There seems to be a bit of a disparity between the facts and what some ACE teachers say. In this, my triumphant return to vlogging, I talk about Brenda Lewis, who seems incapable of getting her facts right when she talks in public.

I am on holiday, so this is a scheduled post. So behave yourself in the comments, because I’m not around to moderate.

I recently had this great comment from an ex-ACE student who has since done a PhD in cultural anthropology. Their insights on ACE are lengthy but well worth reading. Unlike many of my guest posters (and me), Kachoukyori picks out positive parts from the ACE experience. This is something I’ll probably return to later. In order to understand why people turn to ACE, you need to understand what problems it is trying to solve.

If you search Google Images for “cultural anthropology” and choose only images that are free to reuse, this is the first result. No, I don’t know either.

This is a much-needed post, one I’ve circulated to friends over the years in trying to explain how global and curiously pervasive A.C.E. has become as a curriculum, adapting to shifts in contemporary fundamentalist culture, the growth of charismatic churches and aggressive right-wing politics linked to US hardline Christianity, and the anti-secular/social/government rise of homeschooling.

My father was a US military officer; we moved constantly. From the pre-K on I was enrolled in Baptist schools, by the 3rd grade I was placed in a school that used the ACE curriculum. I never experienced US public schools and was immersed in two peculiarly isolationist cultures: fundamentalist Christians and US military bases. What a combination, indeed! The Bible and the Sword.

I graduated at 16 years old from a school in N.J., having finished two years worth of work in one year–a frenzy of study compelled by an urgency to escape and save my life. I had to escape the educational, ethical, and social hypocrisy of the system I’d been raised in. A few days after turning 17 I began my college studies at a secular university. While difficult, it was a huge relief just to be released from the daily, grinding friction of the ideological war waged against young people at every turn in ACE schools.

My schools varied, as many other commenters have noted above. Leaving aside the intense bias of the curriculum itself, the school has some good qualities: inter-generational socializing (due to lack of class striation), self-motivated learning and control over work speed, low risk/consequence for failure due to being able to repeat units (PACEs), and dyadic learning with one-on-one work with a supervisor. Of course, this last is contingent on having a competent teacher. Many Christian schools in the US depend on an incestuous recycling of reproduced labor–graduates from the school go off to one of the major tin-plate Christian “universities” with their fraudulent claims to being centers of higher education, and come back to teach in their alma maters. Thus they reconstitute the same bad techniques, flawed logics, and reinforced notions of having a spiritual calling that magically endows their every word with divine force.

It is easy to dismantle the ACE system through its structures. To take on its ideology is the greater task, and perhaps more critical. As soon as I began to become politically aware at about 12 or 13, I started to question the constant assertion of a divine plan in everything. I graduate school in 1989, so the Social Studies PACEs were still furiously alive with anti-communist vomit. A key moment of realization was when I went to the base library to look up the history of the KMT as they fled mainland China from the “godless” communists. A counter-revolutionary army so vaunted by the scriptwriters in Texas was shown to be merciless, brutal, and capable of horrible massacres of native peoples in Taiwan. So this is how those blessed by God to face-off against the Commies do it: by soaking the ground red with the blood of those who are different and who made any assertion of autonomy. Once I’d punctured that little bit of historical revision, the whole manufactured universe of history quickly fell apart. Though I never encountered Howard Zinn, I basically took on the task of checking and then disputing nearly every major fact my school curriculum put forward as truth. I read voraciously, and this is how ACE served me best: by goading me through its arrogant lying into a campaign of self-education and fearless critical thinking. I began speaking out loudly in our weekly assemblies. At break time I spoke out about the iron rule of the Scripture that was being selectively applied to train us all as a class of mindless believers. I became a regular guest in the principal’s office for a while. When direct debate failed (and how could he win? Truth claims made on God’s Word are so much vapor) I was given regular detentions. Stand and face a wall for up to an hour at a time.

I learned how to teach myself and how to be ever-vigilant against easy assertions of truth. But at the same time I came to respect how Christians in these small, close communities took care of themselves and sought out ways to determine the course of their social and ritual lives and those of their children. In many ways they reflect back a stalwart kind of independence and it this experience I credit with turning me into an anarchist. These lessons came at the price of also enduring and undoing the ideological violence that undergirds this independence.

The trick here is to evaluate ACE for how it is flexible, how it can be creatively used as an educational model, but then work tirelessly in combating its ugly untruths and hateful claims to a particular vision of the good. It took me many years–well into college–to accept evolution (so tentatively and fearfully at first) and even more to admit my homophobia and begin work to dismantle it. These are the greatest wrongs that can be done a learning individual. To inculcate them with a view of the world so truncated and premised on correct ways to live within the body (and a hierarchy of “godly” bodies!) is the rawest kind of evil.

I’ve got a PhD in Cultural Anthropology. I’ve lived and worked in Asia for many years. The outsiderness I experienced both because I went to ACE schools and the alien identity I developed within their walls likely made me more capable in adapting to other cultures and worlds and gave me a patience to analyze and contemplate the social lives being enacted.

So, to this extent, I benefited from my fundamentalist education. It made a weird kid immeasurably weirder. But it also produced me as a fierce enemy of organized religion and especially the white-supremacist, homophobic, colonial, misogynist, and capitalistic champions who support, attend, and champion these types of educational systems as crusades doing “God’s work.”

Related posts:

• Careful, or your karma will run over your dogma
• Bible verse bookmarks
• Relearning everything you know

I have a permanent running offer out to anyone who can offer a defence of Accelerated Christian Education: Submit it here, and I will post it on the blog. Well, the following comment got left recently in response to A Collection of ACE Survivor Stories, and I think it’s the best defence of ACE I’ve seen. I profoundly disagree with it, of course, but I am on holiday and don’t have time to explain why at the moment. So, readers, if you disagree, here’s your chance to respond: Leave your counterargument as a comment, and I’ll pick the best one on my return.

After reading through most of the anti/pro comments above, I was compelled to respond with my own ACE experience, and also to address some of the comments made. I have quite a bit I’ve been thinking about, but I’ll condense it as best I can.
I came across this website while searching for an ACE school for my child to attend. She currently attends one I am quite happy with, but I am relocating so I am looking for another. I also attended and graduated from the same ACE school she is attending now.

From the comments I have read above, it appears to me that some of the writers have had some serious problems since high school. Is it possible that they are now looking back on their life now, looking to figure out where it all went wrong? I think this is possible. It also appears that some of the writers may have had bad experiences at individual schools, and I believe them. Bad people do bad things wherever they are, whether that is in a public, a Catholic, or an ACE school. This is not an indictment of any particular system unless there is a clear indication of systemic abuse, and I do not believe this is the case with ACE.

What are the negative commentators here comparing ACE to? I live in the U.S., and the public education system here is sub par. Polls vary, but not one that I have seen has the U.S. anywhere near the top. PISA in 2012 ranked U.S. at 36th in the world and UK came in at 26th. Many people here have commented about the lack of critical thinking in the ACE curriculum. I guess that they are assuming that other private and public schools are full of critical thinking, well read, open minded students? This has certainly not been my experience at all. Quite the contrary.

After graduating from my ACE school, at the top of my (3 person!) class, I was offered academic scholarships at a few different universities based on my grades, rank and also high ACT scores. I started on my chosen major, but halfway through I realized I didn’t like that major, and switched into the biology program. Most people in this major were pre-med students. Almost all of them had had very good high school careers, and most had taken AP classes in high school. Hardly any of them displayed what I would call high level problem solving skills or much “critical thinking” at all. I graduated with high honors, and at number one in this class (although not official, since I hadn’t started with the original class). When finished I still wasn’t sure what path I would follow, but I took the MCAT exam to open that door. My advisor called me in the summer to tell me I had the highest score of the class. He advised that I consider a medical career, and I did. I am now a successfully practicing doctor. Not one other person in that pre-med class of 40 to 50 students went on to medical school. I am not writing this to brag about myself (no one here even would know who I am anyway!), but to illustrate that my story is not the only one like this. From my same school came graduates who are engineers, run their own businesses, or teach. The majority of students are employed in blue collar professions, and some are homemakers. And some are not doing well at all. There is at least one girl I went to school with who is homeless, and several others have struggled to make their way through life.

This brings me to the most important point, and that is that ANY school is simply a microcosm of the society it resides in. ACE schools are no different. Re-title this website something like “Leaving Chicago Public Schools” and I guarantee that you would receive ten times more stories about kids being left behind in curriculum or who did not feel adequately prepared for college, stories of physically or sexually abusive teachers, or stories of being harassed and bullied by other students. These scenarios are problems in ALL schools. Within my school we had some highly motivated people who excelled at the curriculum and went on to very successful careers. Some struggled with the curriculum, and did not attend college. It is possible that a different style of learning may have benefited these students. I am well aware that in a self motivating, work at your own pace system, certain students lacking motivation can definitely fall behind. This could be a fault of the curriculum, but it could also be a consequence of external situations the student may be in. One misconception I believe that people have about education in general is that it is all done in schools. Family life, and the experiences passed on from parent to child are also quite a large part of any education experience. Almost without exception, the students who did not have a quality home life in my school did not do well. This is also true in public schools. If you have parents who are not making a child attend school, preventing truancy, or who are incapable of helping children with homework, or who can not at the very least pass on valuable life skills to their children, we cannot as a society expect schools to pick up all the slack. Education starts at home.

I am not promoting ACE as the cure for all that ails you. But my experience was positive, and my child’s experience has been positive. I do see the flaws in the curriculum, but i suspect that all curriculums have flaws. Maybe this is because human beings are not made in cookie cutter fashion, but each are unique individuals.

One final thing I will address is the complaint that some here have been forced to think a certain way. No one can force you to accept an idea. They may tell you what the “right” answer is on a test, or what doctrine is “correct”, or they may enforce a certain standard of conduct expected of the students. But no person can actually control or change a thought or idea that you have in your head. The ultimate choice of what you believe in lies solely with you, and you have complete freedom to think what you will. Now, you may not be able to freely express those ideas while you are part of a certain organization. While in college, there were some topics in religion, politics or ethics that I did not agree with the teachers on. They presented their ideas, I examined them, and i either rejected or accepted them. I took the tests, I answered the questions, and I moved on with my life. Fortunately, we live in a country where we are free to practice our religion, or to not practice one at all. What you choose is your choice and yours alone. Thank you for running this website and I wish all of you the best that life has to offer.

More people defending ACE:

• Me!
• Lyndell
• Monica Stringer

It’s always nice to be talked about. It’s particularly lovely when you’ve been campaigning against an organisation for two years and their public strategy has been to pretend nothing is happening. Well, mostly anyway.

But now Christian Education Europe’s Arthur Roderick has sent an email to CEE’s member schools discussing how they intend to deal with the menace that I present. It’s a fun read. Of course, Arthur doesn’t name me or link to any of the associated media coverage in his email. I presume he’d rather his customers didn’t read my blog. I, on the other hand, am all about the debate. I just think this is a conversation that needs to be had in public (not least because it’s one Arthur and other ACE teachers refused to have with me in private).

In that spirit, you should also check out ace-education.co.uk, a new blog by Christine Bradshaw which attempts to debunk many claims I’ve made about ACE (and quite a few I haven’t). Replies to posts like these will come soon. I realise that my linking to them will probably triple the number of people who see them, but like I said, I welcome the debate. Something CEE does not, as I will explain shortly.

Here’s Arthur’s letter. Since it’s online at a publicly available link, I have taken the liberty of reproducing it below. I know CEE are some of my most avid readers, so if they object, no doubt I will hear about it soon and have to replace the letter with a Jesus & Mo cartoon again. After the letter, I’ll tell you about some of my recent correspondence with Arthur and other people.

Dear Christian Educator,

This letter comes with awareness that we all need to encourage one another and stand together, in what are perilous times as far as Truth is concerned.  There have been significant criticisms and scurrilous statements about the ACE programme in the social media, with interviews on the BBC, including an opportunity to present our case on the ‘Newsnight’ programme. This generated a flurry of activity in regional newspapers and even prompted two written questions in parliament. The Trojan Horse affair relating to Islamic schools spilled over to ACE, as we apparently are the potential Christian ‘Extremists’.
Taking advantage of this has been a former disaffected student who spent less than three years in an ACE school fifteen years ago and has openly campaigned in a continuing vendetta against what he considers “fundamentalist and damaging educational practice.” This opposition, both derogatory and inflammatory and birthed in childhood difficulties, appears to be the motivation for his thesis against ACE. May we all heed what the scriptures say in Hebrews 12:15:

“… looking carefully lest anyone fall short of the grace of God, lest any root of bitterness springing up cause trouble, and by this many are defiled.”

Because now there is involvement and comment from the British Humanist Association and the TUC LGBT conference, we believe it is the time to tell you, our customers, what actions we are taking. We have previously felt it best to get on with the job and not be distracted, but now the level of misinformation has called for some actions.

We examine ourselves, our hearts and actions to see if there are things to rectify. As there is a demand for a public apology from me, the founder of CEE, on the internet, let me say I have nothing to apologise for in distributing this amazing curriculum with its emphasis on godly character. I replied privately to this gentleman’s request over two years ago.
So here are some of the things we are doing and we need prayer for each of them:

1. We are preparing DVD presentations of student outcomes by both school and home-school students. Here the results will speak for themselves.
2. We have already commenced looking for problem facts or ambiguities in the PACEs that may best be changed. With over 2000 work books it is so wonderful that there have been very few queries.  
3. Nigel Steele and I have already contacted and visited other organisations including Christian Concern and C.M.I. and the Family Education Trust. We are seeking advice on how to proceed with the media realm and the political networks. This week Thursday, 17^th July, some of us are meeting a member of the House of Lords and a Christian lawyer. We have already had time with Paul Diamond, a Christian barrister.
4. We will be sending suggested letters and approaches that you may find helpful if you are engaging with the media.  At the moment, if you have a press enquiry we suggest that you ask for the question in writing and you respond in writing.
5. Over the summer thought will be given to website apologetics for our cause and a regular blog that I will involve in.
6. In our best ever attended Home-school Conference at Cefn Lea  last week, parents raised the value of a day of prayer and fasting and Thursday 17^th July was suggested.  
7. Next week a televised debate will take place on Revelation T V with a humanist leader. Pray for me as I am proposing that “God is not Dead.”

Trust the above motivates us to ask of God for empowerment and enabling for these difficult days. The Lord Jesus Christ is the Victor.

Yours by his grace,

Arthur Roderick
Education and Training Manager

In response, I sent the following email to Arthur Roderick:

Dear Arthur,

Your email to the schools about the recent ACE media coverage has been forwarded to me. Just to say that if there are any instances where I have relied on factual inaccuracies in my criticism of ACE, feel free to make me aware of them. I will be glad to rectify any misinformation.

Further, if any of my quotations from the PACEs are, in your view, taken out of context, please feel free to point these out and (if it is not obvious) explain how the added context refutes my understanding of the material.

Jonny

Then I realised I’d forgotten something. I recently had an exchange on Twitter with Premier Christian Radio’s Justin Brierley, and he showed an interest in hosting a debate between me and Arthur (or some other CEE representative):

@UnbelievableJB Would you be interested in having a debate about this on your show? christiantoday.com/article/how.a.…—
Jonny Scaramanga (@JonnyScaramanga) June 27, 2014

@JonnyScaramanga yes email me unbelievable@premier.org.uk—
Justin Brierley (@UnbelievableJB) June 27, 2014

So I emailed Arthur again:

Dear Arthur,

Sorry, there was something else I meant to mention in my previous email.

I’m aware that recent media coverage has been biased in favour of the anti-ACE viewpoint. Critics of ACE have been given more column inches and airtime than proponents, and critics have usually set the agenda. On Premier Christian Radio, there is a programme called Unbelievable, hosted by Justin Brierley, which specialises in debates. Justin has already expressed interest in having me on air to debate ACE. This is a show with a predominantly Christian audience, with a Christian host, on a Christian network.

I invite you (or anyone you nominate), to debate me on ACE. We could make sure the debate question is framed in such a way that the pro-ACE motion does not begin on the back foot. There would be time to explain and explore ACE in detail, and for you to rebut any claims I make. This seems the fairest and best way to have this conversation. What do you say?

All the best,

Jonny

Arthur’s reply, predictably, did not address my first email at all, but it did say:

No, I would not entertain the idea of a debate with you because of your inappropriate and false representations about people and your vendetta.

This does not make any sense. If I have made false representations about people, and if I have a vendetta, a public debate would be the best way to expose me. If I am lying, it would be easy to destroy me in a debate. I emailed Arthur, again requesting that he detail any false representations I’ve made and correct them. This has not to date received a reply. I’ve repeated my request for a debate to CEE’s Greg Hibbins, and I await the response.

Related posts:

• An open letter to Christian Education Europe
• Christian Education Europe responds!
• Christian educators respond to criticism

Over at ace-education.co.uk, there’s a post entitled “10 Questions for Jonny Scaramana“. Here are my answers.

Jonny Scaramanga is infamous for his anti ACE blogs. If you Google his name then you will find his Leaving Fundamentalism site and lots more info. I am responding to some of the false information given to the media ATM.

Before we get going then, a question of my own: Please could you detail this false information? It would be useful for all sides, I think, to correct any misinformation that’s floating around. Until now, I’ve seen accusations of falsehoods flying around, but a shortage of specifics.

I invite Jonny to answer the following questions. I will post his response if any.

Q. It is stated on many blog sites and within the press that you went to an ACE school until you were 14. This would imply that you spent many years in the system. Is it true then that you only actually spent two school years at Victory School Bath?

I’ve always been consistent in reporting how long I attended Victory. In my open letter to CEE two years ago, I said I was there from 1996 to 1999. In his recent letter, Arthur Roderick interpreted this as “less than three years” which seems to have been reinterpreted here as “two school years”. In fact, I arrived at Victory in the spring term of 1996, in my last term of Year 6 (final year of primary school). I was then there for three full school years: 96-97, 97-98, and 98-99. I started the 99-00 school year, but my parents removed me halfway through the Autumn term of 1999. So I was there from April or May 1996 until October 1999—three years and at least five months.

I also attended Victory preschool in 1988/1989. So that makes a total of 4 ½ years.

No one has yet explained to me what it is that I would understand about ACE had I attended for 12 or 13 years that I was unable to glean in four. I suspect the real answer is that I would have been inculcated with more Christian character, so now I wouldn’t be asking these difficult questions.

Q. Why do you feel qualified to run this hate campaign?

Well isn’t this the loaded question! Coming next: “When did you stop beating your wife?”

Here are some relevant things about me:

• I have completed ACE monitor (staff) training (Autumn term 1998), scoring 100% on all eight tests.
• When I left my ACE school, I had completed all the credits required for NCSC Level 1 (now called ICCE General Certificate) in every subject except maths, where I was still about six PACEs away from completion. This was claimed to be the equivalent of GCSEs at the time. I then went to a mainstream school and did GCSEs. I think I might be the only person to have done this, so the only person that can make a direct comparison from a student’s point of view.
• I have a PG Cert Ed teaching qualification.
• I have taught teaching placements to KS4 and KS5 students, and been a permanent tutor to students on Level 3 and Level 4 courses.
• I’m currently doing a PhD looking at student experiences of Accelerated Christian Education.
• As part of this PhD, I’ve done a comprehensive literature review. If it’s been written about ACE and it still exists, I’ve almost certainly read it.

What qualifications would you expect someone to have that I don’t?

Q. Why do you personalise your campaign rather than just critique the system?

I don’t. I guess you are referring to my critiques of Brenda Lewis and Pieter Van Rooyen. This is not making it personal. If an individual has a public role (say, acting as a representative of a school or curriculum), it is not personal to criticise their actions in their professional capacity. It would be making it personal if I were to attack them for their personal appearance, or to criticise members of their families, or publish private information about them. I haven’t done any of those things.

Here’s a relevant comparison: When engaging in a political debate, it is normal to critique the words and actions of specific candidates, rather than just their party. For example, over at the Channel 4 blog Fact Check (and dozens of others like it on the net), the researchers frequently refer to specific claims made by individual politicians and conclude that their statements have been false or misleading, much as I did with Brenda Lewis. That’s not making it personal. Whereas you only have to search Twitter for comments mentioning David Cameron or Ed Miliband to find instances of people who have made it personal.

Q. Do you actually care about the students that you think you are campaigning for? Do you not believe in freedom of choice?

I don’t see how the second question is related to the first, but OK. Of course I care about the students I’m campaigning for. What other motivation could I have for doing this? I’ve earned a small amount from this campaign by writing for places like the Guardian, New Statesman, New Humanist, but this pales in comparison to what it’s cost me in lost earnings (because I stopped working to do my PhD) and expenses (because PhDs involve buying many books).

If you think the second question relates to the first, presumably your suggestion is that these students want to go to these schools, and so by campaigning against them I am restricting these children’s freedom of choice. I dispute this. To make an informed choice, you have to have good information, and ACE schools deprive children of the knowledge they need to make an well-reasoned decision. It’s a system of indoctrination, and indoctrinated individuals are not equipped to choose.

I am defending the students’ choice. I am arguing that they ought not to be subjected to indoctrination, so that they are able to reach their own conclusions later on. I’m also arguing that they shouldn’t be sent to schools which don’t offer formally recognised qualifications, or schools that use methods of instruction that are based on outdated behaviourist ideas. Children deserve the best education possible, and ACE is not it.

ACE, on the other hand, is defending the parents’ choice. And I don’t think it’s moral for parents to deliberately shield their children from current scientific knowledge, or to decide on their children’s behalf what religion they will follow. Religion is a matter of personal faith and conscience, and making children recite pledges to Jesus and the Bible every day robs them of that choice.

Q. Has being infamous gone to your head?

Ha! Infamous. Sorry, but outside of the readers of this blog, no one cares. If I was after notoriety, I would have stayed in the music business (I actually got recognised in public when I was a gigging musician, which hasn’t happened since I started this). Even at QEDcon, hardly anyone knew me.

I know I’ve been on Newsnight, but think about it. There are talking heads on the news every day. How many of those people can you name or even picture now? I’m guessing hardly any. If you want to calculate the percentage of the world’s population who know who I am and/or care about what I do, start with a zero. Then a decimal point. Then six zeroes. Then you’re getting close.

Q. Do you think your reports of ACE Schools in the UK are very dated compared with the modern ACE school?

No I don’t, but I’d welcome anyone who can supply updated information. If ACE schools think that I am relying on out-of-date criticisms of what they do, all they have to do is show me around their school, or write a guest post explaining how things have changed.

Since I started my research, I have acquired the latest versions of the ACE Procedures Manual and Administration Manual. I’ve purchased new copies of dozens of PACEs. What I’ve found is that in the overwhelming majority of cases, the PACEs have not changed since I was at school. Where they have, usually the total number of words that have changed is smaller than 1%. The majority of the text in the 2010 Procedures Manual is the same as the 1994 edition, which was current when I completed ACE monitor training.

I haven’t had a chance to blog about the findings yet, but one of this blog’s readers recently sent me the entire set of supervisor’s training PACEs from the early 1980s. They do vary rather more from the more recent versions, but even there, the teaching methods and much of the content remain extremely similar. My conclusion is that ACE rarely changes, and when it does, the changes are minor. The people who run it clearly believe the system is excellent as it is.

On ace-education.co.uk, I have been criticised for suggesting that ACE schools still spank students. But I have never been misleading about this. My post about paddling made clear that the current Procedures Manual instructs teachers not to spank kids in school. I also linked to a number of ACE websites which had clear written spanking policies on their websites. All of the links were active at the time of writing. None of those schools were in the UK, but my focus on this blog is not restricted to the UK; I am interested in ACE worldwide.

Anyway, the case of paddling shows why a campaign against ACE is worthwhile. The only reason ACE schools stopped spanking in the UK is because it became illegal in 1999 for schools in England and Wales to use corporal punishment. If the law hadn’t changed, they would have carried on. As it was, CEE hosted a protest against the law in London (see also here)

Q. All the bad press seems to be instigated by you. Can you explain why then thousands of children educated by ACE are not joining your campaign?

Well, since my main contention is that ACE is a system of indoctrination, I can quite reasonably argue that at least some of them are indoctrinated and think I’m of the devil. Of course, that won’t be true for all of them. No system of indoctrination, even the ones in totalitarian regimes, is completely effective.

It should be noted that most of these ex-ACE students aren’t exactly leaping to ACE’s defence either. I can’t comment on what most students think, because I’m not in contact with them. It’s fair to say most of them probably don’t know about my campaign. I’m in touch with large numbers of ex-ACE students, quite a lot of whom support what I do but have no wish to join the campaign publicly. Some of them would be shunned by their families if they did. Some just want to get on with their lives and forget about ACE, and I don’t blame them. That’s what I plan to do after this PhD.

Anyway, popularity makes no difference to whether I’m right. Almost all major campaigns begin with just one or two voices. The campaign for women to have the vote was ridiculed at first. That doesn’t mean the suffragettes were wrong.

Q. Are you comfortable being an Atheist or is it another crutch to replace Christianity?

In response to the first part of your question, yes.

In response to the second part, no.

(This has nothing to do with anything.)

Q. Are you blaming ACE for your failure to cope with life’s circumstances?

Again with the leading questions! What evidence is there that I’m failing to cope with life’s circumstances?

My life is going fine, in spite of ACE’s best efforts, but guess what? I know a lot of people who do blame ACE for some of their problems, and this complaint is entirely legitimate.

Yes, some of us in Accelerated Christian Education Exposed are angry, some have battled with depression and mental health issues, and some are bitter. If anything, this makes us more credible. Given what we experienced in ACE schools, it would be surprising if nobody had any issues.

It is completely reasonable to be angry if your school taught you falsehoods as facts.

It is entirely understandable to suffer mental health issues if you attended an abusive school.

If you found yourself as an adult with no recognised qualifications and hence no employment prospects, like Anaïs or Christina, and this was because of your school, it is wholly legitimate to blame the school and the curriculum writers.

If you dropped out of university because your school failed to prepare you for the process, it’s fair to ask why they let you down.

If you are gay and your school made you feel like you don’t exist, you have every right to be angry.

If you are a woman and you were raised to believe that you had to obey and submit to your husband, your human rights were violated and, yeah, you should be mad about it.

“Failing to cope with life’s circumstances” is a predictable result of a bad education and abusive teaching practices.

So if anyone plays the “you’re just bitter” card (or anything like it) again, I’m going to ask what their point is. If someone’s been wronged, they may have good reasons to be bitter. Dismissing someone’s complaint because they are bitter shows a disturbing lack of empathy and—frankly—a shockingly un-Christlike attitude.

Even if I and the others who write on this blog are wrong about ACE, as Christian educators, CEE’s first concern should be with the wellbeing of young people. If it were, their corporate image would take care of itself.

Q. How would you feel if CEE reps or ACE parents came to your skeptical tour dates?

OH YES PLEASE!!!

If I am speaking in a city where I am aware of an ACE school, I make a point of letting them know and inviting them to respond. Sometimes, because of a lack of organisation, I don’t give them much notice. So, for example, I think I only gave the Vine Christian School three or four days’ warning before my talk in Reading, so it’s understandable they didn’t come (though it’s less understandable that they never returned my calls or emails).

When I spoke in Lincoln, which is just down the road from Locksley Christian School, the organisers of Lincoln Skeptics in the Pub invited representatives from Locksley almost two months in advance, and Locksley never returned one of their many phone calls or emails.

We have the same situation in Manchester at the moment. I will be speaking in Manchester on August 14, and this was arranged in April. Greater Manchester Skeptics Society has been trying to get someone from King of Kings School to come and debate me ever since my talk was first booked, and again, they’ve had no reply.

I would welcome nothing more than an open, level-playing-field debate with an ACE advocate.

Which means that I find myself ending this blog post exactly the same way I ended the last one:

ACE, why won’t you debate me?

Oh wait, that isn’t actually how I’m ending, because I have a question for the author of these ten questions.

The author and I have been in contact for several years. They have my email address. So here’s what I’m wondering:

Why did I find out about this blog from a Google search?

Did you actually want me to respond, or were you looking to score points?

Related posts:

• The strange case of UK Naric and Accelerated Christian Education
• More ACE survivor stories
• ACE survivor turns cultural anthropologist; destroys curriculum

Could ACE ever be banned in the UK? We’ve occasionally looked at this question in the past on Leaving Fundamentalism, but I’ve most recently argued that it would be better not to ban them. As I said in my New Statesman article, it would be preferable to see the schools improving themselves, encouraged by a more thorough inspection regime. It may be, however, that this is just never going to happen to a sufficient extent—ACE’s supporters hold their beliefs too rigidly ever to change their minds. Then what?

In Norway in 2001, the answer was to ban part of the curriculum, but not for the reasons you might expect. It wasn’t creationism, or right-wing politics, or religious teachings that got ACE Norway into hot water. It was sexism. Many of the same international laws that influenced the decision in Norway also apply in the UK. To understand whether this could happen here, we have to look at the Norwegian situation.

It all started when the Norwegian gender equality ombudsman, Kristin Mile, declared that ACE’s 4th grade Social Studies PACEs violated the Gender Equality Act. Then Norway’s education minister, Trond Giske, announced that he would not approve any future applications to open ACE schools (Link is in Norwegian. Here’s an English translation by Katie Ritson):

 Giske warns Christian schools

Education Minister Trond Giske emphatically put his foot down over the equal opportunities curriculum used by ACE schools when he spoke at the Norwegian national conference for teachers on Tuesday.

Audun Stølås, NTB

Published: 07.Nov. 2000 13:25 Updated: 07.Nov. 2000 13:25

LOEN: – If the equality commission finally decides that the teaching materials used by ACE schools are in conflict with equality laws, each single school using these materials and requiring official approval will get a resounding no as long as I am minister for education in Norway, said Giske, who was roundly applauded by delegates at the teaching conference.

Giske read aloud from a textbook used by ACE schools. This said that “Since God’s word tells us that wives are to subjugate themselves to their own husbands, then this means that wives should obey their husbands. Wives who love their husbands in the way that God intended are happy to submit to their husbands.”*

Shall Submit

Trond Giske also read aloud exercises for pupils, in which the pupils are required to underline the correct answer to questions such as “(wives, dogs, cats) should obey their husbands. Wives should be (sorry, sad, happy) to submit to their husbands”.

Today there are ten ACE schools in Norway which follow an American curriculum. These schools are run by charismatic, free church organizations. Plans to open the school “Oasis” (Oasen) using the same curriculum in Songdalen just outside Kristiansand was provisionally halted by Giske after an equality ombudsman concluded that education on equality was at odds with Norwegian law on this subject.

Not recognized

Giske told the NTB that if the equality commission came to the same conclusion as the equality ombudsman, he will be sending letters to the existing ACE schools in Norway and asking them to explain their position with regard to this educational programme.

“I can’t approve schools that are in breach of our laws. Schools with this kind of curriculum are not just in conflict with the laws on equality, but also with the law on education and public administration” said minister for education Trond Giske.

*Note: Since the quotations from the ACE materials have been translated into Norwegian and then back into English, it’s possible this text varies slightly from the original. I would bet, for instance, that the original word here was “submit” rather than “subjugate”.

Of course, ACE Norway appealed the equality ombudsman’s decision. When the Equality Board of Appeals heard the case, it decided on a 4-3 majority decision that the reviewed ACE materials did breach the Equality Act. As a result, the PACEs were banned.

ACE’s objections amounted to the following:

• The Equality Board of Appeals did not have sufficient competence to make this decision
• ACE’s teachings complied with guidelines from the Ministry of Education and Research
• There was an exception in the Equality Act for religious education, and the Equality Act did not apply to the internal affairs of religious communities.

The first two objections were quickly dismissed and we need not concern ourselves with them here. The third objection, however, is crucial. Because ACE schools are Christian, and because ACE integrates Christian teachings into every single academic subject, ACE Norway argued that everything their schools taught counted as religious instruction, and therefore exempt from the law.

Separate but equal

They also claimed that the PACEs do teach that men and women are equal:

The vision that emerges in the teaching aids related to gender issues can – with reference to the Bible – be summarized such that that women and men have different responsibilities in a family, while emphasizing that they are equal and are obliged to respect each other. It is also said that the father is the “leader” of the family.

This argument is not exactly persuasive. ACE was arguing for complementarianism, the theological belief that while men and women are equal in value, they have different God-given roles. In other words, separate but equal (which didn’t work out well last time it was tried). If you’re the sort of person who believes that, you’re not likely to listen to a filthy heathen like me, so here’s one Christian on why it doesn’t work, and another on why accepting gender equality need not even mean viewing the Bible as less authoritative.

In any case, that separate-but-equal argument was never going to wash with the Norwegian authorities, because the Equality Act requires not just equal status, but also equal rights and opportunities. The PACEs patently don’t teach that.

Absolutism

The Equality Ombudsman argued that ACE still had the right to teach its religious views on gender in religious studies lessons. The problem was that the objectionable material came in Social Studies PACEs. But ACE Norway claimed this wouldn’t work. They argued (as ACE supporters often do) that children will be confused if they are taught one thing at home and at church, and another thing at school. They said that the exception for religious education textbooks wasn’t enough, because then the students would hear contradictory messages between social studies and RE materials.

I actually have some sympathy for ACE’s position here. It reminds me of anti-creationism campaigners saying that it’s fine to teach creationism in RE lessons, as long as it’s kept out of science. I don’t think they’ve thought this through. It doesn’t make sense to have teachers in the same school blatantly contradicting each other over factual claims. The problem is that people don’t realise how RE is taught in these kinds of schools.

When most people think of RE, they think of generally comparative teaching: Christians believe x, Jews believe y, Muslims believe z. When religion is taught in conservative evangelical places like ACE, it’s taught as The Truth: This is what God says, so we know it’s true. It might sometimes be taught comparatively, but the starting point is still “We know what’s right; here are some incorrect views”. The Norwegian Equality Act provisions aren’t set up to deal with that kind of absolutism. I think the Norwegian authorities imagined that the social studies lessons would teach children about equality of opportunity for people regardless of gender, and religious studies lessons would say “Some people have different beliefs”. That’s not the case here, and any adequate decision about what can be taught needs to bear that in mind.

The Equality Appeals Board ruled that all this was not their problem. Their job was to uphold the Equality Act, and ACE were violating it:

For schools and educational institutions using teaching materials in the teaching of Christianity/religion that are not based on equality between the sexes, there could possibly be a contradiction between the learning materials for religious instruction and teaching materials for other subjects such as social studies. Whether or not this will lead to good or bad educational results is not for the equality authorities to consider.

UN Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW)

Here’s where it gets relevant to the UK: The Norwegian Equality Board of Appeals based its decision in part on CEDAW and European law, which applies in the UK. CEDAW is implemented in the UK, and every four years the government reports to the UN Commission on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women. As you can clearly see, ACE’s teachings violate CEDAW. The Norwegian tribunal referred particularly to articles 2f, 5a, and 10c (emphasis from the Norwegian Board of Appeals’ report):

Article 2 States Parties condemn discrimination against women in all its forms, agree to pursue by all appropriate means and without delay a policy of eliminating discrimination against women and, to this end, undertake:…

(f) To take all appropriate measures, including legislation, to modify or abolish existing laws, regulations, customs and practices which constitute discrimination against women;

…

Read more:

• Too much freedom at Norwegian religious schools?
• Women’s Human Rights: CEDAW in International, Regional, and National Law
• Hege Skjeie, “‘Gender Equality': On travel metaphors and duties to yield” in Women’s Citizenship and Political Rights

Five weeks ago, this blog asked “Are ACE schools using misleading advertising?” Now, according to the Advertising Standards Agency, the answer—in at least one case—is yes. To explain why this ruling is so important, though, we need to travel back in time to when I was at school.

When the National Christian Schools Certificate (NCSC) was included in the UCAS UK Qualifications Handbook for the first time, my school erupted with joy. Until then, getting into university with an NCSC had been a fearsome task. No one in university admissions had ever heard of it. The NCSC was officially unrecognised and might as well not exist.

But now it was in the UCAS Handbook! Praise the Lord, this was a miracle. After all the ways the devil had tried to oppose the Lord’s work, finally the secular authorities were recognising the NCSC. God had made a way where there seemed to be no way. My mum remembers going in to school for a special parents’ evening, where not one but two of the supervisors gave a presentation on what an excellent recognition of the curriculum this was. Now the NCSC was officially on the books. Now Christian kids could go to university.

In 2004, the NCSC changed its name to the International Certificate of Christian Education (ICCE).

Ten years later I was earning part of my living interviewing students who were applying to Higher Education courses. At that time, I found out about UK NARIC’s approval of the ICCE, which led to this on the front page of the TES. Little did I know then that this would turn into a five-year campaign.

When I started trying to gather evidence that NARIC had made the wrong decision, I called a friend in university admissions and got them to send me the text of the UCAS handbook entries on the ICCE and NCSC. And I discovered something.

These entries were pointless. They didn’t endorse the ‘qualifications’ at all. They were purely for information purposes. The text explained what the ICCE and NCSC were, and that was it. Now the UCAS handbook is online, so you can see for yourself. The preface says:

The inclusion of any qualification does not imply recognition or endorsement of that qualification on the part of UCAS or HEIs, for the purposes of entry to HE in the UK. Similarly, absence of any qualification in the guide does not imply intended lack of recognition.

It’s irritated me ever since that ACE schools were getting away with claiming the UCAS handbook as a feather in their cap. In fact, bragging about being in the UCAS handbook is like bragging about having your business listed in the Yellow Pages. It’s not an achievement. It just confirms that you exist.

I thought about asking UCAS to remove the entries, for much the same reason as people were unhappy about the creationist exhibit at Giant’s Causeway (it technically isn’t an endorsement, but creationists use it as a way to try to seem more credible). But why should UCAS do that? The ICCE exists, and the UCAS book is a list of qualifications that exist. The problem wasn’t with UCAS; it was with the schools’ marketing.

And then, because I am not always the world’s quickest thinker, I realised what I could do.

I don’t suppose there’s any point in hiding the fact that I was the complainant in the recent ASA case—everyone would assume it was me anyway. After I wrote the misleading advertising blog post, I noticed this on Emmanuel Christian School’s website (see this archived version of the site):

The International Certificate of Christian Education is comparable to International ‘O’levels at General and International ‘A’ level at advanced; the ICCE Intermediate and Advanced both attract UCAS points (Universities and Colleges Admissions Service) and are published in the International Qualifications Handbook providing formal recognition of the work completed by children on the ACE curriculum.

The first clause (about comparability to International O- and A-levels) obviously refers to NARIC’s stupid ruling, so I couldn’t do anything about that. The second claim, that the ICCE attracts UCAS points for university entry, is untrue and has never been true, so I knew that part of my complaint would be upheld. The last part I was quite confident about, but these things are never 100%—NARIC’s approval of the ICCE was and remains ludicrous, but it hasn’t budged.

When the ASA adjudication came back, they upheld both parts of my complaint.

We considered that any claim referring only to the inclusion of the ICCE qualifications in either UCAS handbook, without making clear that that inclusion was intended for information only and did not confer any form of recognition or endorsement by UCAS, was likely to mislead if made in a promotional context for an educational establishment offering those qualifications.

The claim by Emmanuel School referred to the inclusion of the qualifications in the International Handbook as “providing formal recognition of the work completed by children on the ACE curriculum”. In view of the clear statement in the preface of that publication, we considered that the claim was misleading and breached the Code.

So now the Emmanuel website instead says:

The International Certificate of Christian Education has been approved by NARIC as comparable to International ‘O’levels at General and International ‘A’ level at advanced. Students from across the UK with ICCE have gone on to further education including university.

Of course, according to Anjana Ahuja’s research, in a number of cases, the fact that these students held an ICCE was incidental—it wasn’t the ICCE that gained them their university places. The current UCAS handbook entry on the ICCE, doubtless using information provided by the ICCE themselves, says: “ICCE Advanced Certificate is accepted by many universities for undergraduate entry”. I’m not sure how true that is; I’m currently in the process of finding out.

Anyway, the ASA has ruled that schools cannot use the UCAS Handbook entry to imply that the ICCE has official endorsement. If any school does, they will be found in breach of the Code, and hear from the ASA’s compliance team.

Changes are already happening. When I complained to the ASA, Redemption Academy in Stevenage had the same wording on its website as Emmanuel Christian School. As of this morning, that’s gone.

At the Vine Christian School in Reading, however, they’re still claiming:

The International Certificate of Christian Education is a similar standard to GCSE through to A level and is recognised by the majority of employers and universities in the UK and elsewhere. The ICCE is included in the UCAS (Universities and Colleges Admissions Service) International Qualifications Handbook providing formal recognition of the work completed by children on the ACE curriculum.

The prospectus for King of Kings School in Manchester says “The ICCE Advanced Certificate is a
matriculation certificate quoted by UCAS for university entrance.”

Nope.

The King’s House School in Windsor, meanwhile says:

“The ACE programme qualification (ICCE) is listed in the UCAS International Qualifications Handbook along with A-Levels and the International Baccalaurate”, implying that these qualifications are of equal standing. The ASA says this is misleading advertising.

At Maranatha Christian School near Swindon, they’re saying “The International Certificate of Christian Education is recognised by the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (UCAS)”.

Clever play on the two meanings of the word “recognise” there Maranatha, but the ASA says you’re being misleading.

These are far from the only misleading claims I’ve seen made in regard to the ICCE; these are just the ones about UCAS. The ASA says it will be following up all claims like these as instances of non-compliance.

Presumably the schools will all write to their parents, apologising for misrepresenting the level of recognition (ie none) that the ICCE officially enjoys.

Related posts:

• Are ACE schools using misleading advertising?
• Accelerated Christian Education validated by UK government agency
• The strange case of UK NARIC and Accelerated Christian Education

The headline of Friday’s Daily Telegraph screamed “Toddlers at risk from extremists“. The British Education Secretary has announced plans to ban teaching creationism is publicly-funded nurseries.

What it didn’t say is that, although the British Humanist Association (BHA) was the most prominent campaigner against creationism in nurseries, this was originally the subject of a letter-writing campaign by the readers of Leaving Fundamentalism. But I know you wrote the letters, so thank you.

We won.

Here’s a brief history of what has happened, and what it means. More importantly, an article in the TES last week may explain why ACE schools have been able to get away with so much.

On March 8, 2013, this blog ran a post called Government money for ACE schools in the UK. I later identified a further four Accelerated Christian Education schools which, according to their Ofsted reports, had received money in this way.

This was all roundly ignored by the media, apart from a piece in Nursery World which made exactly no difference. But following my discovery, the BHA put in a Freedom of Information request to every local authority in the country to find out how widespread this funding was. They ended up identifying 67 nurseries of concern. And because this list included some Islamic schools, this time the media took notice.

All of which resulted in the new Education Secretary announcing that toddlers are “at risk from extremism”. The BBC is reporting:

Councils are to be given powers to stop funding early-years providers with links to extremism, Education Secretary Nicky Morgan has announced…

Funding would be withheld from establishments that teach creationism as scientific fact…

Early-years children will be taught about learning right from wrong, learning to take turns and share, and to challenge negative attitudes and stereotypes.

Negative attitudes and stereotypes, you say? What, like saying women’s tools include mixing bowls and spoons, while men’s tools include power tools?

This new legislation is surely the end of public money going to ACE nurseries. The ACE nursery curriculum gives children workbooks with the word SCIENCE on the cover in giant letters, and inside they have pictures of Adam and Eve, and activities about the six days of creation. Combined with the gender stereotypes in the curriculum, there is no way anyone could plausibly argue that ACE complies with the guidelines. Job done.

Congratulations everyone. This is our first big campaigning win.

Outside of ACE nurseries, though, I’m interested to see how this plays out. If the wording of the guidelines will be that creationism cannot be taught “as scientific fact”, I think there will be some weasel room. In fact, if that is the final wording, it doesn’t seem very helpful.

There can’t be many nurseries in the country where creationism is taught “as scientific fact”. I doubt, apart from in ACE’s absurd booklets, whether the word science is much used.

The Telegraph quotes a government source as saying “We are absolutely not saying, ‘You can’t teach Bible stories’.” And this is quite right. If they ever try to ban teaching Bible stories to children, let me know the date and I’ll show up at the protest march. The problem is in how these stories are presented. I bet there are tons of nurseries where the term ‘science’ is never used, but teachers read from the book of Genesis and either imply or explicitly state that the stories are literally true. Is this going to be allowed?

This is why using the phrase “scientific fact” is unclear. There’s no way evolution can be scientifically valid, and at the same time the book of Genesis be literally true. If you can’t teach young-Earth creationism as scientifically true, you can’t consistently teach it as theologically true either. I doubt the government has the guts to get into that debate, because it raises some really difficult questions about freedom of religion.

Inspections

Next question: How are the councils going to be identifying these creationist nurseries? Presumably the schools won’t be coming forward to the authorities and saying “We are extremists, so please discontinue our funding”. They’ll be relying on inspectors, then. And inspections of creationist schools tend to be… poor.

Last week’s Times Education Supplement carried this article: ‘Ofsted fails to acknowledge or address the value-judgements involved in inspecting the curriculum‘. In it, Colin Richards, a former schools inspector and advisor to Ofsted, argues that the new guidelines for schools don’t really require inspectors to evaluate the curriculum. And in extremist schools, the curriculum is exactly the problem.

This is in part why ACE schools have been getting away with murder: They’re teaching rubbish, but the inspectors are primarily there to check that the school is following procedures properly. Richards is talking about Free Schools and academies, but independent schools have the same amount of curricular autonomy (indeed, the whole point of Free Schools is to give them the freedom which allegedly allows independent schools to thrive).

In his determination to “free” his academies and free schools, Gove allowed them to opt out of the misnamed national curriculum as long as the curriculum they provide is broad and balanced. Part of that strategy involves ensuring that Ofsted does not include the curriculum as one of the main focuses of school inspection. As a result, detailed judgements about the quality of the curriculum do not feature prominently – or, often, do not feature at all – in school inspection reports apart from anodyne, “coarse-grained” references to a broad and balanced curriculum and to spiritual, moral, social and cultural development. Yet it was the fine-grain of the curriculum, the content of lessons, assemblies and other activities, and the values permeating them, that proved to be at the heart of the Trojan Horse affair. This crucially important dimension was missed by inspectors in those Birmingham schools as, initially, they myopically pursued the flawed, almost “curriculum-free” inspection framework.

Until this is fixed—until the curriculum in ACE schools is inspected thoroughly and critically—ACE schools will be able to ignore independent school standards.

Related posts:

• Tax-funded sexism and creationism
• Richard Dawkins on ACE (again) and Ofsted reports
• You might be a fundamentalist, but at least you’re not brown

Turns out you’re a miserable lot, readers of Leaving Fundamentalism. Monday’s blog post was the biggest piece of good news I’ve ever posted, and it was the least popular blog of the year. So alright, fine. Have some bad news. And some good news: you can help.

14-year-old Skyler is being held at Marvelous Grace Girls’ Academy in Pace, Florida (MGGA). Her parents are divorced, and her father has put Skyler in the home against her mother’s wishes. Her mother, Silke Matero, has a custody/visitation order to see her daughter. MGGA, however, refuses to let Silke see Skyler. It’s a residential reform home for ‘rebellious’ girls, and during their year-long stay, girls have no contact with outsiders except through letters and phone calls which are monitored by staff.

EDIT: Silke informs me that girls can receive visits from family after four months, if they have received no demerits. My own experience in an ACE school suggests that going four months without demerits is no mean feat, however.

MGGA is one of the ‘troubled teen’ reform homes I’ve blogged so much about. The existence of these homes is a stain on the free world. In fact, if people who are supportive of normal ACE schools would speak out against them, it would do their cause a great deal of good. Right now, their silence (and ACE’s supplying of curriculum to places like Marvelous Grace and Hephzibah House) looks a lot like complicity.

The home is on the grounds of the former New Beginnings Girls Academy, a place with survivor stories that will make your blood alternately boil and run cold. This is from the first entry on the “Stop NBGA” survivor stories page. It doesn’t get better from here:

There was a little girl with serious mental health problems. She was about 12 when she came in and was on a bunch of medication for her problems that she truly needed. They took her off all meds and said they could help her better than the medicine. She always looked like she didn’t know what was going on and she didn’t understand why they were treating her the way they did. I remember one time where myself and other girls and staff members were made to stay up with her until about 4 in the morning and force her to stand in a circle of masking tape on the floor. If she got out of the circle or didn’t comply then we had to push her back in.

If she kept misbehaving then we had to put her into an ice cold shower with all her clothes on while she screamed. She was always in trouble and yelled at for no reason at all. You could tell that there was something wrong with her and that was not the place she needed to be. She couldn’t even talk that well and we could barely ever understand what she was saying sometimes. They pretty much just treated her like crap and blamed her for it because she wasn’t “right with God” according to them. It was awful and I felt very bad for her.

The current MGGA website denies it is associated with New Beginnings, but the Tampa Bay Times found evidence that suggests they are very closely related:

An archived website, copyrighted in 2008, advertised “New Beginnings Girls Academy” with [MGGA director] Blankenship as the executive director. His biography described his youth as one of “Alcohol, Drugs, Thievery, Lying, Immorality, Strange Music and Strange Friends.” It said he found God “after years of living as a Satanist and a Witch.”
The home was called New Beginnings Girls Academy in police reports until 2010, the first year it appeared as Marvelous Grace Girls Academy. Online property records show the compound was never sold after the previous home left; the property is still owned by the same corporation, with [New Beginnings owner] Pastor Bill McNamara listed as an officer.

The Times also notes that MGGA itself has been the subject of direct allegations of abuse:

On the old grounds of New Beginnings, Marvelous Grace Girls Academy is run by a street preacher once photographed outside a bar holding a sign about Sodom with a fellow protester who was dressed like Satan. Girls describe a program similar to New Beginnings, where teens are expected to strictly follow fundamentalist Christian ideals.

In 2010, Santa Rosa County sheriff’s deputies came upon two scratched and sunburned runaways who told them Blankenship had called them “faggots” and “bastards,” forced them to street preach and shut girls who weren’t “preaching hard enough” in a van. They threatened suicide if taken back to the school. DCF investigated and found no evidence to support their claims.

Even if we give MGGA the benefit of the doubt and assume that the horrific abuses reported at New Beginnings haven’t taken place there, here are the facts about it we do know:

• It teaches the Accelerated Christian Education curriculum (of course).
• Its website lists an ultra-fundamentalist statement of faith, including statements that “God created the world in six literal 24-hour periods”, and this joyous section on “the eternal state”

We believe that the souls of unbelievers remain after death in conscious punishment and torment until the second resurrection, when with soul and body reunited, they shall appear at the Great White Throne Judgment and shall be cast into the Lake of Fire, not to be annihilated, but to suffer everlasting conscious punishment and  torment.

• MGGA’s public performances are eerily similar to those by the unspeakable Lester Roloff, suggesting Roloff may have influenced the institution in other ways as well.
• Girls are held on site and can’t leave or have uncensored communication with anyone on the outside
• By refusing to let Silke see her daughter, Skyler’s presence at MGGA violates a court order from the state of Florida. EDIT: This post earlier reported that the court order was from Nebraska. This was incorrect.

So it’s an ACE prison camp. Isn’t that enough?

But we can make a difference. Silke has a GoFundMe page which has raised $6,195 in a month. She is trying to raise $7,500 to get a lawyer to get Skyler out. 

This blog has enough readers that if all of you just gave insignificant pocket change, Silke would hit her target. 

We’ve made a lot of differences lately. This would make a huge difference to one girl and her mother.

Click here to donate.

Related posts:

• Fundamentalist education and custody battles
• Religious exemption at some Florida children’s homes shields prying eyes
• Horror stories from tough love teen homes

This is a guest post by Talen Lee, a former ACE student from Australia. This is his survivor story. Be warned, it contains unpleasant descriptions of corporal punishment.

If you’re a familiar reader of Jonny Scaramanga’s blog, you probably already know that the ACE system promotes false information as fact. These are glaring factual errors that honestly shouldn’t even be up for debate. When you’re talking about errors that run throughout the entire ACE system to this degree, you have to come down very hard on one side or another. Either you think it’s not acceptable to teach blatant falsehoods in an education system as facts, or you think that it is, and if you’re in the latter camp, I am comfortable dismissing everything you have to say about education at all. Bickering about  specifics like flipping mountains or universal floods or six day creationism is just trying to blow out matches while the house is on fire. I have no patience to deal with this penny-ante apologism, this horsecrap refining, where people want to argue how the precise details about some fossils may indicate a sort-of-weakness in evolutionary theory when we’re discussing a book that tries to tell me that the Loch Ness Monster is real.

There’s also a long discussion you can make about how its system is pedagogically useless. Repetition of simple exercises without complexity serves no purpose but to teach how to overcome those exercises, in the same way that memorising dates doesn’t actually make you a historian.

You could discuss the ACE system’s political indoctrination. I know that as an Australian consumer I wasn’t particularly keen on reading books that told me about how America was, in fact, the greatest nation in the world, and the only place where people were free. After all people weren’t free in America – if you wanted to buy one, you had to pay for it.

Rather than talk about the flaws in the ACE curriculum and the things it does badly, I want to talk to you about a thing the ACE system does really well.

I don’t think it’s unreasonable at the moment to say that Jonny Scaramanga is one of the leading voices about the ACE system. I’ve heard people try to devalue his experience because he spent ‘only’ two years in the ACE environment. He had other systems changing/influencing him, for example, or he had other, bigger problems going on. Well, I went through ten years of the ACE system, from kindergarten through to year nine. ACE was my foundational education. Of the twelve years I spent at compulsory school, all but three were in an ACE school that ran from kindergarten to year twelve, with a total school population of about thirty students.

In what almost every reasonable person considers a school, with a curriculum and with oversight and with staff, there’s this phenomenon of social collusion. Even if you don’t plan for it, most of the time, people observe work, and they observe students. Being observed influences how the students react, and the work being observed will shape in the mind of the teachers the ways to interact with those students. This is an ecosystem of attention, where people are disposed to pay attention to one another’s interactions, and where information passes from point to point without any deliberate design. Teachers in these contexts will see students as students, and they talk about them with other adults, often other teachers or professional educators of some stripe. In these systems, with information flowing from place to place as reports, double-checking or just plain gossip, make it hard to maintain a truly oppressive level of control.

The ACE system removes all those things. The ACE system does not need planning. The ACE system discourages planning. Give children PACES, it says. When they finish their work too soon, either give them more PACES, or encourage them to keep advancing in the PACEs they have. Crafts, sports, all that stuff can be filled in, if you must, but the bulk of education is through a blind, rote system that does not know the child, does not observe the child, and does not care about the child. The students do not interact with one another, meaning peers do not observe other children struggling, do not gain extra perspective on challenging problems – and the questions are sculpted to fit that. It does not need explanation, because the entire system is so simple that after a few months in almost all subjects, you will become proficient in how to answer the specific style of PACE questions. You could replace PACEs with Sudoku puzzle books for how they teach you – you become very, very good at answering the specific types of questions that the PACEs want to ask. Oh, as you grow older, you’ll have to write out larger sections of text, but you won’t ever have to engage with the question, just with the structure of a sentence.

Like cattle grids and fences, the ACE system is very good at managing a large group. Instead of needing a number of teachers for each group of students, there is a social order, a structure that people have to fit themselves in, like the Panopticon. If you differentiate, it will be seen. You can’t talk to someone, you can’t reach out. You will comply, you will obey, and you will conform.

Panopticon (wiki commons)

It is a readymade toolkit for institutionalised oppression.

Our school had a primary school teacher, four or five volunteer monitors, who were never present two contiguous days, and a principal who served as High School teacher. The primary school teacher was my mother; the principal was a man who hated my father, and, fearing him, took it out on my sister, my mother, and myself in that most masterfully passive-aggressive of ways. Starting from day one in this school, I became convinced I was a terrible student and a wicked child, because that’s what the system told me.

Every single day, I would receive the minimum threshold of demerits for detention. Every single day, even when the principal had almost no direct interaction with me, without fail. I didn’t really put it together, but it was pretty consistent. The principal would see a thing and make it a demerit offence. Even on the days where I had detention sufficient to not interact with other children, there’d be something. A dropped pen. Too many requests for bathroom breaks. Finishing my work early. The smallest slights turned without fail into detentions, every single day.

The school promised great results with ‘discipline problem’ children, taking on students who had been expelled or marginalised in other schools for behaviour or learning problems. This meant that the school had a ready supply of older bullies who would quite happily beat the living heck out of a kid just because they were bored. It didn’t take long for them to realise that they could beat me up with almost no consequence. Routinely, when attacked, the principal would break it up – eventually – only to give me demerits because ‘you must have provoked them.’

When I crossed from primary school – my mother’s control – to high school, it became even more persistent. The school practiced corporal punishment for almost no students except for myself, and that became an additional component of my days. There were days I limped home from school having taken a beating from a bully, been awarded a demerit for my part in the violence, taken to the pastor’s manse, beaten again, then sent home with blood under my clothes and a note from the principal, to my father, outlining some wicked deed I’d done that day – slapping a table, poking my tongue out a monitor, yawning in assembly, humming a pop song – and my father would double the punishment with a flat length of wood.

From the ACE Procedures Manual, 1998 (ACE guidelines now discourage corporal punishment at school, though not at home)

I spent ten years in this situation, during which one man, more or less completely unchecked, with no oversight, terrorised and abused my sister, my mother, and myself, with the moral authority of a church behind him. I was threatened with expulsion, and I would burst into tears at the possibility of it. This was, after all, a safe school, a godly school – if I couldn’t do well here, what dreadful things would await me at public school?

There are some anecdotes about the abuse, about the permitted horribleness. While those things add lurid depth to the pain I – and others – experienced in this environment of control, and the dehumanising ways women and the abnormal were treated, they aren’t necessary. Ask me in private some time. Or better yet, don’t. I’d rather not remember.

I have spoken to educators about this scenario, since leaving it. The response is almost always horror, which makes sense because it was a blatantly abusive, corrosive environment. But the other thing that constantly comes up is that that sort of thing can’t happen. It’s not possible, in any system like this, for long-term child abuse, certainly open like this was, to pass without notice, unless there’s something strange going on.

Thunder and rain

There was something strange going on. I realised that when as a seven year old, when I was stuck at the score-key, looking at my PACE with concern. The question stalling me had been a two-blanker (quite advanced, I felt). The question was – for example – something like “ _____ and ______ happen during thunderstorms.”

I had written rain and thunder. The score-key said thunder and rain.

When I finally cracked and called for a monitor, seeking their judgement, I watched a grown man, his moustache twitching, consider very, very carefully the words before him. The answer was an obvious one, wasn’t it? The answers were effectively the same. I had internalised the concept. I understood what the question wanted to know, but I hadn’t answered it in precisely the way it had wanted. A teacher would, in this situation, probably let it go, or, at the least, provide me with a reason to change it.

Eventually, he shook his head, defeated by the challenge of it. “Mark it wrong,” he said. “Go back to your desk and fix it.”

That was this environment. There was no questioning authority over you; you obeyed it. Even when your own common sense indicated otherwise, you had to be able to tell that there was something strange going on.

Schoolwork was easy, but boring. It was tedious. Over the years and subjects, I grew sloppy. I’d use synonyms as a point of pride. I’d avoid filling in the examples, because they were already filled in. And when I was in year six, the Principal dredged up every PACE I’d done, and went through them all, marking them one by one. Every synonym, every unfilled example, every slip, every mistake, every single page over the years was treated as an individual instance of cheating. I was sent home that day with a detention slip that merely listed ‘cheating x 348.’

My father did what my father always did, and I went to school the next day to deal with the aftermath.

Taught not to think

The Pastor had decided that there was a problem I – and a few others – had. He took us from our PACE work and sat us down in one of the church halls, before a blackboard. There, he stood up and wrote sequences of sums and sentences. 2+2=5. GUD BETER BEST, WE WILL NEVER RESST. A B C D E Q F. Our lesson for that day – and for the whole day – was to sit down, and write, on blank pieces of paper, exactly what we saw on the board.

I was there with a dyslexic student. I’d never felt so humiliated as when that student was told he had it ‘right’ and was allowed to return to his studies.

The whole day, I sat there, trying to write out what the Pastor wrote, one by one. I just didn’t see his errors. GUD BETR BEST he wrote, and good, better, best I wrote. I realised perhaps it was the capitalisation? GOOD BETTER BEST? No. Still wrong. Still wrong.

I was literally sat down in a room and told to copy out wrong sums in order to teach me to not think.

The finale of these exercises was a mangled, incorrectly spaced and spelled edict of Proverbs 3:5 – Trust in the LORD with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding. I don’t remember all the errors. I do remember that it incorrectly labelled it as Psalms. I hadn’t worked it out, by that point. I hadn’t gotten it. And what’s more, it was The Bible. I knew the Bible. My father taught the Bible. Surely it was a worse sin to misquote the Bible?

I spent a lot of time writing that verse.

When I was thirteen, the church started to fall apart. It seemed that over ten years, the pastor of this authoritarian place had been embezzling money from his congregation to prop up failing business ventures. He didn’t apologise or make excuses; he just announced he’d been doing it, then that he was leaving, and that was that. People risked losing their homes. The principal, beholden as he was to the pastor for authority, made his own excuses, and fled at the end of the year.

I wasn’t sure what was going to happen to me. My father had finally discovered that all of the narrative I’d been trying to impress upon him about the unfairness of the principal, about the unprovoked attacks, about the bruises and bloodstains, and on literally the last day that man was present, came to the school to confront him. I had no idea what was said. My father told me afterwards that if anyone laid a hand on me that day, he’d be bringing the police to arrest the Principal on charges of criminal neglect.

It’s not really a very heartening thing, though. After all, he’d won for ten years but for one day.

Moving to a normal school

We moved a year later, my sister having graduated. We went to a university town to the south, where my parents had grown up. My sister’s educational qualifications were laughed at by the university – even with an SAT score that she had studied quite hard for, the ACE system was considered not a school by the university. Thankfully she was able to catch up and learn fast. Me, I was dropped from ten years in the ACE system into another school – still a Christian school.

The first class of the first day was science. The teacher walked in, and drew a circle on the board, then two smaller circles next to it, and drew lines connecting them. Then, he labelled the smaller circles H, and the larger circle O.

“Okay,” he said. “Let’s start off a new year with an easy one.” He pointed at the O in the circle. “Who can tell me the valency of this.”

What the heck is a valency

What is that thing he’s looking at

Why does everyone get this

What the hecking heck is going on oh dear oh no oh

In one year, I had to learn everything.  I had to learn basic chemistry and physics. I had to learn historically accurate information about scientific figures. I had to learn the age of the earth, the mechanisms of evolution, the value of data. I had to learn how to listen to a teacher, and more intimidatingly, I had to learn how to talk to a teacher. I had to learn about lying, and the times it was okay to lie – like drama class. I had to learn how to write an essay, something the ACE system had trained me to believe was just about ten or twelve lines of text on a page, and, crucially, something that the score key could not help me learn to do.  All of this was while I was learning things like swearing, singing, friendships and how to interact with people who weren’t white.

I didn’t manage it.

My School Certificate and Higher School Certificate – the standard certification we use in Australia – both came back abysmally low. I graduated school in 2000 with a 53% total.

The foundation of my education was the ACE system, and it had left me utterly unprepared not just for the real world, but for education itself. I was ashamed and humiliated, despairing and depressed – I was in every way I could understand it, a failure, and there was no more school to go back to.

Even that great question you’re asked so often in your last years of high school – what do you want to do with your life? Was a question that I thought of in ACE terms. What was the blank? I want to ____? What… what could I do? Where was the text I had to read that would tell me? Nobody could help me. Nobody could answer it. I did not know what I wanted to do, nor did I imagine I’d ever work it out.

That was a long time ago. In 2013 I finally mustered up the courage to attempt university education. I had to do a quick access program, because I was, to put it mildly unable to prove any form of educational qualification. But when I sat down to talk with my tutors for my first year subjects, we’d talk and have an interesting chat… whereupon I’d almost always get asked the same question.

“When are you finishing your thesis?”

I didn’t really understand what it meant. Finally, one teacher took me aside and privately asked me, “look, when you’re considering for your PhD –“

“PhD? I’m… I’m not doing a PhD?”

“You’re not?”

“No. Um.”

“Aren’t you a third-year student?”

“No?”

“What are you, I mean, where are you in your degree?”

“This is my first semester.”

It was a nice little ego stroke. I mentioned it to my mother, and she nodded. “Well, we always knew you were smart.”

“We did?” I blinked.

“Oh, yes, of course. It was what [Principal] was so worried about. He talked to me when you started school there, you know. ‘This boy is a genius.’ You could read before you started school.”

I remember feeling a bit numb then.

“He said it was very important we make sure you don’t realise that. Otherwise you might become arrogant.”

And my mother nodded and sipped her tea. With the best of intentions and with a smile on her face, she had agreed with a man who hated her husband, to quietly gaslight me. To ensure I was humble, instead of arrogant. Better I be a failure than proud.

I’m not saying these sorts of abuses couldn’t happen in other schools. I’m sure they do and can. But I am absolutely, ironclad certain, that the ACE system served as a magnificent tool for this oppressive environment. Nobody had to question anything. Not the teachers, not the monitors, certainly not the students, not my own mother. The teachers knew their job was to trust the system, obey the system’s rules, and everything would work out. Just trust and obey.

Trust and obey.

Because there’s no other way to be happy.

Just trust and obey.

Check out Talen’s blog at http://press.arts-eclectic.com/

Related posts:

• ACE survivor becomes cultural anthropologist, dismantles curriculum
• A reverence for received knowledge
• A collection of ACE survivor stories

Alright people!

I don’t normally plug my talks with separate posts (you can see the ‘speaking dates’ page for the latest), but the next seven days have some good ones lined up:

Tomorrow, Wednesday 20th August 2014, I’m appearing at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival performing, for the first time ever, my autobiographical one-man show, My Escape from Fundamentalism.

On Thursday I’m at Merseyside Skeptics.

And then next Tuesday I’ll be speaking in Dover about Dover School for All Nations, which you should know about by now. Much has happened since I last wrote about it. Pieter Van Rooyen has died, which is very sad for his family and friends, but the school he founded continues under new leadership, which is very sad for everyone else.

Here’s the press release ahead of my talk, which will be the first ever Skeptics in the Pub to take place in Dover. I’ve also invited the leadership of Dover School for All Nations to come to the talk and have right of reply. I very much hope they will accept.

PRESS RELEASE FROM THE SOUTH EAST SKEPTICS
Date: 12 August 2014

Faith school whistleblower to speak ahead of Dover ‘ACE’ school expansion

A former pupil of the controversial ‘Accelerated Christian Education’ (ACE) curriculum will be giving a public lecture on August 26^th, ahead of September’s expansion of the Dover School for All Nations (DSFAN) ACE faith school.

Jonny Scaramanga – a former fundamentalist Christian and graduate of the ACE system – has repeatedly spoken out against the curriculum ¹, which seeks to put a literal interpretation of the Bible at the heart of every school subject ². Having left the ACE system 15 years ago, Jonny – whose grandfather went to school with Ian Fleming, inspiring the iconic Bond villain’s surname – now believes his experiences growing up in an ACE faith school border on abusive.

“I started at an ACE school when I was 11, and left just before I turned 15”, Jonny explains. “By the time I left, I was convinced that it was a moral imperative for parents to spank their children, that it was against God’s will for governments to provide healthcare or benefits, and that evolution was a conspiracy cooked up by dishonest scientists who hated God. Unfortunately, most people are totally unaware that these beliefs are being taught in schools here in the UK, under the ACE system”.

The Dover School for All Nations is just one of sixty fundamentalist institutions in the UK to adopt the ACE curriculum, with 100 students due to begin classes at the school in September.

The ACE curriculum has been accredited by a UK government agency as equivalent to A-level qualifications³, despite having been roundly criticised for teaching claims including that the existence of the Loch Ness Monster disproves evolution⁴, that man and dinosaurs coexisted⁵ and that evolution has been demonstrated to be untrue⁴.

Besides clear factual inaccuracies, ACE has been further accused of indoctrination and propaganda, with lessons across a broad range of subjects teaching that the system of apartheid was beneficial to black South Africans ⁶, that homosexuality is sinful ³ and that right-wing political ideology should be accepted as inherently superior to liberalism without question or debate ^{4, 9}.

Jonny will be sharing his experiences and insights being taught under the ACE system at an event hosted by the South East Skeptics Society ⁷, taking place on August 26^th at The Cricketers Crabble Avenue, Dover. During the evening he will outline the concerns shared by teachers and Christians alike ⁸ over the teachings of the ACE curriculum.

“All children, regardless of background, have the right to a broad and balanced education and the opportunity to choose whether or not to follow a religion,” explains Scaramanga. “Some ACE materials have been banned in Norway for promoting discrimination against women, and there needs to be an informed debate in the UK as well.”

Dr Alice Roberts, President of the Association of Science Education, has called for better regulation of independent schools: “Why is there one rule for state schools and another for independent schools when it comes to teaching science?”, she said. “The government requires all state-funded schools, including Free Schools, to teach ‘evolution as a comprehensive, coherent and extensively evidenced theory.’

“This is about standards in science education. If it’s considered to be important that certain standards are to be achieved in our state-funded schools, I cannot understand why independent schools should not be expected to reach those standards too. It is a very odd two-tier system of science education: if you’re wealthy enough, you can buy the right for your child to be taught pseudoscience instead of science.”

Richy Thompson, Faith Schools Campaigner at the British Humanist Association, added, “Accelerated Christian Education schools are one of the most discriminatory networks of schools operating in the UK today. Every child has a right to be educated in an environment that is free from homophobia, misogyny, and pseudoscientific ideas being taught as scientifically valid, and yet ACE fails on all these counts. Jonny has made a huge and important contribution in exposing and challenging this network of schools.”

Tickets to the lecture cost £3 ¹⁰, and more information about Jonny Scaramanga and the ACE curriculum can be found at Leaving Fundamentalism.

-END-

Notes for editors:

[1] Jonny Scaramanga is a PhD student at the Institute of Education, University of London. He writes about his experiences in the ACE system at http://leavingfundamentalism.wordpress.com/. Press photos of Jonny are available: photo 1, photo 2.

[2] The European Academy for Christian Homeshooling, page 5 http://www.christian-education.org/Downloads/TEACHprospectus.pdf

[3] http://www.theguardian.com/education/2009/jul/31/creationist-exams-comparable-to-a-levels

[4] http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2013/feb/01/nessie-accelerated-christian-education-curriculum

[5] http://leavingfundamentalism.wordpress.com/2012/05/07/top-5-lies-told-by-accelerated-christian-education/

[6] http://leavingfundamentalism.wordpress.com/2012/05/04/accelerated-christian-education-and-racism/

[7] The South East Skeptics Society exists to foster community cohesion and social interaction among skeptics in the Surrey, Sussex and Kent area, to promote the use of skepticism and critical-thinking among the general public, and to promote evidence-based politics. http://www.southeastskeptics.org/

[8] http://leavingfundamentalism.wordpress.com/2012/05/25/criticism-of-ace-from-christians/

[9] http://leavingfundamentalism.wordpress.com/2012/05/16/how-ace-promotes-right-wing-propaganda/

[10] https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/inside-britains-creationist-schools-jonny-scaramanga-tickets-12430747701

Media contact: Michael Marshall, marsh@goodthinkingsociety.org, 07841134309
Event contact: Simon Clare, simonclarehove@gmail.com , 07730285957

This is a guest post by Kevin Long.

Image via Pixabay (creative commons)

I am officially heartbroken. I was walking around the neighborhood with my special needs kid. Trying to come up with a way to spend more quality time together, I said, “Let’s do a song on Garage Band or something.” The kid went tense.

Me: “What’s wrong?”

Kid: [Sullen] “I don’t know.”

Me: “Rephrasing: you went tense when I said ‘lets do a song.’ What made you tense about that?”

Kid: “I’m afraid to be creative, ok?”

Me: “Why? You’re so smart and inventive and fascile.”

Kid: [Tense and sullen] “I don’t know.”

Me: “We’ll try it again: At what point did you STOP liking being creative?”

Kid: “It was ACE.”

Me: [Flustered] “Why? How? How is that possible?”

Kid: “It’s true.”

Me: “Of course it is. We’re talking about feelings. If you feel something, it’s real to you. I believe you. You just loved to create, and now…I’m just shocked.”

Kid: “There were a lot of rules, and if you deviate from them you’re going to hell.”

Me: “Did they actually tell you that?”

Kid: “No. It just seemed like that from the PACEs.”

Me: “And that made you feel frightened of your own creativity?”

Kid: “Yeah.”

Me: [Long pause]

Kid: “Are you ok, dad?”

Me: “Dammit. Sorry to curse, but dammit, dammit, dammit, dammit.”

Kid: “I’m sorry.”

Me: “It’s not your fault. I knew the school was for suck educationally. Well, that’s not true. I didn’t know HOW sub par it was, but I figured it was below average. I just wanted you to get some socialization, be around kids your own age, have some damn friends other than just your mom and grandmom and me, and, you know, get used to being around other people. I just wanted you to have…”

Kid: “I know.”

Me: “I never in a million years figured they could take that away from a person.”

Kid: “I feel it’ll get better. It will come back. Distance.”

Me: “Still….dammit to hell.”

Kid: “You didn’t know. It’s ok.”

Me: [Long pause] “Ok, so let’s start slow. Let’s just go back to the house and start playing with some little musical bits and stick things together and see if they sound good. Doesn’t have to be a song. Doesn’t have to evolve into a song. Just playing.”

Kid: [Says nothing]

Me: “Or we could just sing along with the radio? No pressure, work our way up from there?”

Kid: [Nods]

So: I am officially heartbroken. 

“Accelerated Christian Education” or “ACE” is a private school curriculum I was in between about 1977 and 1981, and the kid was in it for about 18 months. I didn’t feel it was harmful as a kid, though being a kid I was perhaps a little unaware of the effects it had on me. As a literalist, fundamentalist Christian, ACE’s unyielding stance on pretty much everything did materially contribute to my eventual nervous breakdown and eventual atheism. I have no doubts of that. They made it clear that the only options were Literalist Christianity or Atheism. They controlled the nodes of the debate and gave me no option.

Fortunately, they were wrong. Atheism wasn’t a good match for me, and after many, many, many years and many different faiths, I found my way back to Christianity. I’m definitely not a literalist. Am I a Fundamentalist? I don’t know. I recently spoke to my childhood preacher, and he said that he believed in the fundamentals of Christianity, which made him a Fundamentalist 30 years ago, but now? He’s not so sure. Now it’s a movement that seems governed by something other than love and caring and evangelizing and hope and being a positive example. He said he was pretty sure most modern Fundamentalists would reject him, though he hasn’t changed. He implied he wasn’t too thrilled with them, either. I paraphrase. I interpolate. I digress.

Point is: at this moment I want to burn the A.C.E. sons of bitches down. To be perfectly legally clear, that’s hyperbole. I don’t actually want to hurt anyone, nor burn anything. Nor, for that matter, do I think that the leaders of ACE as a corporate entity or as schools are the children of prostitutes. Maybe some, I don’t know. But at this moment, I really want to find some way to legally dismantle their organization, or starve it to death of students and teachers. I recognize this is over-reaction, and emotional, but I’m angry. I’m really angry.

They made my kid afraid to create.

My kid has issues, and my own generation-old experiences at ACE aren’t that bad, no worse than public school of the same era. (I never got beat up at ACE, for instance. I got beat up in public school a lot) ACE does have some value as a ‘lifeboat’ for damaged kids who (Like me, like my kid) would get eaten alive in the drunken dogfight of normal school, so there is that. I recognize that they do some good. I recognize that I’m being irrational.

I also recognize that learning was fun for my kid up until 2 years ago, and now: afraid to create.

That’s got to be wrong, right?

So what do I do?

I will probably be blogging more about this in the future. I’m still sorting my thoughts out here.

Jonny: Actually, this story has a happy ending. A couple of weeks after Kevin sent me this, he joyfully emailed to say his son expressed an interest in writing, and has begun producing short stories, vignettes, and introductions. Children are resilient, and they bounce back. And it’s not like ACE is the only kind of schooling that can be damaging to creativity. But ACE’s assault on creativity seems to be coming from a different place. It’s not that creativity is overlooked because of an emphasis on STEM subjects and rationality; it’s that ideas are dangerous, because ideas can be wrong. For ACE, education is about submission: submission first to adults, who are placed over you by God, and ultimately to God himself. You don’t need your own ideas. You need God’s ideas. Then, they believe, God will give you original ideas.

I’m so glad Kevin’s son is writing again. ACE stole my love of reading. I had been an avid reader before I went to Victory, and it took me ten years and a relationship with a passionate booklover to rediscover it. Still, I got it back, or mostly back, in the end. It would’ve been better if I’d been to a school with a decent selection of books and some encouragement to read them, though, just like it would’ve been better is Kevin’s son hadn’t become scared of his own creativity in the first place.

This was reposted from Kevin’s blog. Kevin is an author who has published four books; check them out here.

Related posts:

• Donut story
• Britney Spears? Is she in our class?
• A readymade toolkit for institutional oppression

So here’s the most horrible thing I’ve found in a while: White Pride Homeschooling. I don’t even want to give their page the extra traffic, so I’m linking to an archived version of their website (from August 2014).

From their website (Warning: you are about to read racist propaganda):

The biggest increase in intermarriage has occurred in recent years, due to the social interaction of children of different races in the school room and subsequently the board room and then bedroom. In the year 2000 – 9 percent of married men and women below age 30 were intermarried, compared with 7 percent of those ages 30 to 44, 5 percent for those ages 45 to 59, and about 3 percent among those age 60 and older. Obviously school busing, the promotion of interracial marriages by “Christian” preachers, visible images in all types of media, and 12 (plus) years of social conditioning in the schools for each and every child has had a devastating effect on the racial integrity of white America.

Gotta love the use of square quotes around “Christian” in the above paragraph, because obviously true Christians are racist Christians.

Yup, this is a Christian organisation. No doubt you are wondering which curriculums they suggest parents can use without polluting the minds of their pure Aryan offspring.

In no particular order:

Bob Jones University Press

Alpha Omega (pretty much a clone of ACE, but reputedly more academically challenging)

CLASS (the Christian Liberty Academy School System, which produces a custom curriculum based on a mixture of texts from publishers including A Beka and Bob Jones)

And, of course, Lighthouse Christian Academy, which is the homeschool wing of Accelerated Christian Education.

You may be surprised. You should not be.

Now, I am not saying that Accelerated Christian Education is a white supremacist organisation. I’m sure ACE would prefer to distance itself from such racism (Side note: Dear ACE, if you publicly condemn this organisation, I will write one blog post in which I say nothing but nice things about you). But it is telling that the bigots at White Christian Homeschool find ACE’s materials entirely compatible with their aims.

The fact that ACE’s cartoons depict segregated classrooms means that Mrs White Supremacist Homeschool Mom can rest assured that the materials will reinforce what she is already telling her children: White kids should be separated from the other kids. After all, these white supremacists don’t hate black people. They even link to the National Black Home Educators Resource Association, explaining: “As we encourage a Christian lifestyle for all races and do not believe in integrated classrooms – we are providing this link.” See, they’re thoughtful really.

Bob Jones University’s presence in this company is even less of a surprise, given that organisation’s history of white supremacism. It’s not entirely clear when BJU would have abandoned its discriminatory entrance policy if the political climate had not forced it to do so by 1975.

If all this is shocking you, clearly you need to bone up on your history. Biblical literalism lends itself quite comfortably to racism. “Slaves obey your masters” is a clear-cut instruction. Although my Christian teachers loved to remind me that the British Abolitionist William Wilberforce was a Christian, they tended to gloss over the fact that most of those opposing him were Christians too.

As Mark Noll noted of the US Civil War, and Carolyn Renee Dupont argued about American segregation, racists have always found ammunition in the pages of the Bible. And this is partly because of the way they read it.

Because these fundamentalists believed that the Bible was the inerrant Word of God, this meant that it obviously contained no contradictions. They also believe that the Bible is the eternal Word of God, so it applies equally to all people at all times, and there is little need to consider historical context. This means that if you can find one verse which supports your argument, you have proved your case. Some literalists might be a little more circumspect, referring to the Biblical rule that “every matter must be established by the presence of two or three witnesses”. Some take this to mean that you need three Bible verses to prove your point. But still, three verses and you’re golden.

No True Christian. (source: wiki commons)

The Bible is a long book. With enough determination, you can find three verses to prove just about anything. That’s why the prosperity gospel preachers can tell people that the Bible is a get-rich-quick scheme. The method they use for reading the Bible is perfectly adapted to this. It’s what Fred Clark calls the Clobber-Text Hermeneutic.

Early in this blog’s history, I wrote a post called Jesus Jihad: Could there be a Christian Bin Laden? In it, I gathered Bible verses and wrote a mock tract which made out that the Bible encouraged Christians to become terrorists. My point (which I didn’t make very clearly at the time) was that if you read the Bible in this crass way, it can be open to all kinds of abuse.

So today fundamentalists condemn racism (and they find Bible verses to support that, too). But the way they encourage children to read the Bible has not changed. As a non-believer, of course, I don’t hold the Bible sacred at all, but it seems clear to me that if you’re going to study it, you need to pay attention to the context in which things were written. The Bible is a compilation of books by different authors who made different points, so you cannot conclude “what the Bible says about X” from any single passage.

It’s funny, isn’t it, that Christians suddenly started noticing that the Bible was opposed to racism shortly after it became culturally unacceptable to be racist.

I don’t care whether you can find more verses in the Bible to support racism or to condemn it. All that matters is that it’s possible to support both positions quite well from the text. And this proves that the way ACE (and its ilk) teach children to read the Bible in fact does nothing to prepare them for the real world.

Related posts:

I would not have written this post had I not been inspired by the Christian blogger Fred Clark. I’ve linked to several of his posts above. Here are the most important:

• Of clobber-texts and anti-clobber-texts
• Why Young Earth Creationism needs to be killed with fire
• The clobber verses of slavery and the slavery of clobber verses

Related posts from me:

• Jesus Jihad: Could there be a Christian Bin Laden?
• Who cares about atheism?
• How Accelerated Christian Education is racist

Dover is cancelled

I regret to say that my scheduled appearance tonight in Dover has been cancelled. If you were planning to attend, please accept my apologies and let me know—I’ll keep you informed of future appearances in the area.

This is a guest post. The author has chosen to remain nameless. The title (mine) does the post no justice; this is one of the most powerful ACE survivor stories we’ve had and I want everyone to read it.

I was a student at Maranatha Christian School in the UK from 2003 – 2005. I worked at an ACE school in Moscow, Russia in 2007 and at Christian Education Europe from 2007-2009. I also attended for many years a church overseen by then-director of Christian Education Europe, Arthur Rodrick.

I started ACE “late” at age thirteen after spending the first parts of my schooling as an atheist in mainstream schools. I have little idea what drew my parents to Maranatha, but I suspect the low teacher-pupil ratio was one of the main reasons.

Having always been a “teacher’s pet” Maranatha was a whole new experience for me. Because I was not yet a Christian at that point and had little spiritual knowledge I was branded a “troublemaker.” In my first year at Maranatha I was given detentions and parents’ meetings for blaspheming, dying my hair, refusing to sing hymns during “opening exercise,” my lack of the “submissive nature” we were taught was expected of women, and even once for wearing trousers instead of a skirt to an earned “non-uniform” day.

I was harassed by teachers and students daily – eventually attempting suicide shortly before my fourteenth birthday. This further branded me as an ungodly troublemaker, particularly as I was referred to a child psychologist. Although the head teacher was not pleased and offered both prayer and a referral to a “Christian psychologist” as alternatives, my mother thankfully refused. I was, however, forbidden from returning to the (or any) doctor after his practical suggestions included removing me from Maranatha completely.

Although I had quite a few more run-ins with the school (such as being subjected to a personal and family meeting with the head teacher for attending a sleepover party that included both boys and girls) I eventually learnt how to “behave” (I never wore trousers near school again!) and the rest of my time at Maranatha went somewhat more peacefully.

Others were not so lucky, I remember one boy being ridiculed by the teachers for having “girl hair” and other members of my class were reduced to tears after being publicly screamed at by the head teacher’s wife for offenses as minor as not completing their lunchtime chores (which included vacuuming the classrooms and cleaning the staffroom) to a satisfactory degree. One of my chores included removing the spiders from the girl’s cloakroom… since I was terrified of spiders I refused in tears and was shut in the cupboard until the job was complete – afterwards I was told to pray for God to make me less of a coward. The school’s policy appeared to be ridiculing and humiliating children into submission.

In case you needed reminding, here’s what ACE’s sex education looks like.

Some of my more bizarre memories include “sex education” lessons. Sex ed in the ACE booklets is notoriously bad, so at the very least Maranatha tried to supplement these. All students over eleven were separated into boys and girls to, very awkwardly, talk about our bodies. I can’t speak for the boys but on our side this included the youngest girl being teased by the teacher for being too young to “understand menstruation” and being told no husband would ever want us if we were “used.” This is what happens when you have a group of mostly untrained (as someone studying for 3+ years to become an educator, I do not count the five day ACE “Professional Training Course”) adults in charge of the education and well-being of children.

I regret many of the things I did and said during my last years at Maranatha – things I taught myself to firmly believe and fight for. These include submitting a presentation to the annual ACE student convention “debunking the myth” of evolution (which won me a medal) and my outspoken hatred of homosexuality. Campaigning for these “issues” made me feel like less of an outcast and helped me to fit in with the other students at school, at least to an extent… as a now openly pansexual person, my own actions during this time absolutely disgust me.

After eventually being asked to leave Maranatha as the school “wasn’t a good fit” I was home-schooled for a year on the ACE program. In reality, from the age of fifteen I gave up on an education that was teaching me nothing but how to memorise abstract facts (fun fact – few ACE students actually read the content of PACEs. As you’re rewarded for the quantity of work and not quality, children quickly learn to just skim pages for the answers they need). My parents both worked full-time and had no interest in making sure I was actually studying.

When 16-17 I was then sent, alone, to Russia to work in a school there on “mission.” Placed in a one bedroom flat with four other people who rarely spoke English at home, I was given no training but expected to teach small classes English as an additional language. For this I was paid USD$100 a month – at the time around £50. I feigned illness multiple times to avoid work because I had never been so much as told how to plan or deliver lessons. Eventually the school sent me home after I attempted suicide a second time. Soon after my parents insisted I take a job at Christian Education Europe (ACE’s European distributor), so I could be “ministered” to.

I noticed that on Leaving Fundamentalism a “whistle-blower” from CEE briefly mentions that “one person was sacked for a supposedly gay relationship…” I can confirm that after some time working at CEE I became romantically involved with a girl I had known for some time. When this became known to Arthur Roderick, I was taken from my work, during office hours, to an empty room where I was asked to confirm the “disturbing rumours” he had heard about me. It was then decided that my “lifestyle” did not match the “family-centred” goals of the company and I was asked not to return to work as I could “potentially influence vulnerable minds” …the irony is not lost on me!

At the time I was determined to speak out about what had happened but was warned that, as a member of a church closely affiliated with CEE, I would no longer be welcome there or in my own home if I did so. During the next few months I was “discouraged” from leaving the house and forced to endure the odd beating (I was nineteen at this point). I was also subjected to almost daily visits from Arthur Roderick and other CEE staff members, mainly so they could pray for the “demons” in me to be released but also in intense, hours-long attempts to change my mind and “put me on the right path.” Other church and staff members, as well as ACE students I had considered my friends, outright shunned me.

It took years for me to get over my apprehension about telling anyone I had been an ACE student, never mind had worked for and advocated the program. It took even longer for me to be comfortable enough to announce my sexuality to boyfriends and other Christian friends as I had been convinced all Christians were taught the hatred I had been at school. I have since been re-diagnosed with PTSD regarding this period of my life. It has only been in the past year or two that I have realised the things I was taught under Accelerated “Christian” Education are not the norm and many Christians (including myself) really can be loving and accepting. I am still too terrified to walk into a new church by myself, though.

After attending college to obtain an Access Diploma (having left ACE with no useful qualifications) I am now at university studying to be a primary teacher. This has brought ACE into a whole new light for me. Every day I am provided with proof that rote and Skinnerian learning is little more than teaching circus tricks of memory recall. I have been provided with so much evidence that most of the world is moving forward towards a constructivist model of education that states that children learn better by doing and experiencing, than by being forced to arbitrarily absorb facts. This is how almost every primary school in the UK is run… but ACE is still ploughing along with a model that was becoming out of date when the curriculum was first written in the 70s.

I once thought that my experiences were unique, but I’m writing this because I have since learnt that there are many stories out there like mine. As a future teacher, I cannot allow these stories to keep being produced from future generations of ACE students. Even now I still feel like a “traitor” for revealing my experiences and have to quell the impulse to add “but ACE isn’t so bad because…” onto the end of any criticism I make of the program.

Related posts:

• A readymade toolkit for institutional oppression
• Pinochet good; gay bad
• Being made to feel like you don’t exist

Upcoming talk

I (Jonny Scaramanga, not the author of this guest post) will be giving my talk “Inside Britain’s Creationist Schools” in Maidenhead on Wednesday September 3. Details here.

Do you feel strongly about shining a spotlight on ACE? Join the Facebook group Accelerated Christian Education Exposed.

More Accelerated Christian Education schools, more misleading advertising. On the Advertising Standards Agency website today, an ‘informally resolved case’ is listed, related to Dewsbury Gospel Church trading as Branch Christian School. Branch Christian School uses the Accelerated Christian Education (ACE) curriculum. Rather than preparing its students for recognised exams like GCSEs and A Levels, it offers its graduates the International Certificate of Christian Education (ICCE).

It will come as a surprise to no one to learn that I was the complainant in this case. It’s a similar story to the last time I pointed out that some ACE schools were misleading parents about the nature of their qualifications, but in this case, it’s more extreme.

When I complained to the ASA about this in July, the Branch Christian School prospectus claimed that the ICCE was recognised by the Government’s National Framework for Qualifications (NFQ).

There is no such thing as the NFQ.

There is, however, such thing as the National Qualifications Framework (NQF), and the ICCE has never been on it. Nor has the ICCE ever been part of the newer Qualification Credit Framework (QCF), because it’s an unrecognised qualification.

When the ASA followed up my complaint with the advertiser, Branch Christian School clarified that they meant NQF, not NFQ, but assured the ASA that future advertising would not suggest or state that the ICCE appears on the NQF, or that it is recognised by Ofqual. The ASA took this as settling the matter, and didn’t refer my complaint to the ASA Council.

As of this morning, however, Carmel Christian School in Bristol is advertising this:

The same page says “ICCE appears in the current UK qualifications handbook” which, as we know, is considered misleading advertising.

The latter claim is at least understandable: There is a UK qualifications handbook, and the ICCE does appear in it. It’s just misleading to allow parents to believe that this confers any level of official recognition. The NQF claim, on the other hand, is pure fantasy. In Carmel’s case, the claim is softened to ‘equivalent to’, but this is still nonsense. Even UK Naric‘s benchmarking of the ICCE doesn’t claim equivalence (and doesn’t mention the NQF). Incidentally, Carmel, GCSEs grade D-G are a Level 1 qualification, not Level 2.

Apparently, the ICCE have been coaching their schools over the summer on how to advertise the ‘qualification’, so that fiascos like this don’t happen again. The schools, of course, say that these were genuine mistakes. But it’s difficult to imagine how any of them genuinely misunderstood that the ICCE is part of the NQF, when there’s not even the faintest whisper of truth in that claim. It’s as though they just wrote what they wished were true in their prospectuses.

When commenters accused ACE schools of lying about the UCAS handbook, I defended the ACE schools. I thought they genuinely believed the claims. Here, though, there just seems to have been a totally callous disregard for the truth. They appear to have neglected even the most basic fact-checking. This is such negligence that it almost amounts to the same thing as lying.

In fact, it’s pretty much the same disregard for accuracy we find in their curriculum.

I’ve written about the Branch Christian School before. Their 2012 prospectus said:

Since September 1999 it has been illegal for schools to carry out corporal punishment. However, the school still holds to the Biblical principal of corporal correction, and any infringement of school rules that could warrant such correction will be reported to parents.

Sadly, I failed to get a screenshot of this before it was taken down. The URL was http://branchchristianschool.org.uk/prospectus.pdf, which isn’t in any web archive I’ve searched. The claim disappeared from their prospectus shortly after I blogged about it, though of course I can’t claim any causal link.

Instead, the school’s discipline policy now reads:

School discipline and the home
A discipline issue which warrants a response of greater significance than a detention, but falls short of warranting suspension, will be referred to the Principal. He will, in consultation with the parents, agree an appropriate course of action designed to discipline the student and form part of a training process leading to improved attitudes and behaviour.

*Shudder*

Related posts:

• Are ACE schools using misleading advertising?
• Yes, some ACE schools WERE using misleading advertising
• You lying sack of…
• Creationists lying repeatedly

Please be advised that this post contains discussions of sexual abuse.

In 1970, Pastor Jack Hyles, of First Baptist Church, Hammond, Indiana, called into his office one Jennie Nischik, wife of one of the church deacons. Soon after, Vic and Jennie Nischik began experiencing marital problems. Eventually, Vic confronted Hyles with “evidence of an improper relationship between Hyles and [Vic's] wife”. On hearing this evidence, Hyles, who had been pressuring Vic to leave, instead created an arrangement whereby the Nischiks lived in different rooms of the same house and never had any physical contact. Hyles continued his affair with Jennie for more than a decade. Eventually, Vic complained to Hyles that his room was damp and affecting his health, and said he was going to move back in with Jennie in the master bedroom. Rather than allow this, Hyles paid to have a new room added to the Nischiks’ house.

This is just one of the allegations that have become Hyles’ legacy.

Meanwhile, in 2014 Bill Gothard, founder of the Institute in Basic Life Principles (IBLP), was placed on “administrative leave” while they investigated claims of historic sexual abuse dating back to the 1970s. Thirty-four women have made claims of harassment, and one woman says she was sixteen when Gothard molested her.

Welcome to the world of Independent Fundamental Baptists (IFB). IFB types don’t believe in church hierarchy. They’re not usually part of any official denomination. They believe God invested all authority in the Pastor, and so bishops, archbishops and other formal church structures are unbiblical. This means that when scandals like the above break out, all the others can say “Nothing to do with us!” Unlike abuse scandals in the Catholic church, abuse in the IFB is usually portrayed as an isolated occurrence.

Is there in fact a link between all this?

That’s what ABC’s 20/20 tried to show in its 2011 investigation of the IFB. They found multiple instances of abuse and tied them all together in one documentary. At the moment, there just isn’t enough information to be sure. Still, Boz Tchividjian thinks so:

Tchividjian had become convinced that the Protestant world is teetering on the edge of a sex-abuse scandal similar to the one that had rocked the Catholic Church. He is careful to say that there’s not enough data to compare the prevalence of child sex abuse in Protestant and Catholic institutions, but he’s convinced the problem has reached a crisis point.

Tchividjian is hardly some anti-Christian warrior. He’s Billy Graham’s grandson, and he teaches at Liberty University, the school Jerry Falwell founded. Those credentials still won’t be enough for some fundamentalists, of course: Billy Graham only managed one semester at Bob Jones University, the epicentre of Christian fundamentalism. Later, BJU forbade its students from attending Graham’s rallies under threat of expulsion. Bob Jones Jr also described Jerry Falwell as “the most dangerous man in America” for his willingness to make political alliances with Roman Catholics.

ANYWAY, quite a few fundamentalist preachers have had quite a lot of sex, quite a lot of it extramarital, and not all of it consensual. To the IFB supporters, this is just evidence of what they’ve been saying all along: Man is desperately wicked and in need of salvation. In an age where child abuse scandals are all over the place, it is simply bullying to pick on these men just because they happen to be Christians. Right?

Both Jack Hyles and Bill Gothard have connections with Accelerated Christian Education. In his 1979 manifesto, Rebirth of Our Nation, ACE’s founder Donald R. Howard reproduced the text of one of Hyles’ sermons (pages 230-239). The back cover has a glowing endorsement from Jack Hyles, who says “No man in America knows more about the decay of America, and no man has more answers for its rebirth, and no man is doing more to cause this rebirth than Dr. Don Howard. What a book!”

Gothard is associated with ACE in the public mind because of 19 Kids and Counting, a reality TV show about a Quiverfull family called the Duggars. The Duggars use a combination  of ACE and Gothard’s ATI material to homeschool their many, many children. The connections don’t end there.

ACE materials seek to inculcate children with 60 ideal character traits of Jesus. In Rebirth of Our Nation (p. 296) Donald Howard credits Bill Gothard with this idea. Gothard’s followers will notice that he in fact taught that Jesus had just 49 “character qualities“, but it appears this figure may have been revised down. This website refers to an out-of-print IBLP publication by Gothard called “The 60 Character Traits in the Life of the Lord Jesus Christ”. ACE’s Music PACE 5 also contains anti-rock music arguments which have been lifted straight from Bill Gothard’s What the Bible has to say about… ‘Contemporary Christian’ Music (aka “Ten scriptural reasons why the ‘rock beat’ is evil in any form“).

Gothard’s abusive Indianapolis Training Center (ITC) used the Accelerated Christian Education curriculum, according to former staff members.

Currently, ACE’s headquarters in Madison, Tennessee sits on the same plot of land as the IBLP training center. IBLP is at 612 W. Due West Ave, Madison, TN; ACE is at 610. This plot of land was purchased for Gothard’s ministry by none other than Hobby Lobby. If you can’t think where you know the name Hobby Lobby from, it’s probably this.

The other thing linking all three ministries is David Gibbs Jr, lawyer to the fundamentalists.

Think of Gibbs as like The Wolf from Pulp Fiction, except instead of cleaning up messes for professional assassins, Gibbs cleans them up for fundamentalist preachers.

David Gibbs Jr, pictured recently.

When it turned out that Jack Schaap (Jack Hyles’ successor at First Baptist Church, Hammond) had taken a minor across state lines for the purposes of engaging in criminal sexual activity, they called Gibbs.

When Pastor Bill Wininger was accused of sexual abuse, here’s Gibbs and Hyles coming to his defence (1993):

As they observe over at Stuff Fundies Like:

While watching the video above keep in mind that Bill Wininger, the man being loudly defended by Hyles and Gibbs in 1993, resigned from his church twenty years later after his accusers finally gained enough attention to prompt a new investigation.

What’s really mind-blowing in this video is the way that David Gibbs, Jr. of the Christian Law Association stands in front of this group of people and blatantly acknowledges that there are abuse allegations against Hyles-camp churches all over THE ENTIRE COUNTRY. But then he takes that information and spins a conspiracy theory that the real reason that these allegations are surfacing is that Christ-hating liberals hate bus ministries.

Twenty years of abuse. Twenty years of lives ruined. Twenty years of pain and suffering. Twenty years — and they knew the entire time. These men are nothing short of evil.

So when Bill Gothard’s decades of shenanigans came to light, there was really only one man that IBLP could call.

Gibbs was ACE’s lawyer and a board member. He appeared in numerous promotional videos for ACE. He eventually became president of the company for a spell in the early 2000s.

At this point, some of my readers may feel disappointed that I’ve stooped to raking muck on this blog. I promise I do have a point to all of this, and I’ll explain what it is in the next post.

Related posts:

• ACE: Aiding and abetting child abusers
• Rape victim, confess your sin
• An invitation for abuse

Previously on Leaving Fundamentalism: 

• Pastor Jack Hyles indulges in immoral sexual activity and covers up abuse.
• Preacher Bill Gothard receives 34 allegations of sexual harassment and four of rape.
• There are links between Hyles, Gothard, and Accelerated Christian Education founder Donald Howard.
• All three are represented by the lawyer David Gibbs Jr, who’s made a career cleaning up after preachers.
• It turns out quite a lot of this sort of thing goes on in fundamentalist Baptist churches,

So, this blog being this blog, you probably thought the last post was going to end with me telling you about a sex scandal involving Accelerated Christian Education’s Donald Howard. But you were wrong.

I saved it for this post.

[Be warned, this post will again feature discussion of sexual abuse that you might find upsetting or triggering]

In the 1994 edition of the School of Tomorrow (as ACE was then known) Procedures Manual, there is the traditional cheery introduction from the president, Donald Howard. But in the 1998 revision, Howard has gone. He is not mentioned. He is an unperson.

Similarly, in a 1994 Geography PACE (Social Studies 1106, fact fans), we read:

Unable to fulfill his lifelong dream of ministering in India, Mr. Attaway turned his energy to pastoring two churches in the United States. Finally, after 34 years, Dr. Donald Howard of School of Tomorrow, knowing Mr. Attaway’s burden for India, asked the Attaways if they would be willing to help start schools there.

In the 2002 revision, however, it says:

Unable to fulfill his lifelong dream of ministering in India, Mr. Attaway turned his energy to pastoring two churches in the United States. Finally, after 34 years, his burden for India came to realization through School of Tomorrow. The Attaways were asked if they would be willing to help start schools there.

The new version reads awkwardly and the printes had to reduce the font size to fit the new words on the page. What the hell had Howard done that he was not just forced out of his own company, but written out of its history?

We can find the seeds of this controversy in a 1984 article from the Wall Street Journal, “Gospel Truth: Fundamentalists Open Schools With Classes Run Without Teachers—Rev. Howard’s Popular Plan Is Hailed as Inexpensive, Assailed as Very Chaotic—His Peers Question His Morals” by Eileen White, 02 Nov 1984, page 1:

Mr. Howard, ACE’s 52-year-old founder, is involved in a church controversy and in embarrassing civil litigation. In a civil suit in U.S. District Court in Missouri, two marketing consultants charge Mr. Howard with breach of contract. The suit also states that he was the subject last September of a “Christian tribunal.” An unofficial jury of five fundamentalist-church deacons in Dallas judged Mr. Howard “unqualified to serve as a pastor, deacon, elder or Christian leader,” according to the meeting’s minutes. A copy of the minutes was obtained by a reporter.

The tribunal said that Mr. Howard “has presented himself publicly as a preacher of the gospel and a Christian educator at the same time the evidence revealed that he carried on a series of clandestine, immoral relationships with young women in violation of his marriage vows,” according to the meeting’s minutes. An attorney for Mr. Howard denies the allegations.

Mr. Howard also filed a cross-action charging the marketing consultants with breach of contract. Meanwhile, Mr. Howard has placed himself on a one-year sabbatical from his company, and church members say he has resigned as pastor of Grace Fundamental Church in Lewisville, Texas. Several fundamentalist-Christian leaders have asked Mr. Howard to sell his company and not to participate in political or religious activities.

“For the sake of the cause of Christian education, Mr. Howard should divest himself of ACE, and get out of the business of teaching children,” says the Rev. Jerry Falwell, the television evangelist and Christian political leader.

But this was 1984. What happened between then and 1998?

As much as I’d like to tell you, I can’t say much because none of the people that have emailed me about this is willing to go on record, and some of my sources contradict each other on important points. What I will say is that between 1985 and 1997, Donald Howard continued to have sex more often than his wife did. She divorced him in October 1997 and took control of the company. This is common knowledge among anyone close to ACE. After my schoolmates attended ACE’s International Student Convention in 1998, they returned gossiping about it.

This led to me getting into trouble with my mother the same year. I was watching the BBC comedy news quiz, Have I Got News for You. It was the missing words round, where panellists are shown recent newspaper headlines with some words blacked out, and asked to guess what’s been covered up.

“[blank] BREEDS IN RUSSIA” read the headline.

“DONALD HOWARD!” I shouted at the TV. According to rumour at my school, the straw that had broken the camel’s back had been an affair that took place while Howard was on a business trip to Russia. I have no evidence that this was the case, I should add.

Since then, there have been occasional eruptions of similar rumours on this blog. One commenter suggested Howard was a polygamist (which I’m pretty sure wasn’t the case). The most credible comment on the interwebs about it is from Dr Bob Griffin:

When I did seminars for Christian Education across America and many countries, I was blessed to be with Dave Gibbs Jr (the dad, about 65 now) as a fellow speaker. He was an ardent supporter of ACE/School of Tomorrow and his son Dave III was a “thoroughbred” (raised on ACE K-12).

When Dr Don Howard drifted away from ACE (and morality and Baptist roots) and the company fell on some difficult times, Gibbs stepped in and “righted the ship”. Mrs Esther Howard, co-founder, regained authority, the company returned to its non-profit roots, got out of financial over-extension of resources, and is on the right course today.

Fun as it would undoubtedly be to talk more about Howard’s activities, it doesn’t really affect my point. Howard’s wife, Esther, divorced him in 1997 and forced him out of the company. Then he was written out of history until his funeral last year, when he was suddenly a hero again.

What is with fundamentalist preachers and sex scandals? Why are there so many stories like this?

One possible explanation comes from the current investigation into coverups of sexual abuse at Bob Jones University where, surprise surprise, Donald Howard got his PhD (and where staff may have helped Bill Gothard to cover up his abuse). We’re still waiting for GRACE‘s report on BJU, but it has emerged that, when counselled by BJU staff, rape victims were told to repent of their sins. If that’s the response, it’s no wonder these things don’t come to light sooner.

Another factor is a recurring theme in stories of sexual abuse in church: it’s covered up so as not to “hurt the Gospel” or “bring shame on the name of Jesus”. The most important thing is that these ministers of God are getting people Born Again, so they’ll go to heaven. If people hear about this abuse, they might not listen to the preacher. Then they might not get saved, and then they might go to hell. You don’t want that do you? No. So do the right thing and forgive the pastor, who is after all just a sinner saved by grace like you and me.

That’s an interesting argument, because a common Christian response to posts like this is to say “So what? These men are sinful. It doesn’t change the truth of God’s Word”.

Well, you can’t have it both ways. Either pastors with well-travelled penises hurt the Gospel, or they do not. If they do not, then there is no reason to cover up their abuse.

Anyway, in Howard’s case, the allegations are of affairs, not assault or harassment. But I still think this is an argument against the truth of Howard’s preaching, and not for the usual reasons given in cases like this.

It’s not because it makes Howard a massive hypocrite. I know fundamentalists teach we are all utterly depraved and incapable of good without Jesus. They don’t claim that being saved makes you perfect.

My argument here is not about Howard, or Hyles, or Gothard. It’s about their followers.

According to this sort of Christian teaching, those who are truly saved have the Holy Spirit living inside of them, guiding them into all truth. The Holy Spirit gives them the gift of discernment, which enables them to tell truth from error. In many versions of the teaching, the Holy Spirit gives them a sense in their spirit when a preacher is from God and when he is not. This is sometimes called “feeling a check”. In Frank Peretti‘s novels, for example, the hero “feels a check” while someone is preaching, that this message is not from God. It later turns out that this preacher had in fact been sacrificing goats to Satan. Peretti isn’t IFB, but he does identify the heroes in his novels as fundamentalists.

Under this same teaching, while a preacher is ‘in sin’, the Holy Spirit will not bless their ministry. God’s presence will not be felt while they preach, because their sin has come between them and God.

So here we have Howard, Hyles, and Gothard, who were ‘in sin’ for decades, and their followers, their peers, and their church elders apparently didn’t even notice.

Nobody said, “I can’t follow this man, the Holy Spirit is telling me he is not from God.”

Nobody said, “The presence of God was really missing from those meetings.” If anything, quite the opposite. People continued to flock to their meetings and still rejoice at what they perceived as the presence of God.

That should tell them something. Either the Holy Spirit doesn’t exist, or it doesn’t work the way think it does, or it does and they can’t hear it. What they think is the presence of God is actually something else.

Whichever one it is, they need to rethink their theology.

Related posts:

• The philandering fundamentalists
• Why fundamentalists will never listen to me
• You were never a true Christian
• Believe I’m going to hell? You’re either insincere or don’t care. Pick one.

Welcome to the first installment of a new series. When I named this blog “Leaving Fundamentalism” I really meant it to be a diverse examination of all the unusual parts of my bizarre Christian upbringing. In the end, mostly because of my PhD studies, the blog has been swarmed by posts critiquing ACE. Here’s a bit of light relief: Once a week I’ll show you a Christian rock song from my childhood and talk about how it affected me.

People might be misled by this into thinking that ACE and Christian rock are somehow related. They aren’t, really. ACE is adamant in its opposition to Christian rock music. In fact, that was the first thing I disliked about ACE. Long before I realised how sexist it is, or how racist, and years before I noticed they’d been teaching me lies, I loathed ACE because they were opposed to Christian rock music, which for me was the biggest reason that I was enthusiastic about being a Christian.

In the rules for ACE’s student conventions (annual competitions between ACE schools and students), the music section reads now as it did when I was in school:

Competition arrangements are to be Christian or patriotic rather than secular. Classical instrumental music is allowed as long as it is non-offensive to Christian values or good taste. Music sung or played with a jumpy, sensual, or worldly style is not acceptable. Contemporary Christian, jazz, gospel rock, or gospel country music are not acceptable. In our music guidelines, “contemporary” refers to a style of music, not the date on which a piece was written. Music must be appropriate for a typical conservative fundamental church service (musical arrangement, text, and presentation).

When I first read this, aged 11 or 12, I thought it was among the stupidest things I’d ever seen. It’s now accompanied by a disclaimer that wasn’t there back in my day, saying essentially that ACE doesn’t expect all its member schools to agree with these rules, but please to respect them during the competition. Clearly I wasn’t the only one who wasn’t impressed.

Later, I got to ACE’s Music PACEs, a series of six workbooks that, from a music education point of view, are almost totally useless. If you haven’t previously had a lot of music lessons, they’d be almost incomprehensible. If you have had music lessons, you’d probably already know everything in them. Anyway, in Music PACE #5, I saw ACE’s arguments in full for why rock music was sinful and bad.

A true story is told of an African who worshiped idols before he received Christ as his Saviour. When he heard rock music for the first time, he asked the missionary why the young people were trying to call on demons with their music. The missionary didn’t understand what he meant, so the African explained that the rock beat was the same one his tribe used to call on demons. Most likely the young people were not trying to call on demons, but the African brother knew that the style of music they were using had the capacity of doing just that. It is obviously important to seriously consider the type of music to which you listen.

I realise that this testimony doubtless has you rushing to delete every rock mp3 from your hard drive, but wait, there’s more! (All these arguments against rock music seem to be lifted straight from Bill Gothard, whose anti-rock music polemic I have reproduced in full at the end of this post.) Other arguments include:

• Listening to rock music might make you picture sinful activities such as “a rock concert, dancing, or a worldly lifestyle.”
• Some Christian rock bands dress the same as some secular rock bands. You can’t tell from looking at them whether they are evil or not. The Bible says to abstain from all appearance of evil. Ergo, Christian rock is evil. QED, motherfucker.
• In Christian rock, the lyrics and music are in conflict. The music appeals to our sinful ‘old natures’, while the lyrics appeal to our Godly ‘new natures’. So “listening to Christianized rock music produces a warring between our old natures and our new natures. This battle often inhibits our spiritual growth.”
• “Music is appropriate only when the lyrics and musical style coincide with and are consistent with Biblical principles.”

It occurs to me now that if ACE seriously thinks it’s sinful to dress the same as a sinner, they ought henceforth to ban all their men from wearing suits, shirts, and ties, since all manner of ungodly bastards wear them.

Anyway, I thought these arguments were crap. In fact, in my mind ACE’s opposition to Christian rock music made them suspect more generally. I always read my PACEs with a critical eye, watching for other idiocy in my PACEs. You would think, then, that I would have rejected most of what they taught me. Sadly, that wasn’t the case. Although I had minimal respect for ACE, I had the utmost respect for the Bible, and as far as I was concerned most of what they taught me was straight from the Bible and therefore beyond question. I dearly wish I’d thought “Hmmm… they’re full of crap about rock music, maybe they’re wrong about science and politics too”, but it never even crossed my mind. I was as ardent a believer in ACE’s Tea Party politics and crackpot creationism as they could have hoped for.

So anyway, there’s your history. Tune in every Thursday for my dissection of a different Christian rock song.

If you can’t wait to get started, here are some relevant previous posts.

Related posts: 

• Christians rock too!
• Creationism rocks!
• Nine-year-old Jonny on Christian rock

Bill Gothard’s anti-rock tract What the Bible has to say about… “Contemporary Christian” Music is now out of print. The original comes with a notice saying that it may be reproduced freely as long as attribution is given. It has been posted online many times, but it keeps disappearing when the sites get taken down. For posterity, I’m saving it here. When you read this, you’ll get a sense of what it was like for me growing up as a conservative Christian rock fan. Some of the Christians I knew were fine with Christian rock music (rock music made by non-Christians was of the devil, though), and some of them thought like Bill Gothard. Which made me feel… conflicted.

What the Bible has to say about….

CONTEMPORARY CHRISTIAN MUSIC

Ten Scriptural Reasons Why the “Rock Beat” Is Evil in Any Form.

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“… There shall be false teachers among you, who privily shall bring in damnable heresies… And many shall follow their pernicious ways; by reason of whom the way of truth shall be evil spoken of. And through covetousness shall they with feigned words make merchandise of you…” (II Peter 2:1-3). Music in itself is a language and gives a message. Thus, those who sing and play are teachers. Teaching truth out of balance leads to heresy. A “pernicious” disease is one that is very difficult to cure.

DEFINITION OF “ROCK BEAT”

The “rock beat” is a dominant and repetitious OFFBEAT which competes with the melody and distracts from the words of a song. The contradictory messages in the beat, the words, the melody, the style of the presentation, and the appearance of the musicians all create a subtle confusion in the minds, wills, and emotions of the listeners, which leads them to question the absolute moral standards of God.

1. THE “ROCK BEAT” DECEIVES YOUTH INTO VIOLATING THE FIFTH COMMANDMENT.

The Fifth Commandment is “Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee” (Exodus 20:12).

The New Testament reaffirms this commandment: “Honour thy father and mother; which is the first commandment with promise; That it may be well with thee, and thou mayest live long on the earth” (Ephesians 6:2-3). There is no question that many parents are strongly opposed to the “rock beat.” Therefore, those who promote the “rock beat” are causing young people to dishonor their fathers and mothers.

HOW THE “ROCK BEAT” CAUSED A SON TO DISHONOR HIS PARENTS

“About four years ago, our church got a new youth pastor. He began playing ‘Christian rock’ before meetings and during activities. He encouraged me to get a copy of a certain tape, which I did, even though my parents forbade me from doing so.

“Because I was being home educated, the church youth group was the only significant outside influence in my life, but that influence was enough to cause me to rebel and wreck my life for the next four years.

“I then started listening to secular soft rock music, thinking, ‘What’s wrong with this? It has less beat than Christian music.’ If only I had known what a deceiver Satan is, I would have saved myself a lot of heartache.”About seven months ago at a Christian radio station’s New Year’s Eve party, I was introduced to ‘Christian rap’ music. Before that time, I did not listen to rap, but after hearing it there, I began justifying to myself that the beat couldn’t be all bad because Christians listened to it and it didn’t seem to harm them. “What it did to me was cause a complete breakdown in morals, which led directly to my becoming involved in immoral habits and illegal activities. I was also constantly plagued with violent and unclean thoughts. Since then, I have taken steps to regain the ‘ground’ given to Satan, and for the first time in years, I have a feeling of complete freedom from the influence of this music. ” – Tim Love, age 18, Washington

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A SECOND WITNESS ON HOW THE “ROCK BEAT” LEADS YOUTH TO BREAK THE FIFTH COMMANDMENT

“I’ve never been into rock music or even light rock, but lately I believe my standards in music have been going down. Our family was given two music tapes a while back. “They aren’t extremely ‘rocky,’ but the beat in the music is a little off. I have enjoyed those tapes, and when my mother said she really didn’t like them, I immediately became defensive. “I realize now that even if those tapes were perfectly fine as far as the beat, if my mother didn’t like them it would be wrong for me to listen to them,” – Lael Auble, age 14, Florida

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A THIRD WITNESS ON HOW THE “ROCK BEAT” CAUSES YOUTH TO REBEL AGAINST THEIR PARENTS

Fourteen-year-old Sari Ann Mitchell of California received a booklet entitled, Notice Of Complaint Against the Unrecognized Enemy in the Church. This booklet contains testimonies from young people about how “Christian rock” has damaged their walk with the Lord and their relationships with others. After reading the booklet, she sent it along with the following letter of appeal to her pastor:

January 19, 1990

Dear Pastor,

“I have been praying for a way to express how I feel about ‘Christian contemporary’ music to my friends and others. I was so happy to receive this booklet in the mail that I wanted to share it with you. I want to add my own personal testimony to the many in this booklet.

“I started listening to ‘Christian contemporary’ (rock) music when I was twelve. At this time I was attending a private Christian school, and there my friends all listened to it. The pressure was great, so I started to listen to some of their tapes once in a while.

“I became hooked. It may be hard to believe, but that music made me think sensuous thoughts, and the beat made me want to sway and dance like the world. After this I started to listen to ‘Christian contemporary’ music all the time, and even though my parents didn’t like it, I got some tapes of my own to listen to.

“One day, I went to my friend’s house, and she had her radio on. It was on a secular soft rock station. When I got home I turned my radio to that same station. I listened to it just once in a while, and it sounded just like the ‘Christian contemporary’ music, except the words were a little different. (Actually, I didn’t even listen to the words!)

“When I started to make these compromises, I started to make other compromises too, like stopping my daily devotions and listening to music instead of studying. When I did do my homework, I listened to music, and I cheated on some of my homework so I could have time after school to listen to music. I shut myself up in my room and became secluded so I could listen to it.

“At this time, I also began to rebel against my parents, spreading from rebellion in music to rebellion in clothes. Then my Dad and Mom took me to a Basic Youth Seminar. There I heard stuff I had never heard before about music, dating, marriage, disloyalty, bitterness, genuine love, and much more.

“After that Seminar, I started to think about where my life was going. It wasn’t going how I wanted it to go, no matter how hard I tried! I knew something was very wrong. Then I went to the Advanced Seminar. This cleared it up. I was going downhill, and only God could pull me up, so I gave it all up to Him, and every day He pulls me up a little higher. “I have to tell you this because I want you to know I’m not just saying that I THINK ‘Christian contemporary’ music is bad and is compromising – I know it is. There’s only one way to get out of its addictive clutch, and that’s to give it up to God. So PLEASE don’t let this wolf sneak into the church and kill people unaware.” – Sari Ann Mitchell, age 14, California

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Even if parents are “too strict” in rejecting the “rock beat,” God expects their children to obey them. “… We have had fathers of our flesh which corrected us, and we gave them reverence… For they verily for a few days chastened us after their own pleasure…” (Hebrews 12:9-10).

HOW A TRUSTED MAGAZINE IS URGING TEENS TO DISHONOR THEIR PARENTS

On the cover of the January 1990 edition of a respected and trusted Christian youth magazine, there appeared the title: “Sing You Freedom.” On page 32 is the following article, entitled, “Shake Down at Home.” It’s easy to avoid talking to your parents about music, because it tends to be a touchy subject. But before conflicts arise, communicate with your parents about the music you like. This will help them understand why your music is important to you. “Here are some suggestions for developing communication with your parents about music. These ideas come from discussions with three teenagers. [vs. Scripture]

• “Don’t play YOUR MUSIC so loud that ‘the whole house is shaking….’ If you’re considerate about the volume, you will show your parents that you’re mature enough to be thoughtful of others. [vs. obedient to parents]
• “Share your enthusiasm with your parents…. This is a way to show your parents how IMPORTANT YOUR MUSIC IS TO YOU.
• “Choose CAREFULLY the songs to play for them. Chances are that your parents like a different style of music. For your parents, listening to YOUR MUSIC may be a bit like trying to understand a foreign language. So choose a song that has clear words and an understandable message. [What an indictment to much of the music!]
• “After you listen to a song together, talk about it…. [One of the three teenagers] explains to his parents what the writer is TRYING TO SAY…. Talking to your parents about the words shows your parents that you’ve listened to the lyrics and have thought about what they mean.
• “Be willing to listen to your parents’ music. IF they are willing to listen to your music, it’s nice to meet them HALFWAY.
• “Don’t expect too much; you may not convert them to YOUR STYLE of music. Different generations tend to like different types of music. YOUR GOAL is to communicate to your parents why YOUR MUSIC IS IMPORTANT TO YOU.” [Emphasis added]

WHAT A SHOCKING ARTICLE!!

OBSERVATIONS ABOUT THIS ARTICLE:

• The reference to “the whole house shaking” leaves no doubt that we are talking about “rock music.”
• The writer is very aware that many parents of teenagers are not in favor of the music which their sons and daughters are playing. * Rather than encouraging the young people to honor and obey their parents’ wishes, the writer instructs them to stand up for the rights to “their music.”
• What appalling counsel to say, “Be willing to listen to your parents’ music. IF your parents are willing to listen to your music, it’s nice to meet them halfway.
• Deception is encouraged by urging the young people to “choose carefully the songs to play for them…. Choose a song that has clear words and an understandable message.”
• To say that “different generations tend to like different types of music” is to totally disregard the destructive nature of the “rock beat.” This statement also disregards the true meaning of deference,
• Deference is limiting my freedom in order not to offend the tastes of those God has called me to serve.
• The conclusion of the article is a blatant defiance of parental authority: “Don’t expect too much; you may not convert them to your style of music…. Your goal is to communicate to your parents WHY YOUR MUSIC IS IMPORTANT TO YOU.”

The goal of God’s instruction in Ephesians 6 is not for the parents to capitulate to the will of their children, but for sons and daughters to obey and honor their parents.

Any teenager who disregards the instruction to honor his father and mother will experience the consequences of which God warns in Proverbs 30:17: “The eye that mocketh at his father, and despiseth to obey his mother, the ravens of the valley shall pick it out, and the young eagles shall eat it.”

2. THE “ROCK BEAT” VIOLATES GOD’S COMMAND TO “GIVE NO PLACE TO THE DEVIL.”

When sons and daughters disregard the instruction of their parents by listening to the “rock beat,” they are guilty of the kind of rebellion which is described in I Samuel 15:23:

“For rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft and stubbornness is as iniquity and idolatry….”

Rebellion is simply reserving for myself the right to make final decisions. It is deciding to have an equal voice with those whom God has placed in authority over me. This was the type of rebellion which Satan demonstrated when he said, “…. I will be LIKE the most High [God]” (Isaiah 14:14).

Witchcraft involves exposing oneself to the realm and the power of Satan’s control. Whoever gives Satan such “ground” violates the command of Ephesians 4:27. “Neither give place [ground] to the devil.” The Greek word for “place” in this verse refers to a sphere of jurisdiction. When Satan is given authority, he uses it to control and destroy the one who gave it to him.

HOW SATAN GAINED “GROUND” WHEN A TEENAGER LISTENED TO THE “ROCK BEAT”  

“I started listening to ‘contemporary Christian’ music about four years ago. I thought that the music was OK, and I enjoyed it, but one day I was listening to a Christian radio station and a song came on that I had never heard. I liked the song even though it was questionable.

“When the group who played that song came to town, I went to their concert with some friends. I knew, however, that my parents would not have approved had they known what type of music was played.

“After the concert, I borrowed money from a friend to buy their tape. I brought it home, but my parents did not want me to keep it. I did anyway.

“I listened to it all the time and finally bought some other ‘Christian rock’ tapes even though my parents did not want me to. I listened to them for a while but soon got bored with them.

“I then started listening to secular rock on a light rock station without my parents’ knowledge.

“I began to want to listen to rock music more and more, and I began to enjoy the harder stuff. I soon changed stations to a hard rock station so I could listen to the harder stuff.

“After listening to that station for about a year (all without my parents’ knowledge), I found that the stuff I liked the station could play only at night. So I got the tapes of some of the groups I liked, and I found that I loved heavy metal. I just couldn’t get enough.

“When I finally faced the reality of how wrong I was, I made commitments to give it up. However, I still struggle with it daily, and every time I hear it I am tempted to get back into it.” – David Brown, age 16, Arizona

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THE TESTIMONY OF A FORMER SATANIST HIGH PRIEST THAT THE “ROCK BEAT” GIVES “GROUND”  

“My background is not a good one, but I give thanks and praise to God for saving me from it. I was a Satanist high priest for nine years.

“I am writing in regard to ‘Christian music’ or what is called ‘power tracts,’ ‘Christian rock and roll,’ and ‘contemporary Christian’ music, and their counterparts, rock and roll, heavy metal, black metal, country music, rap, and punk.

“I understand that I cannot judge groups as to whether or not they are genuine believers. But the Bible does say that we are to judge their fruit.

“The Bible says that we are to be Christlike. Some groups who play this kind of ‘Christian’ music say that they do so because it’s the only way they can reach the young people of today. They claim that we must look like the world and use the world’s music in order to reach young people with the Word of God.

“How long will Christians allow themselves to be deceived and lied to by Satan [the father of lies]?

“The Bible says we are to be in the world – not a part of it. It also says that to be a friend with the world is to be an enemy of God.

“As ambassadors for Christ, we should represent Him the best we can. Christ never changed His appearance, whether He talked with kings or the poor.

“When I first became involved in the occult, music had a big influence on my life. It was not just the words but the music itself. Its affect on me spiritually was to bring me into another state of consciousness.

“The beat and style of the music used in the occult rituals is the same that I now hear in ‘Christian power tracts,’ ‘Christian rock and roll,’ ‘Christian rap,’ and in much of what is called ‘Christian contemporary’ music today.

“People who were saved from the youth culture of today say, ‘I cannot listen to this new Christian music, because when I hear it, it takes me back to my past when I was lost. It brings all that back to me – lustful desires, love of money, sex, suicide, and rebellion against authority.’

“Think of the struggle that these young Christians have when they try to separate the things of the world from the things of God. When they hear what is called ‘Christian’ music that sounds just like the world, these vulnerable young Christians become confused and the music becomes a stumbling block in their lives.

“Normally a Christian will take only what is good and leave the bad. This discernment does not always work with music, however, because if the music is bad and the words are good, many Christians are not able to separate them and both are swallowed together.

“Satan tried a mixed-message tactic on Jesus in the desert when he misquoted Scripture by mixing it with half-truths. Jesus rebuked Satan for this tactic and quoted the whole truth back to him.” – David Pratt, Chattanooga, Tennessee

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THE SECOND WITNESS THAT THE “ROCK BEAT” ITSELF IS DEMONIC  

In April 1990, a Christian from Zimbabwe, Africa, arrived for his first visit to the United States. He is a native missionary under the Awana Youth Association. When he turned on a Christian radio station and listened to the music, he was shocked. Here is his report:

“I am very sensitive to the beat in music, because when I was a boy, I played the drums in our village worship rituals. The beat that I played on the drum was to get the demon spirits into the people.

“When I became a Christian, I rejected this kind of beat because I realized how damaging it was.

“When I turned on a Christian radio station in the United States, I was shocked. The same beat that I used to play to call up the evil spirits is in the music I heard on the Christian station.” – Stephen Maphosah, Zimbabwe, Africa

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A THIRD WITNESS THAT THE “ROCK BEAT” DOES GIVE “GROUND” TO THE DEVIL  

“In 1981, I was driving down a jungle road in the Ivory Coast with several African pastors in the car with me. I had recently received a couple of cassette tapes from our denominational headquarters that were intended for our teenaged daughter.

“These were recordings of various ‘Christian rock’ artists. In listening to the tapes, I was very disturbed in my own spirit that such material was being sent to our missionary kids.

“But not trusting my own reaction alone and realizing that these pastors with whom I was traveling were very sensitive to the spirit world (both good and evil), I decided to play the tapes for them. The reaction I got was immediate and verbally violent!

“One of the pastors asked me this question, ‘Do you mean to tell us that this kind of music is played in your churches in America?’

“I answered in the affirmative. His response was filled with disgust and anger as he replied with another question. ‘What are you doing allowing your church people in America to call up the evil spirits with their music?’ ” – Rev. Joe Meyers, Tacoma, Washington

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3. THE “ROCK BEAT” MOCKS GOD’S COMMAND TO “LOVE NOT THE WORLD.”   There is absolutely no way that Christians who love the “rock beat” can deny that they love the world. The “rock beat” not only originated with the ungodly elements of this world, but it expresses the evil intentions of the world’s system which is opposed to Christ and His Truth.

The very phrase “rock ‘n’ roll” describes a form of immorality. To say that we can have “Christian rock” is like saying we can have “Christian immorality.” Furthermore the “rock beat” does not come alone. It was originally designed to stir up and express rebellion to authority, as well as immorality. Those who try to put Christian words to a “rock beat” are simply imitating the world, and because one of the strongest evidences of admiration is imitation, they are guilty of violating God’s command in I John 2:15-16: “Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him.

“For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world.” God condemns any Christian who loves the world.

“Ye adulterers and adulteresses, know ye not that the friendship of the world is enmity with God? Whosoever therefore will be a friend of the world is the enemy of God” (James 4:4).

Christians are to be IN the world but not OF the world. We are not to be influenced by their evil ways; instead, we are to be a light in their darkness. God brought judgment to His own people when they “… mingled among the heathen, and learned their works. And they served their idols: which were a snare unto them….

“Therefore was the wrath of the Lord kindled against his people, insomuch that he abhorred his own inheritance. And he gave them into the hand of the heathen; and they that hated them ruled over them” (Psalm 106:35-42).

HOW THE AMERICAN MEDICAL ASSOCIATION LINKS THE “ROCK BEAT” WITH THE WORLD  

“‘Doctors should be alert to the listening habits of young patients as a clue to their emotional health, because fascination with rock ‘n’ roll, especially heavy metal music, may be associated with drug use, premarital sex and satanic rites,’ a committee of the American Medical Association said.

“‘At the very least, commitment to a rock subculture is symptomatic of adolescent alienation,’ the AMA’s Group on Science and Technology said in its report, ‘Adolescents and Their Music,’ published by the Journal of the American Medical Association.

“‘The AMA committee reported that ‘the average teenager listens to 10,400 hours of rock music during the years between the 7th and 12th grades, and music surpasses television as an influence in teenagers’ lives. While TV viewing often is supervised by parents, music largely is uncensored,’ the committee said.

“‘As an important agent of adolescent socialization, however, the negative messages of rock music should not be dismissed,’ the committee said.

“The committee cited ‘… evidence linking involvement in rock culture with low school achievement, drugs, sexual activity and even satanic activities.’ “The committee expressed special concern about two relatively recent developments in rock music – heavy metal rock and music videos. “‘The violent and sexual content of the video images are disturbing to many,’ the committee said.

“‘…. A study found that 7th and 1Oth graders, after watching one hour of music videos, were more likely to approve of premarital sex than were a control group of adolescents.”‘ (Reported in the Chicago Sun Times, September 15, 1989)

4. THE “ROCK BEAT” DISREGARDS GOD’S COMMAND NOT TO OFFEND OTHER CHRISTIANS.  

On Friday afternoon, May 18, 1990, a twenty-year-old man attending the Detroit Basic Seminar asked the following question.

“Several years ago I was saved out of a life of immorality and drugs. The church I began attending told me to get rid of my rock music. I did and have been growing in the Lord. But now my church is playing the same kind of music they told me to give up. What am I to do?”

This grievous question exposes the violation of the law of love in the matter of “Christian rock” music. It brings us directly to the appeal of the Apostle Paul regarding questionable things: It is good not to do

“… ANY THING whereby thy brother stumbleth, or is offended, or is made weak” (Romans 14:21). This vital command is repeated in I Corinthians 8:9-13. It puts to silence any Christian who says he has a right to play the music that he enjoys.

“But take heed lest by any means this liberty of yours become a stumbling block to them that are weak…. And through thy knowledge shall the weak brother perish, for whom Christ died?

“But when ye sin so against the brethren, and wound their weak conscience, ye sin against Christ….”

The “rock beat” offends Christians who, when they first hear it, immediately discern in their spirits that it is not of God but is of the world.

HOW A YOUNG MISSIONARY WAS OFFENDED BY THE “ROCK BEAT”  

“In the summer of 1988, I attended a missionary training conference with many other Christian young people. Some of the music contained a subtle “rock beat.” The beat offended me, and I decided to appeal to the leader of the group.

“However, before I could make my appeal, he preached a message to the whole group justifying the “rock beat” by condemning anyone who judged another person for his music style.

“Last year, a much larger conference was held by the same organization. This time I was absolutely shocked when I heard the music. The “rock beat” was so strong that many young people began to dance in a worldly manner.

“I was so grieved, I had to walk out of the meetings whenever the music was played. It was a strange mixture of pure worship and sensual beat.

“The conflicting messages created confusion in me and grieved my spirit.

“After the training we went into an area for outreach. Our goal was to bring young people into an evening meeting, but at the meeting, they again played the rock music. I could not even attend these meetings, and there were several others who felt the same way.

“We prayed and fasted and then made our appeal to the national Christian leaders. They received our appeal; however, they had been looking to the American Christians for an example and assumed that because the Americans did it, it must be right.” – Janet Yast, age 27, Pennsylvania

“P.S. What disappoints me so much is that this leader has had such a great influence on my life. He is such a Godly man; I just cannot understand why he is not discerning in this area of compromise.”

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HOW THE LAW OF SYMPATHETIC VIBRATION EXPLAINS WHY THE “ROCK BEAT” OFFENDS MANY

In music, there is a law of sympathetic vibration. This law is demonstrated by a tuning fork. When a note is played on the piano, the tuning fork vibrates at that pitch. Similarly, when we hear sounds, our whole body will either vibrate with the sound, or react to it. When a little child hears a syncopated “rock beat,” he will tend to sway and dance. If, however, the child is spiritually discerning, he will say to his parents, “That is bad music.” The “rock beat” not only offends Christians who have not been exposed to it, but it also offends Christians who have come out of the rock culture and are trying to rid their lives of the rebellion and immorality that the “rock beat” stirs up in them.

HOW THE “ROCK BEAT” OFFENDS THOSE WHO ARE TRYING TO ESCAPE THE WORLD’S CORRUPTION

“I used to reject my family and spend all my free time in my room listening to music that did not glorify God.

“I slid deeper and deeper into the satanic realm. I knew it was satanic, but I couldn’t get out. It also gave Satan a handle to get into other areas of my life.

“I loved the world and the world’s music. I listened to it, sang it, and talked about it, and when anyone said they didn’t listen to it, I would ridicule them.

“Rock music had dulled my senses. Even when I knew something was wrong, I would do it anyway.

“Rock is powerful, and if anyone tells you that it isn’t, they are lying.

“I needed it all the time, just like a smoker needs a smoke. I couldn’t go on a vacation without secretly taking a radio.

“I am now trying to get away from this kind of music. If anyone plays the ‘rock beat,’ it reminds me of songs that I can remember word for word, note for note.” – Dan Steele, age 18, Minnesota

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The “rock beat” is not only offending Christians in America, but it is especially grievous to Christians in other countries who are being influenced by American missionaries and visiting youth groups.

Stephen Maphosah, who was trained to use the beat for demonic worship (see testimony on page 8), visited a Christian bookstore on June 25, 1990. He purchased samples of ten individual “contemporary Christian” musicians and groups that are among the most listened to by Christians in America. He evaluated each tape on the basis of its beat. Some tapes contained the demonic beat that he was accustomed to in his ancestral worship of evil spirits. Other tapes contained a slower variation of the demonic beat. However, he classified ALL the tapes as “unacceptable and offensive to the Christians of this country.”

WHY TWO SINCERE CHRISTIANS CAN HAVE OPPOSING VIEWS ON THE SAME MUSIC

Two Christians may listen to a contemporary rock song and give totally opposite evaluations of it. One will say, “I know that song is wrong because it causes me to be rebellious and sensual.” The other Christian may say, “I don’t see anything wrong with that music. It doesn’t stir up any rebellion or sensuality in me.”

Their viewpoints are illustrated in the chart “The Development of Concupiscence” given in the Basic Youth Conflicts Seminar. Music that becomes sensual will follow the stages leading to reprobation.

Therefore, if two Christians are on different levels in the development of reprobation, they will see the same music from two different viewpoints. The Christian who has not given way to various sensual sins will recognize this music as a temptation to compromise in sensuality. Those who have engaged in sensual activities will probably not be stirred up by this music. Their previous sensuality has dulled their senses, and they are tempted only by a more radical expression of the “rock beat.”

In the early Church, Christians vehemently debated the matter of eating meat that had been offered to idols. Some Christians felt that it was wrong to eat this meat because it had been offered to an idol. Other Christians saw no problem with the meat since it was sold in the open market.

Paul pointed out that there was nothing intrinsically wrong with the meat, yet because it was offending other Christians it should not be eaten. Therefore, the Holy Spirit and the early Church leaders unanimously condemned the eating of this meat because it caused weaker brothers to stumble. They commanded both Jewish and Gentile believers not to eat it. (See Acts 15:28- 29.)

In the book of Revelation, two churches were rebuked because they had believers in them who were encouraging Christians to eat meat offered to idols. (See Revelation 2:14, 20). If the meat offered to idols was condemned when it had nothing wrong with it, how much more should the “rock beat” be condemned in our churches, based on the following Scripture: “But if thy brother be grieved with thy meat, now walkest thou not charitably. Destroy not him with thy meat, for whom Christ died” (Romans 14:15). The same principle applies to music.

5. THE “ROCK BEAT” DEFIES GOD’S COMMAND TO JUDGE ALL THINGS AS GOOD OR EVIL.

In the early years of the “Christian rock beat,” the beat and the sound were justified on the basis that “music is amoral.” If such a conclusion is accepted, then music is not a matter of good and evil, but simply a matter of personal taste. Yet such false reasoning is in total opposition to the words of Scripture. Music is the product of words and actions, and nowhere in Scripture is there an “amoral” classification for words and actions.

“…. We must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ; that every one may receive the things done in his body, according to that he hath done, whether it be GOOD OR BAD” (II Corinthians 5:10).

All Christians are commanded by God to exercise their spiritual senses in order to discern between good and evil. “But strong meat belongeth to them that are of full age, even those who by reason of use have their senses exercised to discern both GOOD AND EVIL” (Hebrews 5:14).

HOW A FAMILY DISCERNED THAT A “CHRISTIAN” CHILDREN’S TAPE WAS EVIL.  

“The day before our three-year-old daughter’s surgery, I went shopping for a small gift to give her when she came home from the hospital. At our local Christian bookstore I bought a tape of children’s songs.

“When she arrived home we presented her with the tape. She immediately wanted to hear it. We don’t own a television set, so listening to her tapes is one of her favorite pastimes.

“We played it for her and were disappointed to find that some of the songs had definite rock overtones to them. She picked up on this, too, because we have trained her to recognize the evil in ‘rock and roll’ music.

“Once we knew which songs we didn’t care for, we would just skip over them. Whenever she would ask to hear the tape and it came to a song we didn’t care for, she would ask us to fix the tape for her. That was all fine and well, but I noticed as time went on that she was wanting to listen to that particular tape more than her favorite tapes.

“At the same time, we started to notice some behavior changes in her that we didn’t really care for. She is a normal three-year-old who would challenge our authority, but she usually knew her boundaries. Usually she would pray and participate enthusiastically in our family devotions, pray before meals, be active and responsive in Sunday school, memorize Scripture, and love to sing songs about Jesus.

“However, the more she listened to this ‘Christian’ children’s tape, the more I noticed her behavior change. She started pushing, shoving, kicking, and biting her friends and her sister. She back-talked more than she ever dared before, and she made faces at us when we asked her to do something.

“She stopped participating in our devotions, stopped praying, didn’t want to go to church anymore, and started doing things I had never seen her or her friends do before. She became openly defiant and rebellious to her father and me, even hitting or kicking us if we asked her to accompany us on an errand or something along those lines.

“I honestly couldn’t figure out what was happening, but because I had been a very rebellious child when I was growing up, I thought I was beginning to reap what I had sown.

“Things continued to get worse. It seemed as though I was forever spanking her, standing her in the corner, or sending her to bed, I started doubting my ability as a parent, and this caused insecurity and other problems to come into my life. It literally affected our whole family, and we were constantly in a turmoil. We tried discipline, we tried reasoning, we prayed a hedge of thorns, and we tried easing up on the discipline. Nothing worked.

“Our personal devotions and prayer lives were affected. Instead of drawing closer to the Lord, I started drifting. This all happened in a three-week period of time. Finally, one evening after the children were in bed, my husband and I discussed our dilemma. He suggested that maybe we ought to do some ‘housecleaning.’

“The more I thought about it, the more I realized that our daughter’s behavior had started changing the day we gave her that tape. My husband was thinking the very same thing. We also noticed that some magazines we had been subscribing to had pictures of alcohol and cigarettes, and different cult articles were scattered throughout their pages. We decided to burn the tape and the magazines as soon as possible.

“The next morning after breakfast, we explained to our daughter what we intended to do. When she asked why, we told her that having these things in our house did not please Jesus. We showed her some of the pictures in the magazines, and she agreed with us. She wasn’t agreeable about including her tape in the things to be burned, but she didn’t put up as much of a fight as I had expected.

“We took everything outside, piled it up, and set fire to it as we all stood by and watched. When we came back in the house, we asked her to forgive us for allowing those things to come into our house. She did and then went on her way.

“This all happened on a Friday, and our daughter’s behavior was still pretty bad. However, by Monday the change in her behavior was incredible! I thought we had brought the wrong child home from church on Sunday!

“Our home is just about back to normal now, since our ‘umbrella’ has been patched. The change in our daughter has been obvious, not only to us but also to our friends who went through this with us. We have learned much from this experience, mainly to be careful about what things enter our home.

“Not everything labeled ‘Christian’ contains the Lord’s blessing.” – The Patrick Hait family, Maryland

————–

Evaluating the evil of the “rock beat” is not a matter of musical ability, but rather of spiritual discernment.

“Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world” (I John 4:1).

6. THE “ROCK BEAT” DISOBEYS GOD’S COMMAND TO AVOID “ALL APPEARANCE OF EVIL.”

A Christian magazine that claims to be “the most widely read resource serving youth ministry” contains a chart in its September 1990 issue which matches every worldly rock sound with a comparable “Christian rock” group sound. Notice the categories:

Heavy metal

Punk/Thrash

Rap

Dance

Pop

Pop/Rock

Rock ‘n’ roll

Difficult-to-categorize

Not only are “Christian rock” groups imitating the sound of evil rock groups, but they are also copying the evil dress styles and appearance of the world’s musicians. An impartial observer would find it difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish between many “Christian rock” groups and worldly rock groups by simply looking at their album covers. So-called “Christian groups” are now even using satanic symbols on their album covers. How can Christians justify such a blatant disobedience to the clear command of Scripture?

“Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. Abstain from ALL appearance of evil” (I Thessalonians 5:21-22). Not only is it difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish worldly rock groups from most “Christian rock” groups, but it is also very hard to determine which members are men and which ones are women, because of the long hair, skirts, and other attire worn by many of the men. This is in clear violation of the following instruction of Scripture:

“Doth not even nature itself teach you, that, if a man have long hair, it is a shame unto him?” (I Corinthians 11:14).

“The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman’s garment: for all that do so are abomination unto the Lord thy God” (Deuteronomy 22:5).

7. THE “ROCK BEAT” CONTRADICTS GOD’S COMMAND NOT TO BE BROUGHT UNDER ITS POWER.   The “rock beat” is, in and of itself, an addiction. Those who vibrate with it begin to desire more and more of it. Like a drug addiction, one’s appetite for it increases so that the “rock beat” in “contemporary Christian” music soon becomes dissatisfying, and a stronger beat is required. The “rock beat” therefore violates the following Scripture: “All things are lawful unto me, but all things are not expedient… I will not be brought under the power of any” (I Corinthians 6:12).

Seventeen-year-old Susanna adds her testimony to several others in this booklet to confirm the addictive nature of the “rock beat”:

A TEENAGER’S APPEAL TO REJECT THE “ROCK BEAT” BECAUSE IT IS SUCH A POWERFUL ADDICTION.

“I started to listen to ‘Christian rock’ when I was eleven. Each time I heard it, I felt rebellious and had sensual thoughts.

“The feelings grew stronger as my music got harder.

“I finally realized this music was wrong, and I tried to get rid of all my music tapes, but I would always slip back into it.

“I am seventeen years old now, and I still struggle with this music. It is very addictive and so easy to slip back into.

“I pray that as you read of my struggles and of the struggles of other young people, you will want to keep this damaging tool of Satan out of our lives, our homes, and our churches.” – Susanna Dressler, age 17, Indiana

————

ANOTHER TESTIMONY OF HOW ADDICTIVE THE “ROCK BEAT” IS.

“In the summer of 1989, I purposed that I would listen only to music which is glorifying to God.

“However, Satan had a stronghold in my life because I listened to rock music for many years. As a result the sounds and words were embedded in my memory.

“As the teachers at school lectured, or as I ate lunch or walked through the hall and heard any word that was in a song, I would begin singing a song that the word reminded me of.

“Every conversation brought a song to my mind. Thus every day, evil lyrics were embedded deeper into my spirit.

“Only as I recognized the demonic nature of this addiction was I able to deal with it in a Scriptural way.” – Brandi Brace, age 19, Kansas

————–

“Reaching teenagers” with “Christian rock” music is like giving out liquor with Bible verses on the bottles.

8. THE “ROCK BEAT” OPPOSES GOD’S COMMAND NOT TO MIX LIGHT WITH DARKNESS.  

Most of those who promote “Christian rock” music would agree that the rock music of the world is evil. However, they reason that by putting Christian words to the same beat, the world’s music is somehow made right. This human reasoning is directly opposed to the instruction of Scripture.

“…. What fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? and what communion hath light with darkness?

“And what concord hath Christ with Belial? or what part he that believeth with an infidel?” (II Corinthians 6:14-15).

In the days of the prophet Haggai, the priests were called together and asked some very pertinent questions. The answers which these priests gave have direct application in the matter of mixing Christian words with an ungodly beat.

“If one bear holy flesh in the skirt of his garment, and with his skirt do tough bread, or pottage, or wine, or oil, or any meat, shall it be holy? And the priests answered and said, No.

“…. If on that is unclean by a dead body touch any of these, shall it be unclean? And the priests answered and said, It shall be unclean” (Haggai 2:12- 13). If a priest who had been cleansed would touch something unclean, he would not purify the unclean; however, the unclean thing he touched would make him unclean.

Similarly, the thought of making unclean music acceptable by putting Christian words to it is in direct violation of the following command:

“Wherefore come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord, and touch not the unclean thing; and I will receive you” (II Corinthians 6:17). The chief justification for combining the pure words of Scripture with the unclean music of the world is that this is the method by which we will reach non-Christians. There are several fallacies to this reasoning.

GOD ORDAINED PREACHING, NOT MUSIC, TO REACH THE LOST.  

There are two primary purposes for music in the life of a Christian. The first is to praise and worship God. The second is to edify other Christians. This is the clear teaching of Ephesians 5:19: “Speaking to yourselves in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord.”

When it comes to reaching the lost, God ordained preaching, rather than music, to accomplish this goal. “… It pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe” (I Corinthians 1:21).(See also I Corinthians 1:18.) Based on these points, the commands of Ephesians 5:6-12 are pertinent: “Let no man deceive you with vain words: for because of these things cometh the wrath of God upon the children of disobedience. Be not ye therefore partakers with them. For ye were sometimes darkness, but now are ye light in the Lord: walk as children of light…”

9. THE “ROCK BEAT” IGNORES GOD’S COMMAND FOR ALL MINISTERS TO BE QUALIFIED.  

Scripture establishes strict standards for those who would teach others in the Church. A teacher must fulfill the qualifications listed in I Timothy 3 and also Titus 1. Churches go through careful ordination services to make sure that those who instruct Christians are qualified. Ironically, teachers who would never pass an ordination council are being welcomed into churches to teach the young people through music.

Worldly rock musicians who claim to be converted are immediately accepted as being qualified to teach Gospel truths to youth. This is in direct contradiction to the following requirement: “Not a novice, lest being lifted up with pride he fall into the condemnation of the devil” (I Timothy 3:6).

Even non-Christian musicians who talk about God are being listened to as teachers of truth. At the beginning of Christ’s ministry, the demons gave a very clear witness about Him. One of them said, “…. I know thee who thou art, the Holy One of God” (Mark 1:24). Rather than allowing the demon to testify, Jesus commanded him to be silent. “And Jesus rebuked him, saying, Hold thy peace…” (Mark 1:25).

Even Christians who give a witness for the Lord are instructed first to sanctify the Lord God in their hearts, according to I Peter 3:15. Based on these factors, how can we justify presenting the truth of Scripture in the vulgar and demonic medium of the world’s rock? To justify vulgar music on the basis that it is being used to communicate the Gospel is the same as justifying profanity in the pulpit or pornography in Gospel literature.

10. THE “ROCK BEAT” VIOLATES GOD’S COMMAND TO PROTECT OUR BODIES AS GOD’S TEMPLE.  

When we become Christians, our bodies become the dwelling places of the Holy Spirit. Those who defile or damage God’s temple will be judged. “Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you? “If any man defile the temple of God, him shall God destroy; for the temple of God is holy, which temple ye are” (I Corinthians 3:16-17). There are many ways in which the “rock beat” damages our bodies.

HOW THE “ROCK BEAT” DAMAGES OUR HEARING  

As noted in many of the testimonies, one of the characteristics of the addictive nature of the “rock beat” is that the music must be played louder and louder. Safe decibel levels range from 20 to 65 decibels. As the decibel level of the music increases, irreversible hearing loss occurs. Some permanent damage is possible after eight continuous hours of 90-decibel sound. Rock concerts are consistently between 110 and 140 decibels. Exposure to noise at this level for more than one minute may cause permanent hearing damage.

HOW THE “ROCK BEAT” DAMAGES OUR BRAIN CELLS.  

When we listen to music, our minds try to bring the beat and the melody together. When there is an offbeat, the mind struggles to coordinate the two. A study conducted by a neurobiologist of Georgian Court College (Lakewood, New Jersey) and a physicist of Fairleigh Dickinson University (Rutherford, New Jersey) indicated the devastating effects that occur in animals when there is prolonged listening to a rock rhythm. The brain cells involved actually became deformed as they attempted to reconcile the beat to the melody.

HOW THE “ROCK BEAT” DAMAGES OUR CONCENTRATION.  

Further research has shown that noise threatens more than just hearing. It is now linked to increased levels of stress, high blood pressure, ulcers, and hormonal imbalance. One of the most common testimonies of young people is that they are unable to concentrate on the Scriptures while under the influence of the “rock beat.”

HOW A TEENAGER RESTORED PERSONAL WORSHIP BY DESTROYING THE “ROCK BEAT”.  

“I have listened to ‘contemporary Christian’ music all my life. My parents listened to it even before I was born.

“When they began listening in the early 1970s, the beat was much softer than it is today. However, both secular and ‘Christian contemporary’ music styles have changed. The beat of the music has gotten much harder and faster. The changes were subtle, so only in retrospect can I see where that wrong music led me.

“My parents would never allow me to listen to secular rock music. However, I disobeyed them and listened to it when they weren’t around. This was partly because of peer pressure. It was also because I was used to the beat of the ‘contemporary Christian’ music.

“I felt that some of the ‘Christian’ music had a harder beat than some of the secular music so there must not be anything wrong with the softer secular music. Listening to this music was feeding my growing rebellion toward my parents by putting wrong thoughts and attitudes in my mind. This music also led to lowering my moral standards.

“In 1987 I stopped listening to secular music and focused totally on ‘contemporary Christian’ music. This did not correct my wrong attitudes, because I was still being fed by the wrong music. Then my pride increased. I felt I was better than a lot of people because I didn’t listen to the world’s music.

“In 1989 my parents became increasingly aware of how this wrong music was affecting my life. They began to try to change my views on it. I listened to the Striving for Excellence tapes, and our family read through the Bible and researched every Scripture that dealt with music.

“My parents prayed that I would give up this wrong music. During this time, God was working in my heart. I knew that ‘contemporary Christian’ music was not what my parents wanted for me, but I was afraid to give it up. It had been a part of my me for so long.

“In January of 1990, I met a large group of Christian young people who did not listen to any music with a rock beat in it. I was tremendously impressed with them. They had a peace and a joy that I didn’t have.

“On February 13, 1990, I gave all my music to the Lord and burned all of my ‘Christian rock’ tapes. The results have been amazing!

“God has given me a new desire to know Him better. I have a peace in my life that I never even realized was missing. For years I had a stuttering problem that is now completely cleared up, and I have a new relationship with my parents that I have never had before.

“It was very important for me not just to get rid of the wrong music, but to replace it with right music.

“It is my prayer that every teenager will experience the freedom that I am now enjoying.” – Christiane Quick, age 19, North Carolina

————-

Introducing the “rock beat” into Christian music is like establishing a pluralistic society. It is simply a transition from one controlling religion to another.

————-

A commitment to reject the deception of the “rock beat” in any form:

“Almighty Father, based on the authority of your Word and the testimony of others, I now purpose to remove from my life any music that contains a ‘rock beat’ and to replace it with melodious music that glorifies You and edifies others.” Signature_______________________________________ Date____________________________________________

————————-

Reprinted with permission from:

The Institute in Basic Life Principles

Box One

Oak Brook, IL 60522-3001

Printed copies may be ordered at the rate of: 1-10 copies: $3.00 per copy; 11-50 copies: $2.00 per copy; 51-100 copies: $1.50 per copy.

(C) 1990 Institute in Basic Life Principles

Reprinted in electronic form by The Light TBBS, Computers for Christ #22, Silver Springs, FL.

Previously on this blog, we’ve looked at the history of spanking in Accelerated Christian Education schools and asked whether it still happens today. Sources closer to ACE than me tell me that paddling is a thing of the past in UK schools that teach the ACE curriculum. But they’re still selling spanking manuals.

Christian Education Europe (CEE) has UK contracts to distribute two ranges of products. One is ACE. The other is Growing Families International (GFI), a series of child-rearing manuals by Gary and Marie Ezzo. In preparing this post, I tried to think of a way to convey to you in a single sentence just how problematic the Ezzos’ teachings are. And I have it. But first some background.

Have you heard of James Dobson? Within the Christian Right, Dobson is a voice to rival Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell; he was particularly influential on the Reagan administration. Dobson’s books on discipline, The Strong-Willed Child and Dare to Discipline, are pretty big on spanking and other ‘creative’ punishments themselves, and you should ask some of the kids who were raised with Dobson’s methods if they think they were abusive.

So you’re in the picture. Dobson is a Christian Right advocate of authoritarian, disciplinarian parenting.

And here comes my sentence that says it all about the Ezzos:

The organisation James Dobson founded, Focus on the Family, has publicly denounced the Ezzos’ teachings.

An article in The Christian Research Journal in 1998 said of the Ezzos’ Growing Families International program:

Although it is not a cult, it has consistently exhibited a pattern of cultic behavior, including Scripture twisting, authoritarianism, exclusivism, isolationism, and physical and emotional endangerment.

It was here that I learned of Focus on the Family’s views on GFI:

According to a public statement, Focus on the Family (Focus) has received numerous reports of “failure-to-thrive in infants subjected to” the Ezzos’ program Preparation for Parenting (PFP), and does “not recommend the Ezzos’ material.”

The Christian Research Institute (publisher of the journal), much like Focus on the Family, is not the kind of organisation that often gets much praise on this blog. Its president, Hank Hanegraaff, is as conservative a Christian as you could ask for. When even these guys are condemning your child-raising practices, it’s a sign that the criticism against you is not just some atheist conspiracy.

Of course, the unbelievers have been out in force against the Ezzos too. They were the subject of a 1999 Newsnight investigation, in which Jeremy Paxman pointed out that their recommendations for baby feeding have been linked with failure to thrive in infants, and had been criticised by the American Pediatrics Association. Gary Ezzo replied that his teachings were in line with the American Academy of Pediatrics, at which point Paxman read a statement from the AAP which appeared to contradict what Ezzo said.

How did the Ezzos come to the attention of Newsnight? Why, they were in the UK at the invitation of Christian Education Europe, who had brought them over to speak at a protest rally against the ban on corporal punishment in schools. This caused professional problems for Stephen Dennett, CEE associate, because he was an Ofsted inspector at the time, and it was quite reasonably felt that Ofsted inspectors shouldn’t be associating with child-abusing cultists.

In the BBC’s report on the subject, they mentioned that the Ezzos “think pain is ‘a gift from God’ and advocate that parents spank their children from the age of 18 months on up to five times a day to teach them discipline”.

A full timeline of the Ezzo controversy can be found at Ezzo.info.

The Ezzos are advocates of child abuse on a par with Michael and Debi Pearl, whose book To Train Up a Child has received so much condemnation. I hear far less about the Ezzos. It’s time more was done about this.

So Christian Education Europe, why are you promoting child abuse?

Christian Education Europe’s vision of the perfect textbook*

Related posts:

• Burning down the woodshed (Defeating the Dragons)
• A step-by-step guide to beating children, by ACE
• Lies, damned lies, and incompetence
• An invitation for abuse

More information on the Ezzos:

• Fresno Family: Dangers of Ezzo/Babywise
• Ezzo.info
• Getting wise to Babywise (Salon)
• American Academy of Pediatrics article
• Apologetics Index (Christian website with many links to information from both Christian and secular sources)

* This is a joke (The caption and picture only. The rest of this post is deadly serious, and I thought you could use some levity.)

It’s all go in the exciting world of fundamentalist education this week as former Christian Education Europe (CEE) employee Christine Gregg has started blowing the whistle again. You may remember that recently a website called Ace Education sprang up, seemingly with the primary intention of discrediting Leaving Fundamentalism. This was the blog that gave the world 10 Questions for Jonny Scaramanga. The blogger behind it was Christine. Now she has had enough.

Christine says that she was pressured into writing the blog by CEE founder Arthur Roderick, but never felt comfortable writing it. Now she wants to expose the unethical practices and bullying she says she saw at CEE.

Last week, I also had an article posted on Guardian Science blogs, in which I revealed two things: 1) Four British universities have stated that they consider the International Certificate of Christian Education (ICCE) as entry qualification. 2) When students study science for the ICCE, they will read that it could be possible to generate electricity from snow.

Presumably ACE thought Frozen was a documentary about the potential uses of snow power.

Taken together, these two developments are very bad news for CEE’s flagship product, the ICCE qualification.

Although my post has had more views, it’s potentially Christine’s revelations that will do more damage to CEE. While I’ve caused a stir in the atheist community, Christine has a better chance of being heard by CEE’s customers and associates. I expect CEE will do everything they can to discredit Christine, but the fact remains that she is a Christian and someone who knows the company from the inside.

In particular, Christine makes two allegations that could be explosive: 1) The prizes were fixed at CEE’s European Student Conventions, and 2) moderation of essays on the ICCE was done poorly by unqualified people.

How does this relate to my Guardian article? Well, much of the blame for universities accepting the ICCE must lie with UK NARIC, who have declared the ICCE Advanced certificate to be on a par with Cambridge International A Levels. It is NARIC, along with CEE, who should be answering difficult questions. Whenever I’ve attacked NARIC for its decision, I’ve criticised Accelerated Christian Education, which makes up most but not all of the ICCE qualification. NARIC has therefore always been able to defend itself by insisting:

In 2011, UK NARIC was approached by ICCE Ltd to review broad subject areas and learning outcomes of ICCE qualifications, not ACE curricula, exclusively, as it has been claimed. The ICCE qualifications that were examined as part of the project are baccalaureate style awards that are partly based on the ACE curriculum, but they also include compulsory assessed elements such as coursework, essay assignments and project work which are supplemental to the ACE material.  In-depth analysis of these elements formed a key part of the overall evaluation of the ICCE qualifications.

Because I have no way of looking at these other parts of the ICCE, I could never respond to that. But a former employee of CEE can. And according to Christine, they have been highly suspect. Entries at European Student Convention which counted for ICCE credits have been subjected to questionable marking practices:

As an arts judge I was often told which pieces were 1st, 2nd or 3rd and to mark them all accordingly. If I were to disagree, I would be overruled. Often if a better work was to win, rather than a favoured student, we were given a good reason, such as it “didn’t honour God”, as to why we had to disqualify the work.

Note to attendees: Did you often believe you were inferior to these gifted winners? Nope you weren’t, you just weren’t favoured or were unknown to CEE. I have witness statements from other Christian judges and a 24/7 (a favoured group of ACE graduate helpers at ESC [European Student Convention]) to back up the claims, so don’t take my word for it.

I once was head judge for Web design. There were only four entries and one was outstanding. The last place went to a favoured student whose website was childlike with broken links, poor navigation and looked awful. Unfortunately, this entry was also up for an ICCE credit and didn’t make the grade. The favoured school complained as the student wouldn’t graduate without his pass. I stood my ground and was overruled. A credit was given to an unworthy student. I can state many more cases of cheating at ESC. A 24/7 member came to me and told me a drama event had been nobbled but there was nothing I could do. In photography I was told to disqualify a student as he hadn’t taken the entered photographs. I did so and it was me who took the flack from those concerned.

So CEE, if you want the ICCE to be worth anything at all, you need to check on ESC judging and entries earning credits. It would be honourable to God to have independent judges too rather than relatives of competitors. The rows behind the scene are second to none.

She also reports that ICCE essays have been moderated badly:

ICCE moderation was a disgrace when I worked at CEE. Often the work was moderated badly by one disabled and very incapable woman. Her marking was inconsistent and writing unclear. No one checked her work. I do believe they moderate better now, but not to Government standards.

Christine says that she can substantiate all these claims. If these practices have been widespread, then it adds to the doubt about the ICCE’s validity as a university entrance qualification.

Related posts:

• Revelations from a former ACE insider
• Former CEE employee turns whistleblower
• Even the vicar can’t stand ACE