Dabney Predicts Rushdoony
[T]he Jeffersonian doctrine of the absolute severance and independence of church and state, of the entire secularity of the State, and the absolutely equal rights, before the law, of religious truth and error, of paganism, atheism, and Christianity, has also established itself in all the States; and still the politicians, for electioneering ends, propagate this State education everywhere. By this curious circuit "Christian America" has gotten herself upon this throughly pagan ground; forcing the education of responsible, moral, and immortal beings, of which religion must ever be the essence, into the hands of a gigantic human agency, which resolves that it cannot and will not be religious at all. Surely, some great religious body will arise in America to lift its Christian protest against this monstrous result! ~ Dabney, Discussions, Vol. IV: Secular, 548.Here Dabney rightly shows that the Jeffersonian vision of secularism and its muscle, the statist public education system, has thoroughly compromised the Christian core of American civilization. In a day when speech was more plain, Dabney describes this shift in "Christian America" to be one of a move to paganism. Education, Dabney argues, must be thoroughly religious; and how then can Christianity survive if its children are placed "into the hands of a gigantic human agency, which resolves that it cannot and will not be religious at all?"
Dabney felt the implications of post-war statism in education. Jeffersonian secularism and state schools were sure to give rise to both paganism and tyranny -- they have: government has never been bigger, and the multiplicity of religionists and spiritualists is exponential. In a day when churchmen were much more conservative Dabney appeared as more than an alarmist. But, as is so often true of the acute Southern Presbyterian thinker, Dabney held a prophetic hope that a God-ordained future will yield a reformation that will oppose secularism and state education. Allow me to cite a second time the last refrain of his prophetic quote:
Surely, some great religious body will arise in America to lift is Christian protest against this monstrous result!Sixty-seven years later, a single voice -- or should I say, "pen" -- sounded from the margins of Dabney's same theological and ecclesiastical stock to speak forcefully and clearly to the Goliath of secularism and its unholy temple, the public school system. The voice, and pen, was that of R. J. Rushdoony. The "great religious body" is that of Christian Reconstruction. The 45 year-old Rushdoony wrote:
Thus, between the two concepts of education, the Calvinistic and that of the Enlightenment and contemporary thought, there can be no compromise. They are in hopeless contradiction. The modern concept, with its cosmopolitanism and its clean-tablet ideal, is erosive and destructive of all aspects of culture except the monolithic state, which is then the ostensible creator and patron of culture. When it speaks of the whole child, it speaks of a passive creature who is to be molded by statist education for the concept of the good life radically divorced from God and from all transcendental standards. The goal of such education will only be reached when man ceases to be man, and, this being an impossibility, the only outcome of such education can be increasing resistance of the child to its radical implications. ~ Rushdoony, Intellectual Schizophrenia, 10.As the debate stands today, what is important is the status of Christian families, not the status of pagans, non-believers, et al. Christians are required to distribute their labor to fund the public school system, ergo fund secularism, but no voice for Christianity is welcomed in the public sphere. Christian lobbying groups waste untold millions in an effort to baptize public education when they should rather compel their constituencies to provide Christian alternatives to public education, e.g. Christian schools and homeschooling.
Over a century ago Dabney represented a minority voice. In 1961, Rushdoony was even more so. Approaching 2007 we are witnessing continued growth in Christian education, but millions of Christian children remain in public schools. The implications of this are felt long-term. Yet, we need not wait another 100 years to know the end result for Dabney has already made this plain. Since his original essays on state education -- which I encourage all to read -- we have seen the the results socially, spiritually, politically, and economically. We can only expect more of this... in spades.
