Op-Ed: To Defeat Critical Race Theory, Here’s What We Must Do

Few remember today that education in America began with Christianity. The Puritans in Massachusetts passed the Satan Deluder Act in order to establish public schools that could teach their children to read. The Puritans believed that children who could read the Bible would be less vulnerable to the devil.

As is often the case, institutions once established to do good eventually do evil. William F. Buckley, in his breakout work “God and Man at Yale,” documented the decline of Christian values in Yale during the 1950s. Although Yale was a private school founded as a religious college, Buckley noted in great detail how Yale was drifting away from Christianity and toward a position of hostility to religion.

Fueled by a leftist cultural advance, in the 70 years since his book’s publication, the phenomenon Buckley noted has spread into public education. Much of the last half-century in education has been filled with an all-out assault against Christianity and traditional Western and Christian moral values.

Largely, the leftists have won, and Christianity has lost. Traditional values have been largely expunged from the schoolyard.

Voluntary student-led prayer and prayers before commencements and football games have been silenced. School nativities have been dismantled. The Ten Commandments have been obliterated from classroom walls. The use of the phrase “Christmas Break” (literally the “reason for the season”) has been usurped and replaced on academic calendars. Even moments of silence and the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance have been assaulted by leftists in education.

With few surviving vestiges of the Christian undergirding on which our educational system was built, modern leftists have worked to replace Christianity with the golden calf of race.

Critical race theory treats kids not as children of God with equal worth but as oppressors and oppressed. Morality under critical race theory is not determined by a universal set of principles and ethics; rather, it is determined by a combination of identities that bring with them a set of arbitrary entitlements and privileges.