Playboy’s reputation for providing intellectually engaging reading material doesn’t rank all that high in the list of influential mainstream media outlets. So it’s easy to not take any activism from the morally questionable publication all that seriously.
In early May, however, the publication touted an anti-homeschooling article from Christopher Stroop, a freelance writer who has contributed articles to Playboy and Salon.
Stroop seized on recent gun violence in the United States to fire a broadside at white evangelical Americans. In doing so he conflated Christian homeschoolers with domestic terrorism, accusing them of white supremacy, racism and radicalization.
Stroop, a self-proclaimed ex-evangelical, who is also a pro-LGBT anti-Christian schools activist, went on to disparage Christian homeschoolers, by appealing to researchers from the “survivors community”, who until recently, made up the now defunct internet group, Homeschoolers Anonymous; a group who describes themselves as “homeschool apostates” and/or ‘refugees’.
Quoting fellow ex-evangelical, Kathryn Brightbill from Coalition for Responsible Homeschooling, Stroop claimed that proof of this radicalization was found in a ‘pattern of violent crimes’ which can (apparently) be connected to Christian homeschoolers, in particular, an obscure movement within the Orthodox Presbyterian Church called ‘Christian Reconstructionism’, which (allegedly) promotes a ‘right-wing version of Calvinist theology – “teaching that God’s plan for society is to implement Old Testament political law, including the stoning parts”.’
Without substantiating his claim with sources, or solid evidence, and leaning solely on unnamed “researchers” from within his own movement, Stroop rattled on, asserting that the so-called “pattern of violence”:
Raised the question about how homeschooling and white evangelical subculture may be contributing factors in the radicalization of young people.
While loosely citing events in Austin and Tennessee, his primary evidence was the recent synagogue shooting in Los Angeles, where teen, John T. Earnest (who was homeschooled for a time), killed one person and injured two others.
Though Stroop’s conclusion notes that Earnest was “radicalized” via the internet, what Stroop fails to mention is that Earnest’s manifesto clearly indicated that homeschooling had nothing to do with his radicalization and act of domestic terrorism.
According to 10 News San Diego, “[Earnest] added that he wasn’t taught this ideology [anti-Semitism] from his family; stating that he “had to learn [from 8chan] what [my parents] should have taught me from the beginning.”
Despite the fact that Stroop acknowledges Earnest was only partly homeschooled, and that the internet was the primary motivator in the synagogue attack. He insists that Earnest is a valid example of this “pattern of violence from Christian homeschoolers” and their radicalization of the young.
Stroop cites, Ryan Stollar, one of the founders of Homeschoolers Anonymous, who accuses Christian homeschoolers of covering up abuse, and of using a “persecution complex” to avoid “honest examination”.
Stroop, Stollar and Brightbill argue that this is reason enough to justify government intervention because the “lack of government oversight creates a legal cover for abusive parents to indoctrinate and warp their children.”
This isn’t far removed from the now debunked theory of the Australian Greens Party, who demanded and chaired a political enquiry because of their firm belief that homeschooling equated to child abuse.
As with the Greens, nothing Stroop tries to provide by way of evidence substantiates his extreme accusations.
Dishonest reasoning isn’t the only problem with his article. As with a lot of fringe arguments against Homeschooling within America, his polemic fails to distinguish between education and parenting, Church and home education. In addition, there is no mention of institutional schooling and the potential role it may play in decisions of all domestic terrorists.
Stroop conflates Christian homeschoolers with the domestic terrorist and blames them for his ideological radicalization. This recklessness and his deliberate use of loaded terms, turns Christian homeschoolers into a straw man, invoking images of Islamist terror camps, and children in jackboots wearing suicide belts, marching with AK-47’s, chanting “death to Israel”.
Stroop’s loose examples and bias reach their zenith when in quoting Brightball, he accuses popular homeschool curriculum, Abeka of “explicit and implicitly white supremacist messaging.” Abeka’s crime? Their World history Curriculum is deemed to be “too white & too Christian.” It’s a typical move against anyone not willing to line up and fall into absolute alignment with Leftism.
In his rejection of American evangelicalism, Stroop fires a reckless broadside at Christian homeschooling, tarring and feathering every evangelical Christian, every Calvinist, moderate or five-point believer, and the majority of Christian homeschoolers with the label white supremacist.
Though Stroop’s Playboy piece claims to provide proof of a pattern of violence which shows that Christian homeschoolers are producing domestic terrorists, all we end up finding is Stroop and his fellow “ex-evangelicals”, grinding an axe in order to further their own toxic form of victimhood and the Leftist socio-political cult that sees an easy profit in any form of anti-Christian rhetoric.
It would be naïve to dismiss the testimony of those who genuinely see themselves as victims of abuse. It would also be naïve to buy into the narrative Stroop has tried to construct by exploiting their apparent suffering.
Having talked at length with homeschooling friends from the United States, there is no doubt that a small portion of homeschooling families get it wrong, or abuse the privilege of home education by abdicating their parental duty of care in educating their child responsibly. However, as reflected in literature and movies like ‘Sister Act 2’, ‘Lean on Me’, ‘The Dead Poets Society’, and ‘Dangerous Minds’, parental abdication from participating in their child’s holistic education, isn’t a problem just experienced in the homeschooling community. It affects every educational platform.
Stroop’s sloppy article and his dishonesty illustrate just how far the Leftist cult of modern liberalism and its sycophants are willing to go. With little to no evidence, Biblical Christianity will be outlawed under the popular phrase ‘homophobic’.
This is another mutation of:
the terrible abuse of language by the Nazis: where the group in charge of the actual killing in the gas chambers was called the General Welfare Foundation for Institutional Care…’ (Dean Stroud)[note]Dean Stroud, 2013 ‘Preaching in Hitler’s Shadow: Sermons of Resistance‘ Wm B. Eerdmans Publishing pp.132 & 136[/note]
This is the reality for Israel Folau. In a vile inversion of morality, Christianity will be deemed immoral. Anyone not aligned with Leftism will be treated as domestic terrorists, and as is the case with Christians in China, people will be forced by those already sold out to Leftism, into allegiance to the State.
This is, as Paul Joseph Watson so aptly described it, the mark of the beast: we will not be able to buy, sell, have a career, or earn a wage, without total intellectual castration and obedience to those on the Left who, even now, deceptively seek to place themselves as our overlords.
