The United States of America was founded as an extraordinary experiment in freedom balanced by an almost universal worldview — the Christian or biblical worldview — which supplied inward moral constraints and rendered heavy handed government unnecessary and even repugnant.

But today, over 240 years later, America is a battlefield of opposing worldviews: secular humanists who have no transcendent truth to constrain them, versus people of faith who still embrace a biblical worldview. That biblical worldview includes exhortation to all manner of good and godly works and attitudes.

But what of The Left? Those with no moral compass who subscribe to the situational ethics school of thought? How can Progressive leaders and gatekeepers motivate their followers? Simple: fear.

People, in general, are either motivated by love or fear. Many times a healthy dose of fear is not a bad thing: ask the parent who loves their child unconditionally, yet understands the efficacy of fear of consequences.

Consider the notorieties of The Left and some of their chronicled pronouncements intended to evoke fear.

National Review columnist David French writes of fearmonger Al Gore:

In January, 2006 — when promoting his Oscar-winning (yes, Oscar-winning) documentary, An Inconvenient Truth — Gore declared that unless we took “drastic measures” to reduce greenhouse gasses, the world would reach a “point of no return” in a mere ten years. He called it a “true planetary emergency.” Well, the ten years passed today, we’re still here, and the climate activists have postponed the apocalypse. Again.

In case you missed seeing Al’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth, here is the film’s synopsis:

Director Davis Guggenheim eloquently weaves the science of global warming with former Vice President Al Gore’s personal history and lifelong commitment to reversing the effects of global climate change in the most talked-about documentary of the year.

An audience and critical favorite, An Inconvenient Truth makes the compelling case that global warming is real, man-made, and its effects will be cataclysmic if we don’t act now. Gore presents a wide array of facts and information in a thoughtful and compelling way: often humorous, frequently emotional, and always fascinating. In the end, An Inconvenient Truth accomplishes what all great films should: it leaves the viewer shaken, involved and inspired.

Notice the hyperbolic language — cataclysmic — and the ultimate goal of the movie, “An Inconvenient Truth accomplishes what all great films should: it leaves the viewer shaken, involved and inspired.” Shaken. Indeed. Trembling with fear. Now that’s some motivation!

Now consider the collective works and declarations of Hollywood heavyweight (pun intended) Michael Moore. Take a look at the PR description of Moore’s 2009 film, Capitalism: A Love Story:

Filmmaker Michael Moore explores corporate greed, the global economic meltdown, and their disastrous effect on American lives. As he travels from the Heartland to the financial epicenter of New York and the halls of government in Washington, Moore delves into the price the country pays for its love of capitalism.

Moore’s earlier 2002 movie, Bowling for Columbine, delivers a foreboding message concerning guns in America:

Political documentary filmmaker Michael Moore explores the circumstances that lead to the 1999 Columbine High School massacre and, more broadly, the proliferation of guns and the high homicide rate in America. In his trademark provocative fashion, Moore accosts Kmart corporate employees and pleads with them to stop selling bullets, investigates why Canada doesn’t have the same excessive rate of gun violence and questions actor Charlton Heston on his support of the National Rifle Association.

Leftist Moore crafts his documentaries to support his radical worldview: capitalism is unadulterated greed which will destroy America and the globe; guns and the NRA and Charlton Heston are evil and the cause of violence in America. Each of Moore’s films seek to instill fear in the audience.

Another purveyor of fear, Nobel Peace Prize Winning Barack Obama has the bully pulpit and the Progressive mindset to disseminate chilling, but fictitious, dictums. With the looming danger of Islamic terrorism, Obama dons his blinders and preaches:

Today there is no greater threat to our planet than climate change.

. . .

No challenge poses a greater threat to future generations than climate change.

Secretary of State John Kerry warns:

It is [climate change], indeed, one of the greatest threats facing our planet today.

Even Veep Joe Biden gets in on the “scare-your-pants off with man-caused climate change doom” act:

Climate change is the threat multiplier.

Watch the video below with these and more scary quotes:

Now we all know we should live in fear and trembling of climate change, gun owners and capitalism. But wait, there’s more.

Slow Joe Biden warned the black community in August 2012, replete with his phony “black brother accent:”

[Romney] said in the first hundred days, he’s going to let the big banks write their own rules — unchain Wall Street. They’re going to put y’all back in chains.

Thus Americans can add Romney and all Republicans to the list of phobias. But, don’t put down your pen — if you’re taking notes.

President Obama decried flyover folks in 2008:

And when he spoke to a group of his wealthier Golden State backers at a San Francisco fund-raiser last Sunday, Barack Obama took a shot at explaining the yawning cultural gap that separates a Turkeyfoot from a Marin County.

“…And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

So there you go. According to Obama, working class Americans are bitter, God-clinging, gun-clinging, xenophobics who should be objects of suspicion and loathing.

Our universities have been indoctrinating students for several generations with this nonsense, instilling fear of patriots and what were once considered solid American values. Colleges advertise “safe zones” and decry “micro-aggression and trigger warnings.”

Oklahoma Wesleyan University President, Dr. Everett Piper, wrote an excellent rebuttal to all the PC/Lefty nonsense in his 2015 article, This is Not a Day Care. It’s a University!:

At OKWU, we teach you to be selfless rather than self-centered. We are more interested in you practicing personal forgiveness than political revenge. We want you to model interpersonal reconciliation rather than foment personal conflict. We believe the content of your character is more important than the color of your skin. We don’t believe that you have been victimized every time you feel guilty and we don’t issue “trigger warnings” before altar calls.

Oklahoma Wesleyan is not a “safe place”, but rather, a place to learn: to learn that life isn’t about you, but about others; that the bad feeling you have while listening to a sermon is called guilt; that the way to address it is to repent of everything that’s wrong with you rather than blame others for everything that’s wrong with them. This is a place where you will quickly learn that you need to grow up.

This is not a day care. This is a university.

Let’s face it, The Left is motivated by, and only by, feelings — not facts nor solid intellectual argument. With a worldview wherein man is both intrinsically good and, strangely, the enemy of the planet, the best mode of motivation is fear. Pure, unsubstantiated fear.

Contrast that with the Judeo-Christian, the biblical, worldview. Those who revere the God of the Bible, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, those who read the Bible and try to live out its precepts. Those people of faith believe in right and wrong, in sin and mercy and grace. And they believe in absolute, transcendent truth.

If The Left motivates through fear, how does The Right, Conservatives of faith, motivate? Love.

There are over 360 passages in the Bible which tells us to “fear not.” And with great clarity the apostle John writes:

There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves torment. But he who fears has not been made perfect in love. 1 John 4:18

Dr. R.C. Sproul of Ligonier Ministries notes:

We are fragile mortals, given to fears of every sort. We have a built-in insecurity that no amount of whistling in the dark can mollify. We seek assurance concerning the things that frighten us the most.

The prohibition uttered more frequently than any other by our Lord is the command, “Fear not …” He said this so often to His disciples and others He encountered that it almost came to sound like a greeting. Where most people greet others by saying “Hi” or “Hello,” the first words of Jesus very often were “Fear not.”

Our culture may be a war zone as we wrestle against principalities and powers who wield fear as a weapon of control.

The antidote for that fear is truth and love. We must be apologists of truth, striking down the nonsense of the fear peddlers. As John Mark penned:

And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength: this is the first commandment.

And the second is like, namely this, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. There is none other commandment greater than these.

Sorry fearmongers, you don’t have a chance of winning: perfect love casts out fear.

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Join IFI at our Feb. 18th Worldview Conference

We are excited about our third annual Worldview Conference featuring world-renowned theologian Dr. Frank Turek on Sat., Feb. 18, 2017 in Barrington. Dr. Turek is s a dynamic speaker and the award-winning author of “I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist”

Join us for a wonderful opportunity to take enhance your biblical worldview and equip you to more effectively engage the culture:

Click HERE to learn more or to register!

In a May 28, 2011 Wall Street Journal article, Bari Weiss said this about David Mamet, one of America’s foremost contemporary playwrights, who in the last few years has experienced a conversion to political conservatism of sorts.

Before he moved to California, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright David Mamet had never talked to a self-described conservative.

Mamet said, “I realized I lived in this bubble.”

Weiss also reported that one of the basic truths Mamet realized is that “Real diversity is intellectual.”

Both the image of a person who has never talked to a conservative and the notion that real diversity is intellectual reminded me of one of the more pressing problems affecting public high schools: the absence of intellectual diversity on controversial topics.

A recent event at Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire, Illinois offers hope that public schools may someday demonstrate a genuine commitment to diversity without which they cannot foster critical thinking.

Stevenson High School’s school-sponsored club, Truth Seekers, hosted a debate between AP Biology teacher Brett Erdmann and AP Calculus teacher Neal Roys on the competing theories of Neo-Darwinian Evolution and Intelligent Design. This debate was followed by a lively Q & A. Approximately 70 adults, including both district employees and community members, and 250 students attended the debate.

Not only did administrators not place any obstacles in the path of club members who sought to hold this event, but they supported and facilitated the students’ efforts. In an email correspondence with IFI, Principal John Carter wrote that “We want students to be as prepared as possible to collect information from a variety of sources, critique that information, and come to their own educated conclusions.”

Superintendent Eric Twadell wrote:

The debate received great response from our students and was a wonderful reflection of the hard work, dedication and passion of our teachers …. we do believe that students should have the opportunity to learn and study a diversity of topics including those that some might consider “controversial.” In fact, as a teacher in the Social Studies Division here at Stevenson, for many years I taught students intelligent design every semester in my World Religions class. Our Stevenson High School Vision Statement calls us to create a culture of inquiry and engagement with challenging academic material, the recent debate was a great opportunity to engage students in important and relevant dialogue.

Dr. Carter and Dr. Twadell expressed important sentiments that all schools endorse in words but many teachers ignore in practice. Instead of presenting students with the best resources from scholars on both sides of disputed topics, many teachers present resources from only scholars whose views line up with theirs and then when challenged about the imbalance, say, “Well, students are free to disagree.”

How can students intelligently disagree when they’ve studied works that espouse ideas from only one perspective? Students are entitled to have their views informed by the best thinking on both sides of controversial or disputed topics.

Stevenson’s website offers this description of the Truth Seekers Club which is as remarkable as the event it sponsored:

Truth Seekers explore topics that matter to students. So we start each semester with student nominations of topics. In a typical semester, students nominate 70 topics. Then we vote to narrow the list to the top 10. During a typical meeting, we explore the topic for the week through any of the following activities: Group Discussion, Video Clip, Guest Speaker, Informal Friendly Debate, Formal Debate, Hot Seat. Once per year, we organize a large venue event to which we invite all interested students, staff and community members.

The first requirement is to keep an open mind to the possibility that truth exists and can be found by those who diligently seek it out. The second requirement is that students agree to form a view of reality that is free from contradictions. Views of reality that contain contradictions will not hold water. Some students attempt to avoid rejection of a cherished yet contradictory world view by separating their beliefs into two non-overlapping realms: public and private. However, the contradiction, like acid, will burn a hole in the world view causing it to leak once again.

Naperville Central High School also has a Truth Seekers Club that is described “as a place for students to tackle hot-button issues that are often touched on in the classroom but unable to be given a full treatment due to lack of time, curricular restraints, or overall reticence to air out an issue deemed too controversial.”

The club has tackled controversies regarding world population; feminism; same-sex marriage; abortion; universal health care; global warming; “gay” rights; evolution, Intelligent Design, and the origin of life; and academic freedom and censorship of “politically incorrect” speech.

On the topic of global warming, students watched both Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth and the BBC documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle. Students watched the film Demographic Winter, which challenges the dominant view that our world is threatened by overpopulation, and the films Indoctrinate U and Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, which examine whether American universities are truly bastions of intellectual freedom and diversity.

Now, if only we could get all teachers to value intellectual diversity more than they value the promulgation of their own philosophical and political ideologies:

• Perhaps students could study the unproven, unprovable assumptions embedded in a materialistic or naturalistic world view that claims that all that exists is the material universe.
• Perhaps social studies teachers who use The People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn could also have students read some of the criticisms of Zinn’s polemical revisionist history, including those of Sol Stern. And maybe social studies teachers could include excerpts from some of Paul Johnson’s works as companion pieces to Howard Zinn’s.
• Perhaps librarians could be inspired to abandon their de facto censorship protocols (aka Collection Development Policies) and purchase books by Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, John McWhorter, Christina Hoff Sommers, and Christopher Wolfe.
• And the subject about which students remain the most ignorant and on which teachers engage in the most vigorous censorship, that is, homosexuality, needs a good shot of real intellectual diversity. For example, those who teach the plays The Laramie Project and Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, and Tony Kushner’s essay “American Things,” could also teach essays by Robert George, Francis Beckwith, and Anthony Esolen. Students could read the work of scholars who challenge the deeply flawed comparison of homosexuality to race; or who challenge the idea that moral propositions about behavior constitute hatred of persons; or challenge the idea that strong, enduring feelings render behaviors inherently moral; or who examine how we determine morality.

Intellectual diversity is the lifeblood of academia without which there can be no culture of inquiry or critical thinking. Without intellectual diversity, there is no education; there is only indoctrination.

Every high school would be well served by having a Truth Seekers Club. Parents, if you have a teen who may be interested in a club like this, share this article with them. If either you or your child has more questions about Truth Seekers Clubs, contact the clubs’ advisors:

Neal Roys, Stevenson High School Truth Seekers Club advisor: nroys@d125.org

Dan Tompkins, Naperville Central High School Truth Seekers Club advisor: dtompkins@naperville203.org