The Battle for Religious Liberty Will Be Won on the Field of Education

[Valin]

Mosaic:

A striking correlation exists between the decay of liberal education and the belief that government should push American citizens toward progressivism.

Peter Berkowitz

Aug. 22 2016

 

The first clause of the first of the first ten amendments to the United States Constitution enshrines religious liberty. The opening words of the Bill of Rights accord this honor to religious liberty because, if government were to establish a state religion or interfere with the free exercise of religion, our other precious liberties would sustain a blow. *It is a short step from government’s prescribing beliefs and dictating practices concerning citizens’ fundamental duties and highest hopes to government’s depriving citizens of their property and imprisoning them for deviating from the state’s religious—or irreligious, or anti-religious—orthodoxy.

 

The First Amendment also underscores the intimate connection between the protection of religious liberty and the exercise of political liberty by immediately following the prohibitions on governmental establishment and state regulation of religion with guarantees of freedom of speech, press, assembly, and petition of government.

 

Any threat to religious liberty in America, the Constitution’s Bill of Rights teaches, endangers all liberties.

 

(Snip)

 

Friends of freedom and limited constitutional government must vigorously resist, through courts and in state legislatures and in Congress, legal efforts to impair religious liberty. But the long-term battle for religious liberty in particular and individual liberty in general will be won or lost in the field of education. There is a striking correlation between the post-1960s decay of liberal education in America and the post-1960s reinforcement and diffusion of the presumption that it is proper for the federal government to strive to induct American men and women into the progressive mold.

 

Only an education that is grounded in the belief in individual freedom, and that therefore seeks to transmit knowledge rather than serve up propaganda, that aims to refine students’ ability to think for themselves rather than to recite socially approved opinions, and that places at the core the critical study of the tradition of liberty under law—particularly the American experiment in constitutional self-government—can hope to fend off the contemporary assault on freedom.

 

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* California’s Culture War against Religious Liberty City of Houston demands pastors turn over sermons