It has become common knowledge that much of our educational system longer exists to impart the fundamentals of math, science, ethics, history, and reason to our youth, but rather is little more than institutionalized indoctrination into the effluent of postmodernist “woke” ideology. The following diatribe by a university humanities professor demonstrates this mindset and philosophy more clearly than most:

It seems to me that the regulative idea that we — we…liberals, we heirs of the Enlightenment, we Socratists — most frequently use to criticize the conduct of various conversational partners is that of needing education in order to outgrow their primitive fear, hatreds, and superstitions. This is the much like the concept which the victorious Allied armies used when they set about re-educating the citizens of occupied Germany and Japan. It is also the one which was used by American schoolteachers who had read Dewey and were concerned to get students to think ‘scientifically’ and ‘rationally’ about such matters as the origin of the species and sexual behavior (that is, to get them to read Darwin and Freud without disgust and incredulity). It is a concept which I, like most Americans who teach humanities or social science in colleges and universities, invoke when we try to arrange things so that students who enter as bigoted, homophobic, religious fundamentalists will leave college with views more like our own.

What is the relation of this idea to the regulative idea of reason which Putnam believes to be transcendent and which Habermas believes to be discoverable within the grammar of concepts ineliminable from our description of the making of assertions? The answer to that question depends upon how much the re-education of Nazis and fundamentalists has to do with merging interpretive horizons and how much with replacing such horizons. The fundamentalist parents of our fundamentalist students think that the entire “American liberal establishment” is engaged in a conspiracy. … these people would say that the typical communication situation in American college classrooms is no more domination-free than that in the Hitler Youth camps.

These parents have a point. Their argument is that we liberal teachers no more feel in a symmetrical communication situation when we talk with bigots than do kindergarten teachers talking with their students … When we American college teachers encounter religious fundamentalists, we do not consider the possibility of reformulating our own practices of justification so as to give more weight to the authority of the Christian scriptures. Instead, we do our best to convince these students of the benefits of secularization. We assign first-person accounts of growing up homosexual to our homophobic students for the same reasons that German schoolteachers in the postwar period assigned The Diary of Anne Frank.

Putnam and Habermas can rejoin that we teachers do our best to be Socratic, to get our job of re-education, secularization, and liberalization done by conversational exchange. That is true up to a point, but what about assigning books like Black Boy, The Diary of Anne Frank, and Becoming a Man? The racist or fundamentalist parents of our students say that in a truly democratic society the students should not be forced to read [certain] books by such people — black people, Jewish people, homosexual people. They will protest that these books are being jammed down their children’s throats.

I cannot see how to reply to this charge without saying something like: There are credentials for admission to our democratic society, credentials which we liberals have been making more stringent by doing our best to excommunicate racists, male chauvinists, homophobes, and the like … So we are going to go right on trying to discredit you in the eyes of your children, trying to strip your fundamentalist religious community of dignity, trying to make your views seem silly rather than discussable. We are not so inclusivist as to tolerate intolerance such as yours.

I have no trouble offering this reply, since I do not claim to make the distinction between education and conversation on the basis of anything except my loyalty to a particular community, a community whose interests required re-educating the Hitler Youth in 1945 and required re-educating the bigoted students of Virginia in 1993. I don’t see anything free of domination about my handling of my fundamentalist students. Rather, I think those students are lucky to find themselves under the benevolent dominance of people like me, and to have escaped the grip of their frightening, vicious, dangerous parents. It seems to me that I am just as provincial and contextualist as the Nazi teachers who made their students read Der Sturmer; the only difference is that I serve a better cause. I come from a better province.

Rarely do we get such a clear window into the thinking and motives of those who dominate our educational institutions, to whom we have entrusted our children: that they may transform a society through their indoctrination into the secular, Utopian fantasy of their dreams. The philosophers referenced herein are: Jürgen Haberman a German post-war philosopher associated with the Frankfurt School of postmodernism, who maintained that moral consensus could be reached through conversation alone, without reference to absolutes; and Hilary Putnam, who maintained that differing and contradictory beliefs could be resolved by each one being its own “truth”, again with no reference to outside absolutes or authority. In like manner, Richard Rorty, the late American philosopher and postmodernist who died in 2007, denied the existence of absolute truth, with each narrative determining its own “truth.” He was unrelenting in his vicious ridicule of Christianity and other religious beliefs.

Drawing on these postmodernist thinkers, our enlightened educator epitomizes the mindset of our secular culture, which insinuates itself at every opportunity through our media, our institutions of “higher learning”, our popular culture and the entertainment industry.

… he is indoctrinating the “racist religious bigots” into his superior ideology — indistinguishable from the Nazi indoctrination of the Hitler Youth during the war.

Notice, first of all, the dense language and almost impenetrable idioms in this screed, a verbosity meant to portray the intellectual superiority of its author rather than the clear communication of his message. Also, while alluding favorably to the de-Nazification of Hitler Youth after the war, he is indoctrinating the “racist religious bigots” into his superior ideology — indistinguishable from the Nazi indoctrination of the Hitler Youth during the war. How fortunate these students are to have such a benevolent Führer!

This is the soul of our now-thoroughly post-Christian, postmodern culture.

The “fundamentalists” whom Rorty, our professor, and others seek to discredit, ridicule, and reeducate, are not simply knuckle-dragging, illiterate, six-day-creation bumpkins — the straw men they create to ridicule and destroy with their pretentious arrogance — but rather every Christian who believes in absolute truth, who places themself under the authority of Christ, the Church, and the Scriptures. Our enlightened masters have their secret knowledge — and sworn duty — to coerce all “religious racists” into discarding their “primitive fear, hatreds, and superstitions” for enlightened secularism. This is Gnosticism with a fascist bent — the arrogance of superior knowledge, forcefully applied to all who resist.

This worldview, now thoroughly inculcated in generations of students, and echoed incessantly in media, entertainment, the arts, and popular culture, has engendered a societal world view which can no longer be redeemed with reason, or persuasion, or by the engagement of religion seduced into the low compromise of “cultural relevancy.” The culture of materialism and the ideology of atheism have merged, and are now entrenched, dominant, and empowered. The Church has fiddled as Rome burned — and now finds itself engulfed in the fiery holocaust it did little to avert. It is long past time for the church to stand proudly apart, to state the truth without fear or compromise, to serve as light and salt to a very dark and increasingly dangerous and toxic society. We will be hated for it — but we are already hated: “If the world hates you, remember that it hated me first.”

The challenge of the Church today is to stand apart, to be the prophet, to be, if necessary, the martyr. It is time to abandon congregations and churches which have been compromised and co-opted by this cultural corpse — let the dead bury their dead. It is time to call church leaders and pastors to account, and rebuke or even reject them if they refuse to stand for and teach the truth of the Gospel. It is time to train our children — after we ourselves have been trained — in the core beliefs of our faith, its historical veracity and integrity, in the defense of that which is true, and unchanging, and eternal. It is time to set aside the petty differences of denominationalism and sectarianism, join hands in submission to Christ, and recognize the true enemy we face. Your enemy is not the Baptist, or Catholic, or Pentecostal church down the street; however large your differences may seem. It is not the man who makes you uncomfortable by raising his hands in church; not the woman who loves the Mass and respects the saints; not the Biblical literalist nor the contemplative mystic who sees visions and dreams dreams. They are your brothers and sisters in Christ. Get to know them, discerning their spirits and the passion of their hearts. Learn to love them, learn from them, serve them, respect them. Pray, worship, and study together. The faith which you proclaim is broad and deep, rich in gifts and heritage, a spectacular jewel with countless facets reflecting the unlimited brilliance of a gracious God.

The night grows dark; it is well past time to fill your lamps with oil and light them, as the Bridegroom draws near.