Depopulation and the Looming Catastrophe
Sam Kastensmidt
From the earliest colonial times, churches were at the forefront of education in America. However, at the turn of the 20th century, the rise of theological liberalism brought significant changes. Both parents and churches began to relinquish their educational responsibilities to the state. As Protestant denominations retreated, secular progressives seized the opportunity to take control. Universities once founded to promote the gospel and biblical truths were delivered into the hands of individuals who reviled Christianity.
Perhaps no other institution did more to change the course of American education than Teachers College. In 1887, Teachers College was established at Columbia University to be the nation’s first college of education. Its founder, Grace Hoadley Dodge, a Christian philanthropist who devoted much of her life to promoting sexual purity among women, recognized “that the country needed trained teachers.” She wrote that she “felt the spiritual force of this need…to make teaching a profession like that of law or medicine.” As enrollment soared into the thousands, Dodge wrote, “From the dark came light and prosperity. God blessed the work.”[1]
Tragically, like so many other colleges of the era, Teachers College was swallowed up by progressives. It is hard to overstate the impact of this institution on our country. For decades, it remained the nation’s only college for teachers, exerting enormous influence over the public school system and providing the only model for other universities to emulate. Yale and Harvard would not establish their own departments of education until 1920. By 1950, roughly one-third of all school administrators in America were graduates of Teachers College. Its notable alumni have included twenty-eight different university presidents and countless professors. To this day, Teachers College remains America’s largest college of education.
Dewey was not subtle in his calls to eliminate Christian influence from American life. In his writings, he rejected God, the soul, and biblical absolutes. He labeled Christianity “a misguided quest” and referred to the concept of an immortal soul as “one of the most persistent delusions” of mankind.[4] Dewey wrote:
The old dogmas of religion have largely lost their power…There is no room for fixed and final dogmas in the life of the mind… The hypothesis of God as a person cannot be maintained.[5]
The true and primary source of knowledge is not in revelation but in observation and reason.”[6]
In 1933, Dewey became one of 34 signers of The Humanist Manifesto, a public denunciation of Christianity. Humanists were not only called to “regard the universe as self-existing and not created,” but to affirm that “modern science makes unacceptable any supernatural or cosmic guarantees of human values.” The manifesto argued that “the time has passed for theism,” and suggested that mankind “alone is responsible for the realization of the world of his dreams.” Dewey naively believed that mankind could create a utopian future without God. Tragically, within two decades of this manifesto, godless ideologues in the Soviet Union, Germany, and China murdered tens of millions of people in the pursuit of their own utopian visions.
It would be a mistake to suggest that Dewey wanted religion removed from the schools. Religious neutrality was never the goal; instead, he wanted to establish his own religion for the public schools. One year after signing the Manifesto, Dewey wrote A Common Faith to propose a new religion. This civil religion, according to Dewey, would offer “all the elements which give the religious attitude its value” without the need for a “supernatural and otherworldly locus.”[7] Even the Humanist Manifesto referred to its belief as “religious humanism.” Teachers were to be evangelists of this godless religion. At the conclusion of his essay “My Pedagogic Creed,” using language more fitting of a cult leader than a professor, Dewey declared that “the teacher always is the prophet of the true God and the usherer in of the true kingdom of God.”[8]
As the Church cowered and compromised its way toward cultural irrelevance, the avowed enemies of Christ were unapologetic in their crusade to seize control of institutions that would influence future generations.
As the Church cowered and compromised its way toward cultural irrelevance, the avowed enemies of Christ were unapologetic in their crusade to seize control of institutions that would influence future generations.
George S. Counts, professor at Teachers College alongside Dewey, sought to “reconstruct” the nation upon the principles of Marx and atheism. In his famous pamphlet, “Dare the School Build a New Social Order,” he explained that teachers were responsible for “shaping attitudes, tastes, and even imposing ideas” on their students. He urged teachers to be “less frightened” of public accusations of indoctrination. Counts wrote:
You will say, no doubt, that I am flirting with the idea of indoctrination… And my answer is again in the affirmative…. Only the most stupid and unenterprising can fail to perceive the promise of power which the school holds out to those who would organize its curriculum.[9]
Reverend Charles Francis Potter established the First Humanist Society of New York, and he recruited Dewey to serve on its board. As a liberal Unitarian theologian, Potter was then invited to give lectures at Columbia urging students to abandon their “dependence upon supernaturalism.” Like Dewey, Potter was confident that the new public education system would purge Christianity from American life. He wrote:
Education is thus a most powerful ally of humanism, and every public school is a school of humanism. What can the theistic Sunday school, meeting for an hour once a week, and teaching only a fraction of the children, do to stem the tide of a five-day program of humanistic teachings?[10]
Not surprisingly, as an atheist, Dewey also called upon society to abandon its belief in moral absolutes, crediting Darwin with the philosophic basis for doing so. In his essay, “The Influence of Darwinism on Philosophy,” Dewey wrote, “Philosophy forswears inquiry after absolute origins and absolute finalities. Nature has no end, no aim, and no purpose. There is change only, not advance towards a goal.” Indeed, if our universe is an unyielding stream of aimless surprises with no purpose, no design, and no destiny, any concept of absolutes would be nonsensical. So, Dewey dismissed the eternal categories of good and evil, advocating instead for “situational ethics” that evolve with the times.
For Dewey, even knowledge itself was perpetually evolving. He contended that Darwin’s theory must “transform the logic of knowledge, and hence the treatment of morals, politics, and religion.” This marked a radical departure from more than two millennia of established Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman philosophy which viewed education as the pursuit of unchanging and eternal truths. With the abandonment of God and His Word, truth and morality became moving targets in American schools.
Dewey not only wanted to abandon our religious and moral foundations; he wanted to replace America’s capitalist economy with centrally planned socialism. In his writings, he repeatedly advocated for the “social control of forces and agencies,” and he contended that his vision for America could “be attained only as control of the means of production and distribution is taken out of the hands of individuals.”[11] He wrote: “We are in for some kind of socialism, call it whatever name we please, and no matter what it will be called when it is realized, economic determinism is now a fact not a theory.”[12]
Dewey even traveled to the Soviet Union to inspect their model of public education. He referred to its system as “nobly heroic” and being “more impressive than my command of words permits me to record.” One Soviet education official honored him by stating that “Dewey comes infinitely closer to Marx and the Russian Communists” than any other theorist of the West.[13] In 1937, Dewey agreed to preside over a show trial, known as the Dewey Commission, to defend Leon Trotsky against Soviet charges of treason. In a triumph for Trotsky, one of three men most responsible for the bloody Bolshevik Revolution, Dewey’s commission affirmed that Trotsky “never recommended, plotted, or attempted the restoration of capitalism in the USSR.”
Dewey’s colleague, Professor Counts, traveled to Russia on three separate occasions. He challenged the U.S. to embrace Soviet communism. Like Dewey, he described a society so beautiful that “few can contemplate it without emotion.”[14] In 1939, this communist professor was elected to serve as president of the American Federation of Teachers, the nation’s second largest teachers’ union. Counts called on teachers to use their classrooms to bring an end to the great American experiment of capitalism. He wrote:
The day of individualism in the production and distribution of goods is gone. The times are literally crying for a new vision of American destiny. The teaching profession, or at least its progressive elements, should eagerly grasp the opportunity which the fates have placed in their hands.
The professors at Columbia were openly calling for a democratic revolution. In 1935, this intensified when the university hired a team of philosophy professors who had established the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, Germany, studying how to spread communist revolutions. In 1933, when Hitler became the German chancellor, these philosophers fled to America, and Columbia invited them to establish the “Frankfurt School.” These radicals went well beyond Dewey—unveiling diabolical new strategies to sow resentment in the hearts of students toward America’s existing cultural and economic systems.
Professor Max Horkheimer called this new field “critical theory,” encouraging students to put all societal power structures under a microscope. Frankfurt School Professor Jürgen Habermas, who studied under Horkheimer, later wrote that critical theory was invented to foster “political disappointments at the absence of revolution in the West.”[15] Critical theory has since given birth to a myriad of divisive branches of cultural Marxism like critical race theory, gender theory, feminist theory, queer theory, and intersectionality.
This Marxist worldview, which interprets all of life through an oppressed-oppressor paradigm, now pervades our education system. In 2021, as nearly every measure of academic performance was declining, the NEA was vowing to study categories of historical oppression including “empire, white supremacy, anti-Blackness, anti-indigeneity, racism, patriarchy, cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, ableism, anthropocentrism, and other forms of power and oppression at the intersections of our society.” It is no surprise that patriotism is at record lows among Generation Z. Two-thirds of “Zoomers” claim that America is an “unfair society,” and 40% believe that our Founders would be better described as “villains.” Horkheimer’s plan has worked.
Herbert Marcuse, another professor at the Frankfurt School, urged students to build revolutionary political coalitions from “the substratum of the outcasts and outsiders, the exploited and persecuted of other races and other colors, the unemployed and the unemployable.” During the violent student protests of 1968, the CIA identified “Marx, Mao, and Marcuse” as the three men most responsible for radicalizing American students. To expand his coalition, Marcuse even began advocating for “polymorphous sexuality” and the normalization of all forms of sexuality and gender roles. He became known as the “philosopher of sexual liberation.” In 1969, at the height of the sexual revolution, Pope Paul VI condemned Marcuse for fostering “disgusting and unbridled” eroticism and “animal, barbarous and subhuman degradations” incompatible with civilization.
The Church accepted the faulty premise that it should no longer be engaged in the public sphere, and godless men seized control of education promising a utopian vision of the future.
Martin Luther was right when he said:
I am much afraid that the universities will prove to be the great gates of hell, unless they diligently labor in explaining the Holy Scriptures, and engraving them in the hearts of the youth. I advise no one to place his child where the Scriptures do not reign paramount. Every institution in which men are not unceasingly occupied with the Word of God must become corrupt.[17]
Christians should abandon this rotting system and enter the fight to establish better alternatives. Of course, parents are ultimately responsible for educating their children, but the Church must reclaim its heritage and present them with viable alternatives. Though Christian schools now teach only a fraction of the nation’s students, they outperform their secular counterparts in academics, and they generate better mental, social, and emotional health. Christian teachers should join this work and only teach where their faith is not muzzled. Donors should only fund colleges and schools that exalt the Lord and His Word. Administrators overseeing Christian schools should fight tooth and nail to maintain resolved allegiance to the scriptures. Pastors and denominational leaders should stand guard against the theological drift that destroys churches. Finally, voters should elect politicians who support school choice policies that provide all parents with educational options for their children.
May the Lord grant His Church the courage, clarity, and favor necessary to recapture its position as the chief partner to parents in training up future generations. Amen.
FOOTNOTES
[1] Columbia University. Stories, Plays, Poems, and Essays. D. Appleton and Company, 1926, p. 268-269.
[2] Federer, William J., and William Joseph Federer. America’s God and Country: Encyclopedia of Quotations. Fame, 1994, p. 392.
[3] Dewey, John. My Pedagogic Creed. E.L. Kellogg & Co., 1897.
[4] Dewey, John. The Quest for Certainty: A Study of the Relation of Knowledge and Action. Minton, Balch & Company, 1929.
[5] Dewey, John. A Common Faith. Yale University Press, 1934.
[6] Dewey, John. Reconstruction in Philosophy. Beacon Press, 1920.
[7] Dewey, John. A Common Faith. 2nd ed., Yale University Press, 2013.
[8] Dewey, John, and Jo Ann Boydston. The Early Works, 1882-1898: 1895-1898. Early Essays. Southern Illinois University Press, 1972, p. 95.
[9] Shook, John R. Dictionary of Modern American Philosophers. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2005, p. 547.
[10] Potter, Charles Francis, and Clara Cook Potter. Humanism, a New Religion. Simon and Schuster, 1930, p. 128.
[11] Dewey, John. The Later Works of John Dewey, Volume 11, 1925 – 1953: Essays, Reviews, Trotsky Inquiry, Miscellany, and Liberalism and Social Action. 2008, p. 367.
[12] Dewey, John. Individualism: Old and New. Minton, Balch, 1930.
[13] United States. Congress. House. Committee on Un-American Activities. The Communist Conspiracy: Strategy and Tactics of World Communism. Vol. 1, Parts 1-2, 1956, p. 187.
[14] United States. Congress. Congressional Record: Proceedings and Debates of the … Congress, Volume 98, Part 2. U.S. Government Printing Office, 1952, p. 2707.
[15] Habermas, Jürgen. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures. Polity Press, 2015.
[16] Marcuse, Herbert. Repressive Tolerance: A Critique of Pure Tolerance. Beacon Press, 1965, p. 85.
[17] Merle d’Aubigné, Jean Henri, and Henry White. History of the Reformation of the Sixteenth Century. R. Carter, 1849.
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