True Education ? Learning to Think Beyond the Bondage of Politically Correct World-Views

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By Joe Renfro, Ed.D.

Slavery is bondage, bondage in degrees often and often bondage can be something that purports to fly under the flag of liberty and progress, when ultimately it is the very opposite, as is much of the education promoted by our schools, our politicians, and the media in America today.  There is an educational enslavement being indoctrinated upon our society that is very much anti-Christian and is very much  in contradiction to the founding principles of our nation. Masses are falling for this!

I recall back in the nineteen forties when I was a young boy that we were the third family in our small town to get a TV, and I felt like I knew it all because I had seen and heard it on TV.  At school, whatever the teachers said had to be the absolute truth, for this is what I had been taught.  I never realized how people could be programmed to believe whatever the powers that be wanted them to believe. Now, many years later, there are multiple forces purporting enlightenment, a new age, and a call for change, but this change that is projected as progress, may be one that moves us from freedom of thought to bondage, to enslavement!

Two terms are very much in the limelight in our day, “slavery” and  “racism.”

Slavery is the ownership of one human being by another. It has existed throughout history in many cultures and is by no means extinct today. Past civilizations often slaughtered their enemies, but sometimes they were taken prisoner and used as slaves. In the Ancient World, slavery was common. The Ancient Egyptians kept slaves. So did the Greeks and the Romans. Some Roman slaves were household slaves who worked in their master’s homes. Others worked on farms and some were skilled craftsmen. Slaves who lived in mines probably had the harshest and most unpleasant lives.

In the 4th century, the Roman Empire split into two parts, east and west. After the collapse of the Roman Empire in the west in the 5th century, slavery continued in western Europe. (The word slave is derived from Slav because so many Slavs were enslaved in the Early Middle Ages.) The Vikings and other nations kept slaves and there were slave markets in towns including London during this time.

Slavery also existed in Central America before the Europeans arrived. The Mayans kept slaves who did all the hard work. The Aztecs too had slaves. Sometimes they were prisoners of war or criminals but sometimes people were forced to sell themselves or their children because of their extreme poverty. In the 20th century, slavery existed in India, Japan, Thailand, Burma and Malaysia.

From the 7th century to the 19th century, Arabs took vast numbers of slaves from Africa. They were transported across the Sahara or across the Indian Ocean.

In the 15th century, the Portuguese began to explore the coast of Africa. They began to transport African slaves to Portugal and Spain. In the 16th century, Europeans began to transport African slaves across the Atlantic. Slavery was nothing new in Africa. For centuries Africans had sold other Africans to the Arabs as slaves. Slavery was very much part of the Islamic culture.

However, the trans-Atlantic slave trade grew until it was huge. Most African slaves were sent to Brazil or to the West Indies. Some were sent to the British colonies in North America. Meanwhile, from the 16th century to the 19th century, there were many European slaves in North Africa. Pirates from North Africa captured Europeans sailing in the Mediterranean and made them slaves.

Slavery in the context of our present focus is being projected as the original sin of our nation by many of the more radical progressive advocates. In 1619, the first Africans were brought to America. On August 20, 1619, twenty or so Angolans, kidnapped by the Portuguese, arrived in the British colony of Virginia, and were then bought by English colonists. The arrival of enslaved Africans in the New World marked the beginning of two and a half centuries of slavery in North America.

Founded at Jamestown in 1607, the Virginia Colony was home to about 700 people by 1619. The first enslaved Africans to arrive there disembarked at Point Comfort, in what is today known as Hampton Roads, a place where I was stationed about sixty years ago in the US Army as a Chaplain’s Assistant. Most of the names of those slaves who arrived in 1619, as well as the exact number who remained at Point Comfort, have been lost to history, but much is known about their journey. 

After being kidnapped by the Portuguese colonial forces in Africa, the captives were loaded on the ship. Around 150 of the original 350 captives died during the voyage on the trip to Veracruz in the colony of New Spain. As the ship approached the destination, it was attacked by two privateer ships, and the around sixty of the captives were taken by the privateers. Later, one of the ships, the White Lion, docked at the Virginia Colony’s Point Comfort, and they traded twenty or so of the captives for food.

Olivia B. Waxman in Time Magazine, wrote:

Scholars note that the arrivals were technically sold as indentured servants. Indentured servants agreed, or in many cases were forced, to work with no pay for a set amount of time, often to pay off a debt and could legally expect to become free at the end of the contract. Many Europeans who arrived in the Americas came as indentured servants. Despite this classification—and records which indicate that some of them did eventually obtain their freedom—it is clear that the Africans arriving at Point Comfort in 1619 were forced into servitude. 

Thus, slavery in the US existed from 1619 to 1865 when the 13^th Amendment to the US Constitution was ratified. In 1640 in Virginia, a runaway slave owned by a black man was sentenced to remain in servitude for life, and thus lifetime slavery began to became established.                              

In an article in respect to slavery written by Jack Phillips in the New York Times, the pattern of promoting an “alternate” understanding of history is being seen from those on the right as being for the purpose of sowing division under the guise of promoting more so-called racial harmony. In reference to the September 6. 2020 article entitled “ ‘1619 Project’ Will Not Be Funded,”  Phillips observed that “the Department of Education is sponsoring the use of the New York Times’ “1619 Project” in schools, saying that institutions that use the alternative narrative of U.S. history could lose federal funding.

In the article he wrote:

The ‘1619 Project,’ created by Nikole Hannah-Jones and widely panned by historians and political scientists, attempts to cast the Atlantic slave trade as the dominant factor in the founding of America instead of ideals such as individual liberty and natural rights. Some critics have said that it is an attempt to rewrite U.S. history through a left-wing lens.  Some historians have criticized the project over inaccuracies such as the American Revolution having been fought to preserve the institution of slavery rather than for seeking independence from Britain.

Phillips went on to observe:

Far from being fought to preserve slavery, the Revolutionary War became a primary  disrupter of slavery in the North American Colonies. Lord Dunmore’s Proclamation, a British military strategy designed to unsettle the Southern Colonies by inviting enslaved people to flee to British lines, propelled hundreds of enslaved people off plantations and turned some Southerners to the patriot side. It also led most of the Thirteen Colonies to arm and employed free and enslaved black people, with the promise of freedom to those who served in their armies,” history professor Leslie Harris wrote. (Inside History Newsletter, August 20, 2019)

Slavery was once quite common globally. In fact twelve U.S. presidents owned slaves at some point in their lives; of these eight owning them while in office. George Washington was the first president who owned slaves, including while he was president. Zachary Taylor was the last who owned slaves during his presidency, and Ulysses S. Grant was the last president to have owned a slave at some point in his life. Of those presidents who were slave holders, Thomas Jefferson owned the most, with 600+ slaves, followed by George Washington, with 317 slaves.

Franklin Graham writes:

While Christ followers still battle with sin, they are no longer slaves to it. Through the power of Christ, His people can be set free from the bondage of greed, vanity, pride, pornography, addiction, abusive behavior, gluttony, selfishness—and any other sin under the sun. Jesus said about the freedom He offers: “If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.” (John 8:31-32). “Truly, truly, I say to you, everyone who practices sin is a slave to sin. The slave does not remain in the house forever; the son remains forever. So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed” (John 8:34-36).

The Pilgrims who came to the shores of America about the same time as those twenty or so Africans who came to Jamestown set up the Mayflower Compact before even landing at Plymouth:

In the name of God, Amen. We whose names are underwritten, the loyal subjects of our dread Sovereign Lord King James, by the Grace of God of Great Britain, France, and Ireland King, Defender of the Faith, etc.

Having undertaken for the Glory of God and advancement of the Christian Faith and Honor of our King and Country, a Voyage to plant the First Colony in the Northern Parts of Virginia, do by these presents solemnly and mutually in the presence of God and one of another, Covenant and Combine ourselves together in a Civil Body Politic, for our better ordering and preservation and furtherance of the ends aforesaid; and by virtue hereof to enact, constitute and frame such just and equal Laws, Ordinances, Acts, Constitutions and Offices from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general good of the Colony, unto which we promise all due submission and obedience. In witness whereof we have here under subscribed our names at Cape Cod, the 11th of November, in the year of the reign of our Sovereign Lord King James, of England, France and Ireland the eighteenth, and of Scotland the fifty-fourth. Anno Domini 1620.

There is a mind-set in America, however, seeking to overthrow our constitutional republic to install a totalitarian, socialistic government that is very much anti-Christian, that is in the sense that it proposes to that of pluralism in what many of us see as a marriage between communism and Islamism.

This is very much in contradiction to the values that are set in our Bill of Rights, in our Constitution, and the freedom that was set up from the teachings of the Bible, which made our republic work.  The message of the Bible from the beginning in Genesis on through Revelation is the proclamation of freedom, and this freedom relates very much to learning, as II Timothy 2:15 directs those in Christ to “study to show thyself approved unto God, as workman that needs not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.”  Notice this is the call to be “workman,” not a “woke” man, as someone who caters to politically leftist thinking, whether it is right or wrong!

We are hearing a lot about the need for culture change, and a straw man of what is called “systemic racism” has been set up by those of leftist thinking.  Without question, police in a few cases have done very bad things, but this is not the general practice of our police departments in America. It is the horrible actions of a few policemen on ego trips.

However, sad to say as we in America, and education being a central part of this, we have discarded the Judeo-Christian foundation in learning, and we are caught now searching for change to a new foundation in the totalitarianism of Islamism and communism, neither of which has worked. 

Sean Hannity in his new book, Live Free or Die: America (and the World) on the Brink, brings some interesting observations that can help clarify our need to return to the foundation that made this country the leader in the development of freedom for the world, as five quotes from page 9-13 well illustrate:

• “While still aboard the ship forty-one of the 102 passengers signed the Mayflower Compact, agreeing to establish a colony dedicated to God’s glory and the advancement of the Christian faith.
• “The essential difference between the American Revolution and the French Revolution,” notes Paul Johnson,” is that the American Revolution, in its origins, was a religious event, whereas the French Revolution was an anti-religious event. That fact was to shape the American Revolution from start to finish and determine the nature of the independent state it brought into being.”
• Fifty-two of the fifty-six signers of the Declaration and the vast majority of the signers of the Constitution were churchgoing, orthodox Christians.
• “I have lived, Sir, a long time and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth — that God governs in the affairs of men,” said Franklin.” I therefore beg leave to move — that henceforth prayers imploring the assistance of Heaven, and its blessings on our deliberations, be held in this Assembly every morning before we proceed to business, and that one or more of the Clergy of this City be requested to officiate in that service.
• “For the founders, it was evident that faith in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob magnifies human reason, encourages virtue, and sharpens a zest for liberty.”

In modern history, at least, only the American Revolution gave the people more freedom, rather than less. In the eyes of radical leftists, of course, that was the problem. Leftist revolutions, after all, are never about freeing people from oppression, as their architects claim; quite the opposite, in fact. They bring bondage!

True education is to learn to think beyond the bondage of politically correct world-views. Jesus Christ does away with racism, and he does away with enslavement. Islamism and/or communism, both with are totalitarianism can never allow real freedom to think for they subject thinking to their world-views.  Learning is revitalized in Jesus Christ, who said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.”

The White Lion, docked at the Virginia Colony’s Point Comfort, brought an opening to freedom ultimately in the new land, as the Christian message ultimately opened the door to freedom in land of freedom, the good old U.S.A.  The declaration made on the Mayflower Compact about the same time as the White Lion came into Hampton Roads harbor set the hope for all races, and this is vital in the development of education in this land!

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