Homeschool
News & Views
Issue 17
April 13, 2007
From Homeschool Helpers
In association with Pass It On
Ministries
Greetings. This is Dan White with Homeschool News & Views,
issue 17 for April 13, 2007.
The Christian family is under attack from three systems: the
education system, the media system, and the economic system.
The news this week is full of the story of a shock talk radio host
receiving great criticism because he insulted the Rutgers women’s
basketball team. The host made the rounds of media events,
apologizing profusely and maintaining that he was wrong to say what he
said and that he is not really a bad person. He was then fired by
CBS.
Of course, the reason he has a show is that a lot of people listen to
him, so he will probably reappear elsewhere, with his listeners
following him. His listeners for the most part will not be
offended at his insulting comments because that’s why they listen to
him. He is a shock jock, who makes his living being rude,
insulting and obnoxious. There are several others like him.
One of the satellite radio companies paid multiple millions to hire one
of these shock jocks for their service, even though the company has
never made a profit. Sure enough, when that shock jock went on
Sirius satellite radio, their subscription numbers went way up, as
listeners paid up to follow their shock jock, so they can listen to him
be rude, vulgar and obnoxious.
Christians get insulted in the media all the time, but somehow that’s
accepted and even commended.
Another area of the media that thrives on being rude and filthy is
hip-hop, which has developed from rap. I don’t think it’s
possible to get more filthy or insulting or violent than hip hop does,
yet it is a major part of the pop culture. This media form comes
from the corrupt, violent inner city life, but it is listened to widely
by suburban and rural young people. I saw a TV interview where a
pudgy, non-athletic small town white guy was sitting in a pickup truck
listening to hip hop. They asked him why he was listening to that
which was so far away from his culture. He answered that he
thought it was cool. I guess that maybe by listening to that cool
stuff, somehow that made him – the pudgy, non-athletic, small town guy
– cool, too.
The real problem, then, is not that a shock jock insulted a women’s
basketball team, but that a whole huge section of the media exists just
to be ugly. People listen to the stuff only because it is rude,
vulgar and violent. That’s a deep, deep problem. Firing the
one guy will not solve the problem.
In raising animals on a farm, you get certain signs of an animal’s
health. One of our farmer neighbors said that his father always
told him, “A hungry calf is a healthy calf.” So if you’re raising
calves and a calf is strongly hunching his mother or knocking the
bottle out of your hands, you have a good sign that the calf is
healthy. On the other hand, if you’re having to entice the calf
to nurse, it’s not just an appetite problem. Another small sign
of health is whether or not a calf has his ears up. If he feels
good, his ears will be up. If he feels bad, his ears will be
down. A parent can often tell whether or not his child is sick
just by looking at his eyes. At first the child may deny it and
protest that he is feeling fine, but many times my kids’ eyes have told
me of an oncoming illness before the child ever admitted it to
himself.
We have a society that has a great demand for shock radio and for
obscene hip hop. That’s a sick calf. When people want to
eat garbage, it’s not a healthy sign for the nation.
Research has shown that 62% of America’s students watch an average of
three hours of TV per day. What are they getting in that?
TV and movies are almost wholly filthy from a Christian viewpoint,
being filled with a constant barrage of sex, violence and
profanities. Now the sex is being changed from fornication and
adultery between men and women to homosexual sex. Homosexuality
is constantly being pushed in the video media as being normal. It
is not yet normal in the country, but with enough media push, it will
be.
So most of America’s young people spend most of their free time
watching hours of this garbage every day. The rest of the time
their ears are filled with filthy hip hop.
Funny how times have changed. When I was a teen, back in the
60’s, I don’t think I could have even found the stuff that is all
around us today. Living out in the country in West Virginia, I
only heard of one place which sold girlie magazines. It was a small
store named Chiselers, he was desperate to sell anything he could, and
he didn’t stay in business long. I am sure there were
places in the nation to get X rated material, but I never heard of any
around us. Today the X rated stuff is on the TV every night and
in the kids’ ears every day.
It used to be that if you wanted real evil, you had to work hard to get
it. Now you have to work hard just to avoid it.
It is no surprise, then, that by the time students get out of public
high school, most of them have defiled themselves sexually.
That’s what they learn from the media.
Sometimes parents, in their efforts to avoid making a stand, will brush
all this filth off by saying kids will be kids. They will say
that back in the 20’s kids were doing the Charleston, which was looked
down on; and in the 50’s they started doing rock and roll, which was
disapproved; and that the same thing is happening today. But
there is no way that Elvis singing Bee Bop A Lula is the same as
rap. We have gone from sock hops to hip hop. Public school
dancing today is just simulated sex. They don’t even try to hide
that, anymore.
What should a Christian parent do about all this filthy media?
Obviously you have to make a stand. You have to get deeply
involved, have some discussions and draw some lines. A Christian
is told to “let this mind be in you which was in Christ Jesus,” or the
Messiah Y’shua. This mind does not consume the garbage of today’s
media, just because most everybody else does.
Again -- It used to be that if you wanted real evil, you had to work
hard to get it. Now you have to work hard just to avoid it.
To do nothing is to support the evil. A Christian parent must
control the media that go into his children’s minds.
In music, I have totally given up on all music being produced today,
except for Christian music. There is a huge quantity of Christian
music being put out, with a great variety of styles and talents.
Some of it is very good, musically and spiritually. Some of it is
really repulsive and worldly, with a Christian title. A few songs
come out of the country or pop fields which are pretty and not filthy,
but it is not worth wading through the muck to get to them.
There is very little on television that is uplifting. We do not
subscribe to cable or satellite service because it’s not worth it to
us. We don’t have that much time to spend on TV, bad or
good. We get all the major networks, but there is almost nothing
on any of them that we will watch. We enjoy watching funniest
home videos and sometimes a ball game, and sometimes a travel program
on PBS, but that’s it. Even watching a ball game becomes
questionable, because of the commercials which run for the normal
sleazy programs.
Most movies are purposely filled with Hollywood’s preaching of sex,
violence and liberalism. Even movies which seem innocuous, such
as the cartoon Happy Feet, are filled with liberal humanist
preaching.
Christian movies are just now really beginning to become
available. Some folks in a Baptist church in Georgia got the urge
to produce a good Christian movie. They collected $10,000 and
made the movie Flywheel. Of course, $10,000 is next to nothing in
making a movie, barely enough to buy the popcorn, but they did
it. After showing in one theater locally with high interest, the
movie was picked up by the movie rental companies Blockbuster and
Netflix. So Flywheel flew. Based on that success, the same
folks got $100,000 together for their next movie, Facing the
Giants. Sony Pictures picked it up and distributed it in 400
theaters. It has grossed millions of dollars. Facing the
Giants has been a giant success.
These movies are strongly Christian, not subtle at all. They are
funny and interesting. Local church people are the actors, and
they are very likable. The most impressive thing about this is
that a few people decided to make a stand and do something, and they
did it. Because they broke new ground and plowed that field, many
others will now be trying to follow their furrow. All of this is
getting the Christian movie sector going, to follow the explosive
Christian music sector.
These people saw there was almost nothing out there for Christians to
watch and enjoy, so they went to work. A Christian parent has to
work, too, to carefully watch what goes into his child’s mind. We
just finished the feast of Passover and Unleavened Bread. Every
year the lesson of that feast is that we put out the leaven, the bad,
and we take in the unleavened bread, the good Messiah. In the
same way a Christian family constantly has to put out the leaven of the
world and take in the mind of Christ, that which is pure and
uplifting.
One of the great problems of the public schools is that the kids’
attitudes and consequently their lives are shaped by the popular
media. Most of the moral damage that is done by the public
schools is not caused by what the teachers say, but by the schools’
inability to control the moral direction of the schools. The
latest garbage from the media becomes the culture of the schools.
Even those kids who don’t absorb the filthy media at home become
surrounded by it at the schools. Urban hip hop fills all the
rural public schools in America. That means the culture of those
schools is full of sex, obscenities, violence and rebellion. Many
public school parents think that public schools as a whole are bad, but
that their school is the one good school. Your school is just as
good as the latest filth that the left wing media puts out. Your
school is full of it. That is the dominant culture there.
And now that media is pushing homosexuality as the cool culture.
Although 62% of students spend three hours a day watching television,
only 6% of home school students do that. Christian homeschool
families withdraw from the media culture when they withdraw from the
public schools, and at home they avoid letting that filth into the
minds of their children. This makes a huge difference in the
minds of these young people.
A Christian ministry was having seminars for young people from
Christian families. One of these was being taught by a Christian
homeschool graduate. He was asked to give a seminar about how
oral sex is commandment breaking, because that is the latest trend in
the public schools. The young man and the other homeschool youth
involved in the seminars were aghast at the subject and declined to
participate. Although this is the latest rage in the public
schools, it is not at all a part of the Christian homeschool culture,
and is too filthy to be considered. The ministry went ahead with
someone else doing that seminar, feeling they needed to discuss the
subject because it had become part of the public school culture.
A Christian family must withdraw from the filthy media. But it
does little good to not allow filthy media into the family home and
then send the children out into that media culture in the public
schools. Christian homeschooling is the effort by families to
draw closer to God in all ways.
This is Dan White with Homeschool Helpers. God bless the
Christian homeschoolers.