An Army of Home-Schooled "Christian Soldiers" On a Mission to "Take Back America for God"

[Joanne98]

By Robert Kunzman, Beacon Press
Posted on September 7, 2009, Printed on September 7, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/142384/

Reprinted from Write These Laws On Your Children: Inside the World of Conservative Christian Homeschooling by Robert Kunzman. Copyright © 2009 by Robert Kunzman. Reprinted by permission of Beacon Press, Boston.

Generation Joshua and HSLDA

“A Few Good Soldiers”

“America is in a culture war. A few good soldiers can make a difference. Equip yourself and come join the battle!” So proclaimed the founders of Generation Joshua, a civics program from the Home School Legal Defense Association begun in 2003. “Our goal is to ignite a vision in young people to help America return to her Judeo-Christian foundation,” its leaders explained. “We provide students with hands-on opportunities to implement that vision.” As I began my homeschooling research six years ago, the birth of Generation Joshua caught my attention. Here was a civics education program aimed at homeschoolers, one that clearly sought to help nurture in students an idea and practice of citizenship informed and energized by their deep religious convictions. Perhaps the homeschooler president of Michael Farris’s dream would emerge from such an education.

Designed primarily for high-school-aged students, Generation Joshua combines online components with periodic opportunities for face-to-face interaction and real-world political engagement. The online elements of the program include extensive civics coursework, adult-moderated “chats” about current events, and thousands of bulletin-board forums where students can post entries on topics ranging from immigration reform and international relations to popular movies and rules for courtship.

This civics education program extends far beyond a virtual electronic community, however. Students are encouraged to participate in summer camps, voter registration drives, regional clubs, and an intriguing feature called Student Action Teams (SATs). These adult-supervised teams of students engage directly with the political process through participation in electoral campaigns. In fact, several victorious candidates for state and national offices have credited SATs with playing a pivotal role in their races.

But assisting with current political contests, while certainly appreciated by candidates, is ultimately a means to a much broader end. An ABC World News Tonight profile described Generation Joshua as developing “Christian soldiers with a mission to take back America for God, ”and GenJ leadership clearly agrees. Founding director Ned Ryun designed a strategy of creating a new generation of leaders who will bring their Christian values and commitments with them into the public square of policy, politics, and culture. “Great movements begin from the grass roots, from the bottom up,” he told one magazine interviewer. “With the homeschooling movement, we’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg so far. In another ten or fifteen years, we may see a disproportionate number of homeschoolers in positions of highest leadership.” In the first six years of its existence, Generation Joshua has seen steady growth in its membership, with a 2008 roster of more than four thousand students.

Michael Farris sees Generation Joshua as playing a vital role in the long-term goals of HSLDA and conservative politics. “We are not homeschooling our kids just so they can read,” he told the New York Times. “The most common thing I hear parents telling me is they want their kids to be on the Supreme Court. And if we put enough kids in the farm system, some may get to the major leagues.” It was Farris who coined the program’s name. He describes current homeschool parents and leaders as the Moses Generation, the ones who led the exodus from public schools (the equivalent of pharaoh’s Egypt). But just as it was Moses’s protégé Joshua who finally brought his people into the Promised Land, Farris sees the homeschooled youth as the ones who will ultimately “take back the land” for God.

This vision of conservative Christian homeschooling, while still rooted in the primacy of the family and parental freedom to direct the upbringing of their children, reaches beyond to instill a particular philosophy and practice of citizenship. Even on first glance, Generation Joshua— with its battle imagery and strong emphasis on real-world engagement in the political arena—promised to be something quite different from the lowest-common-denominator, controversy-avoiding, inert civics curricula sadly typical of public schools.

So I decided to follow the development of this program, to see how they go about “igniting a vision” of citizenship focused so squarely on bringing their Christian values into the public square. What kind of citizen are they trying to develop? Are students encouraged to think for themselves, or parrot a party line? And how is such a citizen supposed to engage with the diversity of beliefs and perspectives at play in our democracy?

Generation Joshua provides a range of online learning opportunities for students. Their formal curricular offerings include a variety of topics, such as Constitutional Law, Founding Fathers, Campaign School, Revolutionary War-Era Sermons, The Federalist Papers, The Great Awakening, and Democracy in America. For the most part, however, it’s pretty dry stuff. I had high hopes for the Democracy in America course, but like most of the other topics, it essentially consists of selected readings followed by quizzes that can be submitted online, with a certificate of completion awarded at the end of the unit.

The GenJ Book Club offers a yearly reading list, with titles ranging from mainstream historical fare such as David McCullough’s 1776 to more partisan texts such as Mark Levin’s Men in Black: How the Supreme Court Is Destroying America. GenJ staff moderators lead online discussions of the selected books throughout the year; these conversations vary in quality from fairly detailed exchanges about central themes in a text to a series of unrelated and unsupported opinions typed haphazardly by contributors.

The most active online participation, however, takes place on the forum bulletin boards, where GenJ members can share their perspectives on a variety of issues. These “threads” are usually started by student participants, although occasionally one of the adult moderators will pose a question or issue and invite comments.

Forum threads exploring the broad and complex relationship between government and religion appear regularly. The vast majority of forum participants agree that the Founding Fathers intended for the United States to operate according to Christian principles, and many cite political speeches by these men that urged a strong link between government, religious devotion, and Christian morality (the GenJ Web site itself provides a page of over forty such quotes). GenJers recognize freedom of religion as a pillar of American democracy, but don’t see this conflicting with their desire for laws that reflect Christian convictions on topics such as abortion, same-sex marriage, religious references in public displays and the Pledge of Allegiance, and so on. The United States can (and should) be governed by principles of Christian morality, they contend, as long as no one forces people to be Christians.

Approximately 90 percent of GenJers are homeschoolers, so it’s not surprising that threads weighing various forms of schooling would be popular. “Public schools are quite simply humanist churches,” one student writes. Another charges that public schools “have become the Enemy’s tool of indoctrination and demoralization of today’s society.” Some students seek support in their Scriptures, such as one who argued, “The Word of God says that parents are to raise their children in the ‘nurture and admonition of the Lord.’ What does this mean? It means that it is a sin for Christian parents to submit 20,000 hours of their child’s childhood to an influence which teaches them that there is no God.” Another puts it quite simply: “Children are not spiritually strong enough to attend a humanist church five times as much as a Christian church.” While many forum participants sound absolutely convinced that public schools are the worst possible choice and they would never send their kids there, a few wrote about their public school friends whom they see as both good Christians and successful, happy students. “Public schools are a problem right now in this country, but it is a generalization to suggest that they are all failing, miserable examples of schools,” one student asserts. “Remember there are a lot of Christians in the public system as well.”

On the whole, however, cautionary views of public schools and secular society rule the day, conveying an implicit conception of childhood as a defensive posture, protected by parents. Only when they reach adulthood can they step out and contend with the influences of the world. As one student remarks, “It is the job of the adult, who is already steadfast in his/her belief, to do the evangelizing, not of the naïve child who is still being taught about the Bible and Christianity.” A few, however, see the pathway to adulthood as ideally more of a gradual transition. “I believe going to a local high school while you are still living at home is much better than being thrown out into the real world during or after college,” one participant writes. “It provides a nice transition to the real world because your parents are still there to guide and direct you.”

Continued>>>
http://www.alternet.org/belief/142384/an_army_of_home-schooled_%22christian_soldiers%22_on_a_mission_to_%22take_back_america_for_god%22/

We need an army of young people to kick their asses. And NO they don't belong on the court!

[jimshoes]

1. But God forbid these impressionable youngsters

should have to listen to the President speak on the values of a good education. I guess their idea of a good education is somewhat different than that of the President's. Frickin' whackos.

[madrchsod]

2. christian students versus charter school students

everyone else--duck and cover!

[ixion]

3. The irony is that they call it "civics"

when their goal is the exact opposite of being civilized.

[rpannier]

4. Funny how all of these people accusing Obama of being a fascist

continue to use Hitler, Mussolini, Franco imagery

[tanyev]

5. "public schools have become the Enemy’s tool of indoctrination"

Oh, the irony.

[peace frog]

6. Only the very brightest of these youngsters

will come away with anything resembling an education that has prepared them for life. The rest will go out into the world woefully unready to meet its challenges, a generation of dunces who believe that Jesus will provide only to come up empty-handed.

[Turbineguy]

7. A friend of ours

fundie wife home-schooled their kids. They've had nothing but problems. Homeschooling breeds ignorance. We often hear of bad decisions made by schools when it comes to discipline and such, but home schooling is like being your own doctor or lawyer, except inflicting it on your kids.

Of course as Judge Smails would say: "The world needs ditch diggers too!"

[Tansy_Gold]

8. They don't care

If there is any single lesson to be learned -- pun of course intended -- it is that we must understand how utterly they do not care for the poor, even their own, even themselves. That is why all appeals to charity, to "christian" mercy, have no effect on them whatsoever.

This is how they want it. This is how they believe their God wants it. It is a total waste of time to argue or try to reason with them.

It is not, in their ideology, their job or their responsiblity to train everyone to think, to train everyone for a good job. That's God's rsponsibility. God will choose who's going to be wealthy and who's goibng to be poor. They have no right to interfere with God's choices.

There are, of course, the tiny few who benefit from this kind of "thinking," and they may or may not believe in it but they sure do support it.

The one thing these people do respond to is authority and leadership -- because (for the most part) they see it as coming from God. Sadly, the one thing the Dems could do to stop this utter bullshit is to lead, and instead they are doing the one thing that will NEVER stop the slaughter: they're trying to appeal to the rightwing's "better nature."

It doesn't have one.


They don't care.



Tansy Gold

[murray hill farm]

11. Amen, Tansy!

If you will excuse the expression! I heard the expression of this just the other day in regard to global warming. The guy said that it is "not possible to break something (the earth, I guess) that god has made". He also mentioned thaat public schools=gov't schools...and blah, blah,blah. He then said that he got most of his information from Glen Beck...Ha! Nothing you can say will have any effect on them.

[old mark]

15. It's like trying to argue with a drunk - you end up pissed off, and nothing

has changed.


mark

[BlueMTexpat]

21. I cannot condemn home schooling with a broad brush

except in the case of those who do so principally for fundamental so-called "religious" or political reasons.
I was born and raised in an area where there are still lots of wide-open spaces and comparatively few people, where in some cases one-room all-grade schoolhouses are the only thing going or parents must send their children to stay in a larger community with relatives or friends, or the children must spend many hours each day on schoolbuses because their homes are 40+ miles away from the schools. Often in the winter, the roads can even become impassible. In such situations, there is often no choice.
So long as the parents themselves (and I include BOTH, not simply the principal home-schooling parent) are people with knowledge, wisdom and experience that they can impart to their children, that they seek to broaden their children's perspectives and experiences and actively look for opportunities to do so insofar as possible, that they integrate those children into as many youth and community activities as possible, that they teach them to be caring and compassionate human beings who are sensitive to the concerns and needs of others, that they coordinate closely with the educational requirements not only for their state but for entry into good universities and share resources that are offered through the state, those children can not only compete on a relatively fair playing field but are generally well-integrated and perform well in liberal arts fields especially. Educational shortfalls seem to occur most often in higher mathematics and science fields.
In my experience of the East Coast metropolitan areas, however, those parents who deny their children access to often excellent public schools are almost universally hard-line fundies who wish to smother their children, to "save" them from interactions with any "others" and to stifle critical thinking.
Such repression is, IMHO, nothing less than child abuse.

[peace frog]

23. See post #20

A broad brush may be used when the result of home schooling is as dismal as I have seen in my professional experience.

[BlueMTexpat]

25. Please note that I specifically qualified my statement.

May I ask in what part of the country your community college experience has taken place and how well-traveled you are within the US? While I tend to agree with your assessment insofar as most home-schooling situations exist here, the kinds of situations that I described do not even have community colleges in the vicinity. Community colleges require a certain population.
Those unique situations exist today. There are even some exceptional results: check out Christopher Paolini for example. And yes, I agree that he is the exception rather than the rule.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Paolini

[stray cat]

14. Many of them get into top schools with a scholarship - school system are not hard to beat

I also no many who are homeschooling for non-religious reasons - and these end up being smart well educated kids who put most of our public schools to shame.

[rhett o rick]

16. That's a load of bull crap. Although some home schooled children become smart most end up back in

the public schools without any social skills and the public schools have to deal with them. I have seen it first hand.

[peace frog]

20. I work in the community college system

and can state unequivocally that many home-schooled kids who "graduated" high school end up in remedial courses in the community colleges in an attempt to bring their reading, writing and math skills up to college level. And that more than half of them fail to make it into college-level course work.

[xocet]

24. To no (sic) or not to no (sic)....

Does "...no (sic)..." equal "know" in your language?

Also, did you mean "...smart, well-educated kids..." instead of "...smart well educated kids (sic)..."?

It is ironic that you comment on education. One has to wonder about your judgment: to be specific, if you can barely cobble together two sentences, it seems unlikely that you have the ability to recognize either intelligence or a good education.

[Tsar_Bomba]

22. Or perhaps they could run for

the Governorship of a state like Virginia. Ridicule isn't going to end the threat these people pose. We have nobody in the media to expose them for what they are.

[Frustratedlady]

9. Somewhere along the line, these "students" must interact with society.

I believe a lot of home-schooling is done because the parents don't want their children exposed to certain elements of society, so they "protect" them from exposure. They aren't protecting them, they are smothering them.

The only home-schooling I have seen that truly works is one that is blended into the community where the children can interact with all other children, not just the home-schooled or church groups. For instance, participation in sports programs, 4-H or scouts, YMCA/YWCA, art classes, etc. Somewhere along the line, those children are going to have to see that the community does not consist wholly of family members and neighbors.

Most parents are trying to do what is best for their child, but slowly smothering them with overly protective love is not the answer. Shielding them from society through chidhood increases their curiosity and they try to answer those deeply hidden questions when they are finally on their own.

Granted, home-schooling can work for those who provide a well-rounded curriculum that includes activities with society and alternate views on many subjects. Parents aren't usually trained well enough to be objective...they didn't even start out that way, if they thought that shielding their child would produce a well-balanced adult. That child will have a lot of catching up to do when they are finally on their own.

[Tansy_Gold]

12. You don't understand ---

See my post above.

These parents do NOT want to do "what's best for their children" according to OUR definition of what's best for them. They have a very different definition and it's not rational and for them that's okay.

They want their children not to succeed in our world but to REMAKE the world into their view of it. What they are teaching their children IS in their best interest in THAT world.

Right now, for instance, are we doing what's best for our children (and grandchildren)? Are we raising them to succeed in a world dominated by religious fundamentalists who believe God chooses who will succeed and who will fail, or are we raising our children to succeed in a rational world where hard work and integrity counts? Our world is inexorably sliding away from rationalism and into fundamentalism and our children may not be equipped to cope in that kind of environment.

The sooner we stop trying to deal rationally with the irrational, the sooner we can stop this madness. Otherwise, we have to adapt ourselves, our thinking, our governing, etc., to THEIR way of believing. And we aren't equipped to survive.


Tansy Gold

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

10. One thing lacking in their education

is the cultivation of critical thinking. They are indoctrinated into an "I'm right, you're wrong" philosophy with no allowance for other opinions, because their parents and their ministers cannot afford to have them become thinking human beings.

[Tansy_Gold]

13. Again, that's the way they want it.

To them, critical thinking is dangerous. They believe in obedience, unquestioning obedience.

They do not want change of any kind. They believe in a god-directed social and economic hierarchy and that any challenge to such a hierarchy -- by ability, by wealth, by race, by gender -- is of the devil. God sent you to earth to be poor and you damn well will BE poor and don't try to change it! That's their philosophy/ideology/theology.

The only way to stop them is to isolate them, and we've done just the opposite. We've allowed them to home school but play sports with the public schools. We've given them tax breaks so it doesn't hurt them financially. We've accommodated their views in the public schools. We've allowed them to compete in academic areas -- spelling bees, etc. -- where they may in fact have a very unfair advantage. But THEY don't care.

Understand that -- THEY DO NOT CARE about the world the way we see it. They consider it evil and WANT it destroyed, either literally or at least figuratively. They want a Jesus-centered world, and they do not care about anything else.



Tansy Gold

[murray hill farm]

17. I really believe....

that these folks are the "antichrist" that they so strongly believe in...so much so that they have become it themselves.

[Tansy_Gold]

18. Well, part of their agenda is to make the world fit for Jesus' return

and if they have to employ the old "destroy the village to save it" strategy, that's fine with them.

It's easy for us to apply OUR perspective to their actions, but in order to deal with them we have to be able to understand THEIR perspective. That's something Dems/progressives/liberals/rationals are not very good at doing.

I was raised as a moderate Republican, the Eisenhower/Rockefeller type. I lived for 15 years in the corner of conservative Indiana that produced Dan Quayle. I was part of that community, and I know that they do not think the way I do now. I used to think like them. Don't ask me what changed. I don't know. I just know that I can't see the world the way I used to.

But I *did* see it that way, and I know how they see it. It's not rational, and you can't deal with them rationally.

So we may think they fit their definition of an anti-christ, but THEY don't think so. And their whole belief system is based on, well, on belief, not on evidence.

The only way to deal with them is to ignore them. Do not engage them. Do not compromise with them. Do not accommodate them. All of that is exactly what they want.

They're winning.



TG

[murray hill farm]

19. I so agree with you tansy!

My born again relatives fit the profile completely. They will home school their children. I did try to put myself in their place by saying to myself that if it were reversed...and the public schools taught only creationism....then I would feel as they do..and not want to send my children to public schools. So, with that thinking I can understand their stand on this issue. And I agree completely. They are not open to rationality in any way. They would NEVER choose to try and put themselves in my place on this issue. In their minds, I am wrong and they are right...and that is all that there is for them.