Published Monday, September 9, 2024

NEXT MEETING SEPTEMBER 18

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BOB LINN

Schools need a Soul

Last Thursday I was in Tulsa to attend the press conference at Lewis & Clark Elementary School to announce the major acquisition of a record windfall.

Ryan Walters secured a grant of nearly $60 million to fund reading programs targeting Oklahoma’s struggling youth. The funds will accelerate the use of the Science of Reading (Phonics) with tutors, materials, and teacher training.

The OCPAC Foundation made page three of the Tulsa World (below). We were also in the background on the front page.

Ryan spoke of his continued dedication to not only restore the integrity of the reading skills of Oklahoma’s youth but to end the use of Oklahoma’s classrooms as a tool to ideologically divert the minds of our children with the ideology of America’s cultural enemies.

Walters said the grant is a part of his mission to focus on the basics and to “end left-wing political activism in the classroom.”

A significant tool in the ability to assault left-wing activism is the ability to read at a high level and to read with comprehension.

Christianity is the only threat to the political goals of the left. It is why superintendent Walters is intent on not only eliminating the leftist ideology in our schools, but also to see it replaced with Christian patriotism.

The concept of Christianity’s role as the

foundation of nation building is not

unique to the American founders. 

Even Germany’s leading philosopher of our day, once noted for his atheism, Jurgen Habermas, has moved from his once-strong anti-Christian perspectives. He now asserts that Christianity is mandatory if civilization is to survive. He sees Christianity as a necessity in the realm of public policy.

In his 2008 book, Why We Should Call Ourselves Christians, Marcello Pera, Italian intellectual and former president of Italy’s Senate, spoke of Habermas:

Habermas recognized that for the unification of Europe, Christianity was not merely a “precursor” or a “catalyst,” but also a fountainhead that continues to nurture us. He recognized that without Christianity, neither Europe nor Western Civilization could have existed. He admits that “there is no alternative to it.

Pera himself states that:

The apostacy of Christianity is exposing the entire West to the risk of a grave cultural and political crisis, and perhaps even to a collapse of civilization.

Twenty-four years ago, University of Virginia professor, James Hunter, Ph.D., published his exceptionally well researched The Death of Character. It came as a follow-up to his Culture Wars published in 1991.

The book is a warning of the flawed trajectory of public education over the past century. He points to the demise of character which is the product of our public school’s destruction of the ultimate creeds of Christendom and the removal of any reference to God as the divine authority of those creeds.

He states:

It is difficult to think of another age when the key socializing institutions for the cultivation of normative ideals and virtuous habit have been so reluctant to communicate to children their standards and the god-terms that give them sanction.

Until America’s public (government) schools become the kind of Christian schools they were more than 100 years ago, we have no hope of restoring the nation. Our government must confess that we are, indeed, a Christian nation and we must all be proud of our Christianity.

Christianity in the classroom is our only hope. For this reason, the far left is fighting our state’s superintendent of public education.

Let me illustrate my point by telling the story of one of the students at the University of Oklahoma that I mentored during my tenure with Campus Crusade for Christ. His name is David Robinson. In those days, I spoke often of the impact of the Gospel in Russia and other Communist strongholds.

A story about how Oklahoma played

a role in bringing Christianity to

Hungary’s public schools.

God used this emphasis to impress upon David a vision to reach Hungary for Christ. He became the leader of the Campus Crusade for Christ initiative into Hungary. In January of 1994, after having been in Hungary for 18 months, a phone call informed David that Hungary’s Dr. Denes Banhegyi, Chief of Immunology at St. Laszlo Hospital and national AIDS Coordinator for the Hungarian government’s National Institute of Health, wanted to meet. AIDS was rampant among the youth of Hungary. 

Hungary’s liberal sex education materials (they came from America) had failed to produce results. Dr. Banhegyi asked David and his staff team to write a curriculum for Hungary’s public schools with the goal of saving Hungary’s future.

Proposed was a public-school curriculum that included the Gospel of Christ, teaching Christian ethics and the fundamentals of salvation and the Christian life. It was designed to enable the youth to grow morally, intellectually, socially, and spiritually. It was called the Youth at the Threshold of Life (YTL) curriculum.

The Hungarian government

accepted it with enthusiasm.

As a part of the program, the Jesus Film was shown in Hungarian classrooms with great effect!

Four years later (1998), the government of Hungary enacted the National Curriculum Act. It stated that by the time a student was 16 years old, he or she had to know “the essentials of Christianity and the New Testament.”

Quoting from David’s book about his ministry in Hungary, The Outrageous Promise, David wrote:

After forty years of communistic-atheism, the country was re-examining its Christian heritage and was looking for a moral soul. It affected each school and every child in the nation.

And, on the heels of Hungary’s rediscovery of its Christian roots, Viktor Orbán role to national leadership.

Orbán said in 2012:

The European crisis has not come by chance but by the carelessness and neglect of their responsibilities by leaders who have questioned precisely those Christian roots.

Thomas Jefferson, passionate supporter of the church in American public life, wrote this:

“Can the liberties of a Nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God?”

Founder and President, John Adams stated the obvious:

Religion and virtue are the only foundations, not only of Republicanism and of all free government, but of social felicity under all governments and in all combinations of human society.

Unless America follows Hungary’s lead and listens again to our founders, we have no hope of restoring our nation. But thank God, we have many bright lights who are standing in leadership with Christian values. And, I believe, many more to come!

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IF YOU MISSED OUR

LAST MEETING . . .

LEGISLATIVE PANEL

Watch the panel discussion here.

Watch the entire meeting here.

____________

GROUP ONE

Senator Rob Standridge

Senator David Bullard

Representative Denise Crosswhite Hader

Former Representative Charles Key.

____________

GROUP TWO

Senator Nathan Dahm

Representative Sherrie Conely

Former Representative Mike Reynolds

Senator's wife, Sherrie Hamilton

COMING!!!

WEDNESDAY

September 18, 2024

OUR FOUNDATION BANKS

AT QUAIL CREEK BANK

A few of our board members at Quail Creek Bank

From left to right:

Joseph Palmer, Alan Loeffler, Suzanne Reynolds, Lucia O'Connor,

Father Stephen Hamilton, Bob Linn, and Gaylene Stupic.

OCPAC FOUNDATION is a 501 (c) (3).

Gifts are tax-deductible.

I encourage each of you to support our mission.

To get started, we are suggesting:

The Century Club

To join, mail a cancelled check to:

OCPAC FOUNDATION

P.O. Box 721212

Norman, OK 73070

Your $100 per month donation will help support the development of the Foundation’s work to widen our audience and outreach capabilities with quality meetings and enhanced educational video content.

Our beginning financial goals will allow us to secure the initial permanent staff positions necessary to the function of a foundation with ambitions to change the world.