Here is Dennis Prager writing about the reality of secular indoctrination:
Many years ago, I attended a dinner at a wealthy man’s New York City condo with, among others, one of the most prominent and influential conservatives in American life. I admired this man then and I admire him now (he has since passed on). He was a major force for good in America.
At one point, the subjects of God and religion came up, and I mentioned how essential God is to morality — that without God, morality is subjective, a matter of personal or communal opinion. Having debated atheist scholars, all of whom agreed with this not-very-audacious observation, I was quite surprised when this prominent conservative took strong issue with me: God is morally unnecessary, he stated with some passion — why would any educated person think otherwise?
This was my first confrontation — I was a young man at the time — with the unsettling realization that to be a conservative did not necessarily mean being religious. Until that time, I had naively assumed that it did.
I thought so for three reasons:
First, all the religious — God-based, Bible-based, religiously active — people I knew or studied were conservative. I grew up an Orthodox Jew in the yeshiva world, home to some liberals, many conservatives and no leftists.
Second, in American terms, the American conservative I most admired, William F. Buckley Jr., the founder and publisher of National Review, was a deeply religious Catholic.
Third, America was founded on religious — specifically Judeo-Christian — principles. Wouldn’t a conservative seek to conserve all of America’s basic principles?
It is a testament to the power of our secular education — primary school through university — that it has successfully secularized students from conservative homes almost as well as students from liberal and left-wing homes. Most well-educated conservatives have embraced secular values and made peace with a secular and godless America just as much as have well-educated leftists.
Read more: Prager on secular indoctrination
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