Family Talk

Dr. James Dobson: Welcome everyone to Family Talk. It's a ministry of the James Dobson Family Institute, supported by listeners just like you. I'm Dr. James Dobson and I'm thrilled that you've joined us.

Roger Marsh: Well, welcome to Family Talk, the broadcast ministry of the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute. I'm Roger Marsh and thanking you for joining us for day two of a powerful conversation featuring Dr. Corey Miller. Dr. Miller is the author of numerous books, currently serves as president and CEO of Ratio Christi Ministry, and he's the author of a brand-new book that we're talking about today.

The book is called *The Progressive Miseducation of America: Confronting the Cultural Revolution from the Classroom to Your Community*. Dr. Miller and his wife Belinda are the parents of three children. They make their home in Indiana and Dr. Corey Miller, it's good to have you back on today's edition of Dr. James Dobson's Family Talk. Thanks for joining us again.

Dr. Corey Miller: Thank you for inviting me back after what I did in the last show.

Roger Marsh: Well, and what you did in the last show, if you didn't have a chance to listen to it airing the broadcast on release day, go back to JDFI.net, you can find it in the archives or find it on our YouTube channel. We were discussing what has happened to major Christian universities and I'm talking about ones that would be readily identifiable whether it be Biola, Point Loma, some of these other California Christian schools because Dr. Miller has a master's from Biola, one of the three masters that he's earned and basically has earned his PhD twice, I mean once from Purdue but then that got derailed and then of course University of Aberdeen took good care of you it sounds like in Scotland, of course I would expect nothing less.

But then to take a look at what's happening at Harvard, what's happening at Yale, and the Princeton one was—you heard me kind of come out of my chair when you were talking about what's happening there because my brother's an alumnus of Biola University and Princeton. To hear what has happened in the 25 years since Brian graduated is just horrifying to me personally. He and I haven't talked about what he might think about that type of thing and I realize as Christians though what you're trying to do through your ministry, through your writing, through this book, is to show us not only, I mean hey let's acknowledge it, you've got a whole section in the book called "What Just Happened? We Are No Longer Grandma's America."

Your second part talks about how did we get here and to paraphrase *A Mighty Fortress*, one little word explains it. Help us understand the university is the mind of culture, why that has kind of become the reason why culture has drifted so far away from biblical foundations.

Dr. Corey Miller: Right. The university. That's the one word. You know, we have unity in diversity constitutes the university. What happened after we started the universities, and it was Christians who started the universities in Europe as well. But after we started the universities, we simply didn't have any PhD programs. And so right around the time of the 1880s, which now they had been around for about 250 years, church and chapel attendance were still required at almost every university in the country.

We didn't have PhD programs and so we sent our best and brightest over to Europe, predominantly to Germany, which was dubbed as the highest level of education, the most formally educated country in the history of the world at that time. And people wonder how in the world could Germany have done what it did in World War II? Well, now America is dubbed as the most formally educated country in the history of the world and how are we doing what we do?

But we sent them over there. You had Immanuel Kant, who we remember by "you can't know ultimate reality." He gave us agnosticism. You had Freud and sexuality. You had Nietzsche, God is dead. You had Marx and Engels. You had all of these various ideologies that our students learned from and then they came back over to Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Columbia and the battle was on and it raged for about 50 years until 1930.

When the dust was settling in the 1930s and we had been kicked out and we had to go start our new institutions like Westminster and Calvin and Biola and Wheaton. At that time something else was happening in Germany and there was this little city called Frankfurt and we know of now the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, Critical Race Theory, Critical Gender Theory, Critical Queer Theory, and so forth. Well, those people were competing with the National Socialists. They were all globalist socialists and when the Nazis rose to power, these guys had to leave town and where did they go? They went to Brandeis University, to UCLA, and to Columbia and started the second process.

And they got us through the 60s generation. And then in the 70s, when the bombing of banks and government buildings was happening and they realized the American people aren't prepared for this yet—they are now—but they weren't then. They decided okay, the new workers of the world that need to unite and throw off the shackles of the bourgeoisie, the ruling class, it now is no longer the working class on the factory floor, it is the elites in academia and they talked about the "long march through the institutions."

And so that's what they began to do and in the mid-90s, the ratio of liberal to conservative professor was just 2.3 to 1. So you still had checks and balances. You had no cancel culture, no monopoly over the system. Until now, where you have in the Ivy Leagues it's 27 to 1, in some cases it goes up as high as 78 to 1. And we have records of campaign contributions: Harvard faculty, it's 99% of their faculty give campaign contributions to the Democratic Party; Yale it's 98, Princeton it's 97. All of the Ivy Leagues are in the 90s. This is not viewpoint diversity, this is an ideological and political monopoly.

And so this is why Christians need to beware of the false philosophy coming out of the universities because we can't beware of something unless we're aware. We need to learn what it is even if we're not philosophically inclined. Well, you've chosen to have children or children that have children, grandchildren. And if you're going to send them to one of these secular baptismal fonts where the statistics are now between 50 to 80% of them go in and they come out with their brains hanging out now, if you're going to do that, why wait 18 years? Train the child up in the way they should go and when they get older, they get conscripted to work for the other side. Just give them up now.

Roger Marsh: You know, it's interesting as you're describing this Dr. Corey Miller, the fact that there are so many Christians, I'm thinking back to something you said in our previous conversation with regard to the political parties and how the Democrat Party of today is nowhere near the John Kennedy Democrats of the 1960s and the Republican Party is so way off base. And I know there are times when my wife and I will look at each other and say they're basically all on the same team, they just wear different uniforms at this point.

But help us understand as Christians why it's important for us to see what the real issues are because sometimes I think we kind of get tricked into thinking, well you know that uniform doesn't look so bad so maybe I'll pick them instead of them or that university, the others are really crazy but this one, well you know my grandfather went here or something like that instead of saying, hey we got to take a complete step back, a complete redo of our thinking and ask the question how are we going to bring a biblical worldview into the culture? How are we going to train up our children in the way they should go knowing that the culture is coming for them from even the moment they're conceived let alone the moment that they're born?

Dr. Corey Miller: Right. And when we think about politics, again politics is downstream from culture, culture from education, and the apex of education is the university. We don't want to confuse Republicans and conservatives and Christians. Those are three separate identities like Democrat, liberal, or Marxist now and secularist. Those are three or four separate identities but they are sharing space in a Venn diagram which is why more Bible-believing Christians tend to vote Republican, more atheist without doubt tend to vote Democrat because the platforms are more friendly in that way.

So the politicians of Democrats and Republicans, that's the superficial level. Below that is liberal or Marxist and conservative. Below that is secularist naturalist and religionist, right? And so we've got two separate worldviews fighting against one another. And despite that, the conclusion in my book is MAGA and the Morning After. Can America be made great again if America is not made good again? And I say absolutely not.

We need to have a biblical worldview revolution. We need to have what I call a third revolution after the first two ideological revolutions in the university. We need to have a third revolution, but we need to have a revolutionary and by this I mean a Jesus revolutionary spirit in our homes, in our churches, in our community groups. And fundamentally, we need to repent.

What do I mean by that? Well, Mark Noll wrote a book 30 years ago called *The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind*. And on page one he said the scandal is that we don't have much of an evangelical mind. And so we are living with this menace of mindless Christianity. We have checked our brains out at the door and we have retained only the heart and the hands of Christ and no longer have the head of Christ.

And that is not good. That is not honorable to God. When Jesus was asked by the Sadducees a question, he took them on. He then got asked a question by the Pharisees: which is the greatest commandment? And he said, "Love God with all your heart, soul, and mind." So do you want to follow Jesus or not? Then we need to start loving God with our head, not just our heart and our hands. And you think, oh that's hard, that creates a headache. Well, then clear out the cobwebs because this is what it means to follow Jesus fully: head, heart, and hands.

Especially if we're going to tango with the universities and guess what, Roger, you have no choice. My daughter is a junior in elementary education at Purdue University, which is one of the most conservative of public universities in the country owing in part I think because of the engineering programs, right? Bridges have to stay up and so 2 plus 2 still equals 4. Good to know. But I have looked at all of her classroom syllabi and I can see Marxism through it. So if she is training to go teach third graders and let's say she's training to go teach in a K-12 Christian school, guess what she's taking with her?

In her case, she has the luxury of having a father who's got four graduate degrees and smells this stuff. Yes, yes. But not everybody does. So you can't hide in your Christian schools. You can't hide in your churches. The university is having a bigger impact on the church than the church is on the university.

Roger Marsh: Dr. Corey Miller's latest book is called *The Progressive Miseducation of America: Confronting the Cultural Revolution from the Classroom to Your Community*. He joins us today here on Dr. James Dobson's Family Talk to talk about the book and this third revolution. In the book, I love the fact that you outline three pretty practical questions that we should be able to answer in terms of what the world is asking because quite frankly a lot of people are saying, look, I've seen this from a lot of people, maybe even from the I guess they call them the "Ex-vangelical" culture, that just says hey I grew up in an evangelical church and then it stopped working for me and so I kind of moved away from it.

But the questions like is Christianity good for the world? I mean there used to be a time when I think people understood that if God endowed us with inalienable rights like life, liberty, pursuit of happiness and this was Plan A for America. Now we live in a time where you can't rely on the Declaration of Independence to be your theological treatise, it has to be something much deeper than that. How do you recommend that we take a look at an answer to one of those three questions that you pose at the end of the book and be able to have an answer, a defense if you will, for the Christian faith not just because we're trying to win the argument but we're trying to win souls into the kingdom?

Dr. Corey Miller: That's right. We want to win souls. Ratio Christi is the "Reason of Christ." We are an apologetics evangelism organization. We want to see souls saved. But we also want to see the soul of the university saved because it is the most influential institution shaping civilization. I mean in fact, one in three world leaders, presidents, prime ministers, dictators—one in three earned an academic degree from a US university. This is the most strategic institution to shape civilization, not just our society in America, but around the world.

And so I tell people that we need to start showing the world that Christianity is good for the world, not just good for heaven but good for the world, that it's reasonable, and that it is true. And this is the area of classical and cultural apologetics. We train people how to do that and we even have a product line of booklets. So there are plenty of good Christian ministries out there that teach apologetics, that teach you why you should believe what you believe as Christians.

But we have a way of narrowing that down. We've got over 60 booklets written by top Christian scholars on everything from why does God allow evil? what about the relationship of science and scripture? to the reliability of the Bible, and then also race, class, sex, gender, ethnicity and so forth.

So the authors of those almost always have a PhD. It's written at the 11th-grade reading level. It's 25 pages and you can get it digital or in print and best of all, it's free for the PDF online if you go to our website ratiochristi.org and give us your email address, we're going to send you our monthly newsletters, our "propaganda," but then you'll have access to all of those free things.

You have those bite-sized chunks you can have in Sunday school, you can do as a home group with your kids, with your youth group. There's no excuse for not equipping yourself because you know what you're going to face when you go to the university: 23 to 1, 27 to 1, 78 to 1. Do you want to lose your kids? Parents and grandparents are literally paying for the apostasy of their own children. Incredible. The good news is Christianity is true and if we're given the opportunity to debate and to demonstrate it, we can show that but people have to be willing to do a little bit of their homework and be prepared to give an answer for the reason for the hope that's in you and do it with gentleness and respect. The head, the heart, and the hands.

Roger Marsh: I love everything you're saying and especially with the resources we'll put that link up at JDFI.net as well, these 25-page booklets written by PhDs, written at the reading level that challenges. I mean there used to be a time, right, when education, at least public education, was kind of drafted into three different categories with you had the grammar schools and then you had the logic and then you had the rhetoric and by the time we get to rhetoric, most people don't even understand what rhetoric actually is anymore in the same way they're saying, "Apologetics ministry, does that mean you're saying you're sorry for your faith?" I mean that's just mind-boggling.

But I appreciate this. I'm going to push back just a little bit here because someone's thinking, yeah okay but you're going onto college campuses, you're having this conversation with people and I saw what happened on September 10th, 2025, at Utah Valley University. I remember watching Charlie Kirk sitting there having the dialogues that he used to have and he was assassinated.

So how do you respond to that? I mean that was such an anomaly and it may have been Charlie's personality that drove that, but do you think Dr. Corey Miller we're getting to the point where a Christian has to be willing to say, I realize it might lead to something far worse than someone saying I don't like you or I'm not going to let you get your education or I'm going to keep you from working here?

Dr. Corey Miller: Yeah, cancel culture is a reality. It mostly happens on the left and that's not the liberal left, that's the illiberal left, the Marxist left. We need to be clear about that. And it's not just canceling you from your job or speaking opportunities which has happened to me multiple times. But it cancels your life as well.

We live in what the *New York Post* called last April an "assassination culture." We remember when Brian Thomas was executed by Luigi Mangione. And what was particularly bothersome about that wasn't just the execution, though that was sufficient. It was that 31% of people under age 45 sympathized more with the executioner than the executed. Wow. Why is that important? Because the closer you get to the epicenter, to the universities, it is literally changing the demographic. 56% according to a Rutgers study of those who lean to the left, 56% say that it is justified, morally justified to assassinate Donald Trump.

This is not a fringe movement. And where does this come from? Again, Peter Singer at Princeton, not only does he talk about "dearest pet" and having romance with pets, but he wrote the book *The Unsanctifying of Human Life*. If there is no sanctifier of human life, then there's no such thing as the sanctity of human life. If God is dead, everything is permissible.

So Utah Valley University, we will be holding our national staff conference there this summer for more than symbolic reasons. Excellent. Our chapter, we have a chapter on that campus. You know, five or six years ago Roger, I saw this stuff coming down the pipeline when I was studying Marxism at Purdue. And there was an atheist counterpart of me who was part of the New Atheist movement named Peter Boghossian who wrote the book *A Manual for Creating Atheists*.

We came in contact with one another. He invited me into his classroom to give a two-hour lecture on God's existence. Really? And then we went to lunch after and he proposed an alliance. We started a speaking tour together on viewpoint diversity, the death of intellectual diversity in the universities. We started in Utah, we covered four universities in two days. We started at the university where Charlie Kirk's assassin, his alleged assassin, started his education. Where one group tried to cancel us calling us "logical fascists." Then we went to another university and then another and we had a Campus Crusade group boycott us because they decided to have their staff watch a video on white guilt.

And so I contacted the president of Cru at that time to let him know what's going on, where this ideology is coming from. This is in 2020. And then we went to Utah Valley University, that's the last university we lectured at, that's where Charlie Kirk ended up getting assassinated at for speaking in dialogue. But you know what? Free speech is gone because a lot of students think that hate speech is harmful and it justifies—one in three students on college campuses believe that hate speech justifies physical violence to get the person to shut up. Incredible. And Charlie had it coming.

He had to go because he was erasing the existence of trans people, that's what they were saying.

Roger Marsh: Incredible. How anybody would even think to formulate that thought let alone to speak it into existence and yet here's Charlie. Well and look at you Dr. Corey Miller, I mean the fact that you were part of Cru Faculty for how many years and just a few years after leaving to start your current position, here's Cru saying, "No we can't have you doing a debate because we need to watch this white guilt video." It just shows you how quickly things have turned over the past let's say decade in particular in this culture.

And for those of us in the body of Christ who have been asleep at the switch, Dr. Corey Miller, take the last moment or two of our time together and give us the encouragement we need. We need a cattle prod of some sort but go a little easier on us if you will in terms of how we as parents and grandparents can wake up and find out what's going on, but then how we can help to mold the next generation who's coming into this and saying, "I need a college education," like in your daughter's case to be a schoolteacher, but I know that even on the Christian college campus my beliefs and viewpoint is going to be assaulted.

Dr. Corey Miller: Yeah. In the last part of my book, I make a clarion call to parents and grandparents, to pastors and ministers, to donors and philanthropists, to para-churches, to political allies, and to prayers. Everyone can pray. If you think about all of the great revivals that were the heart of the real revolutions that took place, the spiritual revolutions at Azusa, at Asbury, at Yale University, at Wittenberg where Doctor Professor Martin Luther launched the Protestant Reformation, all of these are taking place at the college campus.

The university is the most influential institution shaping civilization. Not everybody is called to go back into the universities like me and my ministry are, though we would invite you to join us. Join us, donate to us or join us on the campuses. But everybody, and I mean everybody, must prepare for the poisonous ideology that's coming from upstream down into culture, into the churches, into your families, into the seminaries because it's real, it's happening, we're losing this battle in America and we don't need to.

For those who are following Jesus and equipping themselves as 1 Peter 3:15 commanded us and as Jesus commanded us to love God with all our heart, soul, and our mind, we can overcome this and moreover we can reverse this revolution. So Ratio Christi is actually sending people back in for the next 40 to 50 years into PhD programs at the highest levels and training them on how to be Christian missional professors, not just professors who happen to be Christian.

I think I would summarize with this: as go the universities, so goes the culture; as goes the US university, so goes the world. You have an opportunity, I have an opportunity, we have an opportunity to do something significant in shaping the kingdom of God but we need to be aware where the battle lines are at and the biggest battle line is at the university.

Roger Marsh: Dr. Corey Miller, what an enthusiastic pep talk that's also a bit of a, well I hate to say beatdown but I mean you're really calling us to account for where the church has been in regard to this conversation. And your new book *The Progressive Miseducation of America* is going to help a lot of people especially as we retrain and refocus. *Confronting the Cultural Revolution from the Classroom to Your Community*. There's a link for the book up at JDFI.net in addition to information about Ratio Christi Ministry, we'll put that link up as well.

Dr. Corey Miller, it's been great to get to know you and thank you for the work that you're doing on the college campuses. I know Dr. Dobson, if he were not with the Lord right now and was sitting here right next to us, would give you a big attaboy and say, "When are you going to start a chapter at USC?"

Dr. Corey Miller: By the way, it's so exciting we do, we have a Malik Academic Fellow—that's what we're calling these PhD students. We have a Malik chapter at that university. So yeah, so if anyone wants to bring me out to their institution, their conference, their church, their campus: drcoreymiller.com.

Roger Marsh: All right. We'll check it out. Dr. Corey Miller, thanks for being with us today here on Dr. James Dobson's Family Talk.

Well, what an enthusiastic challenge to wake up, to engage, and to take the long view. You're listening to Dr. James Dobson's Family Talk. I'm Roger Marsh and today's program featured part two of my conversation with Dr. Corey Miller, president and CEO of Ratio Christi Ministry and author of the book *The Progressive Miseducation of America*.

For information on how to hear the audio again, to share today's program with a friend, or to find links for Dr. Miller's book and his ministry, and if today's conversation has resonated with you, you are invited to partner with us here at the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute. Your prayers and your financial support help us bring conversations like the one you just heard to families all across America who need a trusted biblical voice in the culture. To make a secure donation visit JDFI.net or call a member of our constituent care team when you dial 877-732-6825. That's 877-732-6825.

I'm Roger Marsh and on behalf of all of us here at Family Talk and the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute, thanks so much for listening today. Be sure to join us again next time right here for another edition of Dr. James Dobson's Family Talk, the voice you trust for the family you love. This has been a presentation of the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute.