When I was a young man early in my intellectual journey searching for truth, I came across Idols for Destruction; Christian Faith and It’s Confrontation with American Society. It was published in 1983, and I was just beginning to expand my understanding of faith to all of reality beyond my own religious experience. I remember being awed by the author’s learning and insight, and how he took a Christian worldview and critiqued everything, it seemed, about the modern world. It was, to me, a tour de force, especially because as a 23 or 24 year-old I was just beginning to exercise my intellectual chops.  It was from a universe of learning I could only marvel at. The author, Herbert Schlossberg, was an historian who seemed to know everything. I decided after lo these man years to read it again, and it amazes me now just as much as I remember it amazing me then. It’s now a classic in Christian intellectual history. What is striking as I read it in 2021 is how prophetic it was. He died a couple years ago before the world went mad with COVID, and Trump drove the woke left into complete madness, but he predicted with uncanny accuracy the destruction of the idols of our age we are experiencing right now.

This quote is an example of Schlossberg’s insights and his ability to convey truth clearly and persuasively. Few people understand the power of assumptions, and the need to identify them if we’re to engage others and the culture effectively.

Education is a series of religious acts in part because the power of assumptions is so great. Assumptions, in fact, are more powerful than assertions, because they bypass the critical faculty and thereby create prejudice. If someone argues the proposition that modern intellectual people do not believe in religious dogmas, I am able to judge whether his arguments are persuasive. The simple act of listening to an argument is almost enough to engage it. But if I listen to someone discourse on a related subject in a way that only assumes that modern intellectual people do not believe in religious dogmas, my mind tends to accept the assumption and bypasses it in order to engage the argument which, in fact, depends on it. That bypassed assumption is the pocket of the enemy soldiers that was ignored in an effort to engage the main body of the adversary, and it lies in wait to strike from the rear. A false assumption can be combined with an unassailable argument, which then proves the truth of what is false. The false assumption is additionally beguiling because it often appeals to one of the worst instincts—the desire to be fashionable or at least to avoid being associated with the unfashionable or the unpopular.

The assumptions of modern public education concerning the nature of man, the function of the state, the nature of truth, and so on as to inculcate a set of presuppositions that can only be called religious.

Idols for Destruction, p. 210

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