“Since all truths converge towards God, he who is not to name God…can only construct a truncated figure…And no person nor organism has a right to seem to say to a responsible, immortal soul, ‘In this large and intelligent and even ethical segment of your doings you are entitled to be godless’” (239,240).

“In fact the Church does not and cannot repair the mischief which her more powerful, rich, and ubiquitous rival, the secularized State, is doing in thus giving, under the guise of a non-Christian, an anti-Christian training” (241).

Closing observations

1.) Keep in mind that R2K insists that there is no such thing as Christian Education.

2.) Obviously, not all Government schooled children will all have equally bad horror stories about their time in Government schools. Some accounts will be less bad than other accounts but all will be bad. Even in my own time we were taught the occult and given death studies. We also did the whole communist re-education thing in writing biographies.

3.) Even if Government schooled children have a comparative “good” schooling experience nothing can take away the fact that your children are being educated into a Worldview where God is hated and is seen as irrelevant.

The Communist Eschatological Vision

“The Communists are further reproached with desiring to abolish countries and nationality. The working men have no country. National differences and antagonisms between people are daily more and more vanishing.”

(Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848)).”

“Socialism … gives full play to the “sympathies” of the population, thereby promoting and greatly accelerating the drawing together and fusion of the nations.” (Vladimir Lenin ).”

The Communist vision has always been for a time when all colors bleed into one. The Communist eschatology has always thus been the “fusion of nations” that the Communist Manifesto sets forth.

Lately however, this vision has also become the vision of some “Christian” expressions. There seems to be a vision among even putative conservative Christians that the postmillennial success will be measured by the increasing fusion of the Nations as that there is a “Christian” new earth where all colors bleed into one.

This is a clear and unequivocal denial of the Christian one and the many, wherein what is taught that there is unity in diversity and not unit in uniformity.

What shall we be my friends? Shall we be Christians or shall we be Marxist who call ourselves Christians?

John Murray Contra R2K … Christian Education Is a Must

“Now if the biblical revelation is ultimate for thought, outlook, and practice, we must readily see the implications for education… In a word, education must be Christian… [This] means that the subject matter of the classroom must derive its interpreting principles from the Christian revelation” (368,369).

“How indispensable to education from the earliest years, even before the child arrives at school age, is the word of Gen.1:1…No question is more urgent than that of whence… Whence the universe in which we live? Correlative is the doctrine of God’s providence… [Thus] unless the school fosters the fear of the Lord as the beginning of knowledge and of wisdom, the influence of the home and of the church, even when it is to a high degree exemplary, tends to be negated, and it is common knowledge and experience that in many cases the school has undermined what home and church have sought to establish and develop” (369).

“Education, apart from any conception of man as to his distinguishing identity, purpose, and destiny, is inconceivable…If education is to be Christian, it must be based upon and conducted in terms of the Christian view of man. If not, it is not Christian, and if not Christian it is alien and opposed to Christian interests…If boys and girls…are in the image of God, if that is their identity, their chief end cannot be anything less than to glorify God and to enjoy him. And education that is destitute of this objective, or has allowed it to suffer eclipse has lost its direction” (370,371).

“Christianity gives us a world view; it enunciates principles which underlie all our thinking if we are Christian; it prescribes the governing conceptions in terms of which we are to interpret reality. Christianity is not something tacked on to our world view; it is itself a world view. And the central features of our Christian faith are conditioned by, and in turn condition, that world view” (372).

The sum is: “The whole range and content of education must be God-centered; that is, God must be the unifying principle and the interpreting principle of the whole curriculum” (374).

John Murray (1898-1975)
“Christian Education,” in Collected Writings of John Murray, Vol.1, Banner of Truth, 1976, pgs.367-374.

Religion & Culture

“So, while we believe that the same religion may inform a variety of cultures, we may ask whether any culture could come into being, or maintain itself, without a religious basis. We may go further and ask whether what we call the culture, and the religion of a people are not different aspects of the same thing: the culture being, essentially, the incarnation (so to speak) of the religion of a people.”

~T.S. Elliot, CHRISTIANITY AND CULTURE, p.101

“In the case of kinists, the issue is not social structure, the issue is “What determines and defines a culture? Genes or faith?” As Henry Van Til demonstrated in his book, The Calvinistic Concept of Culture, culture is entirely defined by religion, and this is the only Biblical conclusion we can make about a culture. No other factor defines a culture, whether genetics (racism/kinism), environment, or economic conditions (Marxism).

Mr. Bojidar Marinov
Former Communist and Bulgarian

1.) Marinov raises a false dichotomy as social structure is always related to culture. The issue for Kinists is social structure precisely because the issue is culture.

2.) Marinov reveals his odd combination of Gnosticism and Cultural Marxism in this quote. By denying who God has created us to be in our generations has anything to do with culture is to curse the reality that God created us body and soul. Marinov wants to insist that faith can be abstracted from the person who has faith, and further that said person likewise can be abstracted from his people. It is true that culture is religion externalized but it is the religion of a real live person who belongs to a real live people. Marinov’s gnostic tendencies is seen in the fact that he wants a culture driven by a religion that isn’t connected to a person who isn’t connected to a people group. Genetics does not independently create culture but it contributes to the creation of culture inasmuch as the religion externalized that creates culture is a product of a people’s faith. That this is true is painfully obvious. Not all Christian cultures throughout history have been exactly the same. Not all Christian cultures that have existed in different places have been exactly the same. What accounts for the differences in these differing Christian culture in time and place? One difference that accounts for these differences is genetics. God has created different people groups to be different and those differences expressed themselves in the differing Christian cultures that different people groups built. They all held a like Christian faith and were all counted as the people of God but the differences in the way God created different people groups, in their generations, accounts for the differences that demonstrated themselves in the Christian cultures that were uniquely built. To not recognize this and to expect that all Christians will build the same cultures is nothing but gnosticism. It is to deny the physicality of whom God created us to be in favor of some abstracted spiritual category called “religion,” as that abstracted spiritual category is thought by seemingly non-corporeal persons and peoples.

My insistence that distinctions exist between people’s (genetics) is hardly new with me. It has been a common staple of Christianity before people like Marinov have tried to reinterpret Christianity through a Marxist grid. Consider the Princeton Luminary, Charles Hodge

[The] differences between the Caucasian, Mongolian, and negro races, which is known to have been as distinctly marked two or three thousand years before Christ as it is now. . . . [T]hese varieties of race are not the effect of the blind operation of physical causes, but by those cause as intelligently guided by God for the accomplishment of some wise purpose. . . . God fashions the different races of men in their peculiarities to suit them to the regions which they inhabit.

Systematic Theology, Volume 2, Chapter 1, Section 3

And again from Hodge,

It is admitted that nations as well as tribes and families, have their distinctive characteristics, and that these characteristics are not only physical and mental, but also social and moral. Some tribes are treacherous and cruel. Some are mild and confiding. Some are addicted to gain, others to war. Some are sensual, some intellectual. We instinctively judge of each according to its character. . . . [A]dmitting that these dispositions are innate and hereditary, and that they are not self-acquired by the individual whose character they constitute, we nevertheless, and none the less, approve or condemn them according to their nature. This is the instinctive and necessary, and therefore the correct, judgment of the mind.

-Systematic Theology, Volume 2, Chapter 5, Section 6 (1872–73)

And here is Abraham Kuyper on the same matter,

The Javanese are a different race than us; they live in a different region; they stand on a wholly different level of development; they are created differently in their inner life; they have a wholly different past behind them; and they have grown up in wholly different ideas. To expect of them that they should find the fitting expression of their faith in our Confession and in our Catechism is therefore absurd.

Now this is not something special for the Javanese, but stems from a general rule. The men are not all alike among whom the Church occurs. They differ according to origin, race, country, region, history, construction, mood and soul, and they do not always remain the same, but undergo various stages of development. Now the Gospel will not objectively remain outside their reach, but subjectively be appropriated by them, and the fruit thereof will come to confession and expression, the result may not be the same for all nations and times. The objective truth remains the same, but the matter in appropriation, application and confession must be different, as the color of the light varies according to the glass in which it is collected. He who has traveled and came into contact with Christians in different parts of the world of distinct races, countries and traditions cannot be blind for the sober fact of this reality. It is evident to him. He observes it everywhere.

-Common Grace

Is Mr. Marinov willing to label Charles Hodge and Abraham Kuyper “racist” merely because they held that genes had something (not everything) to do with culture?

3.) To suggest that the admission that genetics has an impact and so is a contributor to culture is racist is nothing but Marxist thinking. It was Marx and Marxists who have always insisted that the grand goal of social structure is Uniformity. If the differences of men, can not at least in part, be explained by who God has created us to be then the consequence of such thinking is that when all men become Christian then Nations will cease to exist. After all, if all that explains culture is religion externalized abstracted from the peoples who are externalizing that religion then when all share the same religion then all idea of peoples or Nationalities will disappear. Voila … we have arrived at John Lenon’s “Imagine.”

Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace…

What Marinov is offering as Christianity is a type of thinking perfectly consistent with what Frederick Engels opted for in his Communism.

”What will be the attitude of communism to existing nationalities?

The nationalities of the peoples associating themselves in accordance with the principle of community will be compelled to mingle with each other as a result of this association and hereby to dissolve themselves, just as the various estate and class distinctions must disappear through the abolition of their basis, private property.”

~ Frederick Engels in “The Principles of Communism”, 1847

4.) Is it really “racist” to say that since God recognizes distinctions we should likewise? To recognize distinctions between a Greyhound and a Schnauzer is not to argue for Supremacy for either Greyhound or Schnauzer. It is merely to recognize that distinctions exist.

5.) Mr. Marinov complaint against Kinists is vitiated by the fact that a long known synonym for Culture is “Folkway.” So if we use this synonym in Dr. Henry Van Til’s definition what we get is “Folkways is religion externalized.” Obviously one can not have the externalization apart from the ways of the Folk.

Mr. Marinov’s work is reductionistic to a fault. One simply cannot have a religion to be externalized without a people doing the externalizing. One can’t have religion without people and you can’t have people without the common ties of blood, family, tribe, ethnicity, and race. To try to separate religion from people is madness.

Mr. Marinov’s theology is a throwback to his former Communist days while at the same time combined with some kind of Gnosticism. Some might contend that Mr. Marinov apparently has not yet put off the thinking in which he was originally trained. I don’t know about that. My plea is simply that Christians would see the shallowness of his arguments despite Mr. Marinov’s ability to blow impressive Marx like smoke.

Marinov’s Mistakes On Immigration

Recently, a social media site found former Communist and Bulgarian Bojidar Marinov commenting on a Dr. Joel McDurmon thread. He is addressing a learned and mature Christian with whom he disagrees on the issue of immigration. I place it here in order to demonstrate Mr. Marinov’s dissembling and exaggeration techniques. I place the quote first followed by analysis.

Mr. Marinov wrote,

“Your pathetic attempts at sarcasm show you are out of arguments. Like I said, I don’t care for Sowell, Woods, or Hoppe; their thinking is not Biblical and therefore is schizophrenic and inconsistent where moral issues are involved. And like I said, Woods is not even following von Mises’s methodological individualism in his essay but speaks as a collectivist. And like I said, Rushdoony didn’t mention any immigration restrictions in the Law of God, and what he criticized was not free movement of individuals but forced movement by the state. If you have to say anything on my arguments, do it. If you are just going to babble in desperation, hoping to prove something about yourself, you are only exposing yourself in a not very favorable light. Thomas Jefferson couldn’t give the Barbary pirates work permits because “work permits” didn’t exist then as a policy of the Federal government. Unlike you, these men had at least some Biblical worldview, and they were not so eager to accept tyranny as you are.”

Mr. Marinov has a bad habit of exaggeration, pejorative, and creative dissembling. In this brief quote we see this in the following,

1.) Earlier Marinov complained about certain people that his target was quoting as not being Christians and yet here he seems to see the non-Christian Ludwig Von Mises as an authority to be cited. Note a few of the quotes from the Von Mises that Marinov takes as some kind of authority. I post these quotes here because Christians like Marinov are redefining Christianity in the direction of Misean Christianity with its “von Mises-ian methodological individualism. In point of fact it is my conviction that the whole institutionally organized Theonomy and Reconstruction movement has been co-opted by Misean Libertarianism. Below is some of what Mises thought of Christianity.

Mises says that the gospel of Jesus was

‘utterly negative.’ “He [Jesus] rejects everything that exists without offering anything to replace it. He arrives at dissolving all existing social ties. The disciple shall not merely be indifferent to supporting himself, shall not merely refrain from work and dispossess himself of all goods, but he shall hate ‘father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life’ . . . His zeal in destroying social ties knows no limits. The motive force behind the purity and power of this complete negation is ecstatic inspiration, enthusiastic hope of a new world. Hence his passionate attack upon everything that exists. Everything must be destroyed because God in His omnipotence will rebuild the future order . . . The clearest modern parallel to the attitude of complete negation of primitive Christianity is Bolshevism. The Bolshevists, too, wish to destroy everything that exists because they regard it as hopelessly bad. But they have in mind ideas, indefinite and contradictory though they may be, of the future social order. They demand not only that their followers shall destroy all that is, but also that they pursue a definite line of conduct leading towards the future Kingdom of which they have dreamt. Jesus’ teaching in this respect, on the other hand, is mere negation.”

Theonomic Christians must start asking themselves if they want to rely on sources like institutional Theonomic-Reconstruction organizations given the fact that these organization are increasingly selling out Reconstruction thought to Libertarianism.

As Mises saw it, since Jesus simply repudiated all values of this life. Mises again on Christianity,

“His (Jesus) teachings had no moral applications to life on earth.” In another place he said: “Jesus offers no rules for earthly action and struggle; his Kingdom is not of this world. Such rules of conduct as he gives his followers are valid only for the short interval of time which has still to be lived while waiting for the great things to come.”

Marinov’s Libertarianism, with its “Methodological individualism” is throwing off the heritage of R. J. Rushdoony. Rushdoony, embraced Libertarianism in light of Theonomy but todays putative followers of Rushdoony are embracing theonomy in light of Libertarianism.

2.) Marinov fails to realize that current immigration patterns are indeed being, “forced by the state.”
Mr. Marinov doesn’t seem to realize that our current immigration patterns, and so problems, have been NWO policy for some time.

This book spends a little time telling that story,

http://www.amazon.com/Reflections-Revolution-In-Europe-Immigration/dp/0307276759/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1414013297&sr=8-1&keywords=Christopher+Caldwell

The Humanist Governments of the West have, since WW II, been implementing policy that is designed to remake the West into a non Christian reality. Mr. Marinov is just wrong to suggest that our immigration problems are not the cause of Western Christ hating governments.

3.) Mr. Marinov notes that “Jefferson didn’t give work permits because they didn’t exist.” Marinov almost seems to suggest that if work permits had existed circa 1800 Jefferson might well have given the Barbary Pirates work permits instead of canon fire.

4.) Jefferson — the man who excised all of the miraculous accounts from the famous “Jefferson Bible” — is thought by Mr. Marinov to have had more of a Biblical Worldview then the learned and Christian man he is targeting with verbal explosions.

5.) Elsewhere Mr. Marinov, in the same dialog, wrote,

“For all your quoting of Rushdoony, you should have been aware that Rushdoony specifically separates between those two in his commentary on the naturalization laws of Deuteronomy, and specifically adds: “These are NOT immigration laws.” Another testimony that you either can’t read, or you read selectively and dishonestly.”

“Rushdoony was emphatic that the Law of God doesn’t contain immigration restrictions and therefore the civil government is not allowed to impose such restrictions.”

This is a rather bold claim by Mr. Marinov, and as it turns out, consistent with Mr. Marinov’s debating technique is also a patently dishonest claim as can be seen by what Rushdoony wrote on Dt. 23.

“Immigration laws protect a nation by state discrimination, which can be good or bad, whereas these laws established the discrimination on a family level.”

So, we see that as Rushdoony interpreted Deut 23, those specific laws mentioned concerned the family and NOT national immigration policy. Notice also what Rushdoony says, “Immigration laws are for the protection of a nation” and they can be “good or bad.” We see then that Marinov was in error in his report.

6.) More errant commentary by Mr. Marinov on Immigration

Marinov wrote,

“The US Constitution doesn’t allow the Federal government to control immigration.”

Yet the Constitution disagrees with Mr. Marinov’s “wisdom.”

Article 1, Section 8: “The Congress shall have Power … to provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions; … to make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers.”

Article 1, Section 9: “The Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the Year one thousand eight hundred and eight.”

The implication clearly here is that Congress *could* prohibit the migration of said persons after 1808, which it of course did.

Also this from Constitutional scholar William Rawle,

“If war should break out between the United States and the country of which the alien resident among us is a citizen or subject, he becomes on general principles an alien enemy, and is liable to be sent out of the country at the pleasure of the general government, or laid under reasonable restraints within it, and in these respects no state can interfere to protect him.”

—William Rawle, “A View of the Constitution,” Chapter 9

Mr. Marinov repeatedly has revealed himself as a person whose declarative statements of “fact,” and whose citation of sources needs to be carefully checked.