{"id":29822,"date":"2016-08-01T09:51:39","date_gmt":"2016-08-01T13:51:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\/?p=29822"},"modified":"2016-08-01T09:51:39","modified_gmt":"2016-08-01T13:51:39","slug":"tim-lahaye-wrote-more-than-left-behind","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\/2016\/08\/tim-lahaye-wrote-more-than-left-behind.html","title":{"rendered":"Tim LaHaye Wrote More than Left Behind"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

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<\/a>. Have a look:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

You can read a detailed summary of this book here<\/a>. It\u2019s every bit as bad as it looks. But while some people are already familiar with this piece of LaHaye\u2019s repertoire, I suspect far fewer are familiar with his 1983 book, The Battle for the Public Schools: Humanism\u2019s Threat to Our Children<\/a>. LaHaye\u2019s influence on both the Christian school movement and the homeschool movement\u00a0is often understated, and\u00a0I would argue that understanding the view of public schools LaHaye promotes in this book is critical to understanding these groups\u2019 antipathy toward public schooling.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This excerpt from page 14 gets at the core of LaHaye\u2019s argument in this book\u2014that public schools have become atheistic indoctrination centers. While websites like the Friendly Atheist argue hopefully\u00a0that giving children information\u00a0and 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\u2019s not accusing the \u201celitists\u201d who control the public schools of exposing children to too much knowledge, but rather to too little. In fact\u2014well, I\u2019ll let you read for yourself. This is from page 15:<\/p>\n

The problem is philosophy. As I shall prove, our public schools are committed to the philosophy of atheistic humanism\u2014the most harmful though process in the history of mankind. Given enough time, it will destroy everything it touches\u2014as 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I\u00a0haven\u2019t found any suggestion that literacy rates fell during the mid to late century. Rather the opposite\u2014they appear to have increased. But note LaHaye\u2019s contention that humanists have actually decreased<\/em> the amount that children learn in school. This isn\u2019t about humanists teaching critical thinking. It\u2019s a claim that humanists were\u00a0dumbing down the curriculum to ensure that students didn\u2019t<\/em>\u00a0learn.<\/p>\n

In fact, LaHaye suggests that public schools\u2019 use of the look-say method in place of phonics (a trend he exaggerates) might\u00a0be orchestrated by Communist sympathizers among our nation\u2019s humanists. To be specific, he\u00a0alleges that these individuals\u00a0were engaged in\u00a0a conscious attempt to reduce the education level of America\u2019s 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\u00a0more open to Communism. (LaHaye writes that\u00a0he\u2019s not sure whether this theory is correct, but that if it were, it would certainly explain a few things)<\/p>\n

Next,\u00a0LaHaye\u2019s\u00a0thoughts on sex education. From page 151:<\/p>\n

. . . 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\u2019, ministers\u2019, and missionaries\u2019 decisions were made before the age eighteen. What better way to cut down that number than to create a national obsession with sex and\u00a0to give academic encouragement to get involved?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

LaHaye\u00a0argues, in fact, that humanists designed sex education classes in an effort to get kids hooked on sex so that they would abandon their parents\u2019 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\u2019s young people with moral filth. What he rather ignores is that sex education was created to combat teen pregnancy and STD rates\u2014in other words, the teens were already having sex<\/em>. Sex education was not about getting teens\u00a0to have sex<\/em> but rather ensuring that teens had access to accurate information about sex.<\/p>\n

On page 142, LaHaye\u00a0quotes a Dr. James Parsons as follows:<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And then there\u2019s this from page 143:<\/p>\n

The whole plan sounds Satanic, doesn\u2019t it? Where do you think it came from? The humanists I have met aren\u2019t clever enough to have thought that up all by themselves.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That\u2019s right, LaHaye argues that sex education was a satanic plot. It\u2019s very clear, throughout his book, that LaHaye has only a strawman understanding of humanism. Not only is humanism not satanism\u2014at all-<\/em>\u2013there\u2019s also this bit on 142 that displays a fundamental lack of understanding of the worldview:<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That . . . is not how it works.<\/p>\n

And\u00a0check out this, from page 154:<\/p>\n

. . . the more explicit the classroom sex education, the higher incidence of VD and illegitimate pregnancies.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Okay. Let\u2019s test this. Look\u00a0at the teen birth rate here:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

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\u00a0that the teen birth rate declined from nearly\u00a0100 per 1000 women in the late 1950s to just over\u00a050 per 1000 women in the early 1980s. That\u2019s a pretty steep drop! Ah, but note that this is all<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

While teen pregnancies overall declined after the 1950s, the teen pregnancies that occurred\u00a0were 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\u2019m having trouble finding the rate of illegitimate<\/em> teen pregnancy because that does not seem\u00a0to be\u00a0tracked. Researches appear\u00a0to care about teen pregnancy rates overall than about pregnant teens\u2019 marital status.<\/p>\n

Oh wait! I found one<\/a>!<\/p>\n

\"\"Let\u2019s be clear, then. LaHaye does not have a problem with teen pregnancy. In fact, most evangelicals<\/em> don\u2019t have a problem with teen pregnancy. Their concern, rather, is with unwed<\/em> teen pregnancy. We should find this concerning for several reasons. Any teen birth, unwed or not, has a high likelihood of interrupting the mother\u2019s 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\u2019\u00a0educational plans if the\u00a0mother is married<\/em>. Additionally,\u00a0early 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.<\/em><\/p>\n

With that brief aside, we\u2019ll return to LaHaye.<\/p>\n

The point is this\u2014LaHaye wrote that our public school system was controlled by humanists bent on destroying children\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019 understanding of our public education system (among other things), and in using misinformation and outright lies to scare\u00a0parents into removing their children from public school.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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.<\/p>\n

Click through to read more!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":845,"featured_media":29873,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[106,508],"class_list":["post-29822","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-evangelicalism-fundamentalism","tag-marriage-2","tag-school"],"yoast_head":"\nTim LaHaye Wrote More than Left Behind<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"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. 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