The Antidote for the Therapeutic State

I’ve been homeschooling my three sons (now 12 and twins who are 11) going on 8 years. But much of the history curriculum (including Christian materials) either unwittingly or intentionally cheer on what Dr. Paul Gottfried describes as our “secular theocracy,” in which America isn’t defined by tangible commonalities like shared values, faith, and customs, but rather by egalitarian ideas like “liberal democracy,” “equality,” and “social justice.” In other words, the Yankee worldview.

It’s a toxic brew of the Social Gospel preaching and Enlightenment preening, giving it the self-righteousness of man-made morality and the self-appointed rule of elitism. In order to promote the “greater good,” individual reason must be sacrificed. In order to build up the kingdom in this world, some individuals must be torn down. In order to grow the new social order, some traditions must be dug up root and branch. Just like the Puritans of yore demanded during their sanctimonious sermons: “Reconstruct! Re-educate! Reform!”

Take the Lincoln mythos. He’s called the “Great Emancipator.” The selfless statesman who was martyred for the “Union.” He’s considered a saint or even a god, according to modern Ameridoxy, and the “multicultural catechism,” as Gottfried might call it, hinges upon the liturgy of “Civil War” revisionism.

“The cause of the South is the cause of us all.”
— Alexander H. Stephens

So if you dare to study “what’s true and valuable in the Southern tradition,” you will be deemed a dissident or maybe even an apostate by a sister in Christ. “Racist!” cry the secular theocrats. But why? Here’s how my smart friend William explains it.

It’s a spot-on encapsulation of why Southern history is so vital to understanding the post-modern society in which we traditionalists are trying to survive, although I would add that the cultural Marxists pulling the strings know exactly what they’re doing. They simply don’t articulate it because “white guilt” is a way more effective tool than is honesty. Southern history (and proud Southerners) are simply an impediment to “progress.”

This is precisely why Democrats in Mississippi say homeschoolers “must provide students with an examination of the history of the State of Mississippi from the age of discovery and colonization to the present with particular emphasis on the significant political, social, economic and cultural issues of the 19th and 20th centuries which have impacted the diverse ethnic and racial populations of the state.” The critical-theory reformers must mandate their bad ideas, otherwise, smart people who have already fled from the government-school system may slip through the cracks with some real smarts and grasp what’s really at stake.

So any resistance to what Gottfried terms the “therapeutic managerial state” (centralized government that aims to replace family, God, and localism through subsidization of and interference with every aspect of everyday life) must be crushed. And since it is the archetype – the white, Christian, Southern man – who poses the largest threat to leftist supremacy, he and his symbols must be obliterated. See, if you were to learn some real history, you may start questioning the totalitarian narrative.

“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”
— Flannery O’Connor

One wouldn’t think that “conservative” Protestant curriculum would fall prey to such idolatrous social-engineering schemes. But unfortunately, it often does.

From the beginning of our homeschool journey, my family participated in Classical Conversations, a Christian home-education program. Although CC was a blessing and we parted on good terms, I decided to try something different this year, as I had grown concerned with the increasing politically correct direction of CC, at least on the national level.

If you’ve ever visited the CC Facebook page, I’m sure you can attest to the hysterical mamas who incessantly complain about how “not diverse” CC is (there’s even a shockingly anti-white “Adding Diversity to Classical Conversations” Facebook group), how the curriculum has a “Southern bias,” and how it must be due to the fact that CC corporate is based in North Carolina.

They gnash their teeth about how the Timeline Song states “Lincoln’s War Between the States” and exhibit puerile emotionalism whenever the War comes up. Just get in line with the narrative that the “Civil War” was about those evil slave-owning Southerners and their selfish wants vs. the noble black-people-loving saviors of the North who fought for justice and freedom. We must ignore facts, suspend our own God-given knowledge, and goose-step with the program, or else.

Funny thing is that the above two-year-old comment isn’t even PC enough for 2020, since the terms “slavery” and “slaves” have now been revoked by the speech police, as they’re deemed too “reductive,” and are now being replaced by “enslaved peoples” and “enslavement.” The crusaders of chaos say the change is supposed to emphasize “personhood” and avoid a “nonhuman noun.” Meanwhile, Southerners are dehumanized at every turn.

Below you’ll see two past futile attempts I made in an effort to reason with the presentist finger-waggers within homeschooling, who I’ve written about before. It’s enough to make a mama fit to be tied.

Lord, why do people homeschool if they’re history is just going to promote the progressive paradigm? Just grab a government textbook and be done with it, and leave the rest of alone.

The woke CC mamas would benefit greatly from McClanahan’s podcast. But maybe first they should be deprogrammed by reading Gottfried’s indispensable Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt, in which he explains how post-modernity and post-Christianity are overwhelmingly “liberal Protestant.”

It’s a “religious worldview [that] gives direction to the managerial state’s progress toward a therapeutic regime concerned with the self-esteem of victims” … and the “persistence of the American Protestant establishment in churning out confessions.” In other words, white guilt and virtue-signaling.

I agree with Gottfried, which is why I (as an Orthodox Christian) have written posts like White souls aren’t worth much these days, White Christians should feel guilty, and Keep on protesting, Protestants. I’ve tried to expose the anti-white cancer gobbling up the organs of Evangelicalism because it’s heretical. It’s damaging spiritually and intellectually, but also socially, since it has dangerous cultural ramifications which affect us all.

Let me just state for the record Orthodox home-educators are not immune. “Liberal Christian theologians and clergy have contributed to this [transformational] culture but are not its only creators,” writes Gottfried. It’s really an American phenomenon.

The deleterious dogma is so ingrained in people through our “managerial state and its media-academic priesthood” and our progressive rituals, but it’s mostly mainline religious leaders who’ve made its “inverted positions” more palatable. After all, Protestantism is still highly influential, both religious-wise (being the most popular faith in America) and homeschool-wise (being the pioneers of the American home-education movement and consequently the most prominent publishers of said curriculum).

If good Christians don’t defend biblical morality, true justice, and God’s Kingdom in their churches, why should we expect them to fight against humanist precepts, “social justice,” and the worship of the nation-state in our culture? And just like our centralized government miseducation, many Christian materials are just as bad was what U.S. Senator James A. Bayard, Jr., once described as the “Yankee school system” and “the teachings of a licentious, sensational, and corrupt press.”

Southerners were forced to accept this progressive model of schooling at the point of a bayonet, eventually submitting to it over the course of the 20th century. But homeschoolers today now understand the pernicious aims and effects of the education-industrial complex and have already personally seceded from the menace, so why still parrot so much of the cultural-Marxist creed?

I think they’ve succumbed to the “false theory of progress,” which leads to what G.K. Chesterton called the “suicide of thought.” It befuddles the Word, and encourages people into self-censorship and softheadedness. Chesterton said that such a devolution in critical thinking is “an attack not upon the faith, but upon the mind.” But I believe it’s both, since truth (and the healthy pursuit of it) is a product of man having been made in God’s image and every human being’s innate yearning to know Him, our Creator.

So, today’s puritans don’t build Christ-centered churches, they build government schools and infiltrate homeschooling with government-centered doublethink. They don’t evangelize the Good News, they proselytize social-gospel propaganda. They don’t seek a close-knit community of like-minded brothers and sisters, they demand collective control over all of society. Or else.

Now let me be clear: My local CC community of seven years was filled with bright, faithful, conservative families. The tenor wasn’t Southern-without-apology when we began attending in 2012, but it certainly wasn’t anti-Southern either. I would like to think that my kids and I had a little something to do with decreasing knee-jerk trust of the therapeutic state and its incessant Lincolnian-nationalist “history.” Or maybe it’s just because the intellectually curious tend to get red-pilled when they stop to study real historical evidence.

But as my children moved up in the levels of CC, I became increasingly concerned about the bad history in some of the source texts, so much so that I ended up using different materials, which were typically adult works and much more difficult for my sons to understand. Sure, this was a teaching opportunity for me. “Hey, let’s read this together, kids, and then I’ll decipher it for you.” But then I thought, “Why the heck am I paying for this expensive History-Based Writing Lessons book when I’m not even using it?”

Couple this with the fact that CC is an international for-profit company, I was fearful that the evangeleftists would eventually win, since progressives shriek and stomp their feet and have ceaseless tantrums to eventually get what they want from corporations. Squeaky wheel gets the grease, right? So we opted to make our exit before that could happen.

“My understanding of Marxist Communism is that … its necessary result is the extinction of the memory of the past,” wrote Professor Harry Jaffa, a Straussian who knew a thing or two about twisting history. I don’t want to erase history, any history. In fact, I want to shine an even brighter light on all history, most notably that which is deemed “consensus,” “conventional wisdom,” “settled social science,” or “new, ground-breaking work.” And I’m not willing to ask permission to do it. I say to hell with the triggered mamas and all the adherents of Ameridoxy.

My husband and I decided to home-educate our children well before we became parents and Christians, before we understood how socially engineered we ourselves were to the therapeutic state. Even way back then, we knew that mainstream history is a poison that infects every nerve of society and rips apart every fiber of culture. It clogs the veins of intellectual inquiry.

Like Jefferson Davis opined, “Of what value are paper constitutions and oaths binding officers to their preservation, if there is not intelligence enough in the people to discern the violations and virtue enough to resist the violators?” Bad history deconstructs, dupes, and and destroys.

To me, everything true, good, and beautiful is dependent upon good history. Why do people so greatly misunderstand Americanism and civics? Why do people fall for leftism and morph into foaming-at-the-mouth SJWs? Why do people think warfarism and empire-building are patriotic? Why do people attack the family and tradition? Why do people hate the South and hate themselves (if they’re white)? Why do people get Christianity so wrong and fall for wolves in sheep’s clothing? Why is civilization crumbling? The answer to all is bad history. 

Take a deep breath, pull out the therapeutic-state needle, and detox from the puritanical-progressivism. Real history is the antidote. It will be difficult and uncomfortable, and won’t win you any popularity contests, but seeking truth is way healthier than is being led astray with lies.

Be sure to check out my forthcoming followup about how my family does homeschool history.

Originally published at DissidentMama.net.