Holy War on Public Schools: How Lifewise & “Off-School Property” Film Misleads on Religious Education

[0:04] In this episode, I decided to take a look at the infomercial documentary that Lifewise Academy put out called Off-School Property, a solution for separation of church and state.

[0:18] And we take a look at some of their facts that they seem to play fast and loose with. This is Secular Left with Doug Berger. An independent, religion-free, progressive viewpoint on topics of the day.

[1:00] And sometimes as in the course of doing this show and hosting this episode, these episodes, I have to do, sometimes I have to do things I really would rather not do. Either read an article I don’t want to really read or view a piece of media that I really don’t want to view. And so I ended up having to do that recently. Our buddies at the LifeWise Academy down in Hilliard put out a movie on October the 23rd. They released it to over 700 theaters around the country so people could pay money to see an infomercial about LifeWise. Now, in case you’re late to the game, LifeWise Academy is a religious provider of release time religious instruction.

[2:03] That works with, well, works in opposition to public schools. Their mantra is that they want to teach kids the Bible during the school day. And so what they do is they take, they get these programs together at a local school district. They take kids out of school, take them to another location, usually a church. They teach them the Bible, they pack them back in the bus, return them to school for them to continue their school day. In many school districts, this happens over lunch and recess. It used to be that they, well, they still do, they still have a goal that they actually want to be integrated into the school day and be what they call nowadays a special, like art or phys ed.

[2:58] And LifeWise was founded in 2018. The entity was founded in 2018 by Joel Penton. He’s a former college football player who became a minister and made his living giving fake assemblies to schools. And by fake assembly, I mean he would go and have an assembly, which usually required kids to go He’d talk about character or honesty or something like that And then invite kids to come back to either the school or a local church to be prophelotized, to have a church service, He couldn’t prophylatize during his little fake assemblies, but that was his gig. That was his job. And then he was given a speech at a ribbon cutting for a release time religious instruction group that had actually built a building next to a school. And that’s where he got the idea for LifeWise.

[4:11] And LifeWise has a lot of money. They’re sitting on roughly $35 million in donations, but yet they require local programs to fundraise. And the other thing, too, is that as much money as they have and as slick as this film was, it’s really not as popular as they want people to believe. In some areas, they have high enrollments. In other areas, they struggle to get people to attend. And that’s just because it deals with religion. And I know at the time that this episode is being recorded, they recently lost an attempt to establish a program in a school district in Kentucky because the evangelicals that lived in that county objected to the religion. Of LifeWise. LifeWise, they are in the Southern Baptist tradition. Their curriculum is in the Southern Baptist tradition. So there’s a lot of theological issues with some other more strict, like more Baptist than Southern Baptist.

[5:26] The kind of churches like our friend Bruce Garen, sir, who’s been on the show before, where women have to wear skirts and can’t work outside the home, that sort of religion, they object to life-wise.

[5:45] So setting that up. So they did this film. It’s titled Off School Property, A Solution to the Separation of Church and State. And they released it on October the 23rd into theaters. And I bought a ticket to go watch it because I didn’t want to have to wait for it to come either to a local church or DVD, or in this case, I guess they’re going to stream it on some faith-based streamer. I think it’s called Angel Studios or something like that. So I actually spent money on a ticket, and they were charging $12 for a ticket. This is for an hour and a half documentary. I had to take one for the team. So as I said, this is a pretty slickly produced film, very professionally done. It still is in the framework of a faith-based film.

[6:51] It’s a documentary, so what they do is they frame it, well, here’s this problem, here’s this solution, here is how we are going to do that solution. And then they have testimonials after that. They have some students talking. They had some volunteers talking. And then they cut to Joel and the filmmaker, Nate, and I can’t think of his last name offhand, talking. And that’s when Nate, he does the religious ask, you know, give your life to Christ and will you help, blah, blah, blah. Then they want you to donate money, donate your time. They want you to participate. They want you to let your school districts know. And then that’s the film. And it’s pretty straightforward, pretty much how I thought it would be. In the run-up to The Solution, which is where they introduce LifeWise Academy, which is about halfway through the film, when they’re talking about the solution or the problem they play hard and fast with the facts basically.

[8:03] And so what I wanted to do in this episode is I’m going to play clips from the film to give you a sense of what I’m talking about, where I’m saying that they’re playing fast and loose with with the facts as we know them. This is from the audio sound from the movie that I recorded myself. Thought about taking a camera, but, you know, there wasn’t too many people in the theater, so I didn’t want to get busted for filming a thing. They got my money, so I don’t see any problem with recording the sound. I do need to let you know, though, that there was a four-year-old toddler in the row ahead of me who was very, very chatty. So sometimes her chattiness blends into the audio.

[9:01] And I do apologize for that. Let me go ahead and get started. We’re going to play a clip and then we’ll get more into what the issues are with this film. We would like to have the public schools and the secular community to be neutral. Madeline made the final push to shift schools into religious neutral. There’s just one problem. You can’t come from a frame of reference that’s neutral. You come from some frame of reference about what you believe about life, about death, about your purpose on this earth, and there’s really ultimately like two major differences. You either have something akin to an atheism. And the word atheist, which is a negative word, means simply free from theism. During this time, atheism saw itself as the unbiased, neutral worldview. view. And so it only made sense for this perspective to be taught in schools. But not only is there no such thing as a neutral worldview, but complete silence on the Bible in education is a less than neutral message. Some people think God created the universe. Some people think nothing created the universe, which is the funniest guess. And the nothing people make fun of the God people. They say God doesn’t exist. I’m like, okay, maybe. But you know No, it definitely doesn’t exist.

[10:25] Nothing what happened is kind of like a game of django if this tower represents the public school day in the name of neutrality every aspect of the bible or religion was taken piece by peace, we say to the theists in the community all right if you want to believe in god that’s your business if you want to pray that’s your business you take your marbles and go over there in the corner of your private life and your play your game. But that’s not relevant to the living community now. It has nothing to do with me. It has nothing to do with the government. It has nothing to do with politics. It actually hasn’t got anything to do with business. It has nothing to do with science. It has nothing to do with education. So therefore, do your thing, but leave this outer community free. We want to be free from religion.

[11:13] We take seriously separation of church and state. They started using, you know, terms like separation of church and state, which, of course, those terms are nowhere in the Constitution. But when you use it in a sort of a fundamentalist or very strict way, what you’re saying is anywhere government is, religion can’t be. Well, government’s everywhere now. And so it’s simply a way to push religious freedom and religious expression into the corners of society. The Constitution began being used to be hostile to religion. In the name of separation of church and state, Bible reading and prayer were banned.

[11:52] The Supreme Court has made a judgment to good men. People obviously will disagree with it. Others will agree with it. But that big question that every student carries with them, that question of why, still remained. So naturally, opposing worldviews took the Bible’s place in the public school day. And without some kind of option for public school families who still wanted religious education, Rather than landing in neutral, public schools shifted into reverse. Okay, there was a few issues with that clip that I want to go over. The first of all is they trotted out Madeline Marie O’Hare. She has been dead since 1995. In fact, the narrator of the movie Nate referred to her as Madeline Marie O’Hare, not once, but twice. And, of course, she is the face of atheism. So there’s a reason why they trot her out when they’re trying to complain about public schools being hostile to religion.

[12:59] Another thing, the other voice with the people laughing, it was a comedian, Pete Holmes. They used a clip of him. He wasn’t participating in the film. They just illustrated their point with a clip that he was in. There’s another one by Richard Dawkins that they used. And then they get into the history part where they’re talking about that public schools are supposed to be neutral. And then Kelly Shackelford, that’s the one voice on the clip, said that you can’t be, you can’t have a frame of reference that is neutral. And so my question is, why can’t you have a frame of reference that is neutral? Yeah.

[13:44] And then again, they played another clip of Madeline talking, making some reasonable claims about religion in government. And so then Shackelford and Nate come back and say that they banned the Bible and prayer in public schools, which they did not. And that parents that want to have their children receive a religious education now have no choice. And that is also false because they do have a choice. In most cases, they have a choice. They can send their child to a religious private school, either a Catholic school or an evangelical school. That doesn’t always work mostly in the rural areas. But you could set up a school if you want your kid to have a religious education instead of a public education. One of the issues that they don’t talk about in this film, and they don’t mention because it doesn’t play into their narrative, is that a public school is, by extension, the government.

[15:03] It is publicly funded by tax dollars. It is run by a board that is voted in by the people in that district.

[15:15] So a public school has to cater to the education needs of the entire population. And not everybody is a Christian. Not everybody reads the Bible.

[15:31] And so when they talk about, or when most people talk about a public school being neutral towards religion, it usually means that they neither encourage nor discourage religion in the public schools. And for the most part, you see that. You hear anecdotal stuff about people getting in trouble for praying in school or wearing a Jesus T-shirt or something like that. But again, those are anecdotal stories. And usually that’s because the school district doesn’t want to get sued, and so they clamp down on any expression that might seem religious just because they don’t want to get sued, not because they are hostile to religion. The other thing to remember, too, is that the U.S. Supreme Court did not ban prayer in the Bible from public schools. One of the people who brought one of the cases that combined into Abbey and School District v. Shemp was Madeline Murray O’Hare, and her name was Madeline Murray O’Hare, not Madeline Murray O’Hare.

[16:46] The other person that was part of it was Ellery Shemp. He is the namesake of the case. He was a Unitarian. And as we know, most church and state cases have been brought by religious people, not atheists. The one case that allows kids to opt out of having to recite the Pledge of Allegiance was brought by Jehovah Witnesses, for example.

[17:12] And children can read Bibles and pray. The Abbey and School District v. Shemp didn’t remove anything, any religion from the public schools. It didn’t ban the Bible reading or prayer. It basically ruled that state-mandated prayer and Bible reading was a violation of the First Amendment of the children and their parents because the state was dictating what the prayers were and what Bible to read. And in fact, one of the plaintiffs in the prayer case, he was disciplined by his school when he attempted to read the Koran for Bible reading. So, you know, they talk about that the schools aren’t religiously neutral because they took the Bible out, well, back in the 50s, early 60s, when these were being decided, you had to have a specific Bible and a specific prayer, or they disciplined you. They didn’t allow just any religion.

[18:32] In December of 2011, I came home from work, walked into the kitchen, and my wife, Carrie, said, Hey, babe, are schools doing something? There was this meeting for religious education of some sort, and I didn’t honestly have a clue what it was. And she threw out the words, school, kids, Bible. Somehow during school hours, my brain instantly said, you can’t do that. That’s illegal. I remember talking. I don’t know exactly who it was, but a lady next to me, I was like, this is crazy. The local attorney kicked off the meeting, and he started talking about a Supreme Court ruling that I had never heard of. Let’s rewind a little bit here. This Supreme Court ruling is called Zorak versus Clausen. And honestly, it’s a ruling most people have never heard of. See, back in the mid 1900s, when the Supreme Court began to remove the Bible from public schools, Zorak versus Clausen created a sort of compromise in light of the removal of the Bible. This compromise was called released time religious instruction, often just called release time.

[19:52] It’s a mouthful that simply means while you can no longer teach the Bible in public schools, you could take kids out of public school to receive religious instruction as long as it’s off-school property, privately funded, and the students have permission from their parents. If it’s voluntary off-school property and privately funded, then during school hours our kids can be released to an off-site facility to learn about the Bible. We don’t care what it’s going to take, we are so going to figure this out. Release time has existed since 1952. Since then, many different religious communities and organizations have utilized release time laws. And in 2012, Tim and his team added their program to the list.

[20:40] What they didn’t see coming, though, was the parents of Van Wur would enroll over 95% of their school students in the program, even though a majority of them were unfamiliar with the Bible. The school and the community loved the program. One of the topics or one of the things that LifeWise advertises when they talk to people about this, and it’s in the film, They talk about the Supreme Court, U.S. Supreme Court case, Zora J. V. Clausen, that was decided in 1952. And what this court case did was it said that a release time religious instruction class that the state of New York sanctioned was not a violation of the First Amendment because it was voluntary, took place off school grounds, and did not require any funding from taxpayers. And the school district had no control over the lessons or the teachers and whatnot. And so that’s one of the things that they use in this movie to say, hey, this is why we should do this. Not that we should do it during the middle of the school day. That is totally, that is life-wise take on it, is to do it in the middle of school day.

[22:07] And so this was 1952. Release time religious instruction classes had been going on at least since the 1910s in some cases, where it would take place in the school. During one of the periods that students were learning, they would go to the setter room and be taught the Bible or about Christianity or whatever. Most cases, it would have been Protestant religion because Catholics were not allowed in public schools. Catholicism was not allowed to be taught in public schools. And so that went on. I know from where I’m from and in Ohio, Northwest Ohio, our county has a religious education association that has been together since the 1940s. My mother, who was in her 80s attended a religious education class in her school in the 1940s, early 50s. And so for life-wise to say that nobody knew that you could do this is just false. Because like I said, RTRI has been part of public education since at least the 1940s in majority reasons.

[23:29] And then we had the Zorak v. Clausen court case. And the reason why we had the Zorak v. Clausen court case was because a previous case in 1948 had ruled that religious education classes in the school itself was unconstitutional.

[23:49] So the religious education classes were removed, was removed from the public schools at that point. In that case was McCollum v. Board of Education. That was decided in 1948, and it said that public schools cannot allow religious groups to use their facilities to provide religious instruction to children.

[24:11] And then that was affirmed in Zorach v. Klaassen. And so I have this book. It’s called The Founding Myth. It’s by Andrew Seidel.

[24:22] And this is going to be the other take on that case. So he writes in his book, and this is on page 285. It says, Even the Supreme Court was not immune to the plague of shallow religious nationalism. In April 1952, the court decided that releasing children from public school classes to receive religious education did not violate the Constitution. The entire rationale underlying religious release time is flawed, as three justices pointed out in three separate dissents. Each explained that religious release time allows churches to piggyback on the machinery of the state and mandatory attendance laws to inoculate religion. For Justice Robert Jackson, and he is the one I believe that prosecuted Nuremberg criminals after World War II, he said the release time program is founded upon a use of the state’s power of coercion, which for me determines its unconstitutionality. Because, again, kids that go to public school, they don’t have a choice. They have to go to public school. They have to attend school. They have mandatory attendance laws. And they don’t have a choice on what they learn. In most cases, it has to be the parents that choose.

[25:51] And in Seidel’s book again, to Justice Hugo Black, the purpose of religious release time class was clear. It was meant to help religious sects get attendance, presumably too unenthusiastic to go to religion classes, unless moved to do so by the pressure of this state machinery. Any use of such coercive power by the state to help or hinder some religious sects, or to prefer all religious sects over non-believers or vice versa is just what I think the First Amendment forbids. But the majority agreed with Justice William O. Douglas, who, in a gratuitous paragraph, wrote one of the Christian nationalists’ favorite lines, which does not mention Christianity.

[26:39] And it quotes Justice Douglas, we are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a supreme being. Scholars and Wilson biographers are critical of this anomalous Douglass opinion. There has always been one Douglass opinion that doesn’t fit the opinion for the court in this case. This presuppose a supreme being line is a curious statement given that our institutions, including the Supreme Court, were established by a godless constitution that prohibits religious tests for public office and fails to mention a god. But this decision and Douglass’s fallacy are products of that fearful time when even a Supreme Court justice might not wish to be seen as opposing religion, especially if that justice was contemplating, as Douglass may have been, a presidential run that would have begun shortly after or even as the opinion in this case was released.

[27:38] And then we have in 1961, after the fear of the 50s died down, the Supreme Court decided the case that held that Sunday closing and other laws could only be upheld and justified on secular grounds. Douglas then clarified his remark in a way that speaks against the government’s adding religious language to the pledge. If a religious leaven is to be worked into the affairs of our people. It is to be done by individuals and groups, not by the government. This necessarily means first that the dogma, creed, scruples, or practices of no religious group or sect are to be preferred over those of.

[28:27] For more information on the topics in this episode and the links used, visit secularleft.us.

[28:47] But did these ideas have to come from the Bible? Aren’t these things we’re calling biblical values just common sense ideas? These were not common sense ideas.

[29:05] Bible scholars had communicated to that generation of founding fathers the truth about human equality and the truth about human rights. Intellectual fall of America began on July 4th, 1776, when the Declaration of Independence said that we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. Jefferson had actually drafted we hold these truths to be sacred. These are revealed truth, that all men are created equal because it was never self-evident to America in 1776 that slaves and slave owners are equal. It was never self-evident that male and female are equal. This was revealed truth that both men and women are created in God’s image. Even today, if you go and interview average high school student in the public school in America, Is it self-evident to you that all men are created? All intelligent students will say created. Nobody’s created, we won’t.

[30:23] Okay, so did we evolve equal? All men have evolved equal. They cannot be equal if they are evolved because evolution presupposes inequality and explains why different people are unequal.

[30:39] So evolution is about explaining inequality. Faith and common sense is really nonsense and it is destroying all the beautiful things that the Bible had brought to the Christian civilization.

[30:58] The fact that so many people think these uniquely biblical ideas are just common sense is just further evidence of how unbelievably fundamental the ideas of the Bible are to our modern world. So this movie definitely has a Christian nationalist viewpoint, And of course, they trot out the founders, the founding fathers. And they use an example of the original text of the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson had wrote that we hold these truths to be sacred instead of self-evident. And then it was changed. And then they talked about how that evolution presupposes inequality, and that you could only be considered equal through the Bible, through religion. And so this section, this section of the movie kind of troubled me, and I wasn’t really sure why it troubled me, because it just didn’t sound right. But again, Andrew Seidel’s book, The Founding Myth, helped me realize where they were coming from.

[32:13] The first thing to know about the founders, such as Jefferson, Washington, Franklin, and some of the other ones, were that they were nominally religious. They were gentlemen. They owned property. They were very wealthy. They didn’t go to church very often. They didn’t publicly pray. They considered religion to be a substitute for morality. It kind of reminded me of the famous quote by Karl Marx in the 1840s that religion was the opium of the people. And that’s how the Founding Fathers thought of religion. That’s why they did not put religion in the Constitution, the U.S. Constitution. The U.S. Constitution is an intentionally godless document. They took it out. Because they had this frame of reference, especially because of the king. The king believed that God had put him in charge. And in fact, if you read the Bible, the Bible says that you have to, if a government has been instituted by God, you are to obey it. They don’t support a revolution. And the Declaration of Independence was a justification for revolution.

[33:37] And so, like I said, Andrew Seidel has a good section on this. This is on page 58 of his book. And he starts out, and this answers some of the information that they were saying in that section that I just played for you. It says, the idea that all people are created equal is not a religious idea. The idea that some people are special or chosen is one of the various religious groups have embraced throughout history. The entire Hebrew Bible is about the chosen people. Religion promotes elitism, not equality. So too the divine right of kings elevated one individual or family over an entire nation. In the Declaration, Jefferson wrote that when a government becomes despotic, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to affect their safety and happiness.

[34:39] But despite the Christian nationalist arguments to the contrary, self-government and revolution against tyranny are not principles derived from Christianity or the Bible. The Declaration of Independence is an anti-Christian document with snippets of a religious-sounding language as window dressing, like where he says all these truths are sacred. If Jefferson and the other revolutionaries had been devout Christians, they never would have rebelled. The Declaration would never have been written, and America’s political relationship to the United Kingdom today would probably resemble Canada’s. The Christian Bible stands directly opposed to the Declaration’s central ideas, including that it is the right of the people to alter or abolish their government and to institute a new government. This is Paul’s letter to the Romans, demonstrates this opposition. Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God, Consequently, whoever rebels against that authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves.

[35:53] Paul claims that governments are instituted for men by God, and that rebelling against the government is rebellion against his God. Paul continues, and again he is explicit. For the one in authority is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for rulers do not bear the sword for no reason. They are God’s servants, agents of wrath, to bring punishment on the wrongdoer. Therefore, it’s necessary to submit to the authorities, not only because of possible punishment, but also a matter of conscience. And as Seidel points out, he says, such passages are not outliers. They are more in both the Christian and Hebrew Bibles.

[36:37] And it says, the Christian Bible, we learn that the biblical God must be obeyed first and earthly rulers second. And we see that in LifeWise’s curriculum in their material that the teachers have, where God, where children are taught to obey God before their parents. So, you know, it says, but that God is also telling followers to obey earthly rulers. The Hebrew Bible says, by me, God, kings reign and rulers decree. What is just by me, rulers rule and nobles all who govern rightly. And then Seidel talks about President Trump. I believe this is probably his first term.

[37:26] Paulo White, one of his evangelical advisors, says that people shouldn’t criticize Trump as he’s been ordained by God to be in charge. That plays into this Christian nationalist view of the Bible. And it says, White’s words in these Bible verses exhibit a servility entirely foreign to the Declaration of Independence, which embodies contrary ideas. The political philosophy on which the Declaration is based says people have a duty to throw off absolutist governments. Altering the government is at once a necessity, a duty, and a right. Jefferson says that it is necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another. And speaks of the necessity which constrains them to alter their former systems of government. Rights, necessities, and duties, not obedience, sin, and submission.

[38:23] And then to the claim in the film where it says that the basic worth and dignity of humans comes from the Bible, Seidel also answers that question as well. It says.

[38:49] This also means that religions will usually form progress, as can be seen across history, from flat earthers to geocentrists to young earth creationists, from the index of prohibited books to book burnings to declaring one and only one book, the book of truth, from outlawing pain relief during childbirth to banning contraception to preventing women from taking control of procreation, from exorcisms to opposing vaccines and stem cell research, from validating slavery to enslaving women in the home to prohibiting same-sex marriage, to the religious persecution of Socrates, Apatia, Galileo, Giordano, Bruno, Spinoza, Charles Darwin, progress threatens religion. This was true for and well known to the Founders. The Founders had first-hand experience here. Ben Franklin was renowned in his time for snatching lightning from the sky and the scepter from tyrants. Until he invented the lightning rod, ringing church bells specially baptized with water from the Jordan River were used to ward off lightning.

[40:01] This practice, which required humans to grasp a connection to a hunk of metal atop the highest structure in a town, killed more than 120 bell ringers from 1750 to 1784, but was still believed to be effective. Many Christians did not believe humans had a right to defend themselves from divine attacks. Abbey Nolet, a man of the church, deemed it was imperious to ward off heaven’s lightnings as for a child to ward off the chastening rod of his father. Franklin retorted that the thunder of heaven is no more supernatural than the rain, hail, or sunshine of heaven, against the inconvenience of which we guard by roofs and shades without scruple. When organized Christianity failed to stop the spread of the useful invention, it blamed other natural phenomena, such as the 1755 Boston earthquake on Franklin’s rods. John Adams condemned the religious opposition to Franklin’s rods, writing that they met with all the opposition from the superstition, affectiation of piety, and jealousy of new inventions, that inoculation to prevent the danger of the smallpox and all other useful discoveries have met within all ages of the world.

[41:20] And I just wanted to close this section off by making a comment in the film clip where it talks about that evolution presupposes inequality and explains why different people are unequal. So evolution is about explaining inequality. Well, if we go by what this film is making the claim, their primary claim, that the Bible is the primary book and the word of God is the primary linchpin of the entire civilization, and humans were made in the image of God so they can’t be unequal, then that means that inequality is a social construct. It’s not based on evolution. It’s based on society and what we do with it and how we set things up. And that is the truth.

[42:26] Inequality, equality, how you treat others is a social construct. Gender is a social construct. How you treat women and how you treat men is a social construct. If we take the primary argument that humans were made in the image of God. And even then, you don’t even have to accept that to know that how we treat other people is directly related to society and how we have built our society. It has nothing to do with religion at all. Religion is used to justify it, just like religion was used to justify slavery. Religion was used to justify Jim Crow laws.

[43:22] Religion is being used to discriminate against trans people. And same-sex marriage. You know, that’s the argument that they’re currently using about same-sex marriage, that you are preventing somebody from practicing their religion, by having to be in the same room with two gay people who are married. That is pretty dark and not positive at all for Christianity. And they want to teach the Bible in public school, and it has no business being in there.

[44:31] For more information on the topics in this episode and the links used, visit secularleft.us. If you want to support the show, share it with your friends or visit our merch store at secularleft.us.us.