Why would anyone mind if you taught your kids that God comes first in our lives, then our love for and devotion to our family, and then allegiance to our country? It’s a question worth thinking about because there are some who don’t want your kids to learn to have those priorities. In the minds of those people and their organizations, your kids should bow down to the federal government. They are to depend on nothing but the government. And don’t mistake relying completely on the government is the same as loving your country.
You’ve heard the term “totalitarianism.” An online dictionary defines it as “a system of government that is centralized and dictatorial and requires complete subservience to the state.” Everything we see and experience regarding your children’s public school education points to efforts to strip their minds of God, Family, Country and focus their thoughts and belief systems on whatever the government puts in front of them.
Just as I started to write this post, I received an email link to a Scientific American article titled “Moral Injury Is an Invisible Epidemic That Affects Millions” by Elizabeth Svoboda. The subtitle read, “A specific kind of trauma results when a person’s core principles are violated during wartime or a pandemic.” My mind has a way of wandering down strange paths. As I read this article, I kept thinking about the possibility that our children may be suffering this trauma called “moral injury.” Keep in mind that the article itself focused on the moral injuries suffered because of war or during a pandemic. I’m taking it a step farther.
You teach your children God’s commandments, giving them a moral compass beyond what is natural to all humans, and they take those lessons and beliefs
with them to school. With their still-developing brains and emotions, how traumatic might it be for them to be taught immorality regarding sex outside of marriage, homosexuality, transgenderism, and so on in class? Teachers are to be respected, and children should be able to rely on what is taught. When the two do not align, does that moral compass start spinning?
The author says of adults, in the context of war and pandemic actions and emotions, “. . . given scant public awareness of moral injury: many people do not yet have the vocabulary to describe what is happening to them.” Children are even less capable to express their confusion. Svoboda says, “Moral injury is a specific trauma that arises when people face situations that deeply violate their conscience or threaten their core values.”
She continues: “In the 1980s University of Nebraska Medical Center philosopher Andrew Jameton observed that this kind of moral distress . . . often “arises when one knows the right thing to do, . . . but constraints make it nearly impossible to pursue the right course of action.”
Meanwhile moral injury research at Litz’s [Brett Litz of the Department of Veterans Affairs Boston Healthcare System] lab and elsewhere was starting to take flight. In 2013, along with his health care colleagues, Litz debuted and road tested what he called the Moral Injury Events Scale, a measure of exposure to events that can cause moral injury. The scale assessed things such as how much people felt they’d violated their morals, how much they felt others had betrayed important values and the level of distress they felt as a result.
The moral injury Dean [psychiatrist Wendy Dean, president and co-founder of the nonprofit Moral Injury of Healthcare in Carlisle, Pa.] sees in health care often doesn’t stem from one-time, cataclysmic events. Many providers are suffering what she calls “death by a thousand cuts”—the constant, stultifying knowledge that they have to give people subpar care or none at all. “They think they suck. They think they’re inadequate,” says trauma surgeon Gregory Peck of New Jersey’s Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School.
Effective moral injury counseling is “more about the processing,” Harwood-Gross says. “There has to be that movement: ‘How do I see it for what it is and, from there, develop something more meaningful?’ It’s a more spiritual approach.”
Moral injury therapies that bolster clients’ sense of purpose share a common goal with treatments developed by Austrian psychologist Viktor Frankl, who believed that a personal search for meaning could
fuel trauma recovery. To survive his imprisonment in the Auschwitz death camp, Frankl honed a pinpoint focus on what motivated him to go on—his boundless love for his wife, his commitment to rewrite a research manuscript the Nazis had destroyed. “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing,” Frankl wrote, “the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” After his liberation, Frankl created a treatment approach called logotherapy, which stressed that a clear sense of purpose could help people endure the gravest suffering. (Emphasis mine.)
But clergy often excel at connecting on a more informal, human level—an asset in dealing with morally injured people who have come to doubt their own humanity. “Chaplains don’t bill by the hour,” Brock says. “They spend the time they need to spend with people.” (These are selected quotes from the article. They are not sequential.)
Give some thought to whether totalitarianism and immorality taught in public schools are having a morally traumatic effect on your children. Talk it over with your pastor. Perhaps this can become a series of Sunday School lessons that teach how to be confident trusting in the Lord when all about you seems in opposition.
Let others know your opinions on this. Use the “Comments” and tell me if you think my conclusions are off-base.