MR. CHAIRMAN AND MEMBERS OF THE COMMITTEE:

I am Robert L. Grete, Director of the Rocky Bayou Christian School (RBCS) in Niceville, Florida. RBCS, a member of the Association of Christian Schools International (ACSI) and the American Association of Christian Schools (AACS) is an independent rather than a parochial (organized as part of a local church or denomination) Christian school.

The purpose of my testimony is to provide a small independent Christian school's perspective on the erosion of religious liberty in America.

Since the founding of Rocky Bayou Christian School in 1973, each year an increasing amount of my time involves the defense of religious liberty. We constantly receive appeals from our Christian school associations for aid in alerting our representatives to threats to our freedom. Each year it seems more bills are introduced into the state and federal legislatures that threaten religious liberty. Decisions by the courts have had the same effect.

I believe that the threat to religious liberty arises from the efforts of antitheistic/humanistic leaders trying to establish a set of religious presuppositions that are antithetical to the traditional Judeo-Christian or biblical religious presuppositions upon which America was founded. Using secular education and the influence of the media (Hollywood films, television, the broadcast industry and the music industry), secular1 and humanistic2 leaders have worked toward a goal stated in the Humanist Manifesto II as

1.

2.

Secular means "apart from the supernatural" or worldly. Secularism is a faith that leaves out the Creator of the universe.

Humanism is a faith that defies man. Rather than submitting to the Creator, man is made the measure of all things, the provider, and the determiner of right and wrong.

3. See Humanist Manifestos I & II (NY: Prometheus Books, 1973).

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"a secular society on a planetary scale." John Dewey, the father of American progressive education was a powerful subscriber to Humanist Manifesto I. The increasing success of such leaders is due in part to the inactivity of those who hold to the Judeo-Christian values. Such pietism in the Bible-believing community has surrendered much of the control of the centers of influence in American society to antibiblical humanistic leaders.

The education of children plays a vital role in shaping the values of the leadership of future generations. American education has been increasingly secularized as governmental authority was extended over it. Systematically, government power has been used to increasingly eliminate biblical values from public schools. Today, the efforts to purge biblically-based religious values from the public schools have been so successful that Congress and the federal courts are involved in such questions as, "Can children pray in the public schools?" and, "Can groups meeting in public facilities discuss theistic topics or is their speech limited to presumed secular subjects1 no matter how perverted from a biblical viewpoint?"

Hand in hand with the purging of biblical truths and values from government operated schools, secular and humanistic leaders (using a number of organizations to include the National Education Association (NEA), local, state and federal government agencies, and the media have launched a frightening effort to subject non-government schools to their effective control. The result, if they are successful, will be as complete an eradication of biblical influence in the education of our nation's children as that accomplished in Germany by Hitler's Third Reich or by the Soviet Union today.

As the administrator of a Christian school, the defense against this effort requires daily energy. I am sure this Senate committee will collect

1.

To a Biblicist, all subjects are religious since they involve some aspect of God or His perspective on His creation. Christ is sovereign over every

area of a Christian's life.

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considerable data on a multitude of cases, many of which are a matter of court record. Before going into the specifics of RBCS confrontations, I would like to mention some of the specific tools now being used by American governmental agencies to effect religious tyranny over religious educational ministries. The control devices, which have been used historically, include:

1. Licensing. If civil government can license an activity, it exercises the power to terminate it or require it to conform to regulations as a condition of operation.

2. School Accreditation/Teacher Certification Requirements.

3. Arbitrarily or discriminatory enforced health, welfare, safety, and zoning regulations.

4. Direct regulation of various aspects of the religious ministry (e.g.: personnel immoral persons such as sodomites cannot be excluded from the faculty; curriculum texts must be chosen from state approved lists; etc.)

5. Public trust concept. Religious organizations are considered creatures of the state to be operated according to the wishes of government agents rather than ministries under God required to operate according to biblical authority. 6. Biblically based religious faith must be subordinated to contrary public policy. Thus the whims of fallen man subordinate God's absolute standards.

7. Taxation. The power to tax assumes sovereignty or lordship, and is the power to control and destroy.

8. The tax expenditure concept. This is one of the most perverse concepts being pushed into the public policy arena; tyrants must love it. This radical idea rejects the biblical and constitutional concepts that the fruit of a person's labor belongs under personal stewardship and that the portion of a

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The

person's property that is transferred to civil government should be determined by the consent of the governed. Rather, the tax expenditure concept assumes that all property is owned by the civil government, which can then decide how much to allow citizens to keep under personal stewardship. Anything left in the hands of the citizens is a tax expenditure subject to the controls civil government desires to set upon its use. Thus, nothing escapes government control, since money a person or institution uses has either come from government or remains at its true point of origin by government grace. degree to which this monstrous doctrine is finding acceptance today is frightening. Efforts to get Congress to reject it (e.g., HR 1002, 96th Congress, First Session) have failed. Also, consider the US Supreme Court's recent ruling in the Grove City case and the perverse "corrective" legislation being proposed (HR 5490). This case illustrates the logic that civil governmental control goes with any governmental financial assistance, which under the tax expenditures concept, even means any money the government lets individuals keep. Yes, tyrants must love it!

The perverse exercise of these control tools (whether legitimate authorities such as "3" above, or unconstitutional usurpations such as the rest) are based upon the presuppositions of the humanistic state. Some of the presuppositions underlying the concept of the humanistic state are that the civil state:

1. Has sovereignty over all authorities

even that of the Creator of the

universe Who originates human authority and is alone sovereign.

2. Owns the earth, its produce, and the people under its jurisdiction, denying the biblical concept that God owns the earth and civil government is one

of several limited jurisdictions designed to carry out specific purposes.

3. Owns the children, denying that God owns the children and has given parents stewardship over them.

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4. Authors human liberty, denying the concept that "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments

are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the

5. Defines right and wrong rather than submitting to God's biblical

standards of righteousness.

6. Is the provider of economic resources to the people. This denies that God distributes economic resources, generally to those who earn them through personal responsibility and work.

Citizens have no protection against tyranny when the civil state, which has the biblical function of protecting God-given liberty, assumes the role of God in society.

The exercise of the tools of tyrannical control based upon the presuppositions of the humanistic state is rapidly increasing in America. If Congress does not understand this trend or does not wish to reverse it, the sovietization of America will soon be complete. Consider the words of American communist, William Z. Foster in his book Toward Soviet America:

Among the elementary measures the American Soviet government will adopt to further the cultural revolution are the following; (SIC) the schools, colleges and universities will be coordinated and grouped under the National Department of Education and its state and local branches. The studies will be revolutionized, being cleansed of religious, patriotic and other features of the bourgeois ideology. The students will be taught on the basis of Marxian dialectical materialism, internationalism and the general ethics of the new Socialist society. Present obsolete methods of teaching will be superseded by a scientific pedagogy.

The churches will remain free to continue their services, but their special tax and other privileges will be liquidated. Their buildings will revert to the State. Religious schools will be abolished and organized religious training for minors prohibited. Freedom will be established for anti-religious propaganda. (@page 316)