Public Education Today: The Engine of
Anti-Christian & Athesitic Beliefs
The following is taken from A. A. Hodge’s
Evangelical Theology (first published in 1890). This particular excerpt comes
from the lecture on The Kingly Office of Christ. He now draws out
this obligation further as it relates to State-controlled education (the public
school system) showing that it is impossible for a system under a supposedly
“neutral” State to be anything other than a vicious engine of atheism. This is
precisely what we have lived to see the public school system become in our day.
Dr. Hodge saw it coming over 100 years ago.
“The overwhelming
importance of this principle and weight of this obligation appear in the clearest
light the moment the nation claims to regulate the supreme
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function of education. It is insisted upon that the
right of self-preservation is the highest law of States as well as of
individuals; that if the “First, the
tendency of the entire system, in which already vast progress has been
made, is to centralization. Each State governs her own system of common
schools by a central agency, which brings them, for the sake of greater
efficiency, into uniformity of method and rules. These schools are graded
and supplemented by normal schools, high schools, and crowned by the
State university. The tendency is to unite all these school systems
of the several States in one uniform national system, providing with
all the abundant resources of the nation for the entire education of
its citizens in every department of human knowledge, and in doing this
to establish a uniform curriculum of study, uniform standards for the
selection of teachers, and a uniform school literary apparatus of text-books,
etc. “Second, the
tendency is to hold that this system must be altogether secular. The
atheistic doctrine is gaining currency, even among professed Christians
and even among some bewildered Christian ministers, that an education
provided by the common government for the children of diverse religious
parties should be entirely emptied of all religious character. The Protestants
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 A.A. Hodge |
object to the government schools being
used for the purpose of inculcating the doctrines of the Catholic Church,
and Romanists object to the use of the Protestant version of the Bible and to the inculcation of the peculiar
doctrines of the Protestant churches.
“The Jews protest
against the schools being used to inculcate Christianity in any form, and the
atheists and agnostics protest against any teaching that implies the existence
and moral government of God. It is capable of exact demonstration that if every
party in the State has the right of excluding from the public schools whatever
he does not believe to be true, then he that believes most must give way to him
that believes least, and then he that believes least must give way to him the
believes absolutely nothing, no matter in how small a minority the atheists and
the agnostics may be. It is self-evident that on this scheme, if it is
consistently and persistently carried out in all parts of the country, the
United States system of national popular education will be the most efficient
and wide instrument for the propagation of atheism which the world has ever
seen.
“Third, the claim
of impartiality between positions as directly contradictory as that of Jews,
Mohammedans, and Christians, and especially as that of theists and of atheists,
is evidently absurd. And no less is the claim absurd and impossible that a
system of education can be indifferent on these fundamental subjects. There is
no possible branch of human knowledge which is not purely formal, like abstract
logic or mathematics, which can be known or taught in a spirit of entire indifferency between theism and atheism.
“Every department
which deals with realities, either principles,
objective things, or substances, or with events, must be in reality one or the
other: if it be not positively and confessedly theistic, it must be really and
in full effect atheistic. The physical as well as the moral universe must be
conceived either in a theistic or an atheistic light. It must
originate in and develop through intelligent will-that is, in a person-or in
atoms, force or chance. Teleology must be acknowledged everywhere or be denied
everywhere. Philosophy, ethics, jurisprudence, political and social science, can be conceived of and treated only from a
theistic or from an atheistic point of view.
“The proposal to treat them from a neutral point of view is
ignorant and absurd. The prevalent superstition that men can be
educated for good citizenship, or for any other use under heaven, without
religion, is as unscientific and unphilosophical as
it is irreligious. It deliberately leaves out of view the most essential and
controlling elements of human character: that man is constitutionally as
religious (that is, loyally or disloyally) as he is rational; that morals are
impossible when dissociated from the religious basis out of which they grow;
that, as a matter of fact, human liberty and stable republican institutions,
and every practically successful scheme of universal education in all past
history, have originated in the active ministries of the Christian religion,
and in these alone. This miserable superstition rests upon no facts of
experience, and, on the contrary, is maintained on purely theoretical grounds
in opposition to all the lessons which the past history of our race furnishes
on the subject. It is no answer to say that the deficiency of the national
system of education in this regard will be adequately supplied by the
activities of the Christian churches. No court would admit in excuse for the
diffusion of poison the pleas that the poisoner knew
of another agent actively employed in diffusing an antidote. Moreover, the churches, divided and without national recognition, would be
able very inadequately to counteract the deadly evil done by the public schools
of the State with all the resources and prestige of the government. But more
than all, atheism taught in the school cannot be counteracted by theism taught
in the Church. Theism and atheism cannot coalesce to make anything. All truth
in all spheres is organically one and vitally inseparable. It is impossible for
different agencies independently to discuss and inculcate the religious and the
purely naturalistic sides of truth respectively. They cannot be separated. In
some degree they must recognize each other, and be taught together, as they are
experienced in their natural relations.
“I am as sure as I
am of the fact of Christ’s reign that a comprehensive and centralized system of
national education separated from religion, as is now commonly proposed, will
prove the most appalling enginery for the propagation of anti-Christian and
atheistic unbelief, and of anti-social, nihilistic ethics, individual, social,
and political, which this sin-rent world has ever seen.”