The same holds true if you’re a Republican. Or a least one of the deplorable Republicans who supports Donald Trump. According to Miles Taylor, a former DHS official,
“I’ve spent my whole career not as a political operative. I’ve never worked on a campaign in my life other than campaigning against Trump. I’m a national security guy. I’ve worked in national security against ISIS, al Qaeda and Russia,” Taylor said.
“And the No. 1 national security threat I’ve ever seen in my life to this country’s democracy is the party that I’m in — the Republican Party. It is the No. 1 security national security threat to the United States of America,” he said.
According to a document titled “FACT SHEET: National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism” put out by the Biden White House, “It found that the two most lethal elements of today’s domestic terrorism threat are (1) racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists who advocate for the superiority of the white race and (2) anti-government or anti-authority violent extremists, such as militia violent extremists.”
Interesting. No mention is made of Black Lives Matter (BLM) whose members, along with Antifa spent a good portion of 2020 burning and looting cities across America. Nothing at all about them. It’s the dread bogyman of the progressives, “those who advocate for the superiority of the white race.” Apart from a few people here and there, there is no mass movement of the sort the Biden White House wants you to fear, all the while taking the focus off the real domestic terror threats who are the darlings of the establishment.
Given the way the establishment – whether the establishment is represented by the NSBA, the Biden White House, the press, major corporations, etc. – turns a blind eye to the obvious violence and threats of violence by those who support the establishment line, and the extreme magnification of the threats by those it deems its political opponents, it is hard to escape the view that the Biden White House is conducting a war on normal Americans for the benefit of ideological extremists who seem to run most of the nation’s institutions.
For my part, I 100% back the parents who are raising a ruckus with their local school boards over mask mandates, Critical Race Theory, and any of the other destructive, counterproductive, and ungodly agendas the educrats are attempting to push on their children.
But in the end, protesting at school board meetings is not going to be enough to solve the problems facing education in our nation.
In his essay “Rebuilding American Freedom in the Twenty-First Century,” John Robbins quoted Edmund Opitz, who made the important point that, “the remedy must go at least as deep as the disease.” Put another way, protesting at school board meetings is not going to reverse the downward spiral of our nation’s public schools or American as a whole.
For it is not this or that policy of a public school that is the problem. It is the very idea of public, that is to say, government schools that must be challenged.
The Biblical Politics of Education
Years ago, when I was in high school, our church hired a new youth minister whose family homeschooled their children.
“That’s just weird,” I thought to myself. “Who’s ever heard of such a thing?”
Now before any homeschoolers who happen to be reading this think that I’m about to criticize homeschooling, you may put aside your concerns.
Given this was in the mid-‘80s, my reaction to the idea of homeschooling was understandable. It was, quite literally, the first time I had ever heard of the idea. All the kids I grew up with went to public school, as did I. And if they didn’t go to public school, they went to Catholic school. Homeschooling did not exist to any meaningful degree.
Over the years, I have come to change my mind about education. It is public educations that should be brought into question, not homeschooling.
Putting it more directly, there is no Scriptural warrant for public education, while homeschooling is the Biblical model. Both Paul and Peter tell us that civil government has two proper functions: the punishment of those who practice evil and the rewarding of the good. There is no Biblical mandate for public education.
While there has not been much good news in recent years for those of us who love liberty, an article titled “New Data Shows Homeschooling Explosion!” sheds light on the positive trend of massive growth in the homeschooling movement. This growth is the result of governmental overreaction to Covid and all the restrictions that followed it.
Gordon Clark was, one could say, ahead of his time when in his 1935 lecture “The Relationship of Public Education to Christianity” he made the point,
First of all, education is and should be regarded as the responsibility of the family. It is primarily to parents, not primarily to the State, nor even to the Church, that God has entrusted the children and their upbringing. This principle needs emphasis in these days because so many educators neglect or deny it. There are powerful forces at work in the world and in these United States to destroy the family and to make children, yes and adults too, the creatures of the State.
Note well, Clark made the important point that to parents belongs the responsibility of educating their children. It is certainly not the state that God has entrusted the education of children. It is not even to the churches. It is to the parents that this responsibility belongs.
What, in Clark’s view, is to be done? It’s interesting to read his lecture in full if only to disabuse oneself that the problems we are facing with children being fed a steady diet of immorality in the public schools are something new in this generation. As Clark put it in 1935, “schools and colleges are accused-with some degree of truth-of giving the students courses in applied immorality.” This means the problem of immorality in public education goes back at least as far as the days of my grandparents and likely earlier still.
In the face of the problems with public education in the 1930s, which compared to the 2020s seems like a golden age of Christian morality, Clark made this point,
What suggestion can be made to help the parent in the present situation? There is one very concrete suggestion-whether it is practicable or not the parents must decide for themselves. Suffice is to be said that the suggestion is in actual operation in a number of places. The suggestion simply is that Christian parents band together to form Christian schools. A single family cannot provide a Christian education for its children, but a large number of families can.
In short, if Christians – and it is Christians who are going to have to take the lead on this – are going to overcome the studied immorality being foisted on the children by the education bureaucracy, they cannot rely on the state to teach their children. They must take control of their education of their children away from the educrats and either do it themselves or hire Christian teachers to do the job.
The cure must go at least as deep as the disease.
While it’s good that parents are waking up to and protesting the pagan ideas being taught to their children by what is effectively a state-run monopoly church of education, this is not enough. For it leaves in place those very structures that are pushing the poison. Even if parents are successful at pushing back some of the worst abuses, if these structures are left in place, the same abuses, and perhaps worse, sooner or later will come back.
To use a Biblical figure of speech, Christian parents must lay the axe to the root of the educational establishment by removing their children from it and giving them An Education Acceptable to God.
Lux Lucet 
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