When the Nazis decided to take over the world, they made sure their philosophy was taught in the schools. They made adjustments in church doctrine too. We can learn from those industrious oppressors.

When you want to destroy a culture, you need to control education. Your tyranny won’t be accepted until the “old ways” are erased. You do this by indoctrinating children with your “new ways.” Children are blank slates. Education is how you put your ideas onto those slates. When the children are instilled with your values, they won’t object when you eradicate their parents. They’ll even help you do it.

So, who controls education in America?

Certainly not the Bible-thumping, gun-toting, right-wing, religious zealots. Public school is NOT the place to spread your religious views. We removed prayer from school decades ago. There are no bible verses anywhere in the curriculum. We pulled the Ten Commandments off the walls. In our tireless effort to separate church and state, we have scrubbed all traces of Christianity from public school.

And yet, Christians are still seen as a threat to our American way of life.

“The idea is that certain people, especially white Christian men, are entitled to exercise their freedom, which they understand as the freedom to seize property, to make money, and to dominate others. Order is racial order, and patriarchal, gendered order. To defend that order, they [believe they] are entitled to use violence when necessary.” That’s Philip Gorski’s take in his new book, The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy.

An article from the May, 2021 issue of Time says, “After the Civil War and throughout the years of Jim Crow, Christian leaders routinely provided the theological arguments needed to rationalize limiting Black Americans’ access to participation in the democratic process. They explicitly tied these efforts to their desire to protect the purity of a “Christian” nation.”

Amazing how a religious group, stripped of all influence in both politics and education, continues to be the number one threat to democracy. Christians withdrew from public decades ago. We stopped praying in school. We stopped reading scripture in class. We agreed that the Ten Commandments didn’t belong on the school walls. We don’t put nativity scenes on public property. We don’t put Mary and Joseph in school Christmas…sorry…Holiday Celebrations. And somehow, Christians are still the reason Americans live in fear.

What can Christians learn from the Nazis? At the very least, we can learn that public school is not a good place for our children, unless we want them to abandon the faith. There is little chance your kids will be Christians after spending thousands of hours being taught that Christianity is the world’s greatest evil.

Take responsibility for educating your children. Pagans won’t teach them to love God.

“Fix these words of mine in your hearts and minds; tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Teach them to your children, talking about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up.”

– Deuteronomy 11:18