Weishaupt, Owen, Wright and Brownson

AMERICANS' NEW RELIGION By Dennis L. Cuddy, Ph.D. November 5, 2007 NewsWithViews.com

For the last two centuries, there has been in the U.S. a battle between the Biblically-based values of the American Revolution and the secular humanist’s values of the French Revolution, which emphasized Adam Weishaupt’s Illuminati philosophy of “do what thou wilt.” One of the leading proponents of the French Revolution was the Marquis de Lafayette, who brought Madame Francoise d’Arusmont (Fannie) Wright to the U.S. in the early 1800s. Here, she joined with Socialists Robert Dale Owen and Orestes Brownson secretly to take over America. According to Brownson, who later converted to Christianity, they wanted to establish a “national, rational, republican education, free for all at the expense of all, conducted under the guardianship of the State” with the purpose of separating children from what they considered the “negative influence” of parents. In terms of values instruction, they wanted to impart to the students values different from those of their parents, and this would come to be known as secular (not God-centered) humanistic education which emphasizes naturalistic evolution as well as moral relativism and situation ethics via values clarification techniques.

A few years after the plan of Owen, Wright and Brownson was begun, Karl Marx in 1844 authored ECONOMIC AND PHILOSOPHIC MANUSCRIPTS, which stated: “Communism begins from the outset with atheism. . . . Communism, as fully developed naturalism, equals humanism” (see Naturalism chart). The next decade, Auguste Comte in 1851 began to author a series of volumes on his SYSTEM OF POSITIVE POLITY, with a “positivist” philosophy in which man, not God, would decide for himself what’s right or wrong.

During the last half of the 19th century and into the 20th century, this philosophy became dominant among American intellectuals, including educators and jurists. As these individuals in the 20th century gained control of American higher education and the federal courts, the philosophy began to spread, even to public elementary and secondary schools.

In 1930, Charles Francis Potter authored HUMANISM, A NEW RELIGION, in which he boasted: "Education is thus a most powerful ally of humanism and every American public school is a school of humanism. What can the theistic Sunday schools meeting for an hour once a week and teaching only a fraction of the children, do to stem the tide of a five-day program of humanistic teaching?"
Three years later, Potter signed the first HUMANIST MANIFESTO (1933) as did John Dewey, the "Father of Progressive Education." The MANIFESTO's first affirmation stated: "Religious humanists regard the universe as self-existing and not created." Secondly, it affirmed that man is a product of naturalistic evolution. Humanist Sir Julian Huxley, UNESCO's first director-general, would later explain that humanism's "keynote, the central concept to which all its details are related, is evolution."

In 1954, former president of the American Humanist Association Lloyd Morain, and his wife Mary (a director of the International Humanist and Ethical Union, which has 4 million members), authored HUMANISM AS THE NEXT STEP, which declared that "Humanism is the most rapidly growing religious movement in America today." With all of these references to humanism as a "religion," it was no surprise when the U.S. Supreme Court in Torcaso v. Watkins (June 19, 1961) listed "secular humanism" as a non-theistic religion.
One would think that with the Supreme Court's "separation of church and state" rulings in the early 1960s banning school prayer and Bible reading, secular humanism would also be banned from public schools. This, though, was not the case. When a case eventually was brought before federal district Judge Brevard Hand, he sided with parents in their desire to ban this "religion" from public schools (see "Judge Bans Humanist Textbooks," THE WASHINGTON POST, March 5, 1987). However, his decision was reversed at the federal Appeals Court level, which was dominated by a Positivist philosophy. This was despite the fact that even liberal WASHINGTON POST columnist Colman McCarthy in "Textbook Case Look Again" (April 5, 1987) wrote of Judge Hand's decision about the school texts being challenged, saying "this highly relativistic and individualistic approach constitutes the promotion of a fundamental faith claim opposed to other religious faiths." So much for "government neutrality" !
As the decade of the 1960s closed, leading educator Ted Sizer wrote in FIVE LECTURES...ON MORAL EDUCATION (1970) that "Christian sermonizing denies individual autonomy....Moral autonomy...is the 'new morality' toward which we are to guide ourselves and other people....Clearly the strict adherence to a (moral) 'code' is out of date." Three years later (1973), HUMANIST MANIFESTO II was published and declared: "Ethics is autonomous and situational, needing no theological or ideological sanction." Dennis Laurence Cuddy: historian and political analyst