Reprise: Reconstructionists, Southern Baptists and Education
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Fri Mar 23, 2007 at 09:37:21 AM EST

Those who still doubt there are links between Southern Baptists and theocratic Christian Reconstructionists should look inside the front cover of the December 2004 issue of the Chalcedon Report. There the chief publishing house for Reconstructionist thought, Chalcedon, announces that it has published Bruce Shortt's book, The Harsh Truth About Public Schools. Bruce Shortt, along with T.C. Pinckney, leads the movement against public schools within the Southern Baptist Convention.
Pinckney, who led SBC Fundamentalists to leave the moderately controlled Baptist state convention in Virginia, wrote a forward to Shortt's book. Paul Pressler and Paige Patterson, who organized the Fundamentalist takeover of the SBC, endorsed Shortt's book.

We've read this script before. First they attack the schools, then they organize a movement to take them over, and then they take them over. They did that in the Southern Baptist Convention.

Now they are taking on the public schools. When they are done, we will have a system of religious schools and home schools, paid-for at public expense, that will dutifully indoctrinate children in their theocratic ways.

The first stage of their campaign is passing resolutions at Convention meetings encouraging the parents of school children to investigate the homosexual agenda at the public school.  Any school that teaches tolerance of homosexuals will soon be under attack.

For all those school teachers who are fed-up with the bureaucracy in public schools, you are going to love working for these autocrats.

For all those moderate realists and pragmatists who think this scenario is a little far-fetched, all but a few Baptists thought the same thing about the SBC twenty-five years ago.

Ethics Daily is leading the opposition to Reconstructionist and Southern Baptist attempts to undermine the American system of common education. It is also a good place to keep up with the efforts of Reconstructionist Southern Baptists on this issue.




Display:
 be a bully. Really? Your home-training must have been really poor. And where in the Bible does it say to children: "Thou shalt beat the crap out of anyone you dislike, and no adult shall have the governance of you". Well, PROPERLY brought up children do not bully."

It's not too hard to publicly embarrass a pro-bully adherent (though impossible to shame them).

by NancyP on Fri Mar 23, 2007 at 12:00:51 PM EST



In my opinion, the SBC attack on public schools is in pretty good sync with a coming crisis nationwide.

There is some delayed-action machinery written into the "No Child Left Behind" Act that will soon force thousands of good public schools into a virtually permanent probationary status called "Program Improvement."

Side by side with this widespread mandatory probation phase, the President has set aside $300 M this year for his hoped-for voucher program.  As explained in one Ethics Daily article ( http://www.ethicsdaily.com/article_detail.cfm?AID=8513 ), the money represents education budget amounts that might otherwise be used in programs which have been wholly cut or chronically underfunded.

From the standpoint of the fundamentalists, the Bush plan would make it possible for  parents with children in one of these "probationary" schools to receive federal money to send them instead to religious schools of their choice.

The Bush vouchers would provide money not only for fundamentalists whose poverty prevents them from giving their kids a strictly sectarian instruction - it would also aid those more well-to-do whose kids are already in private fundamentalist schools.

I think the religious right is looking for something that would literally "save" their children from the imagined "damning" influence of a good liberal education.  Now that the probationary phase of NCLB is kicking in, I wonder if it is only coincidence that we find Rapture semantics embedded in the title of the law - i.e. No Child Left Behind?  The Ethics Daily article stated that Bush himself named the program.

I recently read that Senator Kennedy is calling the President's voucher plan "a non-starter."  All well and good.  But there is too little public airing of the problems involved in the theocratic, anti-social and unconstitutional elements of the idea.  Given the amount of repetitive backstory we read in every nooze article on Iranian intransigence or on the rise and fall of this month's celebrity, I feel we ought to be hearing repeatedly that resistance to vouchers is central to a fully-fledged Western culture and not simply due to the whim of a liberal Senator from Massachusetts.


God bless the whole world - - No Exceptions
by John Anngeister on Fri Mar 23, 2007 at 06:03:27 PM EST



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