Author: HA Editorial Team

Ready for Real Life: Part Seven, Vocations

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Ready for Real Life: Part Seven, Vocations

HA note: This series is reprinted with permission from Ahab’s blog, Republic of Gilead. Part Seven of this series was originally published on November 11, 2013.

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Also in this series: Part One, Botkins Launch Webinar | Part Two, Ready for What? | Part Three, Are Your Children Ready? | Part Four, Ready to Lead Culture | Part Five, Science and Medicine | Part Six, History and Law | Part Seven, Vocations | Part Eight, Q&A Session | Part Nine, Concluding Thoughts

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In this part of the “Ready for Real Life” webinar series, the Botkins discuss the transition from homeschooling to adult life, offering advice on work, education, and adult leadership. As with prior webinars, the Botkins give this a separatist spin, discouraging young people from entering traditional workforces, the military, or universities that could “exploit them to their ruin”. Maintaining Christian dominion is paramount, as usual. Unfortunately, the Botkins fail to understand the relationship between impractical homeschool teachings and homeschooled youth who are ill-prepared to take on the world.

Geoffrey began by praising Christian homeschool families, asserting that parents pulling their children out of schools was one of the most significant movements in history. However, he lamented the “nationwide fragility” of the Christian homeschool movement, claiming that a “lack of a dominion pattern of thinking” has weakened homeschooling. Many children remain confused as to why their parents homeschooled them, failing to see the “Biblical purpose” or “urgent reasons” to propel the movement, he claimed. “Some of them are even confused about marriage,” he added.

Who do the Botkins blame for anemic homeschooling and disappointing results? Mothers.

Victoria Botkin claimed that the homeschool movement’s biggest weakness is that it’s “mommy-driven”. At the 4:06 mark, she elaborated on how homeschool mothers allegedly stunt their children.

“We have to be honest and say that the weakness is that it’s mommy-driven … I know that what homeschool mommies like me love most is to gather our chicks together and snuggle up together on the sofa with our cups of cocoa and just have a wonderful time reading together. This warm, cozy mothering style is very good and it’s very nurturing when the children are little, but we have to face it, as they get older, this is simply not a good formula for training up cultural leaders. So, as our children grow up, the way we interact with them and the way we mothers discipline them has simply got to grow with them.”

Geoffrey Botkin agreed, claiming that homeschooling is stunting children’s development in part because “mommies” are driving the process and fathers are insufficiently involved. At the 5:04 mark, he criticized homeschool mothers for cocooning their children in a safe, sheltered environment for longer than necessary.

“We notice that parents’ teaching styles and techniques and priorities really are not growing with the children. We’re keeping the children young. We’re keeping the children undeveloped, and part of that is because mommies who are still driving the process, and because so many dads are not as engaged as they should be, mommies would like that warm, cuddling, secure, sheltered life to continue far into life as adults, as adulthood. And so too many young men, young boys are growing up being dwarfed or emasculated by the world and its real-life issues.”

My jaw dropped at all the sexism, scapegoating, and flawed thinking I just heard.

First, repeatedly referring to stay-at-home mothers as “mommies” was condescending. Second, the Christian Patriarchy Movement demands that women stay in the domestic sphere and nurture their children, so why were the Botkins blaming women for doing what they’d been instructed to do all along? Christian Patriarchy women who were listening to this webinar must have felt frustrated as the Botkins accused them of failing at their demanding, unending duties. Third, Geoffrey Botkin focused on young men, ignoring the possibility that his version of homeschooling might stunt young women as well. If this particular branch of homeschooling is failing to prepare children for adult life, its leaders need to reexamine their methods instead of blaming mothers as a knee-jerk reaction.

Geoffrey Botkin complained that many 17-19 year-old homeschool graduates are not the “dominant minds” in their environments, but rather find themselves being dominated by others. Such young people either strive to fit in with the outside world, or hide from the world out of fear, staying home and indulging in wasteful activities that aren’t “dominion-oriented”.

Christian faith requires Christians to have the “dominant mind” of each generation, Geoffrey reiterated.

That is, Christians are not to dominate others “like the Islamic world teaches,” but to be leaders. Christian homeschooling families are to instill this goal in their children, rather than training them to withdraw into a “sheltered” or “agrarian” lifestyle.

First, I was puzzled by Phillips disapproval of “agrarian” lifestyles. What’s so un-Christian about farming? Second, if the Botkins are so perturbed by homeschool graduates shrinking away from the outside world, shouldn’t they worry that their education model has poorly equipped students for adulthood? Finally, since some branches of the Christian homeschool movement live in their own bubbles as a way of shielding families from “the world”, aren’t withdrawn adults the natural result of this ideology?

As with previous webinars, Geoffrey expressed his distrust of universities. Too many homeschool parents discover that their 16-18 year-old offspring have no social skills or capabilities, he claimed. He warned parents that if their children do not have university-level knowledge by the time they turn 18, their children’s character will be deficient. If such young adults go to college, that poor preparation will “only exploit them to their ruin”.

Geoffrey fielded a listener question about how to make sure children don’t “crash and burn”, that is, lose their faith or degrade their character after leaving home. In reply, Geoffrey warned that children can “crash and burn” even before they leave home if they’re ill-equipped to cope with moral challenges. He condemned country music as one example of a moral challenge in Christian culture, accusing country music of promoting a “very destructive, counter-Christian theology”.

Another alleged source of moral corruption lies in homeschool support groups, he argued, where insecure children can become “peer dependent” and succumb to “peer-dependent compromise”.

Translation: Don’t you dare compare notes! Don’t let those other homeschooling families suggest non-insane ways to homeschool your kids, I thought.

Parents need to talk with their children and understand their minds, as a strong family life can instill vital maturity and responsibility in young people. Parents need to test their children as they would “arrows“, giving them opportunities for moral tests outside of the home.

The Botkins shifted gears to talk about careers and vocations. Immediately, Geoffrey dismissed parents’ concerns about their children’s financial well-being. Parents, especially “mommies”, focus on how their children are going to make a solid, stable living as adults. Geoffrey frowned upon his focus on jobs and validation from the “elite oligarchy”, reminding listeners that a supposed fixation on money, pensions, and “carnal security” isn’t Biblical. A Christian’s highest priority is their mission for God, not their job, he asserted.

Geoffrey’s words left me stunned.

Young adults should be thinking about how they’ll support themselves, because work and bills will be part of their adult lives.

Thinking about benefits and wages isn’t about “carnal security”, it’s about making sure one has food, housing, and medical care. Financial reflection is even more important if one is trying to escape poverty, survive in an economically depressed region, pay for an education, or start a family. To ignore money matters in adulthood is to be dangerously immature, which Geoffrey fails to understand.

At the 18:22 mark, Geoffrey dismissed the American dream as “the pursuit of Mammon”, arguing that society need a Biblical paradigm for worship, education, and career.

“The 21st century needs a completely new paradigm for education … We need a new paradigm for worship. We need a new paradigm for work because the school model, the church model, and the career model are obsolete. They haven’t worked. That’s why there’s so much confusion about going into the 21st century. The church has been endorsing this idea of the American dream since the 1950s, and people have really fallen for it. It’s the pursuit of Mammon at the expense of Biblical obedience. So these models are obsolete because they were wrong, number one, Biblically, but they haven’t worked, have they? That’s why our culture is so broken and people are so confused about what to do. The culture that they created in the 20th century simply cannot and must not be sustained. So here’s the solution. Let’s move our children and the entire culture to the Biblical paradigm. We’ve lived too long in a humanistic paradigm, the paradigm of secular humanism.”

Parents should teach children that being Christ’s ambassador and occupying the world until Christ’s return in their only calling, Geoffrey said. Christ’s civilization must be planted and preserved in every society as part of the Great Commission, he instructed. Ominously, he reminded listeners that America is a “massive spiritual battlefield” and they must not be “taken captive”.

Coldly, Geoffrey discouraged children from following “self-centered dreams” and giving themselves over to Mammon at the 24:17 mark. 

“Parents, you need to help your children aspire to something far different than one career based on self-centered dreams to achieve carnal security by accumulating Mammon.”

Benjamin Botkin, Geoffrey and Victoria’s son, echoed his father’s thoughts, stating that not every dream is worth fighting for. Sadly, by labeling dreams as “self-centered”, the Botkins refused to countenance dreams that could result in progress, enrichment, and joy. As in previous webinars, the Botkins’ advice boiled down to “do what God says, and don’t you dare think, feel, or evolve”.

Geoffrey assured listeners that if they obey Christ, they will have both money and viable occupational opportunities throughout their lives. This prosperity gospel nonsense struck me as dangerous, as it could cause Christians to neglect sound careers, financial planning, and budgeting.

In the real world, God does not always provide, as those who have endured unemployment, poverty, and hunger know too well.

Benjamin discussed the feeling of being overwhelmed, when one’s work, family, and church responsibilities seem overwhelming. His advice for uncluttering one’s life was to excise everything that did not contribute to goals, including “worthless” activities and the desire to engage in worthless activities.

Geoffrey emphasized that the Botkins were not advocating careers (which they defined as lifelong jobs), which they considered part of a broken paradigm. Rather, he encouraged listeners to devote themselves to four chief priorities — family, business, church, and civic duties — which must be integrated and pursued simultaneously.

On the topic of using talents in one’s future jobs, Geoffrey discouraged parents from excessive focus on children’s gifts. Using gifts to determine one’s future job merely plays into the “statist security state”, where a “slave economy” assigns job roles based on one’s talents. At the 46:15 mark, Geoffrey encouraged leadership and decentralized business over work in the “ant colony”.

“Keep the correct, new 21st century paradigm in mind. For the 20th century, people grew up thinking about just becoming part of this statist security state, a workforce state, and it was really a slave economy, very similar to what was advocated by Plato in all his writings. An oligarchy is in charge, and everybody else just kind of fits in as servants and slaves based on abilities, gifts, and talents. You don’t want your children even to be thinking that way … You still can go to a so-called career counselor, and they’ll say, ‘What are you good at?’. Well, they’re helping to to sort people into little cubby holes as servants, not as leaders, as those who serve the planned economy, not those who create it and do something totally different. That’s why we don’t want you to be caught up in thinking about ‘well, what are my children good at’, so they can take their little place in the pyramid, in the ant colony. We want them to be the leader of tomorrow who create the entire new business climates all over the world that are so different, a decentralized state system, a decentralized economy where there’s so many more independent businesses and business people.”

Geoffrey Botkin’s monologue reflected a certain ignorance about how employment works.

Do some businesses behave in unethical ways? Of course. Do wealthy oligarchs wield disproportionate power? Sadly, yes. Does the world need new models of business? Yes. However, helping a young person plan for their future is not “sort[ing] people into little cubby holes”. Plenty of jobs serve meaningful roles in society, and performing such jobs does not render employees “servants and slaves”. Finally, some fields require employees to work their way up to positions of authority, so we cannot expect everyone to take leadership positions immediately. Leadership and paradigm shift take time, and they require years of training and experience.

All young adults, homeschooled or not, need to understand this.

Geoffrey’s poor grasp of work realities was apparent in his advice about degrees and credentials. The Botkin family did not practice graduations, he said. Children are ready to move forward in the world when they’re able to lead their generation with confidence and “cultural discipleship”, he stated. Assessment of young homeschoolers should focus on whether they understand the kingdom of Christ, and how they will spend their lives seeking it. None of his children got credentials, he explained, but that hasn’t stopped them from getting job offers. For example, he bragged that his son Isaac received job offers to be a college professor at age 19-20, dismissing his lack of credentials, but Isaac turned them down.

Wait. What? I thought. Universities. Don’t. Work. Like. That. Competition is fierce for new faculty positions, and degrees are essential requirements for applicants.

No college worthy of the title is going to hire a 19 year-old kid with no degree or credentials.

On the topic of degrees, one listener asked what to do if their state required homeschooling parents to have degrees. Geoffrey scoffed at the idea, encouraging listeners to “stop complying with unlawful laws” and warning them against submission to the state at the 57:06 mark.

“What kind of degree? What if they tell you you need a PhD in education, or a Masters from a teachers college? Would you bow the knee to the state just to get that so you could homeschool your children, or would you give up and throw your children back into the government system? Christians have to stop complying with unlawful laws, especially without challenging the idea behind that law before they’re ever passed. We should be articulating and declaring our independence as parents to have the freedom to educate our children, because this freedom comes to us as a command from God Almighty. I mean, the state does not regulate this … No, we don’t have to go chasing these degrees just because we’re afraid something is going to happen. What would you do if they passed a law outlawing spanking? Would you just simply stop spanking your children? You can’t do that. You have to continue to obey God first more than man. You have to obey God first.”

David Botkin tackled the topic of military enlistment after homeschooling, listing and critiquing four reasons why some homeschooled youth choose the military. First, some people want to earn degrees after their service, but David claimed that degrees weren’t desirable ends. Second, some people want to establish a long-term military career, to which David replied that while short-term work for the military was acceptable, long-term work was not. The Constitution doesn’t allow for a long-standing army, and that the Founding Fathers disagreed with the idea, he insisted. Third, some people want to reform the military from within, which David claimed was a positive but misguided intention. A private would have very little impact on the military as a whole, and many people don’t even know what needs to be reformed. Fourth, some people want to protect and serve their country, but David argued that the government (including “unconstitutional” departments such as the IRS and EPA) are a much greater threat to Americans than any foreign aggressor. David, it seemed, had absorbed much of his father’s disgust toward alleged “statism”.

David discouraged military enlistment, citing the U.S. military’s flaws.

For example, he argued that many of the U.S. military’s actions have been unconstitutional and unbiblical, and that it has involved itself in inappropriate tasks (i.e., nation building) that should not concern the U.S. government. He also complained about the presence of “sodomites” and women in the military, which he blasted as an “abomination”. The supposedly declining moral standard in the military, such as current tolerance for fornication, also disgusted him.

David, if you think “fornication” in the military is something recent, think again, I thought. And I can think of far more serious moral outrages in the U.S. military than gay or female soldiers.

David emphasized that while joining the military would be a bad decision in most cases, Christians would be obligated to uphold the law and the Bible if they did enlist. Specifically, they would be obligated to disobey any unlawful orders, which would result in a court martial and possible dishonorable discharge.

Geoffrey Botkin addressed a listener’s question about whether parents should prepare their sons for social and economic collapse. At the 1:11:41 mark, Geoffrey claimed that the U.S. is already in the throes of collapse as a result of God’s “chastisement”. 

“America has been in an economic and social collapse now for two generations. This is by direct intervention and the will of God, and it’s part of a chastisement of God that’s promised in Deuteronomy 28 and Leviticus 26. And so, yes, you should be preparing them to live in this time of economic and social collapse. We have lost so much social fabric, and the value of the dollar, and the freedom to even conduct business. They need to be fully aware of these things and the direction–they need to know that the direction for the future–yes, it’s very, very fragile. The good news is that things are so bad now that there could be such a collapse that it’s time [for a] great opportunity to begin rebuilding when things stumble and fall clear to the ground. And this has happened at so many different times in history. You can look at history and you can see the trends and you can see  when things actually collapse and totally fail. What a phenomenal opportunity that is for Christians who have wisdom and knowledge to rise up and take the lead and begin the rebuilding process and lay the foundations together again.”

Geoffrey sounded almost gleeful as he spoke of the opportunities Christians will have to rebuild society after a collapse, as if he were excited about the prospect of fundamentalists forming a new world in their image. The fact that a real societal collapse would be terrifying, and that millions of people would face deprivation and death in the ensuing chaos, did not seem to perturb him.

I found Geoffrey’s insistence that America is collapsing to be ridiculous.

While America has many problems, it is not experiencing a wide-scale collapse. Look at war-ravaged countries. Look at failed states. Look at societies that disintegrated due to genocide or ethnocide.

That is what collapse looks like.

Geoffrey’s apocalyptic warnings echo those of other fundamentalist Christians, who see America disintegrating when it really isn’t.

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This part of the “Ready for Real Life” webinar exhibited the following themes.

  • Little respect for degrees and certifications: The Botkins do not see college educations, degrees, or other certifications as necessary for success. Geoffrey also sneered at the idea that parents should have degrees before they homeschool their children, seeing this as an act of unnecessary intrusion by the state. The idea that a college degree could make young people more competitive in the workplace, or bestow knowledge otherwise unavailable to them, was not considered.
  • The workplace as the tool of an oppressive oligarchy:  Geoffrey spoke of the traditional workplace as an oppressive, deadening environment in which workers are rendered “slaves” by a callous oligarchy. He compared workplaces to pyramids and ant farms, refusing to consider that not all workplaces oppress their employees. Geoffrey could have discussed serious problems facing some workers, such as low wages, unsafe working conditions, and job discrimination, but preferred to warn listeners about a supposed “statist security state”.
  • Dismissal of monetary matters: Geoffrey discouraged people from focusing on money matters when contemplating young peoples’ futures. Money matters were dismissed as an obsession with “carnal security” and Mammon.

Which leads to my last observed theme . . .

  • Homeschooling failing to prepare children for adulthood: Geoffrey and Victoria complained that too many homeschooled children were unprepared for adult life. Instead of questioning their impractical beliefs about degrees, money management, careers, or raising children in a fundamentalist bubble, they blamed over-nurturing “mommies”. The irony would be hilarious if real children’s futures weren’t at stake.

Stay tuned for the next part!

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To be continued.

Michael Farris’s Testimony Before the Senate on the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, Part 1: By Rachel Lazerus

HA Editorial Team2 Comments

HA note: The following is reprinted with permission from Libby Anne’s blog Love Joy Feminism. It was a guest post by Rachel Lazerus and was originally published on Patheos on November 11, 2013. Rachel Lazerus received her MPP from the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago in 2012. She is currently researching comparative methods of reporting homeschooling achievement.

Last year, Michael Farris, homeschool advocate and founder of the powerful Home School Legal Defense Association, was instrumental in blocking the ratification of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), despite its complete irrelevancy to homeschooling issues. Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ) is now bringing the treaty back to the Senate, hoping to ratify it in this current session. Last week, Michael Farris was a witness for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, testifying on why he thinks this treaty would be bad for the U.S.

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You probably didn’t watch Farris’s testimony last week, and his followers probably didn’t either. In fact, Michael Farris is banking on them not having seen it. You see, Michael Farris hopes they will accept his description of the hearing, of how mean and unbalanced it was, and how vicious the “Democrat” senators are. Farris hopes his followers will call their senators and demand that they vote no on the treaty. And of course, Farris hopes his followers will donate money to HSLDA in their outrage!

The problem is that Michael Farris’s description does not match up with reality.

While Farris told his followers that the Democratic senators sought to “vilify and destroy” him, in actual fact they treated his arguments against the treaty with the respect they deserved. Many of Farris’s legal analyses were countered by the other witnesses and the Senators. His demeanor throughout the hearing was aggressive and at some points incredibly rude and disrespectful to sitting Senators. And the “petty, silly, and personal attack” that Farris decries was, in fact, a response to Farris’s appeal to his own authority, one which he has used both here and previously to brush off criticism of his legal analysis.

In this post I will examine Farris’s description of the hearing, what actually happened, and some of the issues involved. I will look at Farris’s exchanges with Senators Boxer, Durbin, and Menendez, and contrast what actually took place with how Farris portrayed what took place in a fundraising letter he sent out to HSLDA members later that day. In my next post I will delve more into the legal issues at hand. I believe that this is an issue you should care deeply about, because the political power that Farris has is predicated on his position as leader of HSLDA, and his rejection of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) is entirely consistent with the philosophies he’s built his political base around—and also because there are compelling reasons the U.S. for the U.S. to sign the CRPD.

Of course, you don’t have to take my word for any of this. You can watch and read Farris’s testimony for yourself and judge whether or not my description is accurate. First, you can watch the Senate hearing here (or here). Second, you can read my own transcription, which I made while watching it, my curiosity piqued by Sarah Jones’ description (my transcription is not perfect and may have some flaws or typos). I was not able to transcribe the entire two-and-a-half hours of the panel, and therefore I have not included all of the arguments or debate on the CRPD, but I was able to cover all of Farris’s testimony, as well as his back-and-forth conversations with Senators Corker, Boxer, Durbin, Johnson, Menendez, and Coons.

Background

Before I dissect Farris’s arguments and his back and forth with the various senators, I want to lay out some basic, noncontroversial, unchallenged facts about the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD):

  1. The CRPD has already been ratified by over 130 countries around the world.
  2. The US has signed but not ratified the CRPD.
  3. Until the US ratifies the CRPD, no US representatives are able to take part in the Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which monitors implementation. This limits US involvement in implementation of disability laws in other countries — of concern to US citizens traveling abroad — and in the interpretation of the treaty by the UN.
  4. Michael Farris is the most prominent voice opposing the ratification of the CRPD. Farris’s argument is that because there is no explicit mention of parents’ right to determine their children’s education, ratifying the treaty could potentially affect homeschooling. This is not in line with legal precedent of how the courts determine the US’s obligations under treaties such as these.
  5. Under debate currently in the Senate are a number of RUDs—reservations, understandings, and declarations—that the US may attach to its ratification of the treaty. While these are a common practice by the US and other countries, Farris is arguing that the only type of reservation he would accept is one invalidating the treaty.
  6. According to his opening testimony, Farris agrees with the emotional and political arguments in favor of ratification, but he believes that despite every assurance he has received to the contrary, ratifying the CRPD will change US law.
  7. If Farris had not decided to protest the CRPD, it is very likely it would have been ratified last December.

While Farris has characterized the pro-treaty side as being “Democrat” and “left”, this is not actually the case.

The CRPD has bipartisan support in the Senate, with Democrats, Republicans, and Independents all being in favor of the treaty. While Farris noted that two of the witnesses were “sitting senators”, he neglected to note that both Mark Kirk (IL) and Kelly Ayotte (NH) are sitting Republican senators, or that the other pro-treaty witnesses included Tom Ridge, a Republican who served as Secretary of Homeland Security under President George W. Bush, and Richard Thornburgh, a Republican who served as Attorney General under President George H.W. Bush. The Americans with Disabilities Act, on which the CRPD is based, was signed in 1990 by President Bush and passed the House by a vote of 377 to 28 and the Senate with a vote of 91 to 6. Several of the at the committee hearing made note of the remarkably bipartisan nature of this bill, and made it clear that supporting the rights of the disabled and of veterans is neither a Democratic nor a Republican issue, but a human rights issue.

Farris’s characterization of the treaty as a plot by “the left” is thus both fundamentally dishonest and a cheap ploy to get donations from people who dislike the “Democrat” party.

Barbara Boxer’s “Attack”

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With this background, we now turn to the substance of Farris’s characterization of his interactions with three Senate Democratic committee members. Farris described his back-and-forth by Senator Boxer this way:

After we gave our introductory remarks, the personal attacks began. Senator Barbara Boxer (CA), the second most senior Democrat senator on the committee, asked me if HSLDA or ParentalRights.org has ever raised money during our battle against UN control over children and families with disabilities. Instead of asking her if she had ever raised money during her campaigns for U.S. Senate, or whether any of the pro-UNCRPD organizations raise money for their fight, I explained that HSLDA is funded by you, our members. ParentalRights.org is funded solely by donations.

Senator Boxer’s attack, however, was not really against me or HSLDA. It was against you, and every other homeschool family who has ever supported HSLDA because you believe in our mission to defend the God-given right of parents, not faceless bureaucrats, to care for and educate our children. Senator Boxer thinks that your membership in HSLDA and your support of our critical work to defend homeschooling, support widows and single parents through the Home School Foundation, and the work of ParentalRights.org to pass a constitutional amendment makes you an evil special interest that must be vilified and defeated.

Contrast this description with what was actually said during the two minutes that Senator Boxer spent addressing Farris. You can view the relevant video here or read the transcript as follows:

Boxer: “Now, Dr. Farris, you say that you’re speaking for the disabled, but your statements are directly contradicted by organizations that work every day, 24/7, to protect disabled kids, like the United States International Council on Disabilities who states, quote, ‘this treaty protects parental rights and highlights the important role of parents in raising children with disabilities.’ Unquote. And TASH, you know that organization, says quote, ‘nothing included in this treaty prevents parents from homeschooling. This treaty embraces the spirit of the Individuals with Disability Education Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act, and all disability non-discrimination legislation.’ But you, Dr. Farris, argue the opposite. You once even said, and I quote,‘the definition of disability is not defined in the treaty and so my kids – my kid wears glasses, now they’re disabled. Now the UN can get control of them.’ Well, I have to say in my opinion, that is nonsense that if a child wears glasses [Boxer touches her own glasses], then the child is considered disabled. So I wonder what is behind your fight. And I just ask this question for the record. Have you ever tried to raise funds by telling parents this treaty will limit their ability to decide what is best for their children?”

Farris: “Senator, our organization is funded by membership dues, not by contributions.”

Boxer: “So you’ve never sent out an e-mail asking for funds to fight—”

Farris: “No, the Homeschooling Legal Defense Association, um, is associated also with a group called ParentalRights.org. Parentalrights.org has indeed sent out fundraising emails—”

Boxer: “Thank you very much.”

Farris: (overlapping) “But, Senator, the substantive answer is, the treaty doesn’t ban homeschooling. What the treaty does is shift the decision-making power from the parent to the government. That is what the meaning of the best interests standard is.”

Boxer: “Well, that is not something that I agree with, nor do any of the organizations.

Farris: (overlapping) “Well—”

Boxer: “Thank you very much.”

Farris lied when he categorized Boxer’s questioning as an attack on HSLDA families. Boxer was not attacking, or even coming close to attacking, any HSLDA family. She simply asked Farris a question—whether he was using his opposition to the CRPD as a fund-raising cash cow—that he was embarrassed to answer. She never used the words “evil special interest”—an interesting choice of words by Farris, given that he has done more than anyone else to turn homeschooling families into a special interest group. Perhaps Farris, flushed in his residual embarrassment after his performance, accidentally admitted his private categorization of HSLDA families.

What Senator Boxer was actually getting at was Farris’s practice of issuing bald-faced lies about the implications of the CRPD in order frighten homeschooling parents so as to raise money for his organizations.

And the fact that Farris turned around and sent this letter out—including a P.S. asking for money (“Finally, even though Senator Boxer doesn’t want you supporting the battle against the UNCRPD and for U.S. sovereignty, you can donate if you wish”)—is an example of his inability to understand either what Senator Boxer was getting at or that what he is doing is fearmongering and wrong.

For the record, this very e-mail reveals that Farris is officially sending fundraising e-mails from HSLDA.org in order to fund “the battle against the UNCRPD and for U.S. sovereignty”—the exact thing he denied doing just hours earlier in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, when he claimed that he only sent out such emails from ParentalRights.org. Senator Boxer was onto something. Farris is indeed making inflammatory and incorrect assertions about what happened in order to raise money. Ironically, his attack on Senator Boxer justifies her line of questioning.

Senator Durbin’s “Misunderstanding”

durbin

Next came Farris’s mischaracterization of Senator Durbin, the Democratic senator from Illinois. Here is Farris’s description of their interaction:

Next, Senator Dick Durbin (IL), another senior Democrat on the committee, falsely argued that HSLDA’s position is that the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) is the threat to homeschool freedom. The fact is that HSLDA strongly supports the ADA and other laws advancing the freedom and dignity of persons with disabilities which our democratically elected representatives have passed. What’s more, the UNCRPD would actually threaten parental rights which are enshrined in the IDEA [the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act]. I explained to him that it was the UNCRPD, not the ADA, which was the threat. He ignored me and persisted in stating that HSLDA believes the ADA was the threat. Logic teachers call this a straw man argument, which is used by people who do not wish to debate the merits of an issue.

Again, Farris’s recollection is simply incorrect. You can view the relevant video here, or read the transcript as follows:

Durbin: “I am just stopped cold with this argument by Mr. Farris that the Americans with Disabilities Act is going to put an end to homeschooling in America. Is that your position?”

Farris: “That’s not my position. My position is that the treaty changes the, the legal requirements in this country that it’s just not correct to say that there is no duty to change American law in accordance with the treaty. So, since I believe there will be required to be, uh, an implementation act that complies with the requirements of the treaty I think that at that point in time that’s when the problems will arise.

Durbin: “Mr. Farris—”

Farris: (overlapping) “Not under the ADA itself.”

Durbin: “Mr. Farris, the fact that the administration is not asking for an implementation act and made it clear that it’s not seeking it because the Americans with Disability Act already is controlling, and has been extensively litigated, sets disability standards in our country higher than any in the world, you don’t find that convincing.”

Farris: “That’s the same administration that’s prosecuting the homeschooling family to try to expel them from the United States who came here—”

Durbin: “Under the ADA? Under the Americans with Disabilities Act?”

Farris: “No, they came here under our law of asylum. But the question of the case is—that case is also pending before the Supreme Court, and the question is—”

Durbin: “Well, Let me just say Mr. Farris—”

Farris: “I guess you don’t want me to answer the question.” *flounces back in his seat*

Durbin: “I don’t think you can answer because you want to talk about something other than the American Disability Act or the convention on disabilities, and that’s what we’re here to discuss.”

Farris: “The convention with disabilities has a different legal standard than the ADA.”

Durbin: “I can tell you—”

Farris: (overlapping) “There are numerous disability organizations that say so. I include their citations in my written testimony. I’m not the only one that says that. The CRPD committee agrees with me.”

Durbin: “And I would just say to you, Mr. Farris, that if we’re going to have a battle of the organizations supporting or not supporting this, I think we’re going to prevail. Because we have the mainstream disability organizations across America who are supporting the adoption of this convention on disabilities. And I—I just, I struggle with this notion that we are somehow going to stop this effort, this effort to extend the rights to the disabled around the world for fear of something which you can’t even clearly articulate when it comes to homeschooling. […] This is not going to affect homeschooling, it’s very clear that it will not. And the Americans with Disabilities Act for twenty years has not affected homeschooling. I yield back my time.”

Far from “stating that HSLDA believes the ADA was the threat”, Durbin is very clear: because the US is already bound by the ADA, which holds the US to a higher standard than the CRPD would hold the US, there will be no changes required in US law should the US ratify the CRPD. As Farris originally got involved with this treaty obstensibly in order to prevent changes in homeschooling law, this is not an irrelevant point that Durbin is making.

(Farris actually talks quite a bit about the Romeikes, a German family that is trying to get asylum in the U.S. on the basis of Germany’s essential ban on homeschooling. I personally don’t see the relevance of the Romeike family to the CRPD, and connecting the two seems to fall under the slippery slope fallacy. You can read more about the Romeike family here, here, here, and here.)

It is also clear from the video and transcript that Farris is not exactly acting with the proper decorum due to a sitting US senator or expected in a senate hearing. He is rude, interrupts the senators multiple times, and, when frustrated, resorts to mouthing off. Once I got over my initial shock, I found myself full of questions. Personally, I was not homeschooled, nor have I ever participated in any type of moot court. Is this kind of display in this sort of formal setting considered acceptable for homeschooled students? For participants in moot court? Wouldn’t judges dock points for display of temper? Surely Farris knows that when giving testimony as an expert witness, it is advisable not to behave like a lawyer on “The Good Wife”?

But let us not let our shock at Farris’s visible display of disrespect distract us from Farris’s legal disrespect of Durbin’s very sound arguments.

Durbin, a former trial lawyer, makes numerous strong legal points that poke holes in Farris’s flimsy argument. For example, a large part of Farris’s argument relies on the assumption that US law will need to change in order to accommodate the new treaty. As the treaty is non-self-executing, this would have to be accomplished with an Implementation Act passed by both Houses of Congress and signed by the President. However, as Durbin pointed out, this is not necessary in the case of the CRPD. This is corroborated by the UN website on the Treaty on Disabilities:

Except in the rare case that the laws in a country already conform fully to the requirements of the Convention, a State party will normally have to amend existing laws or introduce new laws in order to put the Convention into practice.

As Durbin states, the US is exactly that “rare case” that the laws already conform to the requirements of the Convention—because the Convention was based on our current disabilities law! Perhaps Farris should consider this an example of American exceptionalism in action?

It is also incredibly ironic that Farris describes Durbin as using a logical fallacy (“straw man argument”) when in fact a large part of part of Farris’s own argument against ratifying the CRPD relies on a logical fallacy–the slippery slope fallacy. See for example what Farris said in response to a question by Senator Menendez about whether or not Farris views this treaty as a “wedge issue” (you can also view the video here):

“I believe that, uh, this treaty would be the first in a—in a line of human rights treaties that would be coming before this treat—before this committee. The committee—the convention on the rights of the child—Senator McCain misspoke, I’m sure, earlier—we have not ratified that treaty. And so, I think that would be coming next. The convention on the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women, that would be coming after that. I think that, that this treaty is the first of many treaties that would be in this, in this range, that is what is intended by that comment.”

As Farris should be well aware, a slippery slope fallacy is often “used by people who do not wish to debate the merits of an issue.” Perhaps he would agree that it is used only by those who lack the ability to make more substantive arguments.

Senator Menendez’s “Dismissal” 

Menendez

This leads us to discuss Senator Menendez’ questions. Although Menendez’s questioning of Farris lasted over eight minutes (you can view the full video here), Farris seems to have only remembered a brief snippet of the exchange (which you can watch here). In Farris’s own words:

And finally, near the end of the hearing, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Menendez (NJ) said, by way of dismissing HSLDA’s legal arguments about how the UNCRPD is binding under international law, “I appreciate that you have an LLM from London which is as I understand from a distance learning course….” The room packed with supporters of the treaty burst out in rude and loud laughter, forcing Chairman Menendez to gavel the room to order.

Again, while this was a personal attack aimed at me intended to sideline my arguments, Chairman Menendez was admitting that he had no response to HSLDA’s arguments about the dangers of the UNCRPD and international law. He showed that he will resort to petty, silly, and personal attacks rather than substance.

Let me first say that I find it repugnant for anyone, regardless of where they obtained their education, to dismiss anyone else solely on the basis of their education.

It is a sad truth that access to education is not equally distributed across the world, and very often access is limited to people who are already relatively privileged in money, time, and social status. Distance learning courses and degrees can be used to change this: in fact, it is very likely that due to Article 24 of the CRPD, on educational rights of persons with disabilities, would lead to the increasing availability of distance-learning courses and degrees such that “persons with disabilities are not excluded from the general education system on the basis of disability.”

However, I do not believe that this was an attempt by Senator Menendez to attack Farris in order to distract from “substance.” Rather, I believe that Senator Menendez’s comment about Farris’s degree is justified by Farris’s earlier attempt at credentialism and, in yet another logical fallacy, an appeal from authority.

In his opening statement, Farris said to the committee (view the video here):

Turning to the issue of homeschooling, uh, I’ve been criticized by many in the press for, uh, fearmongering on this topic. But I have never seen anyone write a legal analysis. It’s just simply conclusions, just assertions that I have incorrectly analyzed the lawness. I have an LLM in International Law from the University of London, I have coached six—excuse me, seven—national championship moot court teams that debate constitutional law, I have written the legal analysis and I dare anyone to read my legal analysis and answer it with legal analysis, not conjecture and raw assertion.

Farris is the one who introduced his credentials—the only person testifying to do so, and in my opinion a rather gauche move—as his authority for making this legal argument.

Farris, while mentioning that he did receive his LLM from the University of London, notably did not include the fact that it was from the distance-learning program, leading the casual viewer to believe that Farris attended the University of London in-person, rather than through the distance-learning program.

In fact, this is something of a pattern for Farris. His bios on both HSLDA.org and ParentalRights.org mention the LLM from the University of London but do not indicate that it was a distance learning program. He also represented himself this way to a reporter from the Boston Globe:

Farris, meanwhile, stood by his assertion that he understood the treaty better than Republican supporters such as Thornburgh. Farris, a graduate of Gonzaga University School of Law, said he has better legal training when it comes to treaties.

“I have an LLM in international law from the University of London,” Farris said, referring to a postgraduate degree that is similar to a master’s program. Asked for details, Farris said he didn’t go to London for the degree; it came in a “distance learning” course and culminated in a proctored exam at a local community college.

“He is just flat wrong,” Farris said of Thornburgh’s sworn testimony that the treaty won’t change US law. “If he wrote that on an international law exam, at any law school, he would fail.”

Farris is misrepresenting himself and his law degree in public all the time, and yet he uses this misrepresented law degree as the authority backing his legal opinions. Does Farris believe that there is a distinction between “University of London” and “University of London, distance learning program”? If not, why does he continually forget to mention the type of program he went through?

In short, I believe that contrary to Farris’s account, Menendez was not making fun of Farris’s degree at all. He was instead making fun of Farris’s appeal to authority. If Farris was honest about the provenance of his degree, if he did not so frequently use it as a justification for his legal theory, then Farris would not be able to be so easily and frequently embarrassed by anyone pointing out the actual program he attended. And if Farris’s legal arguments were stronger, he would not need to resort to the fallacies of credentialism and appeals from authority at all—which is, by the way, yet another fallacy.

(As a side note, Farris complained on his Facebook account after the hearing that “they attacked me personally for ‘fear-mongering,’ misrepresentation, fund-raising, political motives, and having earned an LLM through distance learning.” As I listened to the video of the entire conference, I kept count: the only reference to ‘fearmongering’ made during this Senate hearing was the above reference made by Farris himself. That said, I myself prefer to interpret this as Farris accusing himself of fearmongering.)

Perhaps it’s because he was so embarrassed with the jibe about his degree, but Farris does not seem to have understood any of Menendez’s actual legal points, some of which will be discussed in my next post. As a matter of fact, Menendez actually states Farris’s position more clearly than Farris is able to articulate it: “you argue that the treaty creates obligations others do not see, and then you suggest that the United States must follow your interpretation as in terms of ratifying the treaty.”

In short, Menendez does engage with Farris’ legal arguments and legal reasoning.

Menendez goes on to say:

“I think that where we have a fundamental disagreement here, is that under the Constitution, the President and the Senate determine our obligations under international treaties and therefore the reservations, understandings, and declarations are the resolution and consent—are what are binding.”

Farris is welcome to all the opinions he likes—that’s his Constitutional right as an American. But his opinion of legal theory is not considered binding. The Senate determines the boundaries of the reservations attached to the treaty—this is its Constitutional duty under Article II, Section 2. In Farris’s attempt to protect the United States from encroachments on its sovereignty by the UN, he seems to be ignoring the parts of the Constitution which guarantee the American people freedom from him.

Conclusion

But don’t just let Senators Boxer, Durbin, and Menendez convince you that Farris’s arguments are ridiculous. I may not have a law degree, but I do know how to read and I’m willing to do a little bit of legwork when it comes to research. Farris claims again and again that his opponents have attacked his motives or his degrees rather than attacking his actual evidence—a claim that is false, as we have seen. Farris also continually pads his arguments with citations from other legal scholars, using these experts as a buoy to support his claim that his interpretation of the CRPD is the correct one. In my next post, I will do what Farris urges—but what I don’t think he actually expects anyone to do. I will read the experts he cites to back up his interpretation—and I will do so in their original context.

And when I do so, I think I can prove to you that he never expected anyone to do this, or else he wouldn’t have left himself so very open to being exposed as such a fraud.

Part Two >

Vision Forum Ministries to Cease Operations

HA Editorial Team5 Comments

closing

By R.L. Stollar, HA Community Coordinator

Twelve days after Doug Phillips resigned as president of Vision Forum Ministries due to “a lengthy, inappropriate relationship,” the board of the non-profit has stated the organization will be closing.

In a statement dated today, November 11, the Vision Forum Ministries board explains,

In light of the serious sins which have resulted in Doug Phillips’s resignation from Vision Forum Ministries, the Board of Directors has determined that it is in the best interests of all involved to discontinue operations. We have stopped receiving donations, and are working through the logistical matters associated with the closing of the ministry. While we believe as strongly as ever in the message of the ministry to the Christian family, we are grieved to find it necessary to make this decision. We believe this to be the best option for the healing of all involved and the only course of action under the circumstances.

You can view the statement on their website here; we have archived a PDF of the statement here.

According to Julie Anne Smith at Spiritual Sounding Board, this comes “nine months after Phillips stepped down from his pastoral role as ‘teaching elder’ at Boerne Christian Assembly.”

Vision Forum, Inc., the for-profit counterpart to Vision Forum Ministries, has made no similar statement. Their blog post today is an offer to view a World War II film directed by Geoffrey Botkin. As of November 6, Doug Phillips said he “retain[s] ownership of Vision Forum, Inc.” Phillips also said he will continue “serving as a foot soldier.”

While the non-profit Vision Forum Ministries will “discontinue operations,” it is important to note the board “believe[s] as strongly as ever in the message of the ministry.” Indeed, while Phillips has ceased speaking and teaching engagements, the for-profit side of his ministry continues to sell his speeches and his teachings.

How I Lost My Faith — Reflections of God’s Love and the Power of Indoctrination: lungfish’s Story, Part One

HA Editorial Team7 Comments

Part One: Childhood Indoctrination

HA note: The following story is written by lungfish, a formerly homeschooled ex-Baptist, ex-Calvinist, ex-Pentecostal, ex-Evangelical, ex-young earth creationist, current atheist, and admin of the Ask an Ex-Christian web page.

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Also in this series: Part One, Introduction | Part Two, Isolation | Part Three, Rejection | Part Four, Doubt | Part Five, Deconversion | Part Six, Conclusion

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Introduction

“For I am confident of this very thing, that He who began a good work in you will perfect it until the day of Christ Jesus.“  Philippians 1:6

I once called myself a Christian.

I thought I was a child of God among the children of Satan. A shining light in a world of darkness. I was convinced of the absolute truth of the Bible and no amount of human reason could convince me otherwise. I believed the Holy Spirit lived within me, allowing me to be a reflection of Jesus and his love. But, when I finally looked into that reflection, I could not stand what I saw.

Everyday, for more than a year, I sat in the same corner of the cafe at my university for lunch – always facing outward so no one was behind me. Everyone there brought up such an unbearably anger within me – to the point that my muscles would tense into painful spasms and my vision would blur white around the edges. These people never did anything to me, except give the impression of having lived normal lives. My grades began to fall. All I could think about was my past. Memories I had long blacked out began to resurface. I poured over every word in the Bible and every popular Christian belief that I could not reconcile with my own sense of morality. I could not shake the feeling that my entire life had been dedicate to a lie.

I was de-converting.

Christianity sets for its followers impossible standards – so that its people are broken and desperate for the savior it provides. When a Christian truly attempts to desperately live up to those impossible standards, he finds only failure and the feeling that he can never be good enough. But, despite the mental anguish, a believer often remains in the faith because existence in the provided alternative is unimaginable. This is the doctrine of Christianity. This is the life I left behind.

My de-conversion was not voluntary.

I did not go looking to lose my faith. I fought my de-conversion as hard as I could. I had a family, a wife and child. My wife was a Christian. I had brought her to Jesus myself and I didn’t want to lose her by rejecting the very faith that she accepted from me when we were young. But a balloon expanding with air will eventually burst.

This is my story. A story of the unyielding grip that indoctrination held on me.

Childhood Indoctrination: The Baptist Church and Calvinism 

“And if anyone’s name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire.” Revelation 20:15

Indoctrination is defined as the act of programming a doctrine, principle, or ideology: such as religious belief. It is not presented as something you must think about; it is presented as something you must believe. In the case of religion, one’s belief is rewarded by entrance into a heavenly paradise; but failure to believe results in the eternal suffering of the soul in a lake of fire. Religious indoctrination is often forced on a child at the critical age during which the way the child will think, feel, and act for his or her entire life develops. When a child is indoctrinated into a religion, nothing else exists for that child. The mere thought that others can even hold to an alternative faith or belief is completely baffling.

This was Christianity for me.

My faith started at an age much too young to fully understand. Under the desk in the office is where my older brother told me of a place called hell. Tears ran down my face and I begged him for an alternative. Then he told me of heaven and how Jesus, because he was crucified, could save me from this place. This is the first time I accepted Jesus as my savior and my earliest memory.

“You will know them by their fruits. Grapes are not gathered from thorn bushes nor figs from thistles.”  Matthew 7:16

As a toddler, I attended a Baptist church with my mother and brothers. The church was filled mostly by the elderly and fundamental homeschooling families with older children. The culture here was one of strict rules and mistrust of modern medicine and science.

Morality was the center of our being and every move one made was judged harshly.

We believed that it would be observations of our morality, unique in the world, which would bring lost souls to salvation. We were constantly tempted by Satan to sin against God and any momentary weakness could be observed by one of these souls who might then choose to reject God because of our weakness. That person would be sent to hell and it would be our fault. Although, the eventual version of Christianity that I held to was the result of the belief systems of multiple denominations, this is the world I was originally indoctrinated into.

 ”I came to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law and a man’s foes shall be they of his own household.“ Matthew 10:35-36 

My father did not attend church with us. He had de-converted over a verbal argument with a pastor long before I was born. Afraid that my father would turn her children against God, my mother always kept us at arm’s length from him – making sure we knew that he was not a Christian like we were. The tension between my parents was always high and my brothers and I could sense it. We spent most of our time hiding upstairs in in our separate bedrooms trying to distance ourselves from this tension as much as possible.

The sight of my parent’s broken marriage could be escaped, but the sound could not.

Almost nightly the screaming would echo up the stairwell as my mother tried to force her beliefs and sense of morality on my father. I would often lay awake at night crying and praying to God that they would get a divorce so that the screaming would stop; but divorce was against my mother’s religion.

When my parents weren’t fighting, my father escaped into the cyber world of strategy gaming and conspiracy theory forums. While doing so, he demanded quiet. A single noise traveling down the stairs would set him stomping up to ensure the noise did not continue. He never touched us, but, I can still remember being terrified of him to the point that I could not breathe when he came up those stair.

After years at this small Baptist church, my mother began to realize that my brothers and I were the only young people in attendance.

As homeschoolers, our only contact with other people was through church and, as a result, we had no friends. So, we began attending a small mission church in the next town that leaned towards Calvinism.

Unlike our previous church, worship held a joyful tone and the sermons were passionate.  There, at the age of eight, I made my first friend. He was the pastor’s son. He was five years older than me and I saw him as a wise man that I could look up to. He was from the other end of the country and had seen parts of the world I could only dream of. We skied, we biked, and we went on camping trips, talked about life, hobbies, and girls. I also began attending a very small private Christian school in an Evangelical church during this time and came to depend on him for social advice.

After about a year, the mission began losing attendance; so the pastor and his family decided to return to their home church in Florida. A week before their move, I went on one last camping trip with my friend before he had to move thousands of miles away.

There, alone in a tent, my only friend, the pastor’s son, sexually molested me.

That was not the first time I was molested by an older Christian whom I looked up to – so, I thought it was normal. Images of the previous instance are much more vividly burned into my mind. I do not remember how the first came too happened, but I remember who the person was and what he asked of me. These two people told me to never tell anyone – so, I never did.

To be continued.

Ready for Real Life: Part Six, History and Law

HA Editorial Team9 Comments
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Ready for Real Life: Part Six, History and Law

HA note: This series is reprinted with permission from Ahab’s blog, Republic of Gilead. Part Six of this series was originally published on November 3, 2013.

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Also in this series: Part One, Botkins Launch Webinar | Part Two, Ready for What? | Part Three, Are Your Children Ready? | Part Four, Ready to Lead Culture | Part Five, Science and Medicine | Part Six, History and Law | Part Seven, Vocations | Part Eight, Q&A Session | Part Nine, Concluding Thoughts

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In this part of the Botkin’s “Ready for Real Life” webinar, the Botkin family discusses the role of history and law in homeschooling curricula. Much of the webinar focused on teaching children a fundamentalist Christian interpretation of history and law, with obedience to God as a seminal virtue.

At the beginning of “Ready to Lead in the Gates”, Geoffrey Botkin encouraged parents to raise children to be leaders, to “stand at the gates” without shame. At the 1:22 mark, he once again warned homeschooling parents about alleged “enemies” who rage against their efforts. 

“Your children have enemies today. There are a lot of children out there who have enemies they know nothing about. You parents have enemies. The very fact that you’re homeschooling your children is a remarkable statement against the current status quo, and there are people who have special interests in that status quo who really dislike what you’re doing, a lot, and not just a little bit. They’re very vigorously and viciously opposed to what you’re doing.”

Christian homeschoolers have the freedom to give their children a free, generous, and fully-rounded education, according to Geoffrey. A home education should prepare children to serve as leaders in politics, the judiciary, business, media, religious communities, and other realms.

Geoffrey Botkin clearly believes that fundamentalist homeschooling families will have a massive impact on society.

On the 4:39 mark, he shared his vision for Christian homeschool families establishing a thousand-year Christian civilization. 

“Ten, fifteen, twenty years from now, what will history say about the homeschool families of the 21st century? What will they say a hundred years from now? This is my vision, and I want you parents to share it with me. I want historians to say those parents who took the risks, made the sacrifices, laid the foundation for the building of Christian civilization, and that foundation was used by families for a thousand years, that’s what I want them to say. The foundation that you come up with, the things you teach your children, the subject matter, the generous education you give them will be used by families for a thousand years because it showed everyone what the kingdom of Christ looked like and what the tools of civilization were.”

Sadly, he fails to understand that society isn’t morphing into a “Christian civilization”, and that many Americans would reject his dominionism outright. Time for a reality check, Geoffrey, I thought.

Geoffrey celebrated Isidore of Seville, a 7th century archbishop who compiled the Etymologiae, an exhaustive encyclopedia and curriculum Kings, princes, & statesmen who studied from the Etymologiae became nation-builders, Geoffrey said. However, the Etymologiae is out of date, so homeschooling families should reflect on what books and subjects make up their homeschool curricula.

In the Botkin home, Geoffrey explained, children are taught a range of subjects with a scriptural foundation: scriptural literacy, dominion, patriarchy, theonomy, the five solae of the Protestant Reformation, and applying scripture to life. As extensions of this scriptural foundation, the Botkin children are also taught about family life, multigenerational visions, history, the scriptural foundations of civil society, and the free market as an expression of scriptural liberty. To my amusement (and consternation), the Botkins also teach young earth theology and the great flood as a historical event, as Geoffrey explains at the 12:46 mark. 

“We want them to have historical literacy, beginning where history begins in the Bible. Genesis is incredibly important. All through their life, your children are going to run into people who are being tested morally by what they really believe about a young earth and an old earth, and those who side with the old earth theory are moving away from Biblical truth and a Biblical foundation. They’re on shaky ground. The earth is young, and the Bible explains why. They need to know about the worldwide flood, that it really did happen and when it happened.”

At the 14:56 mark, Geoffrey urged parents to teach their children about the relationship between scripture and civil society. America has “walked away” from liberty and justice because it has abandoned the Bible, he claimed. 

“Teach them about civil society and its scriptural foundations and find in the Bible where it talks about this, the law and its scriptural foundations … Liberty — and that doesn’t mean libertinism, which just means every man just gets to do what’s right in his own eyes — and its scriptural foundations, liberty. Liberty and justice are the foundations of the United States experiment, and we’ve walked away from it. Why? Because we’ve walked away from scripture.”

Biblical law serves as the foundation for everything in their homeschooling curriculum, he emphasized, arguing that obedience to Biblical law is the key to all happiness and success in life.

Tell that to ex-fundamentalists who were desperately unhappy, I thought. Tell that to countless people who are happy without Christian fundamentalism.

Biblical law is a delight rather than a burden, he claimed, adding that children will find rest for their souls if they take up the “yoke” of God’s law. On the other hand, if one’s children reject God’s law, they will become “outlaws” and find themselves on the side of the wicked, he warned.

Geoffrey’s son Isaac spoke next, categorizing all law as either natural law, positive law, or God’s law. Isaac claims that Jeremiah 17:9 (“The heart is deceitful above all things”) shows natural law to be insufficient, and that Romans 13 (“the authorities are God’s servants”) shows that positive law is insufficient because civil authorities have a responsibility to God. Ultimately, the purpose of any law is to honor God, and obedience to God’s law will bestow more happiness than any legal system humans could design, Isaac insisted. He elaborated on this at the 19:29 mark.

“Christians need to be able to understand that the purpose of law, whether it’s civil law of a government, or the rules of a church, or the rules of a household — the purpose of those laws are to honor God and his standards so that we can obey him, and we’re not pursing our own happiness, we’re not doing what we think is orderly, we’re actually trying to pursue God’s standards since we know that his law is perfect. And we also know from Psalm 119 that adherence to his law will result in far greater happiness and order than we can ever define on our own sinful human terms.”

Isaac split all law into a false dichotomy between “man’s law” and “God’s law” at the 20:13 mark.

Outrageously, he made no distinctions between democracy, dictatorship, and sharia, arguing that all are “fallen and destructive” vis–à–vis divine law.

“At the end of the day, there’s only two kinds of law. There is God’s law, and there is man’s law. A dictatorship is one man making up his own law. A democracy is a whole bunch of men making up law.Sharia law is one man making up law and ascribing it to a false God. Only God’s law in his revealed word is going to be any different from man’s law … Human law is fallen and destructive, and it’s destructive to the principle of theonomy, which is pursuit of God’s law.”

This kind of oversimplification is dangerous. Dictatorships, Islamic theocracies, and representative democracies are not the same thing! They do not hold their leaders to the same levels of accountability, and they do not afford citizens the same rights.

Isaac Botkin’s oversimplification betrays his ignorance about the ways that governmental systems operate in the real world.

In their haste to glorify laws based on the Bible, the Botkins ignore barbaric laws in the Bible (which themselves were man-made, ironically). I would rather live in an America under the Bill of Rights than one under ancient laws condoning slavery, forced marriage, honor killing, religious persecution, and draconian punishments for trivial offenses. I would rather live in a country that acknowledges the Geneva Convention and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights than one that reduces people to chattel or expendable vermin. This is not to say that the U.S. human rights record is perfect, or that its ideals have been fully realized, only that its secular democracy is far superior to the state outlined in Deuteronomy and Leviticus.

Furthermore, the Botkins’ blind praise for “God’s law” ignores just how dysfunctional Christian theocracies have been throughout history. The European wars of religion following the Protestant Reformation, Savonarola’s Florence, and the Salem witch trials are but a few examples of the flawed results of such ambitions.

David Botkin offered Nazi Germany as an example of a country that did not honor God’s law. He claimed that because Germans feared a communist takeover of Germany, they brought the Nazis to power. When the German people did not want to take responsibility for the results of that election, and thus the Nazis turned the country into a “single-state democracy”. Covetousness lead the Third Reich to invade neighboring countries, while evolutionary thinking resulted in their attempted extermination of other races, he argued. These “national sins” had devastating consequences for Germany, given that God’s laws “will not be mocked”, David reminded listeners. God uses war as a tool of judgment, and World War II cost Nazi Germany dearly.

David Botkin’s history of the Third Reich was littered with problems.

First, I find it ironic that a regime that practiced offensive war and ethnic cleansing would offend a deity who commanded both in the Hebrew Bible. Also, by depicting Nazi Germany as a country in rebellion against God, David ignored the fact that Germany was solidly Christian during the Third Reich, and that some Nazis wove Christianity into Nazi ideology. Nazi racism, not evolution, produced the Holocaust, with earlier Christian anti-Semitism setting the stage for Nazi racial policy. Finally, David’s notion of “national sin” is problematic, as not all Germans were equally accountable for the Third Reich’s atrocities. What about Germans who actively resisted the Nazis? What about the White Rose activists, the Rosenstrasse protesters, the German “Righteous Among the Nations”, and other Germans who struggled against the Nazis? The idea that World War II was the Botkins’ God punishing innocent and guilty alike is one I reject.

Geoffrey Botkin echoed his son’s statements, telling listeners that all people and nations are subject to God’s law. At the 25:33 mark, he warned that terrifying cosmic judgment awaits those who disobey God. 

“All men in all nations are equal before the law of God, and it’s binding. It’s binding on the Jews, it’s binding on the Christians, it’s binding on the gentiles, it’s binding on every single nation. The Lord held Nineveh accountable, and Tyre and Sodom. They were all accountable to God’s law, and that’s why he ultimately had to judge them because they wouldn’t turn, they wouldn’t repent, they wouldn’t submit themselves and make themselves subject.

Now, one reason that the Lord allows you to have several years with their children is so they can understand this fact. They are not allowed, and parents, you’re not allowed, and your children need to see that the parents are not allowed to go their own way. They have to obey the Lord in the way that they raise up their families. Daddies, you have to submit to the authority of God Almighty, and wives are required, yes, to submit to the husbands, and this is why husbands, you really need to set this example and show that you literally, you are willing to lose your life in submission to the Lord’s authority, and you’re willing to lay your life down for your wife.”

Geoffrey returned to the study of history, slamming education reformers such as Harold Rugg and John Dewey as “historical revisionists”.

At the 29:00 mark, he poured his wrath on Rugg and Dewey, accusing them of hating history, time, and eternity (!?).

“Rebellions men like Harold Rugg and John Dewey and the other men who were getting the funds together to rewrite all the textbooks, they hate the past because it is providential. That means God was in charge. God was decreeing everything. Because of that, it’s full of meaning. And rebels hate the future because it is unpredictable and uncontrollable. They hate time because it’s limited and it reminds them of their appointment with death, and they hate eternity because they cannot control it or they can’t access it on their terms. And so rebellious men like Harold Rugg seek to make God and Christ remote from the present by abstracting them from the past and the future. That’s why they mess up history. They seek ways to manipulate history by denying Providence and manipulating other men. Your children simply need to know this.”

David Botkin chimed in, stressing the importance of finding sound, accurate history books. At the 34:13 mark, he claimed that some books sugar-coat history, but he provided no examples of books that do so. 

“History also teaches us about the sinful nature of men apart from Christ. As we read sound histories, we learn about what the real world is really like … There’s some historians that try to clean up history and remove some of the wickedness. They paint the world as a happy place where there’s no real bad guys, or at worst, just confused people that make some bad decisions, and if you fall victim to this theory of history, it will warp and destroy your ability to really understand the world we live in. I’d like to give you an example. Stalin, in some history books, becomes a nice man with a mustache that’s just trying to save the Russian peasants and stop the mean Germans.”

Victoria Botkin offered guidance on teaching history to homeschooled children, arguing that parents and children learning about history together is the best strategy. She claimed that she knew nearly nothing about history when she began homeschooling, a result of her public school education.

To be fair, Victoria had some positive advice for parents teaching their children history.

For example, she reminded listeners that all history authors have their own perspective, and since none are perfectly objective, it’s important to read several books on a particular topic in history. Unfortunately, she also espoused her family’s beliefs about God in history, ascribing historical events to God’s will. For instance, she claimed that the retreat of “pagan” Mongol invaders in Europe and the failure of the Spanish Armada were God’s judgment against them and a deliverance for Christians.

The Botkins spent the remainder of the webinar discussing the role of economics (complete with a defense of the free market and jabs at the federal reserve) and military history in homeschool curricula. Geoffrey recapped with a discussion of God’s authority, a father’s authority within the family, and the importance of teaching the Bible to children.

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This part of the Botkins’ “Ready for Real Life” webinar contained the following themes:

  • Hierarchy and obedience: The Botkins’ understand the world as a hierarchy, with children submitting to parents, wives submitting to husbands, and governments submitting to God. 
  • God’s law as the ideal root of all law: The Botkins believe that all valid law must honor God and stem from scripture. Governments and legal systems not rooted in the Bible were framed as inferior at best and defiant at worst. Unjust elements of scriptural law were ignored.
  • History as a cosmic story: The Botkins, like other fundamentalist homeschooling voices, attribute historical events to divine intervention. History, in their eyes, is a record of divine intervention, as well as how humans obey or reject God across civilizations. In doing so, they shoehorn history into a narrow narrative, oversimplifying history and ignoring the complex causes of historical events.

Stay tuned for the next partI!

*****

To be continued.

The Stones You Cast, The Tables You Built

HA Editorial Team32 Comments

By R.L. Stollar, HA Community Coordinator

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Jesus bent down and started to write on the ground with his finger. When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, “Let any one of you who never left the path be the first to throw a stone at her.” Again he stooped down and wrote on the ground. At this, those who heard began to go away one at a time, the older ones first, until only Jesus was left, with the woman still standing there. Jesus straightened up and asked her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?” “No one, sir,” she said. “Then neither do I condemn you,” Jesus declared. “Go now and no longer wander.”

*****

It’s a tale as old as time.

A Christian leader falls from grace. For the first time ever, people feel free to talk openly about disagreements they had all along but were too afraid to voice. But the freedom is short-lived. The Eighth Chapter of the Gospel of John is dropped like a noose around their necks. That one verse about casting stones, that verse of grace and freedom, it is twisted into the heaviest gag order by the very Pharisees it was meant to condemn.

We saw this last week when Doug Phillips resigned due to an affair. It took but a few hours before John 8 started dropping like the bass in a dubstep song. “We’re all sinners!” “You’re not better than him!” “Forgive and forget!”

“Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone!”

It’s funny — how quickly invitations to grace become commands to obey. How platitudes pretend to say one thing but really mean something else. That what these phrases are meant to imply is not reflection and forgiveness but that, for some reason, “all have fallen short” means “STFU already.”

It’s funny, too, that this verse — of all verses — has become an order to shut up. This, a verse where a bunch of men were literally about to throw stones at a woman’s face until it broke like a pumpkin and her brains splattered on the ground. The verse whereby Jesus condemns the religious power structures and the hypocritical religious leaders. The moment where he stands up for a powerless individual about to be brutally bludgeoned to death by the insular self-righteousness of the People Who Knew It All and Had Everything Together.

I do not think we fully appreciate the situation.

I do not think we appreciate that this woman was probably all too aware of her own-shortcomings, was terrified and shaking because this group of men, this group of People Who Know the Right Way, was more than happy — giddy, even — to condemn her. They were probably shaking their heads to make a public scene, saying “If only she didn’t leave her father’s umbrella of protection…” Yet deep down, they could not wait to dig a hole in the ground, bury her in it up to her neck, and throw sharp rocks at her head until her blood soaked into the sand.

But that day Jesus stood against Privilege. That day he stood for the woman, for the one who broke the Almighty Law, for the one who needed a safe place.

Yet you, you who spit John 8 in our faces, you demand silence.

You demand a quick and sudden forgiveness. You want to put Doug Phillips in the place of the woman. Doug Phillips, the one who was standing there all along calling the woman a Feminist and a Liberal and a Female Blogger, the one who built an industry and an empire around Casting the First Stone. And you want us to imagine the woman was the Pharisee. That the woman, nursing her wounds from being dragged to Jesus by her hair, has no right to speak. That, unless she remains silent, you will drag her right back before Jesus and repeat the Pharisees’ lines.

Perhaps you don’t get the irony here, but if there is a metaphor here, it is that we who are calling Phillips out are the ones who have spent our lives being dragged by our hair before Jesus. Being dragged by you. We don’t have stones to throw because you’ve held them our entire life.

We never said we were without sin because, oh don’t you worry, you made sure we knew that.

We aren’t perfect. Oh god we aren’t perfect. We know that because you beat it into our skin and you burned it in our ears and you raped it into our souls.

Our imperfections surround us like scattered pieces of a Tinkertoy set. They stretch on for miles and they are all we learned to see.

But today we realize we are more than what we are not. We realize that when you say, “Don’t cast the first stone,” you mean, “Get back in line.” Sorry, but you can go find new soldiers. We will not cast stones — we will learn to forgive — but we will do it on our own time and we will make our own paths.

And sure, we are angry. We are angry because legalism and hypocrisy hurts. Our anger is ok. If we do not feel, we can never truly forgive.

We have a right to be angry.

We have a right to weep and to cry and to mourn because of pain.

We have a right to rejoice when oppressors fall.

And we have a right to call your bullshit. We will never grow and we will never learn to love better unless we learn to say, “That is wrong and that hurts and please, please stop.”

If you think speaking truth to power is casting stones, you need go back to the drawing board.

So don’t tell us we have stones in our hands when you carry sacks of stones on your back, when you trained us to lift them for you and carry them into the future and throw them into the faces of the people you taught us were the enemies. You drew the lines in the sand. You trained us to see threats instead of people, to see sinners instead of brothers, to see lust instead of sisters.

We all have logs in our eyes. But we don’t build industries around our logs like you do.

If we threaten your bottom line, if we call your idols into question, if we melt your golden calves and dance like David in their shimmering puddles while we reclaim our lost youth, it’s on you whether you will listen or pick up stones. And if all you want to do is put your fingers in your eyes and scream “Lalala! Don’t cast stones! I can’t hear you!” so be it.

But don’t play stupid.

You cast the stones. You cast so many stones they formed a fortress from which you made an empire. You took those stones and constructed tables and placed those tables in your homeschooling temples.

And we will keep overturning those tables.

We will keep overturning the tables made from the stones you cast.

Ready for Real Life: Part Five, Science and Medicine

HA Editorial Team13 Comments
Screen Shot 2013-11-02 at 1.15.43 AM

Ready for Real Life: Part Five, Science and Medicine

HA note: This series is reprinted with permission from Ahab’s blog, Republic of Gilead. Part Five of this series was originally published on October 26, 2013.

*****

Also in this series: Part One, Botkins Launch Webinar | Part Two, Ready for What? | Part Three, Are Your Children Ready? | Part Four, Ready to Lead Culture | Part Five, Science and Medicine | Part Six, History and Law | Part Seven, Vocations | Part Eight, Q&A Session | Part Nine, Concluding Thoughts

*****

In this part of the “Ready for Real Life” webinar, the Botkin family discusses the roles that science, nature, and medicine play in Christian homeschooling. While the Botkins spoke warmly of these fields, their words betrayed a distrust of evidence and scientific communities at odds with their beliefs.

Geoffrey Botkins encouraged parents to share things that delight them about science and nature with their children, such as a close-up of an owl’s eye that he saw in National Geographic.

Children must not be afraid of studying science, he said, celebrating parents who encourage children to think about science.

He cited a prayer attributed David in Psalm 28:3-5, which condemns those who “have no regard for the deeds of the Lord and what his hands have done”. The passage warns that God “will tear them down and never build them up again” as punishment for their “wicked” ways. Geoffrey warned that God will similarly punish those who are indifferent to creation at the 3:18 mark.

“If you’ve noticed people in this culture that we live in in the United States who literally have decided that they will not trouble themselves to think about the works of the Lord, including themselves, they don’t want to admit that they’ve been created by the Creator, and so they don’t want to think about the implications of the works of the Lord all around them being of the Lord, nor the deeds of his hands. And what we see here from scripture is that the intimate Lord God almighty does deal with people on a very personal basis. He will tear them down and not build them up.”

As with his previous webinar, Botkin threatened impious people with divine wrath. For all his warm words about learning, his ideology is firmly rooted in fear of divine retribution. A fear-based ideology is unlikely to produce critical thinking skills or genuine wonder, which makes Botkin’s words all the more ironic.

As with previous webinars, Geoffrey Botkin began the talk with a prayer. He beseeched God to help them recognize God as the creator and humans as the created, to avoid worshiping the creation over the creator, to understand the truths in creation, and to comprehend God’s will so that humans can take dominion.

I paused when I heard Geoffrey pray that people avoid worshiping the creation over the creator. An inaccurate fundamentalist myth about environmentalists is that they allegedly worship Earth and neglect God.

Was Geoffrey taking a veiled jab at environmentalism?

Studying the sciences gave the Botkin children mental agility and breadth, Geoffrey proudly told listeners. Study of the sciences equips children with tools for life, including honed powers of observation and mental acuity, he said.

Noah Botkin, one of Geoffrey and Victoria’s sons, stressed that the sciences are a tool to aid humans in obeying God and exercising dominion. At the 8:16 mark, Noah disparaged scientists who allegedly see their craft as a means of glorifying the human mind.

“You read a lot of secular sources … you’re forced to read a lot of papers by men who aren’t Christians, and a lot of these scientists believe that the study of science is simply an exercise in glorifying the human mind. The attitude of them is just, ‘let us see how far we can go to exercise our own intelligence and see just how good we are.’ And that’s wrong. Christians need to understand science as a tool. It needs to be thought of as a tool. The purpose of science is to assist us in obeying God’s commandments, and the study of science is an avenue that we can take in order to learn about the glory of God’s systems, the systems that he’s designed. The world is a system that he’s created and designed. And so, the application of this scientific study augments our ability to obey God’s commandments, to fulfill the dominion mandate and the great commission.”

Geoffrey Botkin emphasized that Jesus exerts dominion over all things, so humans should learn about their creator by studying everything he has created. Parents are to remind children that they will not take dominion someday for themselves, but for Jesus, Geoffrey reminded his audience.

Christians are to take dominion in Jesus’ name so as “to bring order to the world the way he wants it to be ordered,” he said.

Geoffrey waxed poetic about cells as miniature galaxies unto themselves, and about the movement of nutrients from the soil into plants into humans and back to the soil. The world is a harmonious global ecosystem created by God, he explained, not a hostile setting that humans must struggle against.

Doesn’t he mean a harmonious global biosphere, the sum total of Earth’s ecosystems? I thought. As for Earth not being hostile, a few million survivors of hurricanes, earthquakes, mudslides, floods, volcanic eruptions, epidemics, and famines would disagree!

Geoffrey’s wife, Victoria Botkin, caricatured public school science classes as meaningless courses that depict the universe as random and meaningless. At the 15:57 mark, she painted an ugly picture of public school science courses.

“Those of us who went to public school often have a hard time knowing how to think about science because to us, it’s a school subject, right? It’s like band and gym class, science class. Well, most kids in public school hated science class, and that’s because in public school, we learned that science was bunch of facts about stuff that happened at random and for no reason. And we public school kids may have not been very smart, but we were sure smart enough to realize that stuff that happened at random and for no reason was meaningless and therefore boring and a waste of our time. We could see, maybe, that there were patterns in nature that were amazing, and maybe we could see things under a microscope that were beautiful and astonishing, but if we could see this, it was really frustrating because it didn’t mean anything.” 

This was emphatically not my experience of sciences classes in public school.

I look back on my high school chemistry and Earth sciences classes with fondness, because the teachers made science both fun and relevant. For example, my Earth science course did not present the natural world as a pandemonium of random occurrences, but an intricate web of cause, effect, and interconnection. To boot, students learned about the real-world consequences of environmental policies, fossil fuel use, overpopulation, and shrinking resources, so our class content was anything but meaningless. Victoria Botkin may have drudged through class because of a poor science teacher, an inadequate science curriculum, or her own indifference, but her experiences are not representative of all public school students!

Victoria claimed that mothers who attended public schools are often ill-equipped to teach their children science. At the 17:42 mark, she discouraged mothers from using mainstream textbooks, lest they “infect” their children with the same “faulty” thinking.

“Moms who went to public school have a hard time understanding how to teach science, and in fact, we have a hard time even understanding what science is. And so, if our state’s laws say that we’re supposed to do a unit of science this semester, we think, ‘well, okay, now what?’, and we buy a science textbook, and if we do that, we’re going to infect our children with the same faulty way of thinking.”

Victoria defined science at the study of the created world, how it works, and how the creatures therein interaction. Deuteronomy 6 commands parents to teach their children to love God and honor his ways, she argued, and that command should be at the core of everything homeschooling parents teach, including science.

The Bible states that teaching science can help children love God, she insisted. Victoria quoted Deuteronomy 30:19, in which heaven and earth counsel humans to honor God, as well as Psalm 19:1-6, in which the skies reveal knowledge in the form of astronomy. The fact that the books of the Bible were composed centuries before the advent of modern science, and thus do not embody scientific principles, seemed to have escaped her.

At the 21:32 mark, Victoria lambasted non-fundamentalist scientists as “enemies of God” because they are allegedly trying to disprove God’s existence.

She gave no examples of scientists who are allegedly trying to do so, however, condemning them en masse as warriors in the “war for men’s minds and hearts”.

“I guess it should come as no surprise to us — since we know that there is a war of ideas on, a war for men’s minds and hearts — that scientists have taken that which testifies that God is, and that he is good, and they have twisted it to try to prove that there is no God, and in a way this makes sense that the enemies of God would do this because the study of God’s creation, which is what science is, is one of our best tools and one of our best allies for teaching our children to love and revere God.”

Geoffrey Botkin addressed a listener question about teaching science on a budget. He replied that he’d known families who realized that public school wasn’t an option, and who strove to give their children a better education than what “government schools” could offer. Libraries, access to books, and talking with children about science were vital in those families, Geoffrey explained.

Isaac Botkin, one of Geoffrey and Victoria’s sons, discussed Christian homeschooler’s reticence around evolution, stressing the need for Christians to fight evolution through science. What fundamentalists were supposed to do if science supported evolution was not explored.

Considering that scientific evidence supports evolution, good luck with that, I thought.If fundamentalists cite the pseudoscience they’ve relied on so far, I’m not worried.

In true fundamentalist form, Isaac trotted out tired stereotypes about evolution, eugenics, and racism at the 28:40 mark.

“There is a lot of skepticism in the homeschoolers’ approach to science in a lot of ways, and I think a lot of that is reactionism. It’s fear of studying books or resources that mention evolution, and this is a really good fear to have, because the evolutionary thought, the concept of Darwinism is itself incredibly destructive, and it’s something that we need to fight by studying science well. You can’t fight bad ideas with no ideas. You can’t fight bad information with ignorance. And it’s incredibly important that children understand that they can see God’s hand in God’s creation by studying science, but it’s also important that they understand that they need to be able to refute the enemies of Gods who will deny God’s work in creation, and there’s dozens of reasons for this. There are reasons in scripture that describe that, but there’s also the practical reason that evolutionary thought is incredibly destructive. It’s one of the many driving forces between the eugenics movement. It’s something that supports racism, that supports social Darwinism, that supports socialism.”

Geoffrey Botkin elaborated on his son’s statement, encouraging listeners to take a “bold stand” against “false science and pseudoscience”. He mocked Charles Darwin as “not a real naturalist, he was a a fantasy naturalist, really, and came up with fantasy theories for his own personal theology that was just readily received by everyone.”

Elizabeth Botkin spoke at length about science education for girls, arguing that both sexes are responsible for dominion and thus require a science background. At the 31:33 mark, she claimed that girls and women can help men exercise dominion.  

“It’s very easy to think that these are guy things … and to think that our role will never require us to know any of these things. That’s because often, we girls have actually assigned ourselves a role as women that’s a lot smaller than the role the Bible gives us, and we think, ‘Oh, well we’ll never have to be involved in invention or engineering or exploration, because our job is to do the dishes and the sewing’, and we let ourselves off easy. And it’s because, I believe, we’ve forgotten the dominion mandate, which involves invention, exploration, classification, cultivation, and discovery, was assigned to the man and the woman, and the great commission of discipling all the nations was assigned to men and women, and though there are very definitely differences between the Biblical role of man and the Biblical role of women, the lines between those roles are not drawn so much by activity as they are by jurisdiction and hierarchy. And so, yes, there are certain roles and jobs that are off-limits to women, the Bible says very clearly, but when it comes to what we’re allowed to help our men do, the field is really as wide as the earth itself.”

Elizabeth elaborated at the 33:57 mark, arguing that girls need science education to help men and teach children.

“If we never have to do more than wear modest clothes, cook good meals, keep the house clean and decorated, then it’s true. That doesn’t require a super-vigorous education. But if a girl is going to grow up to help a man make disciples of the nations and teach her children to do the same, and be a highly skilled and productive Proverbs 31 woman, she needs a very vigorous education, including in all the sciences.”

I was stunned. The Christian Patriarchy Movement restricts women to confined roles, but Elizabeth accuses girls and women of assigning themselves a small role. Furthermore, as much as Elizabeth tries to obscure it, she cannot avoid the fact that her subculture denies women career opportunities in the sciences. The best a woman can hope for is being “allowed” to help her men with scientific pursuits (between cooking, cleaning, homeschooling a huge brood of children, and recuperating from repeated pregnancies, of course). That’s assuming that the men in her life have any interest in science. The idea that a woman could be more than a subordinate helper to her father or husband, that a woman could be a science leader in her own right, did not occur to Elizabeth.

Elizabeth should learn more about female scientists in recent history.

The world has made great strides thanks to the efforts of women like Rachel Carson, Jane Goodall, Wangari Maathai, Vandana Shiva, Grace Hopper, Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, Gertrude B. Elion, Nancy Roman, Vera Rubin, Rosalind Franklin, Christiane Nusslein-Volhard, and Elizabeth Blackburn, just for starters. These women changed the world by breaking barriers, striving for excellence, and working alongside their male colleagues as equals. Had these scientists been content to be men’s subordinate helpers, the world would have never benefited from their genius.

Anna Sophia Botkin praised female scientists of the past such as Ada Byron and Marie Curie, describing how they worked alongside their fathers, husbands, and male friends. At the 35:30 mark, she wondered why more homeschooled girls don’t pour themselves into science and technology.

Because your subculture grinds their self-esteem into dust? I thought.

“You’ve got to wonder why is it that homeschool girls today are not doing any of these things. We see a lot of girls who are pursuing small handcrafts but not these bigger, dominion-oriented things. But there’s really no reason why they couldn’t be using their gifts for design and fine detail processing, for example, to do web design or graphic design instead of scrapbooking and kitting. There’s nothing in the Bible that says that we have to use a sewing machine and not a skill saw. There’s nothing that says that you have to make hand-knitted tea cozies and not furniture or robotic arms. There’s nothing that says that the woman’s job is to clean the house but not to build it.”

Anna Sophia’s comments troubled me, and not just because of her mirthless chuckles sprinkled throughout.

Anna and Elizabeth seem to believe that females in their subculture deliberately limit themselves to lesser roles, ignoring how Christian Patriarchy suppresses females through sexism. They also seem to think that girls and women have boundless time and energy for scientific pursuits, ignoring ways that endless household chores, child care, homeschooling, and health problems from repeated pregnancies can constrain girls and women in their subculture. In the Christian Patriarchy Movement, females can’t win.

Geoffrey Botkin offered advice to families with sons looking into careers in medicine. (The idea that daughters might do so was not considered.) He warned that modern medicine is a broken system, having been hijacked by “special interests”. For example, Sen. Ted Kennedy advocated for “nationalized medicine schemes” in the 1970s, he lamented, with Hillary Clinton and President Obama continuing those efforts in the decades after. “Doctors are now agents of the security state system,” Geoffrey claimed, in keeping with his prior statements about alleged “statism”. Society need doctors, but it also need to reform the medical system, and thus sons may need to work outside the system as reformers or independent professionals. Geoffrey encouraged an independent, self-policing medical system with its own private licensing, private insurance options, and private medical education.

All this struck me as problematic. Self-policing isn’t a reliable way of keeping organizations accountable. To address and prevent wrongdoing, policing needs to come from without as well as within an institution. Furthermore, if Geoffrey Botkin believes that the mainstream medical establishment is corrupt, how would an alternative medical establishment avoid the alleged pitfalls of its predecessor?

The Botkins’ disdain for the Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. Obamacare) was evident.

Geoffrey took delight in new technology and its potential for helping people detach from the Obamacare system. His son Isaac blasted Obamacare as well, claiming that it would give patients fewer opportunities for care. In such a world, people need to be informed about medical care, requiring scientific knowledge.

Finally, I was confused by Geoffrey Botkin’s contradictory advice on how to approach the science community. At the 1:08:47 mark, he urged listeners to “engage this century” by being leaders in science.

“We have to engage our generation. We have to engage this century. We need some students who really go far in these sciences so that they can be leaders, and they can understand the science. They don’t have to be followers. They can be leaders.”

On the other hand, he disparaged higher education as a “setback” for homeschooled students. At the 1:09:05 mark, he warned that college could alleged set students back, and that higher science professions could “compromise” or “enslave” them.

“You have to be so careful about throwing your children into a university environment to get certain qualifications that literally could trap them. For most people who go to university for other non-scientific, non-engineering pursuits, college is a real setback. You don’t really want to be training your children or getting your children ready for that. It will truly set them back for the 21st century. But what about these more precise, heavy science obligations that we’re facing? The students need to be extremely careful not to compromise themselves to be enslaved to any of these higher professions — bioscience, in medicine, in medical research. They have to be very careful.”

The contrast between the two statements baffled me. He encouraged young people to become leaders in their fields, then warned them against university educations and high-powered science professions.

Did Geoffrey Botkin want young professionals to engage the world of science or not?

*****

Despite their ostensible respect for science, nature, and medicine, the Botkins’ ideology prevents them from fully engaging with those fields. (This meme comes to mind…) Part IV of the “Ready for Real Life” webinar contained themes of poor science, sexism, and disdain for the scientific community at large.

  • Flawed approach to science: The Botkins assume that their inerrant interpretation of scripture is true, using science to justify those faith-based assumptions. Evidence that could undermine their beliefs is ignored or scorned. This is a mockery of legitimate science, which tests hypotheses against observed evidence, rejecting or modifying hypotheses not supported by evidence.
  • Science and medicine careers as male domains: In the Botkin’s eyes, leadership roles in science and medicine are reserved for men. Geoffrey Botkin spoke of sons (but not daughters) seeking our medical careers. Elizabeth Botkin relegated females to subordinate roles as men’s helpers. In doing so, the Botkins discouraging females from becoming leaders in science and medicine.
  • Distrust and disengagement from the scientific community: For all his talk of engaging the 21st century world, Geoffrey Botkins advocated for disengagement from higher learning and the science community. Geoffrey Botkin discouraged students from attending universities, calling university education a “setback”. Furthermore, he encouraged Christians to work outside the mainstream medical establishment, ignoring the cutting edge research and promising careers it offers (for all its flaws).The Botkins also mocked and caricatured non-fundamentalist science professionals. For instance, Victoria Botkin derided non-fundamentalist scientists as “enemies of God” for allegedly trying to disprove God’s existence. Noah Botkin also dismissed non-Christian scientists for “glorifying the human mind”. Geoffrey Botkin sneered at Charles Darwin, attacking him as a “fantasy naturalist”.

Stay tuned for the next part of the “Ready for Real Life” webinar series!

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To be continued.

When Did Homeschooling and Parental Rights Mean Anti-Gay?

HA Editorial Team3 Comments

Original photo posted on Michael Farris' Facebook page here: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=468390293258668&set=a.351585204939178.76024.351012244996474&type=1
Original photo posted on Michael Farris’ Facebook page here: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=468390293258668&set=a.351585204939178.76024.351012244996474&type=1

HA note: The following is reprinted with permission from Kathryn Brightbill’s blog The Life and Opinions of Kathryn Elizabeth, Person. It was originally published on October 2, 2013.

Well, I guess it was too much to hope for that Farris et al. would speak out against the egregious threat to the rights of gay parents in Russia. When a concerned former homeschooler asked him about it on his Facebook page, he pretty much blew her off by saying that because it wasn’t a homeschooling issue he wouldn’t do anything.

Funny though, how he doesn’t have the time and isn’t willing to take the effort to speak out against the proposed legislation in Russia to take children away from gay parents, but he did find time to be at the launch of Trail Life. Trail Life, for the uninitiated, is the organization that just formed as an alternative to the Boy Scouts. To be precise, it was founded as an alternative by those who do not like it that the Boy Scouts is no longer kicking children out of the Scouts for being gay. Note, the Boy Scouts still does not allow anyone over 18 to be involved with scouting if they’re gay, but that’s not enough for the Trail Life folks.

If you’re not kicking kids to the curb if they come out, you’re caving into the pressures of the amoral left.

Source: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=468390293258668&set=a.351585204939178.76024.351012244996474&type=1
Source: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=468390293258668&set=a.351585204939178.76024.351012244996474&type=1

Again, let me remind you, no time to speak out against Russia wanting to take gay parents’ children away since it’s not homeschooling related, but plenty of time to go help launch a group that differentiates itself from the Boy Scouts by targeting children in the culture war. Yes, that’s what they’re doing.

They’re putting kids in the cross hairs of the culture wars. It’s kids who are going to get booted out of Trail Life, it’s kids who they want to get booted out of the Boy Scouts. Kids.

Not surprisingly, Farris has a bit of a persecution complex about all of this. Here’s the relevant conversation from the comments on his post.

farris2

Two things here. The first is that as a K-12 homeschooler and homeschool graduate, I’m tired of the media treating Michael Farris as if he speaks for all homeschoolers. He doesn’t. He certainly does not speak for me.

The second is this. When Michael Farris talks about “the homosexual community and their elitist friends and the courts,” he’s painting this as an us versus them battle between his band of conservative Christians on one hand and the aforementioned homosexual community and their elitist friends and the court on the other. He is mistaken. There is no us versus them. There is only “we.”

Not just “we” in the abstract, “We the People,” sense either. “We” as in, the people his movement is fighting against aren’t some “other.”

Mr. Farris, we are you—

—your family members, the kids who sang in the church choir and went to AWANA every week, who were trusted to babysit for other homeschoolers because we were part of the community, the homeschool kids who listened when you said that we were the generation who would change America.

You’re fighting so hard, but you aren’t fighting for liberty, you are fighting to deny liberty to people who are not so different from you.

Mr. Farris, it was your con law book for homeschoolers that inspired me as a teenager to want to go to law school.

I listened to you when you said that homeschoolers were going to change the country and I believed it. If I’m some activist elite, Mr. Farris, it’s because you and the homeschool movement created me. When I worked on an amicus brief in Perry and Windsor, it was because of the seeds you planted in me to go to law school.

We are not others, this is not us versus them, and it never has been, no matter how much you try to make it that way.

Silent No Longer: Lani Harper’s Story, Part Two

HA Editorial Team14 Comments

Screen Shot 2013-11-02 at 8.01.15 PM

HA note: The author’s name has been changed to ensure anonymity. “Lani Harper” is a pseudonym.

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Trigger warning: graphic descriptions of physical abuse.

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< Part One

He closed the door behind us, and told me to pull my pants down and bend over as he dramatically pulled his belt out of the beltloops of his pants. Disobedience was not an option and would most certainly grant me a far worse session with the belt, so I pulled my pants down. Sometimes my mother would let us leave our underwear on, but JD never did. Once I tried to wear double underwear, anything to help dull the blows a bit, but got found out and the reprisal was so severe that I never did it again.

But for JD, all our beatings were naked from the waist down, and if we were wearing a dress, then we were totally naked.

I stood half bent over, holding the edge of the bed, while his mountainous bulk shadowed me from the ceiling light. And braced myself for what was to come. No amount of bracing kept me from stumbling to keep my stance, to keep from falling over. I was a small child and he used all his substantial force to emphasize every strike. Though my legs trembled violently and could barely hold me up, I knew that falling over meant starting over.

With each strike, I was to count out loud. I tried to order my wobbly tongue and quavering jaw to speak clearly enough that I wouldn’t have to begin again, but inevitably I cried and he could not understand me. This meant restarting multiple times, and his frustration when I lost track of where I was. The numbers I pictured in my mind wouldn’t stay still. In the middle somewhere, overcome with humiliation, anger, frustration and other emotions I could not name, I urinated. And prayed that my underwear and culottes tangled around my ankles would absorb the warm liquid, prayed that my socks would catch any straggling drips, prayed that it would not wet the carpet beneath my feet.

I gripped the end of their comforter so hard that I made fists in spite of the fabric in my palms. Gripped harder and harder so as to resist the powerful instinct to raise my hand to shield my bare behind. But I had done that before too, and not only did my arm get the brunt of a lash or two, but I had to begin all over again, ensuring the beating lasted longer.

Hot saltiness tumbled down my cheeks until I was almost gagging on my tears, combined with the warmth of urine down my leg, and the all-encompasingness of my humiliation threatened to drown me.

Indeed, I prayed for death in those moments.

I seem to remember 18 being the magic number, though the number changed every time. This, I guess, so that we would always be wondering, and he would always be in control. I was never sure when exactly he would decide I’d had enough.

When he was finished, he made me recite a verse or two while pulling my clothes back on with trembling fingers. There was a lecture about how how this was his God-given duty to show love to me and help me become less sinful, that I deserved more, worse and should be thankful, that this was hard and he didn’t like it but it was necessary and in my best interests.

Then he would duct tape my mouth shut, a concrete reminder that I was never to say anything to anyone.

My mouth was now shut, and I knew I was to keep the tape on all night, during my sleep. Now go clean yourself up, hurled at me with disgust in his voice.

I did not get to finish my half-eaten meal, but was sent still-hungry to clean up the table and kitchen. I did not regret not being made to sit down, but moving was difficult. My sister Andie was to help me, both to ensure that the job was completed properly and also so that I didn’t sneak scraps off plates to try to ease my hunger. Anyway, the tape over my mouth prevented further eating. Her eyes burned compassion into me whenever I dared look at her.

My mother actually told me after one beating that I would not remember these episodes and that if I did, it meant I was bitter. I remember thinking that I was okay with that because I did not want to forget what she had done to me and how much I hated her in that moment.

I always walked out of The Bedroom with newly-kindled anger and hatred at my parents.

The bruises stayed for weeks, but often there would be another beating before the bruises from the previous incident had completely healed such that my skin was a mottled mess of yellow and green old wounds mixed with the bright red-purple of the new welts. The frumpy, blousy style of the early 80s, combined with the mandated-loose clothing of the fundamental churches actually worked to my benefit: I could hide my wounds, though even the softest cloths chafed my swollen, cracked and oozing skin.

And always, on the way out, he would say, remember, what happens in The Bedroom stays in The Bedroom, and what happens in This House stays in This House. And he would send me away with the knowledge that he was watching and all-knowing, that he would know if I told even my siblings, which would result in another lesson. We were never allowed to comfort each other, though there were a few hasty, whispered words to the newly-beaten one in the dark of our room.

We did not dare hug.

I cried myself to sleep, fiercely dashing the tears from my cheeks, attempting to wipe them away before they sogged the adhesive and loosened it from my skin. I had to be able to show him my still-taped mouth first thing in the morning. After a while, we stole tape so that we could remove the tape while we slept, then replace it in the morning.

The Pearls published their book about the time I graduated from high school, but my parents had been using their methods, espoused by Jack Hyles and Lester Roloff at the time, from our infancy in the late 1970s. Contrary to what the Pearls, Gary Ezzo, Jack Hyles and others who espouse this way of rearing children believe, this expectation of a surface appearance or semblance of obedience actually works against the parents who use it: in our family, it created bitter children adept at hiding their bitterness. It created strife and hardened our hearts (that they thought they were softening) against our parents: we hated them.

It created a subversive culture of deeply angry children with secretive, ignored and repressed anger, who lashed out at each other because we could not lash out at our parents. It created a culture of blind obedience instead of teaching us how to make good and informed decisions. It ignored the fact that we would grow up and move out, and kept us in this perpetual childhood for longer than is natural. As a result, I spent much of my twenties figuring out things and growing personally in ways I should have been able to during my teen years. Finding indpendence and autonomy, discovering my authority and my rights that were denied me.

It wasn’t until I had children that I realized spanking isn’t hard, it is easy.

It is easy to hit, and once you have begun a habit of hitting, the next hitting episode comes easier and easier until it’s rote, instinctual, without thought, automatic. Hitting is also a gateway to anger: the more I hit my kids, the angrier I became and the easier it was to become angry. I recognized this very early, while my kids were still very little, but though they were nothing as severe as my own beatings as a child (three swats with a spoon while clothed), I regret every episode of spanking them.

I do not remember my last beating, though they continued in much the same fashion until I was sixteen. I still remember the humiliation and ferocious anger at being violated on the outside by the beating and on the inside by the changes they sought to force into us, by the association to God and spirituality. It affects me decades later and has thus shaped my views on everything from parenting to God to spirituality, to self-worth and more.

I got out without really knowing what I was running from or why…and was shunned, but that’s a story for another time. Decompressing and deprogramming continue into the present, but I hope that telling my stories will begin to dispell the power my parents and their secrets still hold over me.

My name is Lani Harper, and I am a survivor.

Ready for Real Life: Part Four, Ready to Lead Culture

HA Editorial Team33 Comments
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Ready for Real Life: Part Four, Ready to Lead Culture

HA note: This series is reprinted with permission from Ahab’s blog, Republic of Gilead. Part Four of this series was originally published on October 14, 2013.

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Also in this series: Part One, Botkins Launch Webinar | Part Two, Ready for What? | Part Three, Are Your Children Ready? | Part Four, Ready to Lead Culture | Part Five, Science and Medicine | Part Six, History and Law | Part Seven, Vocations | Part Eight, Q&A Session | Part Nine, Concluding Thoughts

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In this part of their “Ready for Real Life” webinar, the Botkin family discusses the role of the arts in homeschooling, contending that parents must train their children to appreciate Christian-friendly art and music instead of worldly arts. The webinar amused me in its disdain for Bratz dolls, jazz, ragtime, Picasso, the Frankfurt School, and Jimminy Cricket, but disturbed me with its advice on constraining children’s tastes.

The Botkins’ approach to the arts struck me as a constricted and passionless, focused more on supposed Biblical principles than creativity, expression, and expansion.

Geoffrey Botkin began the webinar with a prayer asking for God’s wisdom, reminding his audience that they were living in “such a dark and crooked and confused and perverted and twisted generation”. As with previous webinars, Botkin depicted the modern world as a depraved place that Christians must resist.

A listener submitted a question regarding how much school work to do with children versus how much time to spend on skill-building for real life. Geoffrey Botkin replied that as young Christians, he and Victoria quickly realized that homeschooling parents cannot make a distinction between academic and real-world studies. If academic materials do not prepare children for the real world, parents should discard it, he said. The Biblical paradigm teaches that all of life is training for living in the world, he claimed.

Victoria Botkin chimed in, encouraging homeschool mothers to be flexible and take advantage of opportunities for their children to learn. Anything a mother does with children can be education, she claimed, as long as a parent is talking with them about it. She explained that real life offered her children learning opportunities that were sometimes better than the academic tasks she’d planned for the day. For example, one day she and the children found an injured lamb that fell off of a truck, and they spent the day butchering the lamb.

Geoffrey Botkin spoke at length about culture from a fundamentalist Christian perspective.

He defined culture as the “secondary environment” superimposed on nature by “man’s creative effort”. Another definition of culture he offered was activity by man (the image-bearer of God) that fulfilled the mandate to exercise dominion over the earth. Dominion involved bringing order to the world as God designed it, Geoffrey Botkin explained, adding that human activity must reflect a relationship with the divine. “Man’s essential being is expressive of his relationship to God, or it will be expressive of his relationship to rival gods like Satan,” he said at the 11:38 mark.

The purpose of humanity is to teach all the nations and obey everything Jesus commanded, thereby bringing order to the world and glory to God. He quoted Isaiah 9:7 (“Of the greatness of his government and peace there will be no end”), citing it as the essence for teaching culture to children.

At the 13:24 mark, he envisioned a goal in which God’s government and peace were everywhere, with no “enemies” to get in the way.

“If we’re doing our duty to obey Jesus Christ because we love him, and we’re seeing the increase of his government, we’re extending the reign of the king, then we are enculturating the world in a way that it need to be enculturated. Your children need to know how to do this. How do we increase his government and peace so that there’s no end of it, no interruption to it, no enemies who get in the way?”

Christians are called to impose order through culture, even while living in a “disorderly generation”, and even to the most “disrupted, degenerate places and corners on planet earth”. Children must develop zeal for their father’s business and for Jesus Christ, he insisted

All culture is religiously oriented, Geoffrey Botkin claimed. We can “dress” culture according to what God wishes, or conform to a world which “disintegrates” culture. Christians must “dress” culture with meaning, he stressed, rather than inject culture with meaninglessness or madness as many poets, musicians, and filmmakers do.

“Culture is being formed by people who are either on God’s side or working against his will,” he said at the 17:54 mark, dividing cultural contributors into godly and ungodly. Geoffrey Botkin described his son Isaac’s visit to Egypt, where he found “an irreligious people worshipping a false religion, and they’re tearing the order of the world down by what they do.”

Egypt’s Islamic religion shaped Cairo’s culture, he claimed, including its women’s dress and its dirty streets (!).

Culture is not neutral, he emphasized, nor is culture the mere “flavor” of a place or time. Words such as “diversity” and “multiculturalism” frame culture as different flavors of living, ignoring the role of culture in exercising godly dominion. He contrasted the art of Johannes Vermeer with that of Picasso, a “truly a degenerate man, an impure man” who cursed his father, ran away, and lived in a brothel which “deranged his mind”, Botkin insisted.

Victoria Botkin stressed the importance of talking to children about what they see and hear in the world. For example, Victoria sees a little girl feeling drawn to a Bratz doll in Wal-Mart as a “red flag”. Something in a child’s heart causes them to gravitate to the messages that a Bratz doll communicates, she explained, and parents must redirect their children’s hearts. Victoria added that the Botkin household had a constant running commentary on the outside world, and if one of her children gravitated toward the “wrong” parts of culture, the parents had a duty to redirect their tastes.

Geoffrey Botkin argued that a battleground exists in every discipline, including science. In every discipline contains people who worship and obey God, alongside others who present new, unbiblical theories. At the 30:22 mark, he elaborated on such battlegrounds, lamenting that Christians lost the battles for control of political science and government. 

“One of the great dramas that our children have really loved talking about is when we as parents … say here is a subject we’re going to study, biology or astronomy or chemistry. What is the battleground in this science and in this discipline? What is the battleground in the queen of the sciences, theology? What is the battleground on political science? Every single one of these disciplines, there has always been a raging battle, which is called the antithesis … It’s a battleground. There are people who will worship and serve the creator, and try to organize things and study things and proclaim things that are correct and true, and there will be others who say, ‘no, we have a new theory on biology, the origin of man. We have a new theory the way society should be run. Our political science is scientific secular statism, for example. It’s a new authoritarian organizational method that we’ve come up with and we think it’s better.’ And so, one of the greatest battles of the 20th century was in this sphere of political science and government and governance, and Christians truly lost this culture battle in America, in the 20th century.”

Geoffrey Botkin reserved special ire for Wilhelm Reich and the Frankfurt School, depicting them as ungodly forces that wanted to win battlegrounds in academia.

“They worked very hard, these Frankfurt school revolutionaries masquerading as academic to insert what they called … a complete social revolution to overthrow Christianity with decadence and cultural disintegration,” he said at the 34:21 mark, caricaturing Frankfurt School thinkers as anti-Christian libertines. Botkin preached that an overthrow of Christianity would culminate in tyranny. “”It’s such a simple formula. If you can eliminate the knowledge of God, then you have a perfect opportunity for tyrants of totally centralized regulatory government to rule,” he insisted at the 33:38 mark.

His depiction of Wilhelm Reich was equally hysterical. He accused Reich of wanting to rid the world of Christianity and replace it with behavioral control via mass psychology. At the 35:20 mark, he claimed that Reich wanted to reduce society to permanent adolescence by promoting “polymorphous perversity”.

“That’s what your children have been born into, and this polymorphous perversity means you just do what you want when you want to. You justify it any way you want, any kind of misbehavior but especially sexual misbehavior. You justify and rationalize according to the tools this modern culture is giving to young people.”

On the topic of music, Geoffrey Botkin caricatured early American music as devout, in contrast to modern music that he decried as chaotic and debauched.

At the 35:51 mark, he pined for an earlier era characterized by songs of God and nation-building. 

“For three-hundred years, Americans wrote music about nation-building, bringing order to a culture, building culture the way it should be built, honoring the Lord’s design, his architecture for it. The very first music sung in this country were Psalms … We fought a war over the freedom that we wanted to have so that we could continue building the foundations around proper Biblical culture, and we sang about them. We built music around it. We had lyrics around the Christian foundations of culture, both black and white. For four-hundred years, Americans have expressed themselves through music, and until the 20th century, the lyrics and instrumentation was very orderly and very Biblical. And so, you need to teach your children that music is theology, both externalized and internalized, because music is one of the most theologically influential arts there are.”

Music allegedly declined in the 20th century, Botkin claimed, when American culture succumbed to an “antithetical urge” that drew its music away from nation-building themes. As young people had more free time and disposable income to buy sheet music and records, music houses experimented with “uninhibited immaturity” in their craft.

Geoffrey Botkin held 20th century music styles such as jazz and ragtime in utter contempt.

He dismissed jazz and ragtime as “discordant, unplanned collisions of harmony”, calling them “sloppy” forms of “covert protest” against older European music traditions. Jazz in particular was “infantile”, he argued, as it allegedly celebrated moral dissipation and misbehavior.

Ragtime and jazz both emerged from the African American community, I recalled. Is Botkin making a veiled race commentary here?

Such music was part of a larger “dissipating culture”, Geoffrey Botkin maintained, arguing that Hollywood too was contributing to a changing moral tone in America. For instance, he cited the song “When You Wish Upon a Star” in the 1940 animated film Pinocchio as an example of the “superstition theology” taking over America.

Really? Duke Ellington and Jimminy Cricket contributed to America’s decline? I thought.

Victoria Botkin told listeners that she and her children listened to classical music at home, listing “Peter and the Wolf”, “The Nutcracker”, and “The 1912 Overture” as examples of pieces that her children enjoyed. Victoria trained her children to appreciate music that was good and “orderly”, she explained, discouraging any taste in “bad and ugly, chaotic, discordant music”.

This broke my heart.

By restricting her children’s exposure to different musical styles, Victoria Botkin denied them so many tastes of innovation and beauty.

I couldn’t imagine my youth without heavy metal, or summer vacation trips with my father without classic rock playing in the car. Not only were the Botkin children fed revisionist history and a rigid, fundamentalist worldview, but they weren’t even allowed to explore their own musical preferences. How can someone blossom as an emotionally mature person — fully alive, fully self-aware, fully engaged with the world around them — if they aren’t even allowed to explore their own tastes, to savor many kinds of paintings, photos, and songs?

Benjamin Botkin, son of Geoffrey and Victoria Botkin, argued that the world should come to Christians to learn about music, not the other way around. The assumption, it seemed, was that Christian values and aesthetics would create superior music. The idea that musical talent takes many forms, and that people of all belief systems can produce quality music, was not considered.

Geoffrey Botkin used the music discussion to expound on children’s gifts, arguing that gifts can become obstacles to serving God.

He argued that gifts are entwined with service to God, and that some gifts have to be put aside sometimes so as to best serve God. Botkin cited his daughter-in-law Audrey as an example, telling the audience that Audrey had been a gifted cellist, but understood that marrying Benjamin Botkin was far more important that playing cello.

How many other women in your movement have been forced to put aside gifts and dreams? How many were pressured into nigh-mandatory marriage and motherhood while their gifts atrophied? I thought.

At the 49:07 mark, Geoffrey Botkin warned against children using undesirable gifts, or allowing gifts to instill too much pride. His comments about cheerleading were very revealing.

“The two greatest spiritual battles that you and your children will face between the ages of 10 and 20 are related to parental authority and how your children respond to that, and the emerging gifts. And this is one of the widest gateways to sin in our generation, because of the gifts they think they have. And you know, little girl thinks she’s totally, absolutely gifted in the ability to be a cheerleader. That may not be a gift that qualifies her to conform to the ugly conventions of our time. It may not be a God-given gift. It may just be a lustful desire on her part to be seen and noticed as a performer. And so the ability to mimic fools and show off foolishness is not a gift, it’s a vice.”

Botkin transitioned from music to art, complaining that modern art is supposedly atrocious.

At the 51:21 mark, he divided art into Christian and anti-Christian categories, arguing that bad art instills vices.

“Your children are so completely surrounded by really bad art, and the ugly art in our generation, like Picasso, like the art they see on billboards, the art they see surrounding them all over the place, on taxi cabs, on the sides of buses, it inspires men to rebellion. Selfish art inspires men to childishness. Undisciplined art destroys standards of discipline. Meaninglessness, meaningless art robs men of hope and vision … Art will be either Christian or anti-Christian.”

The Botkin daughters discussed artistic standards at length, critiquing artworks. Anna Sophia and Geoffrey Botkin discussed different pictures, criticizing pictures that struck them as unrealistic or stylized.

At the 1:10:43 mark, Anna Sophia Botkin scoffed at the idea of art as a vehicle for emotional expression or spontaneity, calling works that draw upon these forces “sloppy” and “mediocre”. 

“The art world and the music world are both infected with the idea that the highest artistic expression is one that just comes from inside us, from our hearts, from our emotional impulses. They think it’s better if it’s more spontaneous, and less planned and worked out … Christian artists have taken this to a worse extreme by thinking that those emotional impulses are from the Holy Spirit, which makes their art inspired, and above rules and above criticism. And I believe this is why there is so much poor art and music and film-making coming out of the Christian community, and I believe that we take the Lord’s name in vain when we say that he or that his holy spirit is responsible for our sloppy, mediocre efforts.”

Elizabeth Botkin elaborated on her childhood, during which their parents frowned on “chaotic” forms of creative expression. At the 1:13:18 mark, she discussed the “discipline” and “good attitude toward reality” that her parents instilled in the Botkin children. 

“Mom and Dad knew that whether we became artists or not, all of our lives, we’d be building a culture of art around us. We’d eventually be creating art anywhere we went, which is actually exactly what’s happened … They wanted to be really, really careful that they were guiding us toward more disciplined efforts and better taste in all of our creative endeavors, from the little people we made out of Play-Do, to the pictures we drew. And so, if we did something in a sloppy way or with a bad attitude, they wouldn’t say ‘Oh great job! You are so talented!’ Or if we seemed attracted to things that were ugly …  or things that were smarmy or chaotic or had a bad view of reality, they wouldn’t say, ‘Oh, you’re just so unique, such a free spirit!’ They would keep trying to disciple our attitude back toward God, give us a Good attitude toward God’s created order, a good attitude toward reality, a good understanding of reality.”

Isaac Botkin joined the conversation from offsite, discussing photography as an art form. He used the photography discussion to preach against hobbies.

He warned that any activity performed purely for self-expression or self-gratification is selfish. 

At the 1:17:24 mark, he had this to say.

“At the moment, photography is a very easy hobby to get into because cameras are so cheap. Pretty much every phone has a camera on it now. And so, photography is an easy way to very selfishly pursue self expression … This is a good opportunity to talk about the concept of hobbies, and the idea that Christians really shouldn’t have hobbies. And I’m not saying that they shouldn’t do work for free, but the idea of having a hobby that you do purely for self-gratification or for self-expression is not something that a Christian should be doing. Christians should be learning skills and desiring to express their creator.”

Isaac Botkin’s comments floored me. Is the Christian Patriarchy Movement so resistant to individuality that purely personal hobbies are considered sinful? Enjoyment and self-expression are necessary parts of life, not sins, and denying oneself these healthy outlets is a recipe for repression.

In typical fundamentalist fashion, the Botkins transformed natural human impulses into sins.

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This part of the “Ready for Real Life” series contained many of the same themes as the previous two episodes, such as distrust of the outside world, binary thinking, and control over what information children absorb. However, this part also contained several themes related to the arts.

  • Art as servitude to God. In the Botkins’ eyes, artistic expression should always serve God. Art for self-expression, emotional outpouring, or pleasure was frowned upon, as was any aesthetic that deviated from Botkin-approved principles.
  • Antipathy toward anything deemed “ugly” or “chaotic. Art that deviated from the Botkins’ aesthetics was rejected as “ugly”, “chaotic”, or “sloppy”. First, such ad hominem attacks ignore the merits of art and music that the Botkins happen to dislike. In essence, the Botkins failed to recognize that art need not be realistic and perfect to express truths about the human condition. Second, real life contains things that are unpleasant and chaotic, and a refusal to countenance these things in art is a refusal to acknowledge all of reality.
  • Parents molding children’s artistic preferences. The Botkins repeatedly told listeners about how Geoffrey and Victoria trained their children to like certain paintings, music, and film. The Botkin children were discouraged from showing interest in the “wrong” kinds of toys, music, and art. While there’s nothing wrong with parents teaching their children about high culture, children also have the right to explore their world and develop their own preferences. Many art forms capture beauty and convey truths about life, and to deny people these art forms is to deny them new perspectives.

Stay tuned for the next part of the “Ready for Real Life” webinar series! In the meantime, I’ll be reading Alex Grey’s Transfigurations while listening to goth metal, out of spite.

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To be continued.