Christians have not been without warnings about the result of churches supporting the utilizing government-sponsored education. The two principal founders of government education in America were hostile to biblical Christianity. Horace Mann, the father of public education and the Unitarian faith, exhibited an open hostility to orthodox Christianity. John Dewey, the father of progressive education and of Columbia University Teachers College, was also a committed humanist and coauthor of the Human Manifesto I. Dewey was mentor to thousands of educators and professors who later staffed the various teacher colleges across America, beginning in the early 1900s.

Does not the warning of Martin Luther now ring powerfully in our ears when he said, “I am afraid that the schools will prove the very gates of hell, unless they diligently labor in explaining the Holy Scriptures and engraving them in the heart of the youth.” Also, Dr. Archibald Hodge, one of America’s eminent theologians, wrote some 100 years ago: “I am sure as I am of the fact of Christ’s reign that a comprehensive and centralized system of national education, separated from religion, as is now commonly proposed, will prove the most appalling engine for the propagation of anti-Christian and atheistic unbelief, and anti-social nihilistic ethics, individual, social and political, which the sin-rent world has ever seen.”