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Educational Stratification in the United States

Stratification

Yes, “stratification” is a word, and the one used right now to discuss education as a demographic in voting habit.  Students of the election call one aspect of this point as historic for the 2024 election.  College education most divides the electorate in the United States.  How does education stratify a view of the world?  Think with me about this.

The students of election will say that smart people vote for a Democrat.  On the other hand, dummies (or garbage) vote for a Republican and specifically Trump.  They delineate this demarcation by education.  Education stratifies voters into these separate voting trays.  Is that true?

Present American education is overwhelmingly or essentially propaganda on worldview.  Both state and private colleges or universities hire Democrat teachers.  I believe, and I also think I’m right here, that the best description of college and university philosophy is postmodern.  This matches with what comes out of the other side into the Democrat Party.  The best of Democrats are modernists and the worst are postmodernists.  The postmodernists have the loudest influence in college and university education.

History

What I’m writing here about education goes way back.  I think it best traces to two points of address.  First, educational institutions eliminated God and the Bible in the early 1960s.  That left these places without a mooring in objective truth.  Second, I point to Allan Bloom’s book, The Closing of the American Mind, except things have regressed even further than its 1987 publication.  It became a bestseller because it truly reflected what dominated the American university experience as early at the 1980s.  It’s easy to see this began much earlier with all of the sit-ins and protests on the college campuses in the 1960s.

Colleges and universities produce a high percentage of clones now.  More than ever these are infected with the woke mind virus (article here).  Even if they don’t subscribe to the extreme, they obediently and silently get in line.  The universities immerse their students in lies and worse, the lie.  And they all do think they’re smart, because they got, akin to the strawman in the Wizard of Oz, their diploma.  They is smart now.

What Happens

Perhaps the biggest push-back with what I’m writing here is that it broad brushes college graduates.  Those who put so much into their college and post-college education don’t want discreditation of it.  For sure, many escaped the strongest influences of the state university.  They came out of it with certain values intact.  If that’s you, then so be it.  That doesn’t mean that what I’m writing here is not true.

Many of the college educated today are not only not smart — in general they’re stupid — but they think they’re infinitely smarter than these non-college-educated, blue collar types.  It’s worse than that.  College education as a whole dumbs people down in the worst example of “mass formation hypnosis,” what others call “mass formation psychosis.”  American universities and college indoctrinate their students, which explains the sameness of their graduates.

1 Corinthians 15:33

To explain from the Bible education stratification, I ask that you consider what the Apostle Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 15:33:

Be not deceived: evil communications corrupt good manners.

“Communications” translates homilia of which BDAG says, “this noun is used of a group and then of what a group ordinarily engages in: conversation.”  The English word “homily” comes from the word, which is a type of instruction or speech of a theological kind.

Indoctrination

An evil theological speech would spread false doctrine and practice, something that sends someone a different direction than God and His Word.  Those in Corinth were hearing false theological instruction that rejected bodily resurrection as a doctrine.  When someone was hearing this from false teachers in a Greek culture that embraced the concept that found goodness only in the spiritual and not the physical, it corrupted the person hearing it.  It would send the hearer of it down the wrong path, even away from a true gospel.

The “evil communications,” which is theological speech or philosophizing, is another way of saying, “indoctrination.”  The beliefs espoused in colleges and universities puts its audience, the students, into an unnatural state.  They would not naturally think the way they do, except that they are coerced or brainwashed during a very vulnerable time of life.

Colleges and universities corrupt good manners.  They spread a worldview that changes the course of their adherents away from a Christian worldview.  Instead of pleasing God, the hearers of the college and university homilies for four to eight years at a pivotal time of their lives please themselves, their teachers, the world system, and the prince of this world.

Avoidance

Missing college and university doesn’t mean that you will have the right type of thinking, belief, and living.  I would say it is more likely that you’ll do better at living how you should if you avoid colleges and universities.  You will miss those homilies, which are powerful in the wrong direction.  The constrast between hearing the “evil communications” and not hearing them causes the stratification that manifests itself in election results.

I say, “manifests itself,” because the election just reveals the difference.  What actually occurs is worse than that.  The evil homilies of colleges and universities dumbs down the whole country.  Even if graduates can get a job, they infect everywhere, including their companies, the government, and other institutions with their bad ideas.  It degrades the country overall.  Not only do the graduates think wrong, but they don’t know it, because the education makes them more clever at resisting the truth.  It hardens them against the illumination of the truth and wisdom from God.

Change Necessary Immediately

As an example, Decatur County, Indiana voted one way in the election.  The teachers in the county schools voted completely opposite to the parents and voters of the county.  Parents send their children to school to receive the opposite of who they are.  The parents paid these teachers to undermine them.  What I’m writing is true.  It’s a wonder that this last Tuesday could turn out how it did, but it also explains how a Kamala Harris could come so close to winning.  A majority of her voters drank the kool-aid of the colleges and universities.  That’s also why they talk the way they do, that sounds so incomprehensible to most of us, the other side.

You maybe don’t understand the Kamala Harris word salad.  You ask, “What was she even saying?”  Yet, those hearing her speeches sit or stand there and accept it with wide eyed enthusiasm.  It’s as if they operate on a different frequency perhaps with a different antennae.  This is the education stratification at work.

For real change to occur on a national level, educational stratification needs to stop.  It is so ingrained that generation after generation repeats it.  Everything about education needs to change.  That will start by illumination of the problem of educational stratification.  It’s a diversity than the United States cannot afford.

 

If There Is No Secular State, then It Does Matter What Religion Rules

What do you think?  Is the Constitution of the United States a religious document?  You say, “Nooooo.”  Okay, why?  I think many people would say, “Separation of church and state.”  One part of the first amendment perhaps someone, maybe you, latches on to.  It’s called the “establishment clause.”  It reads:  “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.”Without giving him an endorsement, but instead maybe giving him a disclaimer, perhaps you’ve seen the “church lady” that Dana Carvey does, and the line she says:  “Isn’t that special?!?”  We’ve got an establishment clause.  Aren’t we special?  I mean, we are going to make no law respecting an establishment of religion, cross my heart and hope to die.  Is that true though?Every nation has a ruling religion.I grew up being taught great respect of the United States Constitution.  This was an amazing document of government.  You’re not a patriotic American if you don’t love the Constitution.  It seems a major verbiage of a conservative is, “I love the Constitution of the United States.”  You’ve got your little pocket Constitution.  You could mock someone who doesn’t know it, like Jesus with the Pharisees, “Have you not read?”Everything about the founding of the country, however, connected itself at least at the beginning with the Declaration of Independence, which was the founding document, with God.  Most of all, there’s this:  “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.”  And then there’s this:  “the laws of nature and of nature’s God.”

Before the Constitution, the federal government fell under the Articles of Confederation, which didn’t do much, but it did result in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which included this:

Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.

As Congress then enacted the Ordinance, it put this into affect by having religious requirements.  I’m not going to go into detail, but there are trails of official government documents in both the federal government and then in the new states for religion.
There’s not just that.  You know the argument behind the entire structure of the American government, the three branches, separation of powers, and checks and balances, expressed in the Constitution.  All of this, people say, is about an understanding of the depravity of man.  Man is by nature evil, not good.  Our government protects men from themselves.  It assumes the worst about them.  There’s much more to tease out there as far as enumerating powers essentially for the protection of liberty.
If a group of men are saying that the founding of the country is about God, the function of it is about God, and then the structure of it admits that man can’t do it, because he’s depraved, it’s putting religion right at the top.
The Bible shows and history illustrates that all men are religious.  All government is religious.  In other words, there is no such thing as neutrality.  There is no truly secular state.  That is sheer fiction.  It is an idea pushed upon the Constitution by implying, insinuating, or inferring its religious foundation without plainly stating it.
Is same sex marriage secular?  What about abortion, is it secular?  Evolution?  Is hatred of God secular?  No to all of these.  All of these are the evidence of a religion, the wrong religion that is in charge.
The only religion that has dedicated itself to stay out of the public square is true religion.  True religionists allow paganism to reign in the land through many various means.
If we are dealing in truth, which is the only way to deal, then everything revolves around God and His pure revelation, the Bible.  That is the truth.  Lies are also religious, but they are a faulty, failing foundation.  We don’t do better by lying to say that the truth is only a religion, and what the state is doing is secular.  No.  They are both religious.  One is religion based upon the truth, and the other is a religion based upon lies.
Men are God’s creatures.  God rules over men.  Men should act like it.  When they don’t act like it, they are failing.  They are not statesmen.  They are not any term associated with anything good.
As you read this post, you might ask, “Is Brandenburg advocating for a state church?”  I’m advocating for functioning in every realm of life according to God’s Word, the Bible.  Men in the government should start saying it.  They follow the Bible.  The Bible is the truth.  If that isn’t happening, it doesn’t mean there’s no state religion.  There’s still a state religion. It’s just one based upon lies and according to another god, not the one and true God.
Take a modern issue.  Russia and the Ukraine.  It’s too late to put all this back in the bottle, but it’s impossible to see this in a right way without looking to God for what He wants in it.   A true leader, worth following, should be quoting the Bible and talking about what God would want us to do.  Do you think it’s better to leave God out?
If this is going to happen, then everyone should start by talking about God like this in every sphere of their lives.  Be open about your belief in the Bible.  Include God in it all.

What Is the Primary Cause of Division in the United States?

Our country is divided.  Many say it is more divided than any time since the Civil War.  Most of you readers live here, so this is no surprise to you.  Many articles and even whole books have been written in the last decade on the division in the United States, but the present situation provoked some to write in the last month on the subject.  The following paragraph represents writing in the last month on severe division in America.

The City Journal published an article by Andrew Klavan, titled, “At the Heart of Our Divisions.”  Klavan, part of Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire, tries to explain the division as others have. Newsweek reports that a “Majority of Trump Voters Want to Split the Nation Into ‘Red’ and ‘Blue’ Halves.”  The Las Vegas Sun reported it this way:

A new political poll offers an alarming look at the state of American unity and our population’s respect for some of the nation’s core values.

The poll, conducted by the University of Virginia’s nonprofit Center for Politics, shows that 52% of respondents who voted for former President Donald Trump were in favor of splitting the country into red and blue states, while 41% of voters for President Joe Biden agree with the idea. More than 2,000 voters participated in the poll, nearly equally divided between those supporting Trump and Biden.

Ed Kilgore at The Intelligencer, part of New York Magazine, writes, “No, We Can’t Get a National Divorce There’s growing sentiment for secession, particularly on the right. It should be rejected.”  At Substack, Claremont senior fellow David Reaboi writes, “National Divorce Is Expensive, But It’s Worth Every Penny.”  Karol Markowicz writes at the New York Post, “Sorry, but a national split up just won’t work.”  Steven Malanga at the City Journal writes, “The New Secession Movement.”  Conservative commentator Rich Lowry writes at Politico of all places, “A Surprising Share of Americans Wants to Break Up the Country. Here’s Why They’re Wrong.”  Dan Rodricks writes at the Baltimore Sun, “Civil war unlikely, but the nation’s present course could still be disastrous.”  Most of these were written in the last week, and there are more.

Okay, so there’s division.  Everyone can agree with that.  Putin of Russia and Xi of China smile.  Why though?  I’ve read or heard a lot of different reasons:  media, tribalism, the education system, the deep state, and more.  Klavan lists reasons in the first paragraph of his post.  Those are typical, whole books written about them, but I believe these are surface reasons, I would call, non-worldview reasons, that are superficial and don’t dig deep enough.

My take on the acute and bitter division between states, people, and parties in the United States, I want to give credit, corresponds to something Nancy Pearcey writes about in her book, Total Truth.  She explains a division portrayed by the lower and upper stories of a building or house with the lower story being “facts” and the upper story being “values.”  Today you hear a lot about facts in the media, news, and schools.  This is the “science is real” at the top of the leftist value sign.  In this upper and lower story bifurcation, values are probably not what you think they are.  Let me explain.

God is One.  Truth, which proceeds from God, is also one.  Pearcey’s proposition is “total truth,” the title of her book.  There are not two stories that treat facts different than values, where values are constructed, personal and subjective.  You can’t really know these with certainty.  No, with God His natural laws, facts or science, are no different than moral laws.  If you fall from the edge of a cliff, gravity sends you down to destruction.  Breaking moral laws also destroys.  Worse even.  God is the Author of both.

Premoderns took a transcendent view of the world.  Truth, goodness, and beauty, the transcendentals, all related to God.  God transcending the world is the basis of the transcendentals. He’s not part of the world.  He created it and having created it, He is separate from it.  As James 1 says, that with God there is no shadow of turning.  God is holy.  He is Self-existent and immutable.  Nothing affects Him.  All meaning comes from God, so truth, goodness, and beauty, the transcendentals, are objective.

This world is God’s world. Even if someone doesn’t believe in God, they are living in His world.  This is reality.  The division breaks down into those who live in reality, recognition that this world functions according to laws according to which everyone must live, even if they reject the God of the Bible, and then those who don’t live in reality.

The ones not living in reality, which are one side of the division in the United States, see the top story, values, how they want to see them.  It’s one reason they are called “values,” and not “morals” or “moral laws.”  Using “values” is using language with power.  Incidentally, part of critical theory is perfecting this language for use in reconstructing reality.

Looking at the world like two sides of the campus, religion, art, etc. on one side and then science, math, and engineering on the other, the blue part of the country thinks they can assign their own meaning on one side of the campus. They ultimately don’t want God in charge.  They don’t want objective values that clash with what they want, so they make up their own and dismiss God or make up their own god that approves of their values.  This is the basis for the Democrat party booing God when voting on their political platform in 2012.  This is also how they justify killing babies.

The truth is that the blue states, people, etc. now assign their own meaning to science as well.  They call it science like hanging out a shingle, pulling science out of a Cracker Jack box.  Their subjectivity on the upper story, think of it as bad plumbing, has burst through into the lower story like a broken pipe.  That side can’t tell you that a girl is a girl.  This is one reason why many don’t want to go to college in this country anymore.  They know it’s a racket that is not living in reality.

One side of the division in the country wants the nation to be called like it really is.  Borders are representative of this.  You can’t be a nation when you don’t protect, not just protect — how about acknowledge that you have a border.  Whatever one thinks about the virus and masks and the vaccination, it’s understandable why a big chunk of the country doesn’t trust authority on this.  I’m not going to even get into what Fauci has said.  He doesn’t speak science and this is demonstrative on multiple occasions.

The government, the media that supports it, and now even corporations are all in on the lies. They allot whatever meaning they want and they expect you to receive it.  If you don’t, now they’ll even prosecute you.  They’ll fire you.  If you don’t put on their particular pin, which supports whatever lie that they deem correct, you might lose your job.

I believe most churches too have succumbed to the two stories I’ve described.  They put beauty, music, dress in the personal, the subjective, the top story.  They capitulate on basic doctrine and practice to accommodate for popularity and numbers.  Their targets see the world according to the lie of these two stories.  They know it and they concede to it.  This does not bode well for the country.  Even if the nation does split into two parts, what will happen to the red side when the churches have taken the same basic approach to truth?  This is the most fundamental aspect of worldliness in churches today.

Another metaphor to demonstrate what the division of truth, the two story view, does to the country is a rudderless ship.  The country has no certain belief to hold it together or to give it direction.  It moves according to whatever current or wind produced by the world, like a float or a bob on an aimless sea.  The force of popularity, what scripture would call lust, the combined desires of the population, decides what is it’s truth, it’s goodness, and it’s beauty, whatever each of these is in their own eyes.

Everything above explains the division in the country.  Maybe the next question is, what is the solution to this division?  That, my friend, is much more difficult.

Reality and Truth: Celebrity Conservatives Versus True Bible Believers

Perhaps you, like me, as a Christian, pay attention to certain celebrity conservatives, who take many of the same or similar viewpoints as you.  You know there are differences.  Where is the overlap?

In diagnosing a worldview, there are various components to understanding it, as some people have or might put it, to see the map of the world.  Some of them are knowledge, ethics, purpose, and epistemology, but among the others, I want to explore two of them, reality and truth, as they relate to celebrity conservatives versus true Bible believers.  In general, very often true Bible believers are interested in the celebrity conservatives without their being interested in them.  Part of their “fan base” are Christians, who listen to their podcasts and watch their shows.
One of the celebrity conservatives, Jordan Peterson, the famous PhD professor, author, and public intellectual and speaker from Canada, doesn’t even call himself a conservative.  Celebrity conservatives today might call themselves classic liberals (you can look up classical liberalism).  Maybe he really isn’t conservative, but you also shrink your audience if you call yourself one.  As well, “liberal” might mean you keep your job and other opportunities.  Peterson does resonate with true Bible believers and they listen to, watch, and read him.
When I write, celebrity conservatives, I’m especially saying, Peterson, Ben Shapiro, Charlie Kirk, Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity, the late Rush Limbaugh, Dennis Prager, and Candace Owens.  There are many others.  There is overlap between their worldviews and the worldview of a true Bible believer.
Before Covid hit and also before he had major health issues, my wife and I and another couple got tickets to hear Jordan Peterson in person in San Francisco, sponsored by the Independent Institute.  As I was listening to him, I enjoyed many things he was saying.  However, I knew he and I did not have the same worldview.  I was glad he could say what he did in public, but it wasn’t nearly enough for me either.  The celebrity conservatives like him are disappointing.
In the last week, I was thinking about the difference between the worldviews of celebrity conservatives and true Bible believers.  Even as I write this, I think about how a true Bible believer could even be a celebrity in our world.  I don’t think it’s possible.  The greater the celebrity status, the more you must be doing something wrong, and that includes evangelical leaders who have their own celebrity. They in part got there through capitulation and compromise.  Their greater celebrity doesn’t speak well.
The common ground in worldview, I believe, is that there is more proximity between celebrity conservatives and true Bible believers in their view of reality.  I would say that they both attempt to function according to reality, even if it means abandoning the truth.  The truth and reality do go together.  They overlap completely for a true Bible believer, but they don’t for celebrity conservatives.  Even actual reality and the reality of celebrity of conservatives don’t overlap identically.  To stay a celebrity, like everyone else who isn’t a true Bible believer, celebrity conservatives forsake actual reality and even more so, the truth.  Let me explain.
I want to use Jordan Peterson as an example.  Jesus either rose from the dead or He didn’t.  Jesus can’t be the greatest figure who ever lived if He wasn’t truth and He lied about the resurrection.  Peterson says that he’s not sure if he believes Christianity, but he tries to live like one.  He’s also saying, he’s not committing to the truth of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, while living like Jesus did resurrect from the dead.  He borrows a reality based upon the truth without actually believing the truth.  Other conservatives do that, and it’s easy to see.
The world we live in is the real world.  Celebrity conservatives more than the mainstream culture try to explain positions according to reality, even if they deny much of the truth or many truths, depending how you want to put that.  You may live a reality of Jesus and defend a life that fits His existence and deny the pivotal truth of His resurrection.  Peterson does that.
Complementarianism is the truth and celebrity conservatives borrow from a complementarian reality without the truth of complementarianism.  Gender fluidity proceeds from egalitarianism.  God designed men and women differently.  That’s the truth.  Celebrity conservatives deny complementarian truth while defending a complementarian reality.
Let me get more simple.  Whether you think he’s a conservative or not, let’s consider President Donald J. Trump as if he were a conservative.  Trump operates according to a certain Christian reality that results in Christian support, including from true Bible believers.  Trump thinks that one thing is better than another.  Certain behavior is wrong.  He believes that America as a standard of living better than other countries, which can be and should be protected at the border.  This is one of the most fundamental conservative beliefs and it is a reality that borrows from the truth.
Former President Trump doesn’t believe the truth, but he functions as though there is truth. He is a realist in that we must have standards.  Things won’t be better when we can’t discern the differences of one thing from another.  This is a reality according to a Christian worldview.  The truth is more important.  However, people who eject from reality are much further away from the truth. These either practical or positional nihilists must be rejected for something short of the truth, if that’s the choice.  The path to the truth won’t come through their relativism.  It can come through someone who at least embraces reality, even if it doesn’t mirror actual reality.
The answer for humanity is still the truth.  It isn’t the reality of celebrity conservatives.

AUTHORS OF THE BLOG

  • Kent Brandenburg
  • Thomas Ross

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