Save America Ministries

Chuck Crismier: It's a battle for the soul of your kids, my friends. Consider Sarah Miller. That’s not a real name, but just consider her, whose experience represents that of millions of parents who never thought she would become a radical.

A suburban mom of three from outside Nashville, she considered herself a reasonable woman who believed in working within the system. Her children attended the local public school, she volunteered for the PTA, and she trusted that America's educational institutions, however imperfect, fundamentally shared her values of faith, family, and freedom.

Then her eight-year-old son came home with questions that disturbed her, to put it mildly. He said, "Mom, my teacher says America was built on slavery and that white people like us are bad. Is that true?" The innocence in his eyes mixed with confusion broke the mom's heart.

When she contacted the school for clarification, she discovered that her third grader was being taught to categorize himself and his classmates by race, to examine his privilege, and to question the very foundations of the country she loved. But that was just the beginning.

Over the following months, Sarah watched in horror as her children's education became less about reading, writing, and arithmetic and more about social activism, gender ideology, and racial grievance. The school counselor suggested her daughter might be transgender because she enjoyed playing soccer.

The history curriculum portrayed America's founders as racist oppressors rather than champions of liberty. When Sarah tried to voice her concerns at a school board meeting, she was dismissed as a bigot and threatened with investigation by the FBI.

Sarah's story is not unique. Across America, millions of parents are awakening to a sobering reality, and that is our kids are not being educated; they're being indoctrinated. The institutions that we trusted to form young minds in knowledge and virtue have been captured by an ideology that is fundamentally hostile to everything we hold dear.

Where did it begin? With a group that sounds almost like a law firm: Dewey, Mann, and Marx. Dewey, Mann, and Marx. Welcome to Viewpoint. I'm Chuck Crismier. It’s conversation with ever-increasing conviction, talk that transforms. Today, I trust that will be true for you if you're a parent, if you're a grandparent, if you're a parent-to-be, or if you're involved with working with kids.

You need to listen to today's program from beginning to end. It's very important because the people that we're talking about today are, you might call them, soul eaters. Soul eaters. That's what they do. They eat the soul of the young. Today on Viewpoint, having gotten your attention, we're going to continue looking at what these soul eaters are really about.

Before public education became a tool of the state, before the architects of the government takeover came on the scene, education in our country looked very different. It was family-centered, church-supported, thoroughly Christian, and governed by a biblical worldview.

It equipped generations with literacy and virtue and deep reverence for God. It was wildly successful, so much so that American early literacy rates dwarfed those of the 20th century despite the absence of centralized systems, national standards, or compulsory attendance laws.

What we're talking about today has to do with what has been forgotten: the essential history of American education before it was subverted by collectivists and repurposed for social engineering. It's a picture of what worked: education rooted in truth, morality, scripture, and liberty.

Almost all of our original founders were raised according to the educational ideas that we're going to talk about today—not the ones promoted by the soul eaters Dewey, Mann, and Marx, but by their parents and by those who were then respected leaders in their communities and their moms and their dads in school.

No wonder so many of them actually spoke several languages by the time they were 15 and 16 years of age. How could that possibly have happened without a public education system? But it did. Today we're going to talk with Robert Bortins. He's our special guest today with his book *Woke and Weaponized: How Karl Marx Won the Battle for American Education and How We Can Win It Back*. Robert is joining us from North Carolina. Robert, it’s good to have you on the program.

Robert Bortins: Thanks for having me today, Chuck. This is vitally important to each of us individually as parents and grandparents and in the interest of our country. If we're to get back on the right track, we have to start with education.

Chuck Crismier: One wonders if that's even possible. Things have moved so far down the track, starting with a fellow by the name of Horace Mann, who was the father of American public education. That was picked up about 50 years later by Dewey, and then all of them were co-opted in their minds and their hearts by a fellow by the name of Karl Marx. Hence, we have Dewey, Mann, and Marx, the soul eaters. Why would we call them soul eaters?

Robert Bortins: Their goal in life was to destroy Christianity, destroy the family, and destroy private property. Today, we have so many kids on antidepressants. Their view of life is really eating someone's soul. They don't have any joy. They're depressed. They designed a system to give us exactly what we have today in the United States: one that's based on obedience to the state instead of a love for your family and a love for your country.

Chuck Crismier: I remember a couple of guys by the name of Peter and John who were brought to account by the religious leaders of their day who were indoctrinating them. They tried to force them not to teach the name of Christ and not to teach the doctrine of Jesus Christ and the salvation of souls. They beat them and then ordered them not to teach or preach anymore in that name, and they said we ought to obey God rather than men. How did we end up obeying men rather than God here in this country?

Robert Bortins: It was a series of decisions started in the 1820s with a guy named Robert Owen who wanted to destroy Christianity. Then we had Horace Mann, as you've mentioned, and Dewey. They saw that Christianity, they believed, was the root of all evil and the ideology behind that.

They slowly saw that if we could separate children from their parents and do it at as young an age as possible, children would no longer respect their parents. They wouldn't see them as authority figures. Instead, whoever the state or local civil authorities appointed would be those authority figures.

They would be able to strip God from the soul and from the conscious by stripping Him from the education system because that was intertwined in our education system prior to 1850 and 1900 here in the United States. They could do it over a series of years.

Chuck Crismier: You and Robert and Alex Newman have presented us with a great book, *Woke and Weaponized: How Karl Marx Won the Battle for American Education and How We Can Win It Back*. It’s going to be interesting to see what you say about how we can win it back. Your gift of $20 or more to Save America Ministries will put this very important book in your hand on the website saveus.org. We'll be back.

Once upon a time, children could pray and read their Bibles in school. Divorces were practically unknown, as was child abuse. In our once-great America, virginity and chastity were popular virtues and homosexuality was an abomination.

So what happened in just one generation? Hi, I'm Chuck Crismier, and I urge you to join me daily on Viewpoint where we discuss the most challenging issues touching our hearts and homes. Could America's moral slide relate to the Fourth Commandment? Listen to Viewpoint on this radio station or any time at saveus.org.

Why are so many parents choosing homeschool now? Well, because government schools have become laboratories for progressive education and Marxist ideology. That's what our special guest Robert Bortins and investigative journalist Alex Newman in their book *Woke and Weaponized* are talking about.

Incarnate in the words that I just shared with you is their hope for the future, but it's going to have to be embraced by an increasing large number of parents and grandparents. Today on Viewpoint, we're focusing on this. Many parents are considering homeschooling. Others are afraid to consider it.

Others are not just afraid to consider it but just don't want to spend the time or don't want to dedicate themselves to that responsibility because they've adopted purposes other than biblical parenting. It's a very difficult situation and environment in which we find ourselves while we continue to see our children's souls eaten by an ideology that has been developed by Dewey, Mann, and Marx.

Robert Bortins is not only the co-author of this book, but he's the CEO of Classical Conversations that supports classical Christian homeschooling in all 50 states and in 30 foreign countries. Now, that's a big order. Tell us a little bit about Classical Conversations, Robert.

Robert Bortins: Classical Conversations was started by my mom in our basement when I was in high school in 1997. I was one of the first 10 students to go through it. She knew if you were going to homeschool through high school that you would need some support. If you were going to do things like mock trial and debate, you needed groups to do that.

Classical Conversations students meet one day a week with a trained parent tutor who's there to support the parents in homeschooling their kids. We have a full K through 12 curriculum developed over the last 29 years that helps you teach your child how to think well so that they can embrace whatever God gives them in life, whether it's going to college or going into ministry or starting their own business. We've helped millions of students and their families over the last 29 years now.

Chuck Crismier: You have several kids, right?

Robert Bortins: I have three of my own that are going through Classical Conversations. My daughter's 11 and I've got two boys, 9 and almost 6. It's designed for families with multiple kids or just one kid. It's integrated the whole way through so that the kids, like all three of my kids, are learning a lot of the same things.

It's not like my wife's having to teach three different things to three different kids. The curriculum is built for homeschoolers with multiple kids and reinforcing itself. It's really cool to wake up in the morning and see my daughter helping my youngest son with his schoolwork. Of course, my wife and I are intimately involved as well, but they can help each other out too.

Chuck Crismier: It's interesting because what you did not know is that you're talking with a man here on this end who not only was a public school teacher for nine years in California during the period 20 years before you even started this educational program, but I've seen it from the inside out.

I began to watch the dynamics of how it was taking off and taking over American culture, how it was taking over our churches, and how it was taking over Christians from the inside out. For nine years, I taught junior high school in Southern California.

It was a very interesting thing starting with 1967 when I graduated from a Christian college and then up through 1995 when I began the practice of law. First of all, I taught math for four years. Then when I was going to law school in the evening, I decided to change my direction a little bit, make it a little more balanced, and I taught boys physical education and US government for five years.

From the inside out, I saw what was happening and I went to the principal of the school somewhere after the third year of my teaching. He represented himself as a Christian man. I said, "Sir, how is it that we can continue to put continued restraints upon educating our young here with biblical principles—not necessarily trying to sell them Christianity, but at least with biblical principles—and adopt all of these worldly ideas?"

He tried to justify it basically based upon, "Well, I'll lose my job." Then I wrote him a letter and in that letter, I said it seems that we're trying to sell armchair philosophies that are not tried in the fires of reality. Those were the very words that I used. We're advancing armchair philosophies that are not tried in the fires of reality. It didn't matter to him because, "Well, I'll lose my job." But I persisted trying to minister to the children, the kids that I was involved with, and they found that my lifestyle was something that they wanted to model after. But those were then. After that, up to 1997 when you began Classical Conversations yourself, things had changed dramatically, hadn't they?

Robert Bortins: You saw the beginning of it. My wife was a public school teacher for 10 years before we got married, so she saw it as well firsthand. The system itself was designed to really merge the United States with the Soviet Union to create a godless collectivism in the United States through our education system and to strip God from it.

It was a series of years. The Soviet Union before the wall fell understood that they could not defeat us militarily and so they partnered with our teachers' colleges. Even good teachers who love Jesus would be taught all this Marxist ideology trying to get straight A's. They would have to accept it or lose their job.

I've heard of teachers who go to church on Sunday but they teach the LGBT model during the week because they don't want to lose their job. For me and my house, we will serve the Lord, but for other people, they've got a mortgage to pay and so they'll have to answer to that in the judgment seat.

Chuck Crismier: It didn't start with LGBT teaching. That's the current iteration of it. It came in far more subtly. It came in like the fog on little cat feet and gradually became implemented to advance the cause of LGBT and Critical Race Theory and those kinds of things that we're now seeing. But it wasn't like that then.

I remember when I grew up in various places across the country—I went to 26 different schools, by the way, from east to west, from north to south—my experience in public schools did not manifest itself in the way that Dewey, Mann, and Marx had intended. I was very fortunate to get a good solid education without the infection of that ideology openly.

Things began to change gradually in the 1960s with the sexual revolution and the complete rebellion in the entire Western world against authority. I think that's where ultimately the influence of Dewey, Mann, and Marx gained tremendous traction. What say you?

Robert Bortins: Dewey said change must come gradually. To force it unduly would cause violent reaction. Each generation forgets a little bit of what the previous generation knew and so the moral decay goes very slowly until it doesn't and then it goes quickly. That's really what we saw in 2008 with the election of Barack Obama when it really became aggressive towards this ideology.

The Marxists, of course, they divide us by economics. Since that hasn't worked so well in the United States, they figured they would try to divide us up by race and by gender and, of course, put us into an oppressor-oppressed category. That had to be the dirt; it had to be toiled.

The ingredients had to be put in for these things to be put into place, and that takes time. It took 20 or 30 years for it to happen and multiple generations, but eventually, the fruit of the tree that it produces can't be hidden anymore.

Chuck Crismier: Starting with America's teacher colleges at Columbia Teacher College. Wow. Columbia University, Columbia Teacher College, and then the various teaching institutions across the country all adopted gradually this, as you call it, woke and weaponized version of what education should look like. It was toxic to the country.

This is important to understand when we're looking at the 250th anniversary of our country, at least the political birth of the country. We're looking at how things took place that actually undermined and destroyed the very foundations of liberty that began way back in the 1600s. For instance, you cite in your book the Old Deluder Satan Act that was adopted by the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1647.

It was the first education law in what would become the United States and its purpose was unmistakably theological. It being one chief project of that old deluder, that is Satan himself, to keep men from the knowledge of the scriptures, it is therefore ordered that every township shall appoint one within their town to teach all such children as shall resort to him to write and to read.

The goal of education was to ensure every child could read the Bible and resist temptation. If parents were unwilling or unable, the local community centered around the church in this Bible colony would step in to help. Literacy was a means to spiritual discernment. Wow. The Old Deluder Satan Act. What an amazing thing in a state that has completely gone woke, that is Massachusetts, one of the most rebellious of all of the colonies. Yet it started with Harvard University to prepare pastors to be godly leaders and lead the culture, and things have gone very much awry, haven't they?

Robert Bortins: The more that we've given up our self-sovereignty and our loyalty to the Lord for the state, the more God has turned His eye against us or away from us here in the United States. They knew that reading was so vitally important.

Frederick Douglass said it himself that learning to read was the most important thing of his life. Now we have 34% of kids proficient in reading at grade level. They've stripped us of that through what's called whole-word reading. They replaced phonics with that and it's destroyed 30 or 40 years of generational reading.

The whole intention from the Rockefellers to the Ford Foundation was they wanted good workers. If you aren't going to be loyal to your family, you have to be loyal somewhere. They knew that they could use a just-educated-enough populace to be willing to work in their factories and enrich themselves.

These type of laws were natural and they were just an obvious thing to write down when our country was getting started, but now they would be considered radical to think that we should have children who can read and write well. Satan's first lie was, "Did God really say?" He keeps saying that over and over again.

We need people who are critical thinkers who understand the Bible. That's what we had for the first 100 years or 150 years in our country. Then through the world wars and then through these big foundations weaponizing our tax dollars against us, just like USAID did in the 1950s to merge the United States education system with the Soviets. Of course, we know the Soviet education system led to the murder of tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions, of people, that Marxist ideology. They wanted to use it for their own power, not to better the citizens.

Chuck Crismier: Robert, as a parent, as a father, you perceive that you have a calling, a responsibility before God to do something different. What I'm understanding from you is you wrote this book because you realize you cannot continue to submit to that kind of leadership for your kids. Their souls are being eaten by a horrible disease, Dewey, Mann, and Marx, as the leaders.

There is so much more about Chuck Crismier and Save America Ministries on our website, saveus.org. For example, under the marriage section, God has marriage on His mind. Chuck has some great resources to strengthen your marriage. First off, a fact sheet on the state of the marital union, a fact sheet on the state of ministry marriage and morals. Saveus.org: marriage, divorce, and remarriage. What does the Bible really teach about this?

Find all of this at saveus.org. Also, a letter to pastors, the Hosea Project, saveus.org, and many more resources to strengthen your marriage. It's all on Chuck's website, saveus.org. Again, you can listen to Chuck's Viewpoint broadcast live and archived on Save America Ministries' website at saveus.org.

Welcome back to Viewpoint. I'm Chuck Crismier. I want to make available to you the very fine book *Woke and Weaponized: How Karl Marx Won the Battle for American Education and How We Can Win It Back*. It wasn't just Karl Marx, friends. It was Americans John Dewey, Horace Mann, and then coupled with the underlying philosophies of Karl Marx.

All of them godless, all of them intentionally intended to undermine the foundations of the country for ulterior motives. You don't want to let that happen to your kids. Somebody's got to do something about it. If you don't understand the situation, you might want to get a copy of the book. You should get a copy of the book. $20 will put it in your hands, *Woke and Weaponized*, on the website saveus.org. You can call us at 1-800-SAVE-USA, 1-800-SAVE-USA, or write to us at Save America Ministries, P.O. Box 70879, Richmond, Virginia, 23255. Ready a check at $6 for postage and handling.

Robert, if someone wants to connect with your particular Classical Conversations, which is going to be a way of facilitating an answer for their family to this situation, this crucial situation, how do they do that?

Robert Bortins: Go to classicalconversations.com. If you put in your zip code, we'll get a homeschooler that lives in your city to reach out to you and have a conversation. They can invite you to an information meeting or an open house and help you get started homeschooling today. As Deuteronomy 6:6-7 says, you shall teach these words diligently to your children and shall talk to them when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way. It's so clear that God gave children to parents and not to the state. We want to help parents take that God-given responsibility back.

Chuck Crismier: Let me inform you concerning another aspect that you probably did not know, and that is yours truly on this end of the broadcast today. My wife and our family began homeschooling in the late 1970s. In the late 1970s, it was virtually illegal. You were taking the law in your own hands, your life in your own hands to begin homeschooling in that period of time.

It was a very difficult thing. You had to make a serious decision, and we did. Let me give you an illustration. It didn't involve homeschooling per se, but the implication is there. We were involved in a very large congregation in the late 1980s, and I was a volunteer pastor there. They wanted to take our daughters—we had three daughters—and put them into the youth program in the church.

My daughters agreed to go there, and they did. It wasn't very long before they came to us and said, "You don't want us to be there. You don't want us to be in that program." What was happening there was the same thing that was happening in the public schools. It was the diminishing of the Christian faith. It was the mushiness of what was happening. They felt like their souls were being eaten right there in the youth group in the church.

This was supposedly a strong, Bible-believing church. I was a volunteer pastor there. So they began to join with us in an adult group of about 100 to 150 people and there they felt more comfortable. It's very interesting. We have isolated our children in education for a very long time, but that was never the way that education took place in the early days of this country, was it?

Robert Bortins: Not at all. In Luke, the gospel, it says that a child will be like its teacher or like its mentor. Early on, that meant being with your family. That meant being in your church. If there was some sort of formal schooling that you went to, it was usually three or four hours a day, maybe two or three months a year.

Mostly it was your father or someone who you were apprenticing under that you were learning entrepreneur skills. You were learning to sell corn or whatever your family was producing. Education is really just life preparation. Of course, when families are together and you're with people who are likeminded, you're going to be in a much better situation.

We were never meant to be in a room with 30 students our exact same age because you're going to learn from them. You're not learning from the one teacher because that's just overwhelming. No sane person would think that that would work, but that's the exact system they imported here from Prussia and the USSR into our country.

They knew that if they could have our kids seven to eight hours a day, five days a week, it didn't matter if they went to Sunday school, it didn't matter if they went to Wednesday night service, because they would have the kid's heart and soul and those things would be automatically undermined.

It took generations to get to where we are today. Now Barna says about 6% of Americans have a biblical worldview. I'm sure it was probably close to 100% in the colonial times. It's just been this systematic dismantling of Christianity. That's what Dewey wanted. That is what Horace Mann wanted. That's what Karl Marx wanted. They designed a system to destroy Christianity and that's what we have today.

Chuck Crismier: That was all driven then within the field of psychology that was coming into its own in the 1800s. You had fellows like Pavlov and Watson and Skinner, B.F. Skinner. They called him a conditioner. They were about conditioning.

They considered that kids were to be conditioned. They were not looked upon as human beings. Behaviorism, behavioral conditioning, powered by psychology then began to take over philosophically within the education system, and it was like the whole system of thinking changed dramatically, didn't it?

Robert Bortins: Absolutely. They basically believe that children are just like animals and they use bells and whistles to train them. They train them to act like the herd so that if you step out from the herd, you get bullied or you get called out. That's why when things like COVID happened, so many good people just followed along and did whatever the authorities told them to do because they didn't want to isolate themselves from the group.

That was the best example I can come up with of this psychological grooming that they're doing to our kids. They call it classroom management nowadays. I was just talking to someone who has a master's degree in education and they said they had a whole class praising B.F. Skinner that she had to stomach to get her master's degree.

I said what a waste of time. That guy was just an evil human being who viewed children as something to be manipulated so that he could have his own worldview shape instead of the Bible shaping our culture.

Chuck Crismier: You indicate in your book that classical education emphasizes truth, goodness, and beauty with a high regard for instilling moral virtues. Modern education has forgotten that education is soul formation, not just knowledge transfer. Implementing a classical education and cultivating wisdom through a holistic view of the world requires freedom, and freedom requires you to pay your own bills.

You can't be free if you're relying on the state to tax your neighbor to pay for the things you want. All of this connects with the way we live. It connects with what has happened now with the millennial generation and Generation Z that even sociologists say they have a failure to launch. They're not prepared to live. They're not prepared to assume responsibility. The homeschooling concept, the classical education, would have prevented that and prepared people to assume responsibility and not to expect to be entitled, right?

Robert Bortins: Absolutely. What we do in classical education is we read the classics and then we read original source documents. We read things like our Constitution and the Magna Carta and we compare them. We read the Federalist Papers and we read things like the biography of Frederick Douglass so that we can have those types of people as our mentors.

We can see what it's like to overcome adversity. They can know that God loves us and that we have Him in our corner and that all good things come from Him, not from the state. Most people don't realize over 50% of their state taxes go into an education system that is undermining everything that we believe as Christians, that's undermining our faith intentionally because it's creating this state system where people have to rely on it because they're stealing so much of our money through taxation every single year.

People just mindlessly send their kids to it now. That's what's happening, turning us all into collectivists. The state will collect all this money and then they'll divvy it out to everyone by their needs, but everyone work by their efforts. We know that has never worked out; that just leads to mass starvation, but they've done that by trying to ingrain that into us through our education system.

Chuck Crismier: Then there are efforts such as school choice, various kinds of school choice laws and so on, that have come into the fore in the last 10 years or so and are being implemented, but the problem with those is that ultimately they also are under the dominion of the government, are they not?

Robert Bortins: The United Nations education arm said that they were trying to figure out how to get Christian schools under their purview so that they can put in this gospel of global warming and stuff like that. What they decided to do is try to fund Christian education so that Christian schools and Christian parents would get addicted to the funding and then they would be able to control them. They used the country of Sweden as kind of this testing ground.

Chuck Crismier: Now you've touched tender toes because I'm half Swedish. We're going to have to hear what you have to say. Feel free to say it. Viewpoint does determine destiny. The book *Woke and Weaponized*, I think you're going to want to get a copy of it for the life of your kids and your grandkids. $20 will put it in your hands on the website saveus.org.

Have you ever considered what the early church was like? Many people are developing a hard longing for a greater fulfillment in our practices as Christians. A recent study showed 53,000 people a week are leaving the back door of America's churches in frustration. What is going on? Why has there not been even a 1% gain among followers of Christ in the last 25 years? Could it be that God is seeking to restore first-century Christianity for the 21st century?

Jesus said, "I'll build my church." Is Christ by His spirit stirring to prepare the church for the 21st century? The early church prayed together and broke bread from house to house. They were family, and it was said by all who observed, "Behold how they love one another." Incredible, but the same can be found right now. Go to saveus.org and click Sell Church. We can revive first-century Christianity for the 21st century. It's about people, not programs. It's about a body, not a building. That's saveus.org. Click Sell Church.

Does Sweden have anything to say to us about our educational system and perhaps the whole idea of school choice and so on? Our guest today says indeed it does and it shows you the process of government evolution in taking over what ostensibly was going to be wonderful school choice.

In 1992, the very year the Lord spoke to my heart there in my law office in California saying, "Son, I want you to plead the cause of men long enough, I want you to plead My cause in the land as a voice to the church declaring vision for the nation, America's greatest crisis hour," that was the year Sweden's conservative government transformed their education system through what they called free school reform, a voucher system. What happened to it, Robert?

Robert Bortins: Unfortunately, even though all of our conservative friends were celebrating it, by 1997, they put price controls on it and then the country of Sweden then created its own curriculum and then started saying that the schools had to teach the state curriculum or they weren't going to be eligible for funding.

They banned private schools, basically schools collecting fees outside what the government was reimbursing because the government was reimbursing it. Then by 2011, they made homeschooling outlawed and every single school had to teach the state curriculum. All the good Christians who were excited about it at first are now teaching all the socialist ideologies and have to keep their mouths shut about their personal beliefs.

Chuck Crismier: Interesting. Sweden's promise of school choice transformed into a state monopoly that criminalized the most fundamental form of educational freedom: a parent's right to teach their own kids. That's absolute what happened and it only took 19 years, one generation. My co-author Alex Newman was there. He was there while this was happening because his wife is Swedish as well.

I'm only half Swedish. My grandfather came over here when he was 15 years of age from Sweden and interestingly, because of the education that then was available in Sweden, homeschooling shall we say, he was brilliant and was able to, without any college degree, become a millionaire twice over in America.

Why? Because he was educated with the fundamentals of what education was supposed to be. Things changed dramatically. Sweden, Norway, Finland, they've all gone hyper-liberal now.

Robert Bortins: If you go look at the statistics, it's super scary because that's also the country that they then did the experiment on mass immigration on. It's been a country that the United Nations has used to experiment their ideas on to turn it from a free country into a socialist hellscape for anyone who dares raise their head against the collectivists in charge of their country.

That's what they want to do here in the United States. They want to successfully merge the United States with the collectivists. They don't want us to be a free-market, independent, God-fearing country. They want us to be a country controlled by the state. How do you do that? You get the state to pay for everything, tax us all to death, and then make it so children believe that every good thing comes from the state, not from your father, not from your mother.

Chuck Crismier: Or from God. You say in your book the path forward requires courage, wisdom, and faith to stand for truth even when it's costly, to advocate for principles even when they're unpopular, and to work for freedom even when it seems impossible. Let's move forward into what you believe is the only real hope for this country to preserve its freedom.

Robert Bortins: We have to return to the fathers' eyes back to their children, as the Bible says. As they say in Ephesians 4:28, anyone who has been stealing must no longer but must work, do something useful with their own hands that they have something to share with those in need.

We need fathers and mothers to take seriously the command that the Lord gave them to educate their children in the way they should go. Do not outsource that to a state entity that is undermining your faith and family and freedom. We need churches who fear God more than they fear the teachers' unions.

Churches can either start private schools, support Christian private schools in their area, they can create scholarships, raise money for kids to go to them, they can invite homeschoolers into their doors. The church used the center of our culture in the United States when we were God-fearing and God was blessing us and we've given that over to the state. We need to get back to that.

Business leaders need to understand that their businesses aren't going to be hire any of these people. They're going to have to spend tons of money training them if they continue letting the public school system educate their future employees and future customers.

Chuck Crismier: They're already finding that out. They have people that they hire and don't even show up for the first day of work. Then they might work for a few days and decide, "I don't want to go to work today." It's the most unbelievable entitlement society that began with the millennials and now with Generation Z, which is deemed to be the most godless generation in American history and also the largest generation in American history. It doesn't bode well if we're heading toward our 250th anniversary, does it?

Robert Bortins: Very few republics have lasted much longer than 250 years. Unless Christians repent and start going and following the Bible again, we're not going to last too much longer. It takes self-sacrifice, an idea that has apparently lost its edge here in the United States. That's why for the first time ever, the next generation isn't going to be as well off as the previous one because the previous one didn't do any sort of self-sacrifice. They collected and collected. That's why we're 40 trillion dollars in debt as a country.

Chuck Crismier: It's interesting, Robert. As I look at the development of things, I've been around for a piece. Some people think I might have been older than Moses because I taught school for nine years, practiced law for 20, have been a pastor for 35 years, have been on this program for 31 years, and so on. That's a lot of time and a lot of experience and a lot of exposure having gone to 26 different schools across the country.

It's a lot of exposure to prepare for being able to speak with authority into the life of our country and particularly the life of professing Christians. What I have observed is that those who have been trained in the public schools and in that system have become the Sunday school teachers of our time. They have become the pastors in our time.

Therefore, much of the very same woke spirit that invaded the public schools has invaded our churches, even our evangelical churches. So you form Christian schools. I was a founding board member of a Christian day school. I was on the board of directors and chairman of the board of a very well-respected Christian elementary school with 500 students.

I was on the board of directors of a Christian university for several years. What I found is the very spirit that you and I are talking about had invaded every single one of those institutions through the teachers, even through the principals and so on, to the point where my oldest daughter in one of the most well-respected Christian high schools begged us to take her out of the school because she said, "You don't want me there," and began to tell us why. We made her write a paper as to why we should remove her from that school.

Robert Bortins: The system accumulates power to itself and it degrades our self-sovereignty and replaces it with collectivist ideologies that makes it so that all of us have, whether we acknowledge it or not, unintentionally have had this worldview forced upon us. Unless you've been completely out of the system like someone myself that you've inherently received it.

You have to work to get rid of it out of your system and most people don't know that it's there because it was intentionally hidden because that was the ideology. That's how we got to where we are today and again, it took multiple generations, but so many people have just taken this idea that the state should educate you and pay for it and think that that's going to turn out well. We can see that that has turned out terribly. It's a 150-year experiment and the people being experimented on are our children.

Chuck Crismier: You and your wife have dedicated yourselves to the sacrifice that is necessary to raise, to teach, and instruct your children, to disciple them. That's really what we're talking about is discipling and educating our children from the get-go. It takes time, it takes time together, it takes sacrifice, doesn't it?

Robert Bortins: Absolutely, but what worthy cause doesn't cost sacrifice or take sacrifice? Anything that I've done that's difficult in my life was worthy of being difficult. Anything that was easy usually meant that I was giving up something that I wasn't aware of.

Ultimately what parents need to understand is that God says that your children are the greatest gift that He has given you and pastors need to understand that as well. When we die and go to heaven and are on the judgment seat, you better have a good answer when God asks you what you did with the greatest gift He gave you. If you say that you sent them to the atheist to get educated, that's not going to be a very fun conversation.

Chuck Crismier: Well stated, Robert. It has been said that our children are a message that we will send to a world that we will never see. They’re going to be the ambassadors representing who we have been or not been in their lives. This is a very important thing from God's viewpoint.

It’s not just from our viewpoint. This is not a political thing we're talking about. This is a spiritual thing. That's why we call this program 'The Soul Eaters: Dewey, Mann, and Marx.' If you and I are not engaged in God's viewpoint of educating and training and discipling our children, then we have actually become co-participants with Dewey, Mann, and Marx. That isn’t a pretty picture. It just isn't.

The book *Woke and Weaponized*, I think you're going to want to get a copy of the book. It's going to help you understand a lot of what's going on here. Our guest is telling us very definitely that if we have any hope of changing these things, we're going to have to engage in a new vision, restoring the old vision of how to raise and train our kids. Just going to have to do it.

It's going to take time together talking, thinking, thanking, tenderly touching. It's going to have to do it by faith: educating, discipling our kids by faith. Faith is a long obedience in the same direction and that's what it takes for us as parents and as grandparents. As grandparents, my wife and I have been involved in this with our grandkids in many different ways. Those who were willing to receive, did. Those who were not willing to receive or their parents not willing to receive have had problems. It's just as simple as that.

Get a copy of the book *Woke and Weaponized*, $20 on our website saveus.org. Call us 1-800-SAVE-USA, 1-800-SAVE-USA, or write to us at Save America Ministries, P.O. Box 70879, Richmond, Virginia, 23255. Ready a check at $6 for postage and handling. Robert, give us the website of your Classical Conversations again.

Robert Bortins: Classicalconversations.com. Classicalconversations.com. Go check it out.

Chuck Crismier: Pretty simple, classicalconversations.com. That will help give you a lead there and you can begin with that. Everything begins at the beginning. As Julie Andrews said, the beginning is the very best place to start, and that's true.

Thanks for joining us. Become a partner, friends. Send your gifts by faith to Save America Ministries. Do it today. This broadcast is always by faith, has been for 31 years, and still is. God is, we're trusting God and God is trusting you. God bless and be a blessing.

You've been listening to Viewpoint with Chuck Crismier. Viewpoint is supported by the faithful gifts of our listeners. Let me urge you to become a partner with Chuck as a voice to the church declaring vision for the nation. Join us again next time on Viewpoint as we confront the issues of America's heart and home.