Tag: LifeWise

Public schools all over the coun­try and espe­cial­ly in Ohio are being invad­ed by a Christian Nationalist group called LifeWise. They claim to be teach­ing char­ac­ter val­ues using Bible sto­ries but in review­ing some of these Bible sto­ries, we have to ask, Do we want to be teach­ing young kids about Human sac­ri­fice for exam­ple?

LifeWise sets up in a local school dis­trict and with parental per­mis­sion take kids off-campus for some Bible learn­ing dis­guised as Character and val­ue edu­ca­tion. They refuse to let the pub­lic review their cur­ricu­lum and is in fact suing some­one who legal­ly obtained a copy and post­ed it online.

Maybe this is why LifeWise refus­es to let peo­ple out­side of LifeWise see their cur­ricu­lum:

In the Elementary cur­ricu­lum, that is not­ed for Kindergarten through 3rd grade, Lesson 8 is about the char­ac­ter trait “sac­ri­fice”. One seg­ment of the les­son talks about God test­ing Abraham. For those who don’t know the sto­ry, God tells Abraham to take his son up into the moun­tain and sac­ri­fice him to show his loy­al­ty to God.

God wants Abraham to mur­der his own son to show much he “loves” God.

Abraham does what God says and takes his son up the moun­tain, builds an alter, and is just about ready to do the deed and an Angel stops him and lets him know that since he was ready to mur­der Isaac he knew he feared God (ie. would do what God Wanted).

Side note: Isaac had no clue his father was pre­pared to mur­der him.

So, not only is LifeWise teach­ing lit­tle kids that human sac­ri­fice can be a good thing as long as it is for God, here is this tid­bit

The les­son is to have 2nd and 3rd graders act out the Abraham sto­ry and for the oth­er kids to pro­vide sound effects. Have the kids act out human sac­ri­fice for God? Some kids have issues with what is real and what is not so should we be teach­ing this par­tic­u­lar sto­ry? We don’t think so.

That isn’t the only prob­lem­at­ic sto­ry. Here is a les­son about the trait sub­mis­sion:

Submission means learn­ing to be a good fol­low­er. Instead of doing our own thing, we can do what we are asked. We don’t talk back or demand our way. We choose to “fol­low the leader,” whether that is God, our par­ents, our teach­ers or oth­er good author­i­ties God puts in our lives.

LifeWise Lesson Example

In an iron­ic twist, the title of the les­son is “Jacob’s New Name” and some of the activ­i­ties are kids choos­ing a new name as a game. Yet, Joel Penton, the founder of LifeWise is against kids choos­ing their own name to social­ly tran­si­tion at school. Also LifeWise train­ing doc­u­ments make clear that the order of author­i­ty for chil­dren is God then their Parents.

If this was a sec­u­lar les­son about sub­mis­sion (it would­n’t be called that in the first place), the teacher would also talk about caveats like are you being hurt or ‘has an adult asked you to keep a secret.’ Unlike this Bible sto­ry we don’t teach kids to nev­er ques­tion why an adult or par­ent is ask­ing them to do some­thing. There will be things a kid must do that they don’t want to do — like their home­work or mow­ing the yard, but typ­i­cal­ly they need to “sub­mit” as long as it won’t hurt them in some way that typ­i­cal­ly is ille­gal if uncov­ered.

And what if a child actu­al­ly mur­ders their class­mate and they say they did it because God told them to do it?

LifeWise does­n’t have an answer for that.

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If you are inter­est­ed in more infor­ma­tion about the prob­lems with LifeWise, check out our recent episode of Glass City Humanist.