American Education: From Biblical Roots to Atheism

American schools began with the Puritans in the 1600s for the purpose of Bible literacy. With the Bible as the core of learning, America’s first reader, the New England Primer, was created to teach children Bible stories, poems, hymns, and prayers. This emphasis on literacy and education promoted strong religious convictions among colonists and led to the creation of the most literate, educated society in the world.

By the 1800s, the core of learning in schools had begun to shift. For more than 200 years, American culture has endured an onslaught of secular ideologies that gradually have undermined our Christian foundations.

In late 1824, Robert Owen, a Welsh utopian textile manufacturer who communicated with spirits through mediums and séances, arrived in America. He founded the New Harmony socialist commune in Indiana that soon failed. He proposed that government should educate children and introduced the Prussian government indoctrination system that inspired our first public schools.

In the late 1830s, socialists, determined to replace the Biblical lessons with secularism, established government-controlled — public – schools. This would be implemented by teachers educated in the new teacher colleges that standardized what government wanted students to learn.

A signatory of the Humanist Manifesto that rejected the existence of God and moral truth, John Dewey was one of the most influential of the teacher education professors. Often referred to as the “father of public education,” Dewey believed that children should not think for themselves. His mission was to use public schools for the reconstruction of society. With his long tenure at the prestigious Columbia teacher college and his prolific publications, he was largely responsible in his lifetime for turning public schools from largely Protestant Christian academies into secular indoctrination centers.

In the 21st century, the core of education shifted still further from the Bible with the implementation of Common Core Curriculum Standards in public and some private schools. The standards were rooted in the U.N.’s occultist World Core Curriculum derived from the teachings of theosophist Alice Bailey, founder of the infamous Lucis Trust.

Although former U.S. Department of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos stated in a 2018 speech that “Common Core is dead,” it is alive and well — under aliases — even in states such as Texas that did not adopt Common Core during the Race to the Top under Obama. With the passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015, Common Core was codified so every school district that accepts federal funding is required to implement this leftist legislation with its occult rooted curriculum.

With the far-left teacher colleges churning out radical activists, public schools have become a magnet for paganism, witchcraft, and eastern religions that are contrary to our Judeo-Christian principles.

In California, the State Board of Education adopted an ethnic studies curriculum that required students to recite prayers and chants to pagan Aztec gods of war, human sacrifice, and cannibalism. A lawsuit forced the board to remove the section about chants with the rest of the curriculum remaining in place.

Florida students were subjected to witchcraft programming — “Witchy Wednesday” — via the school’s TV system during weekly announcements. Only when faced with allowing Christians to have equal time to profess their faith was the school administration willing to stop the witchcraft indoctrination.

In Chicago, students were coerced to participate in silent mantras to Hindu deities and in individual worship in dark rooms where they had to kneel in front of an altar with fruit offerings to the gods. The indoctrination stopped after the district was forced to pay a multi-million-dollar award to the victims over violation of their First Amendment rights with Transcendental Meditation (TM).

Some public schools such as Pin Oak Middle School in Bellaire, Texas, have credit-based classes in Hinduism and the culture of India. Where is a credit-based course in Biblical history?

Although schools and educators steadfastly refuse to integrate Christian prayer into the curriculum, Buddhism often is found in public classrooms as “mindfulness” and “meditation techniques.” Claimed to be a way to reduce student stress and promote mental well-being, Buddhist mindfulness meditation is akin to prayer for Christians while the mindfulness curriculum teaches Buddhist practices. Often referred to as the Quiet Time Program, students and teachers meditate for 10 to 20 minutes twice each day with instruction and follow-up by teachers trained to provide instruction.

Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) is claimed to improve student mental health, but actually it is a vehicle for indoctrination. The “circle time” practices used in SEL lessons in schools across the nation are drawn from Theosophy and Mahayana Buddhism.

In 1965, the Students International Meditation Society (SIMS) was founded to teach Transcendental Meditation in schools and universities. By 1974, TM was in local schools in 14 states and 50 universities. In 1979, the courts ruled that, although it is not a theistic religion, TM focuses on issues and ideas analogous to those in well-recognized religions and is prohibited, under the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, from taking government funding for mandated programs. Determined to continue their mission to infuse Buddhist principles into Western schools using secular language, SIMS obtained private funding.

For decades, Saudi oil money has bought the “right” for Muslims to proselytize in the classroom through Middle East history, culture, and the Arabic language. In the red state of Texas, students chant to Allah, recite aloud Islamic prayers, learn the Five Pillars of Islam, visit mosques, and wear burqas. In conservative rural Tennessee, numerous school activities indoctrinate students in Islam.

Recently, Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro Pennsylvania announced a $5 million “grant,” funded by taxpayers, to the Al-Aqsa Islamic Society of Philadelphia to expand its K-12 Muslim school. Taxpayers already are funding Islamic education under various guises.

Once a moral and highly literate nation of people, America has become amoral, violent, and dumbed down. We cannot lay all the blame on public education, but we have to consider what kind of morals might develop when citizens are educated in a system that teaches God is irrelevant. We have to consider what effect that a steady barrage of atheism, paganism, and eastern religions in the classroom is having on our youth.

Angry parents have organized to “take back” public education. The problem is that they fail to recognize that they never controlled the government schools in the first place. They believe they can “fix” public schools. Yet public education was flawed from its inception. Education reformers have tried for decades to improve public schools, yet the problems grow ever more dire. Fixing public education requires changing its purpose. Don’t count on that happening.

If parents really want schools that produce highly literate and moral students, they should withdraw their children from public schools and seek alternate forms of learning — like those in colonial days.

Source: American Education: From Biblical Roots to Atheism – American Thinker

I have long looked for a definition of antisemitism that could help me explain to Christian’s why this targeted hatred of Jewish people is a spiritual battle that’s playing out in real time right before our eyes.

I finally found it in the words of Israeli journalist Haviv Rettig Gur, who captures antisemitism with rare clarity.

He argues that antisemitism is “an ancient idea that recurs throughout history—the archetype that Jews stand in the way of the redemption of the world.”

That definition gets to the heart of something many political commentators, academics, and activists miss entirely. Antisemitism isn’t ultimately about stereotypes, war, money, power, or politics. It’s about a deeper belief embedded across civilizations; it’s the belief that the Jewish people are the obstacle preventing the world from becoming what it ought to be.

For years, I’ve heard evangelicals insist that antisemitism is more than prejudice—that it is spiritual warfare, a satanic assault against the people God chose to bear His promises.

I agree!

But if we want to confront the rising tide of Jew-hatred—especially now that it spreads far beyond the progressive left, infecting conservative spaces and even Christian communities—we must go deeper.

If antisemitism is satanic, we must ask what Satan is actually trying to accomplish, and Gur’s framing, in my opinion, provides the key.

If the Jewish people are seen as the barrier to global redemption, then antisemitism is fundamentally a theological grievance disguised as political, cultural, or racial critique. It is the same ancient lie retold in new vocabulary. Antisemitism is a shapeshifter that has taken on three dominant forms throughout history.

The first is the oldest, religious antisemitism—the belief that Jewish faith and Torah observance are what threaten the world’s progress. That lie surfaces in the book of Esther when Haman describes the Jews as a people who refuse to obey the king’s laws. It resurfaces centuries later in Antiochus Epiphanes, a Greek king who outlawed Jewish practice because it interfered with his imperial vision of cultural conformity. It appeared in Medieval Spain, when King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella insisted Jewish difference was so intolerable after the Reconquista that Jews must convert, leave, or die.

Religious antisemitism persists today; it can be seen in Islamic teachings and certain Christian doctrine. Last year, social media influencer Father Calvin Robinson went on a viral rant claiming that there is no such thing as “Judeo-Christian” values, only Christian values. He refused to use the word Judeo. His post was received with acclaim by many, including Candace Owens, who said she’s stopped Judeo because of its “overtly political history.”

Religious antisemitism claims that Jews are a problem because they will not “become like us.”

A second form of antisemitism took shape in the modern era: racial, genetic antisemitism. Unlike earlier hatred, which targeted what Jews believed, this newer version targeted who Jews were. Jewishness became a biological stain, an inborn problem, a threat embedded in DNA. A Jew could be secular or observant, religious or an atheist—it didn’t matter. Their very existence, their bloodline, was now seen as the source of society’s corruption.

This is the worldview Adolf Hitler seized upon, accusing the Jewish people of poisoning Germany and dragging it into humiliation after World War I. Nazi propaganda went so far as to invent physical identifiers, like the infamous “Jewish nose,” even though scientific studies disproved such claims.

But the truth was irrelevant.

Demonization was the goal. And genetic antisemitism gave Hitler the ideological foundation to murder six million Jewish men, women, and children in the Holocaust. It didn’t matter what Jewish people believed; the problem with Germany and the world was the Jew.

A third form of antisemitism has become unmistakable in the 21st century: statehood antisemitism. It claims to be political, offering critiques of Israeli policy, but always ends by targeting Jewish people—anywhere, everywhere.

You see more clearly since the Hamas massacre on October 7, Jewish students on college campuses have been shoved, harassed, screamed at, and excluded from classrooms—many of them aren’t even Israeli.

Synagogues, kosher restaurants, and Jewish community centers across the world have been vandalized or threatened. The message is unmistakable: Israel’s existence as a Jewish state is the problem, and therefore Jews everywhere must pay the price.

Statehood antisemitism pretends to be about geopolitics. But it functions the same way ancient hatred always has: it collapses Israel, Judaism, and the Jewish people into a single target. The war in Gaza becomes a pretext for hostility toward Jews in New York, Paris, or London who may have never set foot in Israel. This is not “critique.” It is the same old lie wrapped in modern language.

As I considered these three expressions of antisemitism through Gur’s definition, one truth became impossible to ignore and helped me see Satan’s goal.

Every form of Jew-hatred aims at undermining the foundational promise God made to Abraham in Genesis 12—God’s promise of a land, a people, and a blessing for the nations.

Religious antisemitism attacks the blessing by targeting the Jewish faith through which Scripture, covenant, and the Messiah came into the world. Genetic antisemitism attacks the people by attempting to erase them entirely, which would make God’s promises void. Statehood antisemitism attacks the land by denying Israel’s legitimacy and centrality in God’s redemptive plan.

In other words, antisemitism tries to dismantle the Abrahamic covenant from every direction. And that is why it is satanic. Not simply because it is bigotry or hatred—though it is—but because it is a direct assault on God’s credibility. If Satan can convince the world that the land no longer matters, that the Jewish people are not chosen, that the blessing through Abraham is irrelevant, then he can convince the world that God is unfaithful.

This is why antisemitism is so persistent. It is why it mutates from religious to racial to political forms. It is why it appears on the left and the right. And it is why today’s Jew-hatred looks eerily like yesterday’s, even when the rhetoric has changed. The covenant God made with Abraham remains, and therefore the hatred remains.

But the Scriptures are clear: the Jewish people are not the obstacle to the redemption of the world—they are the vehicle of it. Through them came the Word of God, the prophets, the Messiah, and the promise of restoration that would begin in Jerusalem and extend to every nation. And through them God pledged to bless all the families of the earth. A promise that still stands!

That is the truth Satan seeks to erase through antisemitism. And that is why confronting antisemitism is not merely a political or moral duty—it is a spiritual one. To stand with the Jewish people is to stand with the covenant God made with them, going back to the moment Abraham took that step of faith to heed God’s call in Genesis 12. To resist antisemitism is to celebrate God’s promise to Abraham. And to proclaim the truth is to declare, again and again, that God’s promises still stand.

According to God, the Jewish people aren’t the obstacle to global redemption; their salvation is the pathway!

Chris Katulka is the Vice President of North American Ministries for The Friends of Israel Gospel Ministry, the host of The Friends of Israel Today radio program, a writer for Israel My Glory magazine, and a Contributor to Harbinger’s Daily.

Source: The Truth Satan Seeks To Erase Through Antisemitism – Harbinger’s Daily