Beware of Educating to Materialism through Socialism
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by Joe Renfo, Ed.D.
The public educational pattern in America has moved toward teaching the supposed virtues of socialism through our schools, a process dates back nearly a century but that has escalated much more as time has moved on. This has evolved the colleges to even the pre-school with the cultivation of socialism in America and the rejection of the basic values that were the foundation of our land. This promotion of socialism through education is not new at all but dates back to the days of the depression in the 1930s. This pattern has shown increased governmental control over learning in our society.
Dr. J. Gresham Machen (1818-1937), a scholar, theologian, ordained minister, and spokesman for conservative Presbyterianism in his book, Education, Christianity, and the State, a book that has been republished many times in the past century, spoke to this cultivation of socialism educationally in our land as being a very negative influence. Machen was very much against and concerned about the effects of socialism on our land. He observed that in a New York Times article back on August 7, 1934 his feelings and even quoted one of his adversaries, Dr. Robert A. Millikan, with whom he had a very different world view, as a way to affirm his thinking.
On page 133 in this book, he illustrated how:
From the address from one of the most eminent scientists of our day, Dr. Robert A. Millikan, President of the California Institute of Technology how that in ringing words Dr. Millikan condemned dictatorship and Communism and paternalism. ‘Some of them call it communism,’ he said ‘some socialism, some something else, but I am using the proper term Statism to include this whole tendency toward the government’s ownership and operation of everything, this whole movement that weakens self-reliance, discourages private initiative, diminished opportunity, stimulates bonus marches, to end too much socialism.” Dr. Millikan said further, “is inevitably the breakdown of both the character of a people and the effectiveness of its government.” (Education, Christianity, and the State-J. Gresham Machen, published by the Trinity Foundation-2004)
Socialism and materialism tend to amalgamate. Materialism, when it is defined as placing the love for material goods in place of love for God, is certainly contrary to Christian virtue. In the book I referred to earlier Machen observed that: “The worst part of public schooling is what it does to children s’ minds. From birth to six years of age, children are wide-eyed and curious about life and the universe. They absorb everything they see and experience life with a sense of awe and wonder.” Socialism blunts and distorts the wonder and awe as being education and learning as a gift from God and deforms it into an indoctrination of statism from schooling. It looks to make people more machines of the state and to deform from seeing the openness of heaven to the learners.
It is sad to see that in our day socioeconomic ideologies have become a substitute for the Christian faith in our land. Secularists embrace doctrines like communism or fascism to satisfy their hunger for meaning. In America in my lifetime, I know, it is very evident even in many mainline Protestant churches that there has been a shift from preaching about righteousness to that of rights, and this factor is one factor as to why children reared in the mainline Protestant denominations no longer are much involved with Christianity. This value system has replaced the value system of individual people developing a right relationship with God to one of being involved in the civil rights quests of our days. The socialist path to atheism begins by substituting a temporal, class-based morality for divine revelation. As socialism makes inroads among America’s young people, it replaces the Christian eschatology of seeing God’s guidance and judgments with a secular narrative. Left unchecked, it erodes both the adherent’s religion and society’s liberty.
Churchill noted, “Socialism is the philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, and education is the surest way to defeat it.” But the sad fact is that now in America, instead of recognizing our educational problems in having schools showing the failures of socialism, as Churchill pointed out, the liberal left through education is having a field day in promoting it.
According to Churchill this progressive learning was the creed of ignorance. The material realm displays facts of science, which is good, vital, and is a gift from God. But when the focus is on the material as being ultimate, it really undermines the basic roots to and for learning. Psalm 19:1 states: “The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament showeth his handiwork. Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge.” Seeing the work of creation and seeking to understand it, regardless of how and when God creates it all, is beyond human understanding, although there is nothing wrong at all with seeking to unlock and better understand God’s handiwork!
Christian discipline is a most vital part of learning, and without question our schools are not promoting the development of appropriate discipline in the classrooms. Discipline in Christ is not something imposed from the environment, but something developed from within individuals beyond environment that in turn can develop a real positive environment.
The behaviorism that is so dominant in American public education becomes a very limiting factor in learning and certainly is an influence in the ignorance of so many of our students in American schooling. Behaviorism, initiated by John Watson in 1913, who was a radical atheist proposed his theory that subtracted God from education. His thinking was to reward learning for external rewards rather than the joy of learning itself. But from this line of thinking we spend far more than other nations on education, and we certainly do not get better results for what we spend as a nation!
Many parents are very much concerned about effect of the Covid-19 on public schooling. Ideally, pupils should be able to transition their learning from the classroom to the computer screen, but it is not working out that way.
It is safe to say that parents want their children back in the classrooms, but states like California have chosen in some cities to educate illegals, children who have entered the United States illegally instead of educating the own native children or our land, this in the midst of the Covid-19 epidemic. Much of this is in the philosophy or seeking what they would say is the quest for equality, but in the process really ends up hurting overall learning!
In our land education has become a real dilemma. The public schools are falling short. There is public schooling, private schooling, and home-schooling. Oftentimes, however, private schools end up as mirror images of public schools, either because they are afraid of losing their state-issued license to operate the school or because the teachers and administrators are themselves products of the public-school system. It is a sad fact that in many instances high school graduates can scarcely read or do adequate math, and we have politicians calling for free tuition and open enrollment in our colleges in the name of equality. This is really pure ignorance!
According to Churchill socialism is the philosophy of failure. Socialism is a materialistic worldview. It punishes virtue such a hard work and discipline, as the socialists wish to take private property and to redistribute according to their judgments. It endorses stealing which the Ten Commandments condemns. Many of our politicians are continually sowing discontent, so as to increase their political power. It also encourages envy and class warfare. It is not good!
This entails the neglect of individual responsibility. Socialism breathes off of materialism. Most of socialistic thinking either neglects the spiritual elements or rampantly attacks it, as well as the morality that the Bible teaches. It seeks to spread discontent and enslavement to materialism. It does not cultivate the development of responsibility or gratitude toward God. It will kill the soul of our nation and of the world. It fails.
Is socialism just secular or does it as well have spiritual substance? When we look at the nations that have set up socialistic governments, we can observe that all have gravitated toward hostility in respect to toward the message of Christ. Venezuela, North Korea, China, Cuba, the Soviet Union are examples.
Some in defining socialism wish to look to countries like the United Kingdom, Norway, Finland, and Sweden, all which are not really socialistic. The term “Socialism” is a broad term, as some even in America say we are socialistic because of our national parks, our social security, our Medicare or Medicaid, etc. Socialism, in its simplest definition, is popular control of the means of production, distribution, and exchange, either by public ownership or through bureaucratic oversight and control. This somewhat addresses the material understanding of socialism.
Education in socialist countries gravitates basically as job training rather than the cultivation into the multiple area of knowledge and to cultivate the ability to think critically. People are educated for the state not for the quest of knowledge in itself. The socialistic education does not fit into what the Lord Jesus taught when he said: “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.”
Churchill said that socialism was the gospel of envy. It is a materialistic worldview. It punishes virtue such a hard work and discipline, as the socialists wish to take private property and to redistribute according to their judgments. It endorses stealing which the Ten Commandments condemns. Many of our politicians are continual sowing discontent, so as to increase their political power, as it encourages envy and class warfare It is not good! .
The word, “socialism” comes from the Latin word, “socius,” meaning “comrade.” Karl Marx took the concept and from it popularized the term “Utopian Socialism”, famously developing from what he said, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”
This is not what Acts 2:44 & 45 said, which was “All the believers were together and had everything in common. They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need.” Interestingly, Marx mooched off others his whole life, and failed to provide for his wife and children. He gave most persons an impression of intellectual arrogance. ]The favorite answer about who he was, was he wanted to live off other people’s work. He never did a real day’s work in his life and depended on rich friends who supported him. He had no trade or profession from which to make a living. Marx was a scrounger.
Almost all his life he lived off the wealth of his family’s [capitalist] business, or else he sponged off friends. A sad picture! He was a Prussian Ashkenazi Jew, whose family had converted to the Lutheran religion, where he was baptized at age six, but he rejected the faith of his family.
Due to his political publications, Marx became stateless and lived in exile with his wife and children in London for decades, where he continued to develop his thought in collaboration with German thinker Friedrich Engels and publish his writings, researching in the reading room of the British Museum. His best-known titles are the 1848 pamphlet, “The Communist Manifesto,” and the three-volume, “Das Kapital,” set forth Marx’s political and philosophical thought. Which has had enormous influence on subsequent intellectual, economic and political history, but if you are honest when you look at it that it has not been good. His name, Marx, has been used as an adjective, a noun, and a school of social theory, but the mark he has made on life was demonic!
The Apostle Paul wrote: “For even when we were with you, we gave you this rule: “The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat.”The 10th Commandment says: “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbor’s.”
Yes, the talk about socialism is very much on the forefront in our day. In studying the growth in the faith in socialism it can be observed that the atheists, agnostics, and anti-evangelical religious people tend to see socialism as the hope for the future, a faith to believe in.
People love government handouts, but in so doing often tend to ignore what the word of God teaches. Government handouts in the long run can cost much more than the immediate benefit they might seem to bring.
In Neo-orthodoxy the very mention of the word capitalist or capitalism, and especially of laissez-faire capitalism, immediately stirs up an adverse emotional response if not one of outright hostility in the minds of most Christians. Emil Brunner, who is classed as one of the bitterest opponents of communism by many, equates capitalism with an unrestrained, unlimited individualism that is destructive of justice for the common man. Paul Tillich speaks of class war as the secret condition of all capitalist society and says that “free economy tends necessarily toward infinite commercial imperialism.“ Reinhold Niebuhr, especially in his earlier years, looked upon capitalism as incompatible with the necessities of a technical civilization and a system that brought about overproduction, unemployment crises, and a breakdown in the system of distribution. Karl Barth has always been one of the most ardent warriors against what he terms “bourgeois capitalism.” (Socialism: Spiritual or Secular?, Francis Mahaffy, Foundation for Economic Education, May 1,1960)
These theologians have greatly influenced Western Christianity, but what they have done is to blunt the evangelical message and make much of Christendom move to the social gospel.
The Lord Jesus nor his apostles forbade private property to all Christians, and as matter of fact he showed the call to responsibility use one’s wealth wisely and diligently the Parable of the Talents
The socialist path to atheism begins by substituting a temporal, class-based morality for divine revelation. As socialism makes inroads among America’s young people greatly influenced by our education systems it replaces Christian eschatology with a secular narrative. Left unchecked, it erodes both the adherent’s religion and society’s liberty.
The socialist path to atheism begins by substituting a temporal, class-based morality for divine revelation. As socialism makes inroads among America’s young people greatly influenced by our education systems it replaces Christian eschatology with a secular narrative. Left unchecked, it erodes both the adherent’s religion and society’s liberty.
Studying Communism the “second oldest faith,” the promise “whispered in the first days of the Creation under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil: ‘Ye shall be as gods.’” Marxism promotes “the vision of man as the central figure of the Creation, not because God made man in His image, but because man’s mind makes him the most intelligent of the animals. Communism restores man to his sovereignty by denying God.”
Winston Churchill noted, “Socialism is the philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, and education is the surest way to defeat it.” But the sad fact is that now in American instead of having schools showing he failures of socialism, the liberal left through education is having a field day in promoting it. Looking at Communism, there is that promise that Satan “whispered in the first days of the Creation under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil: ‘Ye shall be as gods.’ Marxism promotes the vision of man as the central figure of the creation, not because God made man in His image, but because man’s mind makes him the most intelligent of the animals. Communism restores man to his sovereignty by denying God” in the socialist thinking, and Marx from his writing shows he regarded the two terms and synonyms.
Churchill said that the best way to defeat socialism was through education. What we have observed is that the Christian Church which led the world in promoting education in the Western world from the Protestant Reformation on up to the retreat from the forces of behaviorism and its socialistic thinking, that we have taken from the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and socialism, communism and Marxism is using secular education to undermine the basic values that can only hold learning in a way that does not ultimately cause it to degenerate into chaos, much of what we see developing in our day. Churchill was right that “education I the surest way to defeat it, but there is a reverse to that as Marx said, he turned Hegel’s thinking on it head.” The Material world has value, but it is a value that ultimately degenerates into disaster, when the spiritual foundations are overruled.
Job 28:28. well says” “Behold, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom, and to depart from evil is understanding,” something to which materialism totally ignores, but something that should be the heartbeat of education. This is a call to beware of educating to materialism through socialism!
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