Early in the fight for America’s soul, rationalists emerged from within the ranks of the Congregationalist churches in New England where, in no small part as a reaction to the stirrings of what would become America’s Second Great Awakening, they began to propound “Unitarianism,” a heresy as old as the Reformation itself. Unitarians saw man as inherently good, Jesus as strictly human, Satan as non-existent and God as a hands-off Creator. Evil was attributable to a lack of education and opportunity (sound familiar?) thus rendering sin the playing out of ignorance and repression. Give a man enough information, their reasoning went, and his natural inclination must be to better himself and his world around him.
Information plus opportunity equals paradise. It was an idea as old as the seduction of Eve, and it proved as powerful, especially around Boston. By the early nineteenth century the new world’s first Congregational church had bitten the apple to become America’s first Unitarian church.
While the evangelists of both Awakenings had drawn thousands to arbors and altars where tears of repentance were emphasized, these humanist forebears quietly set their sights on key areas of society like economics, civil government, and especially education.
Harvard College had been founded in 1636 by the General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony for the purpose of training young men for Christian ministry. But by 1800 Unitarianism, the intellectual vogue throughout New England, had gained a foothold there. Finally in 1805, upon gaining the school’s professorship of divinity, the Unitarians captured Harvard’s soul as well. They immediately purged the institution of its Calvinist members, and with them their orthodox Christianity.
The “new and improved” Harvard University would provide its students with a superior “humanist” education. But the school’s secular saviors now faced their second challenge: Where would they find a steady stream of intelligent, non-religious secondary school graduates capable of passing Harvard’s stringent entrance examinations? Such youngsters would be ideally suited, they thought, for their “enlightened” approach. The obvious agent for such a school, or system of schools, would be the civil government, which itself was increasingly being accepted as a secular, religiously neutral institution. Moreover, there was no need to create such a system when an existing one could be transformed to meet the need.
Nearby the city of Boston had a diverse network of educational institutions—church schools, charity schools for the poor, home tutors, private schools, trade schools—as well as a system of “common schools.” These were public secondary schools, originally established by Massachusetts’ constitutional law as a feeder system for Harvard’s seminary, so as to ensure that the Holy Commonwealth would always have an adequate supply of ministers. These public schools had become the stronghold of Boston’s affluent Unitarian community, whose children comprised the largest percentage of their students. But then, as today, public schools were not as efficiently or economically administrated as their private counterparts. They were, in fact, slowly drying up at a time when Harvard’s messianic vision required fresh faces.
The private schools were overwhelmingly Christian in their orientation and curricula. Most of them also maintained well-funded scholarship programs for children whose families were otherwise too poor to pay tuition costs. Nonetheless a small percentage of the city’s children remained out of school, mostly due to parental choice rather than a lack of opportunity or funds. Harvard seized upon this statistic and, joined by Boston’s Unitarian elite, began a propaganda campaign calling for an expanded system of public schools, primary and secondary, with free education for all of the city’s children. Most of their rationale was lifted from an essay entitled “A New View of Society,” a virtual socialist manifesto, written by England’s Robert Owen, the father of modern socialism.
The campaign succeeded beyond their wildest rationalist dreams. In 1837 the Massachusetts Board of Education was established, with avid humanist lawyer Horace Mann as Secretary. By 1850 a law authorizing the establishment of free schools had been passed in New York. Within a few years public education would become the national norm, as Americans accepted the idea of free schools almost as quickly as their taxes rose.
Private schools, financially unable to compete, shrank both in size and influence. Harvard had lost its soul and gained a whole nation. Fully approved and subsidized by a tax-paying, predominantly Christian populace, public education was adopted from border to border, under the benign administration of a religiously “neutral” civil government. In years to come this same stance of neutrality would be adopted by public education’s most avid proponent and self-appointed guardian, the National Education Association. Of course, the ensuing century-and-a-three-quarters have seen the humanist elite in American education constantly redefine the concept of neutrality, from an originally assumed meaning of denominationally neutral Christian, to non-evangelistic Christian, to “values free,” to today’s prevalent and increasingly overt anti-Christian hegemony.
And here we are. Today, the overwhelming majority of Christian parents across America routinely send their children to a nearby public school, the one institution in town where they are guaranteed never to be instructed in God’s word, and where they are likely as not to be taught thirty hours per week by teachers whom, in many cases, they would reject for one hour per week in Sunday School.
But hey, it’s free.