Tim LaHaye Wrote More than Left Behind

Evangelical pastor and author Tim LaHaye died last week. While LaHaye is best known for his Left Behind series, which details the end times as described in Revelation, set in a fictionalized future, this was far from his only written publication. For example, there was his 1978 work, The Unhappy Gays: What Everyone Should Know about Homosexuality. Have a look:

You can read a detailed summary of this book here. It’s every bit as bad as it looks. But while some people are already familiar with this piece of LaHaye’s repertoire, I suspect far fewer are familiar with his 1983 book, The Battle for the Public Schools: Humanism’s Threat to Our Children. LaHaye’s influence on both the Christian school movement and the homeschool movement is often understated, and I would argue that understanding the view of public schools LaHaye promotes in this book is critical to understanding these groups’ antipathy toward public schooling.

Public education today is a self-serving institution controlled by elitists of an atheistic, humanist viewpoint; they are more interested in indoctrinating hitter charges against the recognition of God, absolute moral values, and a belief in the American dream than they are in teaching them to read, write, and do arithmetic.

This excerpt from page 14 gets at the core of LaHaye’s argument in this book—that public schools have become atheistic indoctrination centers. While websites like the Friendly Atheist argue hopefully that giving children information and teaching them to be critical thinkers sets them on a path toward rejecting religion as myth, that is not what LaHaye is talking about here. He’s not accusing the “elitists” who control the public schools of exposing children to too much knowledge, but rather to too little. In fact—well, I’ll let you read for yourself. This is from page 15:

The problem is philosophy. As I shall prove, our public schools are committed to the philosophy of atheistic humanism—the most harmful though process in the history of mankind. Given enough time, it will destroy everything it touches—as the academic level of our schools testify. We once boasted the highest literacy level in the world. But that was before humanism took over the schoolhouse.

I haven’t found any suggestion that literacy rates fell during the mid to late century. Rather the opposite—they appear to have increased. But note LaHaye’s contention that humanists have actually decreased the amount that children learn in school. This isn’t about humanists teaching critical thinking. It’s a claim that humanists were dumbing down the curriculum to ensure that students didn’t learn.

In fact, LaHaye suggests that public schools’ use of the look-say method in place of phonics (a trend he exaggerates) might be orchestrated by Communist sympathizers among our nation’s humanists. To be specific, he alleges that these individuals were engaged in a conscious attempt to reduce the education level of America’s children (by using the look-say method in place of phonics) so as to bring down our standard of living and make the next generation more open to Communism. (LaHaye writes that he’s not sure whether this theory is correct, but that if it were, it would certainly explain a few things)

Next, LaHaye’s thoughts on sex education. From page 151:

. . . creating a generation of sexually active teens is the best possible way to keep these impressionable youth from being open to the truth of Scripture. For years we churchmen have advertised that approximately 75 percent of our converts’, ministers’, and missionaries’ decisions were made before the age eighteen. What better way to cut down that number than to create a national obsession with sex and to give academic encouragement to get involved?

LaHaye argues, in fact, that humanists designed sex education classes in an effort to get kids hooked on sex so that they would abandon their parents’ moral beliefs, because, he argues, people tend to change their morals to align with their actions. It was, he contended, an intentional targeting of our nation’s young people with moral filth. What he rather ignores is that sex education was created to combat teen pregnancy and STD rates—in other words, the teens were already having sex. Sex education was not about getting teens to have sex but rather ensuring that teens had access to accurate information about sex.

On page 142, LaHaye quotes a Dr. James Parsons as follows:

The sex educators are trying to create such an obsession with sex in the minds of our youth that they will have no time or interest in spiritual pursuits.

And then there’s this from page 143:

The whole plan sounds Satanic, doesn’t it? Where do you think it came from? The humanists I have met aren’t clever enough to have thought that up all by themselves.

That’s right, LaHaye argues that sex education was a satanic plot. It’s very clear, throughout his book, that LaHaye has only a strawman understanding of humanism. Not only is humanism not satanism—at all-–there’s also this bit on 142 that displays a fundamental lack of understanding of the worldview:

You must understand that, in the mind of a humanist, the worst catastrophe for a young girl is not that she loses her virtue in promiscuous sex or even becomes the rape victim of some sex-crazed pornography reader. To a humanist, the greatest disaster occurs when a young person grows up with religious taboos about right and wrong, or as many call them, absolutes.

That . . . is not how it works.

And check out this, from page 154:

. . . the more explicit the classroom sex education, the higher incidence of VD and illegitimate pregnancies.

Okay. Let’s test this. Look at the teen birth rate here:

Ignore the bump after 1990, both because it came after LaHaye wrote his book and because I have no effing clue what happened there. Looking at the period before that bump, note that the teen birth rate declined from nearly 100 per 1000 women in the late 1950s to just over 50 per 1000 women in the early 1980s. That’s a pretty steep drop! Ah, but note that this is all births to women aged 15 to 19, regardless of their marital status. My grandmother married in the late 1950s at age 18 and immediately became pregnant. That would be included in this statistic.

While teen pregnancies overall declined after the 1950s, the teen pregnancies that occurred were increasingly likely to be illegitimate. Why? Well for one thing, as the age of first marriage increased, fewer teen girls were married, which meant that even if the same number of girls became pregnant, a larger percentage of those pregnancies would be out of wedlock. On a related note, as social pressures changed, pregnant teens were less likely to be pushed into shotgun marriages than they had been in the past. I’m having trouble finding the rate of illegitimate teen pregnancy because that does not seem to be tracked. Researches appear to care about teen pregnancy rates overall than about pregnant teens’ marital status.

Oh wait! I found one!

Let’s be clear, then. LaHaye does not have a problem with teen pregnancy. In fact, most evangelicals don’t have a problem with teen pregnancy. Their concern, rather, is with unwed teen pregnancy. We should find this concerning for several reasons. Any teen birth, unwed or not, has a high likelihood of interrupting the mother’s educational plans. This is true both for girls who are still in high school and for those who are 18 and 19 and might be considering college or vocation training. Teen births do not cease to disrupt mothers’ educational plans if the mother is married. Additionally, early marriage carries with it certain risks, including a far higher divorce rate. I am just as concerned about a married teen mother as I am about an unmarried teen mother. LaHaye and his fellow evangelicals, however, are not.

With that brief aside, we’ll return to LaHaye.

The point is this—LaHaye wrote that our public school system was controlled by humanists bent on destroying children’s faith in God by keeping children uneducated and getting them hooked on sex. He argued that this was a part of a satanic humanist (and perhaps Communist) plot to destroy America and its way of life. And you better believe his readership took him seriously. It’s easy to laugh about a series like Left Behind, and the ridiculousness of it. But LaHaye was no humorous figure. He was instrumental in helping shape evangelicals’ understanding of our public education system (among other things), and in using misinformation and outright lies to scare parents into removing their children from public school.