The Sphere/Mountain of Education
(an extract from 40 Days Prayer and Fasting for 7 Mountains or Spheres of Influence by Lilian Schmid, available on Amazon and Kindle)
Heaven is My throne,
And earth is My footstool.
What house will you build for Me? says the Lord,
Or what is the place of My rest?
(Acts 7:49 NKJV)
Throughout history, both the state and the church have claimed responsibility for the role of educating children. Yet the primary responsibility of educating children is a task God has given to parents. Parents have direct authority over their children. Parents are commanded to teach their children the ways of the Lord.
These commandments that I give you today
are to be on your hearts.
Impress them on your children.
Talk about them when you sit at home and
when you walk along the road,
when you lie down and
when you get up.
(Deuteronomy 6:6-7 NIV)
While schools have responsibility of teaching the academic curriculum, the church on the other hand has a role to equip and aid parents (and school staff) to carry out fully their responsibility for the spiritual education of the future generation.
Over the past 150 years, the majority of Western countries have become dominated by monopolistic and compulsory state school systems, often taking over or being given church-established school systems (e.g. the Anglican local schools in Australia), and then progressively removing or excluding Christian principles as part of the ‘separation of Church and State’, to now ‘demonising’ the Christian foundation of their school system as being ‘unfair’ and introducing liberalistic mythology as a new layer of ‘ethics’ on top of purely academic teaching.
Twenty-first century people are members of a global community, connected to the whole world by ties of culture, economics and politics, enhanced communication and travel. This shared environment enables young people to be part of a global education and participate in influencing a better future for the world. In principle, it also emphasises the unity and interdependence of human society, develops a sense of self and appreciation of cultural diversity, affirms social justice and human rights, and builds peace and actions for a sustainable future in different times and places.
Yet at the same time we see lots of challenges around the world, but if we pray into these issues asking God to give us wisdom, provision, blessings, knowledge, assurance, affirmation, connection; we can make a difference to change the culture of countries who are suffering because of war, poverty and natural disasters which prevent the people from having good education.
The Use of the Muses
© By Hector J. Ramírez Martínez
Gender ideology, critical race theory, feminism, queer theory, trans-genderism, trans-species, post-humanism, trans-humanism, animalism, abortion rights, euthanasia, singularity, racism, sex trafficking, political despotism, harvesting of human organs, pedophilia, globalism, the normalization of drug addiction, global warming, Satanism, homo dues ─the belief that with the help of science and technology humans can become gods. This assortment of ideologies, movements, tendencies, inclinations, deviations, and fascinations ─even government policies advocated by Western democracies in the 21st century─ are either reluctantly tolerated, have been accepted as a standard, or are in the process of being normalized by such respected institutions as governments, political parties, supranational organizations, universities, the media, and so on. This state of affairs is the most apparent evidence of Western culture’s final collapse of values, morality, truth, and reason itself.
Indeed, whether we like it or not, whether most people know it or not, the truth is that the West finds itself living under a new postmodern, post-Christian paradigm. Developed during the 20th century, it has finally been established as the novel frame of mind in every aspect and area of society in the 21st. We live in a time of crisis, confusion, moral degradation, culture wars, and social confrontation. Claus Schwab, founder and president of the World Economic Forum, defined our present situation as a “poly-crisis” at the annual meeting in Davos in January 2023. This collapse is due to the many new ideologies that developed from the 18th century onwards and were slowly but firmly established, finally replacing the once-Christian paradigm in Western culture.
In this entire transformation process, art has played a crucial role, largely due to the intricate relationship between art, life, culture, and society. The creative imagination plays a significant role in shaping how people perceive the world. With its enchantment and fascination, art certainly helps shape culture and society. That is one of the reasons why artists, free thinkers, and people concerned with the present cultural developments in the West cannot conform or overlook the actual situation. Apathy and indifference from people who are well aware of this situation or accepting, as artists, the role of generators and producers of works of evasion and escapism amid this devastation, as some have already done, would be a wholly inappropriate and, I dare say, even immoral thing to do.
The arts have always played a crucial role in every society and must be considered in the context of what has happened to the Western paradigm in the 21st century. However, to gain some perspective on this issue, we must identify what has disrupted how the arts are viewed today. We must consider that living in a soulless, consumerist, materialist, and alienated society has contributed to reframing our thinking and eroding our culture’s most solid foundations, including the domain of art. Indeed, even the delicate Muses have been used as tools for propaganda, entertainment, monetary gain, and indoctrination, something that has little to do with their very nature.
Empires, governments, politicians, corporations, and advertisers have done this at specific times throughout history. But, the most reprehensible misuse of the arts is probably related to political and ideological propaganda. In the modern era, with the help of newly developed technologies, its most ferocious application was found in extreme communist and fascist States. Communists in the Soviet Union and China used it overtly and implacably against a population they wished to mold and control, and the Nazis followed the communist example only in a more brutal way.
However, possibly the most damaging use of the arts and the mass media ─apart from the role they have played in advertising for leisure and consumer goods─ as tools of political indoctrination and propaganda in the West was by the sophisticated and highly educated, political ideologues of the Frankfurt School, otherwise known as Institute for Social Research, whose subtly crafted and frankly malevolent ‘crusade’ sought no less than the subtle colonization of the Western mind. This is what German Playwright Bertold Brecht, one of the advocates of the Frankfurt School, wrote: “Art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it.” Thus, starting in the 1930s and ’40s, members of the Frankfurt School were very influential in helping shape society. However, their influence was widely ignored and unacknowledged by those who ought to have known better and done the job of exposing it. This covert demolition plan was adopted and used by newer postmodern ideologues, and an unprecedented cultural devastation was finally completed amid the unsuspecting capitalist and post-Christian West by the end of the 20th century.
The creative imagination and the arts have been highly instrumental in creating today’s climate of disruption and confusion in the West, making them subservient to ideological causes. This impetus probably started with the avant-garde artistic movements at the end of the 19th century in their aggressive pursuit of novel self-expression, ideological militancy, and political activism, doing away with the classical ideals of beauty, truth, and goodness.
To explore the realm of the arts and consider the nature of the creative gift, it is vital that we examine the movement mentioned above. It will help us clarify and understand some of the developments in modern art over the last hundred years. The word avant-garde is a word that comes from the military and originally meant the “advance guard” of an army or other significant military force in the field. It is a squad at the forefront, which opens the way for the army coming behind. And this is precisely the attitude of the artistic movements at the beginning of the 20th century. Picasso, the Spanish artist, is one of the first and best to represent this attitude. In 1906, he painted Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, one of the most famous paintings of the 20th century.
In his beginnings, Picasso had a very classical approach to painting, as he learned from the great Renaissance masters. Still, in this specific work, he had three objectives: do away with bourgeois artistic taste, see the artist´s approach to their work from a different angle, and liquidate creative rules and codes. The painting represents a brothel, and the prostitutes are depicted utterly unsuspectedly for the sensibility and standards of the day. There is no perspective, vanishing point, or proportion on the anatomy of the human body, and no natural representation, but there is complete decomposition of the subject matter. The new and revolutionary cubist movement was born, and with it, a new approach to viewing and representing reality.
Similarly, Oscar Wilde, who had died just six years before Picasso´s painting was executed, said in The Picture of Dorian Gray: “No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style… The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.” And in the Decay of Lying: “The proper aim of art is to lie – or tell of beautiful, untrue things.” In André Breton´s words in his Second Manifesto of Surrealism: “Everything remains to be done, every means must be worth trying, to lay waste to the ideas of family, country, religion.”
Virginia Woolf, in her essay entitled Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown, published in 1924, mentioned what she considered the fact that “In or about December 1910, human character changed.” The reason for this enigmatic remark was that she was referring to the first Post-Impressionist exhibition at the Grafton Gallery in London, which had taken place in November 1910, where artists such as Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Picasso displayed their works. She was not talking about a change of personality per se but about a way of perceiving personality and the new sensibility of modern artists. Some critics suggested that since the exhibition’s inauguration took place on November 5th, those painters were up to something roughly analogous to what Guy Fawkes had planned for the Houses of Parliament, a widespread plot to destroy the whole fabric of European art. The Exhibition was widely denounced as being pornographic, degenerate, and evil. In this context, Woolf´s words may not sound too exaggerated.
Though there were some exceptions, for most advocates of the avant-garde ─who had adopted some of the new political ideologies developed during the 19th Century, like nationalism, communism, socialism, or fascism─ pursuing beauty ceased to be a longing for the sublime and transcendent, as it had been in most cases throughout history; it became a mere whim, a fetish for the unconventional, the eccentric, and the revolutionary. Ugliness began to be contemplated only in its crude reality. Posters and canvases depicted political ideologies; theatre and comedy promoted moral degradation; and although movements like the Symbolists, the Surrealists, and others were interested in the supernatural, many artists gravitated towards esoterism and occultism. Finally, by the middle of the 20th century, this movement evolved into deconstruction theory, and decadence became the prevalent trend in most Western art. Painting, music, poetry, sculpture, literature, and even architecture became tools to express unconventional, subversive and disturbing subjects, plots, and themes.
Nineteenth-century playwright Edward Bulwer-Lytton wrote, “Beneath the rule of men entirely great/The pen is mightier than the sword.” Percy Bysshe Shelley, in his Defense of Poetry (1821) was in no doubt that “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Writer and theologian Francis Schaeffer was convinced that the ideas worked out by philosophers in the ivory towers were picked up and brought home to the masses by artists. History itself bears witness that when utilitarian minds discover the potential of art, they waste no time reducing them to mere tools for propaganda, political exploitation, moral degradation, and entertainment.
Entertainment is the second aspect worth considering since it relates to the transmutation and misuse of the arts for mere evasion and escapism. Undoubtedly, one of art’s applications is to provide amusement and recreation. However, that is not its sole function nor the most important one, though it has become increasingly prevalent. Actually, Western culture has been defined as “the culture of entertainment” by writers like Mario Vargas Llosa (Nobel Prize laureate.)
Through social media and TV, life itself has become a reality show, and in the same way that people consume food, clothes, cars, and gadgets, they consume culture, education, and art. Indeed, in a world where iPhones, tablets, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and many other social media platforms and devices have become so popular, games, entertainment, and information are continuously accessible and available at everyone’s fingertips, to the point that a heavy-duty multitasking behavior has been encouraged, and many times demanded by electronic signals or ring tones installed in all those sources of trivial, and many times, unsolicited information. This new lifestyle has significantly contributed to the erosion of conceptual, critical, and creative thinking in many minds. This fact has rendered our society incapable of sound intellectual judgment, uninterested in factual knowledge, and zombified, leaving it incompetent in processing the critical issues of our time.
Philosopher and historian Johan Huizinga, speaking in the 1930s and 40s at a time when many of these technological gadgets had not yet been developed, saw the whole situation coming and described it in his book In the Shadow of Tomorrow. This is what he says: “… Plato once called men the playthings of the gods. Today, one might say that man everywhere uses the world as his plaything… The confusion of play and seriousness… is undoubtedly one of the most important aspects of the malady of our time.” These words, written at the beginning of the 20th century, can more aptly describe the situation of our sophisticated, technologically advanced 21st-century society, where games, amusements, and pastimes are readily available at work, school, home, and leisure, in an infinite variety of forms. Dare we say that modern man has been infantilized?
An unexamined life deprived of meaning and significance is more prone to turn itself into a show, spectacle, and play. People in the 21st century have become homo Ludens, the playing man, the showman, and the “adman” with the help of the arts and the mass media. Indeed, modern humans can only find their value and meaning in what they do, experience, wear, or the social group to which they belong. However, the classical approach to art was always docere delectando – to teach by entertaining. Plato, Aristotle, Horace, Vitruvius, and Western Christian tradition emphasized art’s didactic qualities as having a high moral purpose, a civilizing function, and a unique ability to elevate the human spirit. Entertainment may be one of the roles of art, but it has a more profound and valuable quality and function.
As we have seen, empires, politicians, and tyrants have always been astute in using the arts as entertainment to keep the population insensitive to the real issues of life and society. Bread and circuses was the common slogan used by Roman Emperors to keep the populace happy and submissive. But that is not art´s noblest nature.
What is art´s loftiest nature, then? This question may be better addressed by considering what a biblical worldview of the arts could be. In this regard, we can first say that the arts are a powerful, God-given means of helping humanity grow in spiritual sensitivity, emotional well-being, intellectual clarity, and making life more bearable and enjoyable. However, from a biblical perspective, the arts also have a profound impact on human affairs, captivating the heart with the sublime and, through subtle, delicate glimpses, awakening the soul to an awareness of the transcendent.
Dostoevsky wrote: “Art is as much a need for humanity as eating and drinking. The need for beauty and for creations that embody it is inseparable from humanity, and without it, man perhaps might not want to live on earth. Man thirsts for beauty finds and accepts beauty without any conditions but just as it is, simply because it is beauty; and he bows down before it with reverence without asking what use it is and what one can buy with it”.
From my own personal experience, the more I grow in my relationship with God, the understanding of the nature of the creative gift, and the knowledge of history, the more I am stunned and amazed by the wonder of God’s creation, the ubiquitous presence of beauty everywhere in the universe, the need and urge for aesthetic experience and expression in every human heart, and the power of the creative imagination. It is as if God’s unconditional love towards humanity cannot be avoided, wherever one moves, looks, and works, with a clear mind and an open heart.
Consequently, though the arts have been used as tools for indoctrination and propaganda, as well as for entertainment and for promoting moral degradation at certain times in history, the creative imagination, at its very best, plays a vital role in the life of society, the church at large and the individual made in God’s image. There is an undeniable connection between aesthetic sensibility, moral imagination, culture, society, and human life, as well as artistic expression. From a Christian perspective, the arts indeed entertain, but they also educate, nourish the human spirit, address life’s relevant issues, enrich the world, and bring about cultural and social transformation. In short, artistic imagination cannot be neglected or overlooked without damaging culture, society, and human life.
Let us pray that as Christians, we will help our society see the great potential of the arts, and that our artistic work will reflect our Creator´s imagination, greatness, power, and love for the world He has made.
Pray for Cleansing of the Sphere of Education
(adapted from 40 Days Prayer and Fasting for 7 Mountains or Spheres of Influence by Lilian Schmid)
Children and young people across the world are being taught liberal or fascist or extreme ideologies, atheistic teachings, and pagan and postmodern principles in most schools, colleges, and universities.
For your nation, pray against:
- The persistent and insidious attack on religious freedom.
- Suppression of balanced teaching on moral issues.
- Suppression of established fact for unproven ideologies.
- Anti-church and anti-Christ attitudes in the Education system.
Pray also against the infiltration of gender bias and/or gender confusion into your Education systems. Pray for exposure of the true agendas of those seeking to pollute the God given roles of ‘man’ and ‘woman’, ‘mother’ and ‘father’, ‘boy’ and ‘girl’.
Jesus said, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.” (Matthew 19:14 NIV)