Summit Ministries
From EvoWiki
Summit Ministries is a Christian organization founded in 1962 by Dr. David A. Noebel. From its organizational campus at the base of Pike's Peak in Manitou Springs, Colorado, Summit Ministries cadres conduct two week sessions in which high school and college students from across America are intellectually inoculated against the ideas that gave rise to the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution: formal logic, rationalism, physics, and Darwinian evolution. Tellingly, pluralism is also denounced. This is intended to safeguard their fundamentalist Christian faith from the threat of conversion to Secular Humanism, Marxism-Leninism and Postmodernism which they might encounter in liberal arts curricula. Students also pledge allegiance in reverential ceremonies to both the flag of the United States and the Protestant Christian flag, thus promoting a Christian nationalism.
Noebel, who also publishes textbooks for parents who homeschool their children and has run unsuccessfully for Congress, is highly critical of a number of intellectual celebrities including but not limited to Richard Dawkins, John Dewey, Erich Fromm, Bertrand Russell, Margaret Sanger and Carl Sagan. The National Education Association, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the MacArthur Foundation are also targets for denunciation.
Noebel's political-philoshopical obsessions may be found in his Understanding the Times: The Religious Worldviews of Our Day and the Search for Truth, Eugene, Oregon: Harvest House Publishers, 1991, ISBN 1565072685. This work maps contemporary intellectual currents in the United States as an ideological struggle between Marxism-Leninism, Secular Humanism and Biblical Christianity. One of the stranger elements in Understanding the Times is that science fiction author, atheist and skeptic Isaac Asimov is repeatedly identified as one of the prime villains in the struggle.
Among the Summit Ministries Board of Directors is Georgia State Senator Preston Smith.
External links
- "Ideological Inoculation" at summit.org website.
- Jende Huang, "Inside Summit Ministries," The Secular Web, July 27, 2001.
