Winning America’s Heart Back

How often have you looked at someone who passionately disagrees with everything you stand for and thought, “just look at the facts!  You can’t argue with facts, if these people would just look at the truth they would have to change their minds!”?  I’m discovering that with some people, no matter how often the facts are crammed down their throats, their beliefs will not change.

This summer a little book by C.S. Lewis caught my attention.  In The Abolition of Man: How Education Develops Man’s Sense of Morality, Lewis taps into how the educational establishment controls the way people believe.  His analysis surprised me, but the more I thought about it, the more it appeared to be true.  The secret to educators’ success in controlling the culture is not their appeal to intelligence or rationality, but their appeal to emotions.  To put it memorably, brainwashing has more to do with the heart than the mind.

In the beginning of the lecture, Lewis explains how writers of a particular grammar book effectively master the thought processes of a student.  By teaching them that particular sentimental descriptions are “bad grammar,” they are not actually teaching them English, but rather teaching them how they should or shouldn’t feel about what is being described.

“I must, for the moment, content myself with pointing out that it is a philosophical and not a literary position.  In filling their book with it they have been unjust to the parent or headmaster who buys it and who has got the work of amateur philosophers where he expected the work of professional grammarians.  A man would be annoyed if his son returned from the dentist with his teeth untouched and his head crammed with the dentist’s obiter dicta on bimetallism or the Baconian theory.” (1)

Suggesting that someone could alter another’s worldview through little descriptions sounds extreme at first, but upon further examination it is conceivable.  The Obama administration has decided to refer to terrorist attacks as “man-caused disasters” (2).  But a man-caused disaster could be many things!  If such a description takes root (which I doubt it will), imagine how it would affect future generations’ understanding of this historical era.  Instead of thinking of the United States and other countries as having been under assault by radical, deliberate perpetrators, they would envision the attacks as little more than spilled milk.  Similarly, the way schools define homosexuality, murder, the Bible, abortion, fornication, and government mold the students’ sentiments regarding those issues.

“The belief that we can invent  ‘ideologies’ at pleasure, and the consequent treatment of mankind as mere…specimens, preparations, begins to affect our very language. Once we killed bad men: now we liquidate unsocial elements.”

Let us examine why molding sentiments is so successful to permanently imprinting minds.  Apparently, it is easy to change your mind about something you are not emotionally attached to.  If I misread something in a college text book and then find out later what it really says, I’m not going to be terribly disappointed or doubtful when proven wrong, because I’m just glad to know what it truly says (especially so that I don’t mess up on an exam).  But once views have become emotionalized – ground into the very sentiments of a person’s being – it is extremely difficult to convince them otherwise no matter how much evidence is put forward, because they have been trained to react in a certain way to that issue.

For instance, when I was a young child, I was obsessed with reputation to the extreme.  I was afraid that everything my siblings and I did was under meticulous public scrutiny because we were Christian and homeschooled. Nobody actually told me to be that concerned, but I was. I also added on to the categories of embarrassment and avoided such actions like the plague.  Smacking while eating was already unappetizing to me, but as soon as I was aware that it might also be particularly impolite, I burned a negative, evil image of it into my heart.  I trained myself to speak against it every time I saw it happen.  Soon I did the same with crooked chairs, improperly held pencils and utensils, and the like.  My siblings recall me shouting “Repent!” when I caught them doing some of these things.  Why did I have such a harsh reaction to annoyance?  Because I had convinced myself that it was not a mere annoyance, but an illogical sin, and thus justified my disgust with something that was not worth focusing on.  To make matters worse, I had so conditioned myself to feel that way that it never occurred to me that I was acting on emotions.  I thought I was being rational and that my siblings were too emotional to handle my superb arguments against dinnertable idiosyncrasies.

The emotions can control a great deal of what you see.  That is why the haunting of bad memories and nightmares is so difficult to end.  When you come to your senses, you know that it is all in the past or all just a dream.  The rational side of your brain knows the truth, but your impressionable fleshly emotions are convincing you otherwise.

“The Chest – Magnanimity – Sentiment – these are the indispensable liaison officers between cerebral man and visceral man.  It may even be said that it is by this element that man is man: for by his intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetite he is mere animal.”

There are at least 10 different words in the Bible for what we translate as “heart.”  The most common, lêb in Hebrew and kardia in Greek, both combine the definitions of “intellect,” “will,” “midst,” “middle,” “center,” “understanding,” and “feeling.”  The basic differences and relationships between emotion and sentiment are the following:

Emotion = strong agitation of feeling; even physiological reaction may accompany; fleshly response.

Sentiment = Manifestation of more tender, refined feelings and emotions; mental feeling; attitude toward an issue; bridge between mind and emotion; spirit and flesh.

Most likely every political and philosophical ideology under the sun is actually expressed in the folly of childhood before it reaches academia.  Educators and others of influence have the same silly misgivings about their quirks that I had about mine.  Lewis calls them “Innovators” and “Conditioners.”  The great irony of Innovators is that they claim they are debunking old sentiments and substituting them with advanced reason.  In reality, they are 1.) removing sentiment and forcing people to function off of raw fleshly instinct and 2.) in fact replacing the gap with an innovated sentiment that has no reason behind it.

The liberal feminist argument for female combat is an example of this.  Feminists believed that women not being allowed in military combat was an archaic sentiment of simpletons that had no logical backing.  First they argued that it was perfectly rational for women to be soldiers equal to men.  President Carter was convinced and let them have their way.  Then the reality set in – women have physical limitations and can’t reach the performance level of men in combat.  Rather than see this as a contradiction of their earlier argument, the feminists insisted that the fitness standards be lowered for female soldiers.  But soldiers should be soldiers; fighting machines that are uniform in fitness.  To have such differing standards in the military is completely irrational and troublesome.  Thus, the feminists did not tear out sentiments and replace them with reason.  They tore out sentiments based on reason and replaced them with sentiments based on needless feelings of inferiority and insult.

“Their scepticism about values is on the surface: it is for use on other people’s values: about the values current in their own set they are not nearly sceptical enough.  And this phenomenon is very usual.  A great many of those who ‘debunk’ traditional or (as they would say) ‘sentimental’ values have in the background values of their own which they believe to be immune from the debunking process.  They claim to be cutting away the parasitic growth of emotion, religious sanction, and inherited taboos, in order that ‘real’ or ‘basic’ values may emerge.”

By altering the sentiments that a child holds towards an issue, you can affect their ultimate worldview of it and how they act upon it.  A young man in Sparta may have looked at the art of war as the utmost form of courage, nobility and defending what is valuable because his father and culture imparted such feelings to him.  But such sentiments are not likely to be felt amongst young men who are immersed in the sentiments of greasy-haired protesters chanting “Make Love, Not War.”  Oh, they will act upon that sentiment, to be sure.  But don’t expect any nobility to come about because of it.

“In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function.  We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise.  We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.  We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”

THE HEART OF AMERICA

I study at a State university, but my history textbooks are surprisingly objective.  In fact, they are not afraid to credit the American Revolution in part to the Great Awakening:

“This unprecedented evangelical outpouring altered the course of American history… It is no exaggeration to claim that [this] populist movement took place in mid-eighteenth-century America, and the new, highly personal appeal to a ‘new birth’ in Christ caused men and women of all backgrounds to rethink basic assumptions about church and state, institutions and society.” (3)

The Great Awakening (which began in the 1730s but really fired up in the 1750s and onward) brought about a reformation of thought within the Church.  Jonathan Edwards challenged congregations to consider where they were spiritually and turn their hearts toward Jesus Christ to Whom they were accountable.  Barriers between denominations were broken and stuffy authorities ignored as itinerant preachers such as George Whitefield stirred the hearts of Americans across the colonies.  Historians find it mysterious that no single denomination or area brought about the movement.  It was not some religious organization.  It sprung up unplanned and uncontrolled across the nation – a work of the Holy Spirit, no doubt.  This was well accepted by most Americans who were longing for a sense of purpose, both individual and national, that seemed long gone with the Winthrop days (yes, believe it or not, they had already felt disillusionment since then!).  Samuel Adams hoped that America would become a “Christian Sparta,” ruled by vigilant citizens who guarded against corruption, degeneracy and luxury.

The  founders were immersed in the reformation sentiments of the Great Awakening.  A counter-culture change had to take place to win the hearts of the people into unity and understanding in order for the country to take on a quest for liberty.  Like all nations, America’s heart has been won and lost in unpredictable ways.  One of many illustrations is that of the fight for the Pure Food and Drug Law of 1906.  Chief Chemist Harvey Wiley had logical scientific evidence that the practices of the food and drug industries were unhealthy and needed to be reformed.  But it was Upton Sinclair’s dramatic account of filthiness in the meat packing industry in his novel The Jungle that shocked the citizens and politicians into action over it.  Thus, not only were their minds convinced; their sentiments were convicted.

The Presidential Election of 2008 was not an overnight fluke.  It was the result of years upon years of innovating, training and conditioning Americans to sentimentalize a certain way about their nation, the government, morality and liberalism (the resulting product is vividly retold by Rebecca Hagelin here).  I wonder if the injury to American sentiments is like the injury of an arrow -  which must come out the way it came in; painfully shoved all the way through.

Winning America’s heart back must be done,  but how are we to go about it?  We must somehow tap into not only the minds, but the hearts of the American people.  We must not only present information to the minds of citizens; we must strongly dominate fields that touch the people’s sentiments – art, music, movies and literature – to win America’s heart back.  Perhaps the eyes of the people must be cleansed with tears so they can see again; perhaps they must laugh uncontrollably to set their hearts back into rhythm; perhaps they need to be incited with righteous anger at the exposure of injustice.  We need to be willing to listen to the strategy God has laid out for us and not be carried away with our own excitement.  The Great Awakening was not some compromise with the world that commercially attracted followers.  It was a fierce, non-compromising, outspoken and beautiful movement that drew hearts to the LORD in a powerful way.

Jesus could have presented impeccably logical, lengthy and intellectual arguments to win the minds of the people.  But He most always chose to reveal things to them through parables; He touched their sentiments even as He blew their minds away.  So did the prophet Nathan when convicting King David about his sin (2 Samuel 12).  David was moved to write in a memorable Psalm,

“Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me.”

- Psalm 51:10

Create in America a clean heart, O God!

I cannot close this article without including C.S. Lewis’s prophetic tribute to those faithful to resist the flow:

“Hitherto the plans of educationalists have achieved very little of what they attempted and indeed, when we read them…we may well thank the beneficent obstinacy of real mothers, real nurses, and (above all) real children for preserving the human race in such sanity as it still possesses.  But the man-moulders of the new age will be armed with the powers of an omnicompetent state and an irresistible scientific technique: we shall get at last a race of posterity in what shape they please.”

Those of us from the homeschool movement are particularly indebted to the sacrifice of our parents to preserve godly sentiments for us.  Let us see to it that they have not worked in vain!

WORKS CITED

(1) Lewis, C.S.  The Abolition of Man.  New York: Macmillan, 1947.

(2) “Obama’s newspeak”  Lynn Vincent.  WorldMagBlog.  March 26, 2009.  http://online.worldmag.com/2009/03/26/obamas-newspeak/

(3) Divine, Robert A., et al. America Past and Present Volume I: To 1877, pg. 110. 8th ed.
New York: Pearson, 2007.

Written by Amanda Read. For more articles by Amanda, check out her site: AmandaRead.com