RECRUITING OUR IMMIGRANTS to RESTORE AMERICA Published Monday, July 17, 2023 WE ARE MEETING This Wednesday at NOON Oklahoma History Center RECRUITING OUR IMMIGRANTS TO RESTORE AMERICA'S FOUNDATIONS This Wednesday ENVISIONNING AN EDUCATED IMMIGRANT COMMUNITY WHO WILL HELP RESTORE OUR FOROTTEN FOUNDATIONS Having spent twelve years as missionaries in Guatemala, God has called Francis ("Pancho") and his wife, Lera, to help save America, which has sent more missionaries throughout the world than the rest of the nations combined. Today, America's education system has hidden the foundation of her greatness to our next generation. Francis and Lera Hobbes have dedicated the remainder of their lives to restore our lost national conscience by educating those who have crossed our borders to live in our communities. They are working within our immigrant communities to teach the history, culture and founding principles of America. And, just as it was our early immigrants which founded this nation, our prayer is that today, another group will help return us to sanity and re-light the torch of Christian liberty, restoring the hope of the nations that God still reigns in the affairs of men and nations. Bring your family and friends this Wednesday to the Oklahoma History Center. However, do not forget to bring your pastor and offer to buy his lunch! The future of a nation depends upon its shepherds to guard, protect, and guide the people of God that we may perform our roles well in both family and state. Please bring your friends, family, church leaders, and your pastors! $5 ENTRY FEE Tax-deductible donations accepted at door. SEE YOU AT THE WEDNESDAY LUNCHEON ___________  WEDNESDAY LUNCH Doors open 11:00 AM $5 entry fee Tax-deductible donations accepted at door.  Optional Lunch 11:00 AM Meeting NOON to 1:15 PM  Optional Lunch: $10 Find us at Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. TABLE of CONTENTS BOB LINN The Cure for Ideological Illiteracy YOUR PRESENCE NEEDED THIS THURSDAY ... STATE DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION THIS MONTH! Thursday, July 27 9:30 A.M. ODE Meeting Plan to be there at 8:30 A.M. to get a place in the room. BORDER REPORT Americans for Prosperity BOB LINN The Cure for Ideological Illiteracy This Wednesday, we will hear from the leader of Building Bridges, USA. It is a movement with a vision to reach the growing community of those migrating to American shores. The goal is to educate them in the principles that built the American dream they so eagerly seek. No nation has brandished such an irresistible allure to the world’s diverse populations as has America. Fundamental to its successful rise as the Land of Promise to the nations of the world was its founder’s vision of a nation with the liberties and human rights akin to those of the ancient Hebrew nation and its system of laws and a judiciary bound to the rule of those laws. Inculcating a generation of immigrants to those same ideals which built the land of liberty and opportunity for all is an elementary requirement if the torch of America’s freedom is to continue to burn brightly without flickering. Not to introduce a generation of American children to those same ideals is inconceivable. A generation of young people with no exposure to the recipe of America’s founding documents will end in the death of a nation. Last week, I wrote of the impassioned insistence of our founders that the Bible be read in every classroom of America. Without exception the American founders looked primarily to the Bible when articulating their political and governmental ideas. The founders knew that America’s future blessings was rooted in the Biblical passages which so filled their writing. They understood that if America’s children would forget these texts and if then, their grandchildren would thus never know them, the root of liberty would wither and die. Dr. Herbert Schlossberg warned in his Idols for Destruction: The myths of secularity have been wrapped around academic disciplines. Expelling the biblical presuppositions that were the only ones that could provide a foundation for rationality, we unwittingly invited the irrational to join us. Today, these ancient texts of rationality are forbidden in our children’s schools. Biblical illiteracy yields a hopeless search for identity in the darkness of nihilistic chaos. What remains in America’s classrooms is the teaching of unknown personal anthropological identities. Cultural and political confusion has followed. Twenty-five years ago, Angelo Codevilla, former professor of international relations and national U.S. intelligence advisor, pointed out: In modern northern Europe, established Protestant churches have acquiesced first in the government’s secularization of society and even in the teaching of antireligion. In Catholic Europe, the Christian Democratic movement, the principal reaction to militant liberalism, gave up advocacy of Christian causes, refused to take clear stands on the major issues of the day, and died. Throughout the European continent, then, politics has trained people to forget the soul. The recent threat by Tulsa School Board President, Stacey Woolley, and Tulsa Public Schools (TPS) superintendent Deborah Gist to take formal action against TPS schoolboard member E’lena Ashley for praying, in the name of Jesus Christ, at a high school graduation, indicates the steep decline of American culture. Woolley and Gist are asking for what they will never receive: an apology from E'lena Ashly to the Freedom from Religion organization and a promise to never ever pray at a Tulsa Public School function in the name of Jesus Christ again. The ideological plane of Oklahoma’s local school districts would have been the target of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s rebuke. In his Templeton Prize address when he noted that: The world had never before known a godlessness as organized, militarized, and tenaciously malevolent as that practiced by Marxism. Within the philosophical system of Marx and Lenin, and at the heart of their psychology, hatred of God is the principle driving force, more fundamental than all their political and economic pretensions. Militant atheism is not merely incidental or marginal to Communist policy; it is not a side effect, but the central pivot. To achieve its diabolical ends, Communism needs to control a population devoid of religious and national feeling, and this entails the destruction of faith and nationhood. By the way, officially printed graduation materials handed out at all the TPS graduation ceremonies referenced the date of the incarnation of the Lord Jesus Christ and displayed that date prominently as 2023 (that is 2023 AD, anno domino, the year of our Lord). E’lena Ashley’s remarks were perhaps the only remarks which provided the students any historical context within which to frame the day’s festivities. This brings to mind an even more historic graduation day involving the renowned Soviet dissident and author of The Gulag Archipelago. On June 8, 1978, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn stood before Harvard’s graduating seniors. Publishing his address, the editors summarized the speech saying: Solzhenitsyn announced that the world had reached a “major watershed in history,” one that required nothing less than an ascent to a new “anthropological stage” that would reconcile the legitimate claims of the human soul and the physical nature of man. He claimed that human freedom needs sturdier foundations than those provided by an “anthropocentric humanism” that refuses to defer to a “Superior Spirit” above Man. THERE IS A DISASTER WHICH IS ALREADY VERY MUCH WITH US As Solzhenitsyn closed his remarks, he said: There is a disaster which is already very much with us. I am referring to the calamity of an autonomous, irreligious humanistic consciousness. Five years later, on May 10, 1983, as he neared the close of his Templeton lecture, he said of the onslaught of worldwide atheism, and its devastating political impact, “Men have forgotten God.” Were Solzhenitsyn’s comments to be re-aimed and pointed, instead of the Soviet Union, but to our local Oklahoma school boards and the administrative personnel they hire to make sure everything is allowed into the classroom except the most impactful book in the history of man on this earth … THE CRITICISM IS DEAD CENTER No other text is available which has the track record of transforming the souls of both men and nations as does the Bible. The Bible is not old fashioned. It is, rather, a book that has, for thousands of years, enlightened the souls of men and thereby renewed the souls of both men and nations. Because the soul of man is defined by divine transcendence (mankind is imprinted with the Image of God), no political ideology, from the conservative free market texts of Hayek, Smith, and Friedman to the elitist top-heavy ideology of Marx, can provide an adequate starting point for the education of our American young people. It is only the Bible of our American founders which introduces, to the multitude of budding men and women now in our schools, the full range of the human soul with its divinely imbued identities, motivations and capacities. It is history’s proven text, that for thousands of years, has nurtured the personal and cultural identities upon which free societies are built. These are the ideals touted by the greatest of literary figures Solzhenitsyn, Dostoevsky, T.S. Eliot, and many more. Speaking of economics and free markets, FR. Robert Sirico, of the Acton Institute, asked the most important political question Americans today must ask: What happens when we have our prosperity but lose our meaning? What happens when we lose a sense of ourselves as transcendent beings? Our children will not understand who they are from reading Hayek, Smith, and Friedman let alone Nietzsche, Marx, and Mao. That is why, as a minimum, the book of Genesis is must reading for school children all over the world. For American school children, the entire Biblical text represents a primer if we are to move forward as a nation under the constitution our founders drafted and considered it suitable only for a Biblically-literate society. Christianity is the foundation for human liberty and prosperity. Nathaniel Hawthorne was an early American author, famous for many works, including The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The House of Seven Gables (1851). He wrote: Christian faith is a grand cathedral, with divinely pictured windows. Standing without, you see no glory, nor can possibly imagine any; standing within, every ray of light reveals a harmony of unspeakable splendors. Our Creator would never have made such lovely days, and have given us the deep hearts to enjoy them, above and beyond all thought, unless we were meant to be immortal. In The American Scholar (1837), Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: In how many churches, by how many prophets, tell me, is man made sensible that he is an infinite Soul; that the earth and heavens are passing into his mind; that he is drinking forever the soul of God? All I have seen has taught me to trust the Creator for all I have not seen. America is another name for opportunity. Our whole history appears like a last effort of divine Providence in behalf of the human race. Ryan Walters has shaken the state and is forcing us to question what our schools mean to the future governance of the state and of the nation. If we are to follow the lead of history's greatest minds, we will consider the structures of society and culture when contemplating our curriculum’s epistemological foundation. A few thousand of you read this newsletter each week. I would challenge you to connect with us through our meetings, or by email and get involved in bolstering the Christian cultural foundations of Oklahoma that we may cast a light on our nation, the last bastion of freedom in the world. Christianity is the very foundation of human thought. It is the foundation of free and prosperous societies. We are in desperate need of returning our nation and our state to Biblical foundations. Thank you for your activism. _________ This Wednesday's luncheon! 11:00 AM Doors open 11:00 AM Lunch Available NOON to 1:15 PM Meeting Oklahoma History Center 800 Nazih Zuhdi Dr., OKC, OK 73105 God bless! MAKE YOUR CHRISTIANITY PUBLIC: MAKE PLANS TO ATTEND WITH A FRIEND July 27, 2023 Thursday 9:30 am State Superintendent of Public Instruction, Ryan Walters, and the State Department of Education, invite you to attend their June 22nd public meeting. Your comments and presence are sought as the foundation of the future of Oklahoma's children is being established. The SDE offices are on the northeast lawn of the Oklahoma State Capitol. PLEASE MAKE PLANS TO ATTEND: State Department of Education Oliver Hodge Education Building 2500 N. Lincoln Blvd, OKC, OK Thursday, July 27, 2023 8:30 a.m. Gather for fellowship and prayer. 9:00 a.m. Sign in for option to speak. 9:30 a.m. SDE meeting begins. BORDER UPDATE and a FREE DINNER Join with OCPAC and Americans for Prosperity for dinner and an insightful discussion on July 20th! Our special guest will be Bradley Ward, the Deputy State Director at AFP-OK. Bradley and our Operations Director Michael, will be discussing their recent trip to the southern border in Yuma, Arizona. This roundtable discussion and Q/A on what we learned will be a great insight to what America is experiencing on the southern border and how those issues impact Oklahomans. Americans for Prosperity works to empower individuals advocating for freedom in their community. Please RSVP to hear from a great speaker, and to learn more from AFP OK about how you can make an impact. As always dinner is provided to everyone who sends an RSVP. July 20th, 2023 Dinner is served at 6:00 PM Program starts at 6:30 PM Advance Center For Free Enterprise 415 NE 13th St, Oklahoma City, OK 73104 OCPAC FOUNDATION is a 501 (c) (3). Gifts are tax-deductible. Bring your checkbook this Wednesday! Make your tax-deductible donation OCPAC | P.O. 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