When Reason is Dethroned

Dr. Ken Craven is, if anyone can justly claim the title, the person most singly responsible for the ruination of my schismatic foray into Anglicanism, and my subsequent return to the Catholic Church.  It all began innocently enough, when the good professor spotted me on a downtown corner in Sparta, Tennessee, and invited me to partake of a Chesterton reading group he was convening at a local coffee shop.  We read Chesterton's "Orthodoxy," and so began the slow reopening of my eyes.

The following is a letter submitted by Dr. Craven to the "Sparta Expositor," a publication that passes for what used to be known as a local newspaper.  Now, being simply an in-print instrument of the madness that rules in most communities, it is doubtful that Dr. Craven's letter will grace their pages.

If Dr. Craven's words were of strictly "local Sparta, Tennessee" importance, I would not be passing them along to a wider audience.  It is unfortunate that his words are equally applicable in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and -- I will venture to say -- in your community as well.  

As I tip my hat to my dear home schooling friends, I strongly recommend Dr. Craven's letter for your reading and attention.

When Reason is Dethroned

“”When reason is dethroned, not only is Faith dethroned (the two subversions go together) but every moral and legitimate activity of the human soul is dethroned at the same time. There is no God.” –Hilaire Belloc, Heresies, 1938

Thus wrote a great historian in the year of my birth. I recall these words when I encounter the nonsense recently reported on Fox News from McMinnville where a mother was required to shave her son’s head to meet a mysterious code of the school. The crime? The boy came to school with a military haircut—in an elementary school named for a Vietnam war hero. 

But this opinion column is not about a young boy having his hair cut off; it is about lots of boys and girls having their heads cut off.

If the incident were merely proof of a local stupidity, it would merit little notice, but it is in fact just another tiny bubble from the gaseous monster of public education, which is so permeated with the sickness of moral relativism that its makers can no longer perceive themselves as rational beings when they get up in the morning. If you are a public school teacher or administrator and this offends you, all well and good. That permeation by moral relativism, which distorts everything real, is not merely indoctrination, it is a viral contamination.

It can be so deep seated that in an informal class I taught in a local coffee shop a man who had been a Baptist Sunday School teacher for most of his life said, “I have been a moral relativist for most of my life without knowing it!”

If the meaning of the phrase is escaping you, perhaps you too are a carrier of the relativist virus. Moral relativism is, quite simply, the view that every moral code or ethics is equally valid and every person has a right to his own. When teaching Honors classes at TTU, I challenged students to explain to me why the moral code of any serial killer was not equal in value to their own. They had all been graduated from public schools and reacted as if they were stung by a torpedo fish. I got few answers.

For nearly a hundred years now, the public school system has been created and administered by ideologues firmly rooted in moral relativism and all its effects on every subject. Every year, education colleges at universities graduate teachers who can no longer distinguish right from wrong or good from evil. When I tried to discuss this with an education professor at TTU, I learned that she had no idea of what moral relativism is or whether it resided in her head. 

When I wrote about this in the Expositor about nine years ago, recommending home schooling and the abolition of public education, I received support only from an elderly Baptist minister, a kindly gentleman now deceased. I could not even provoke a controversy—the mandarins and lackeys of the public schools, secure in their ignorance and salaries, will not even rise to the bait. Even Ronald Reagan, faced with the bureaucratic terrors, backed down from his promise to abolish the U. S. Department of Education.

I have a copy of a handwritten contract between my great-great grandfather Nathaniel Marks and five families in Woodlawn, Ky. In which he promises to educate their children in basic subjects in return for some dollars, a school building, and firewood. No federal agents were required for this transaction, and the control of the school and approval of the teacher were entirely in the hands of the families, who could be alert to any misdoings or immoral teachings. Much later, but before the federal deluge, my father completed only the ninth grade in Springfield, Ky., where McGuffey’s Readers helped him become a better speller, writer, and reader than most college graduates today.

As my Church teaches, the family is, under God, the natural authority over children, and to surrender any of that control to the State is a serious moral matter. Every morning, millions of parents surrender that authority to the Federal government with hardly a blink of an eye—and then are astonished by the results in the national culture. As an experienced college professor, I am a scarred veteran of thirty-plus years of trying to re-educate the shell-shocked, arrogant, or drugged aliens from the public schools, many of who no longer know green grass, blue skies, or human speech.

By sharp contrast, most of my fifteen grandchildren have been wholly or mostly home-schooled by parents who have made great sacrifices to achieve this. Despite propaganda to the contrary, their children are all very well developed, literate, self-confident persons, some of whom have had stellar college careers. I expect the same from my growing tribe of great grand-children, and if I have any hope for America, it is vested in these good Christian young men and women who have not given up the minds to the State or the confusions of a deracinated, non-Christian culture.

That culture should be obvious to those who have not lost their wits—a culture dominated by the unnatural—abortion, pre-natal engineering, homosexual ‘marriage’, and a growing phalanx of violations of God’s natural and moral laws. That is what Hilaire Belloc meant when he wrote “every moral and legitimate activity of the human soul is dethroned at the same time. There is no God.” In 1938, he could see it all coming.

The current controversy over the Core Curriculum quite misses the point. Many seem to think opting out of this latest Federal control will solve the educational problem. It will not. As Professor Anthony Esolen, a Christian professor at Providence College says, it will only emphasize that the current heart of education is turning students into endless acquirers of skills, without any moral, spiritual, or imaginative souls. Think artificial intelligences with endless gimmicks but no depth.

The solutions? First, recognizing that when defeat came at Appomattox, not only swords and cannons were surrendered to the Federal invaders, but basic principles, mind, the sacredness of the home, the authority of parents, and a Christian culture. The solutions can only be a family revolution backed by courage and resistance.

Dr. Ken Craven