1a. God Votes Republican

An Introduction to Donald Ray Howard

Welcome Reader, to Safe White Space.

This project is going to focus on Accelerated Christian Education (ACE) and the author behind the curriculum, Donald Howard, by first discrediting him as an educator, reporter, and Christian. We’ll come to understand who he was by parsing out his published work, and the many contradictions and bigotries therein. We'll explore all the ways in which Donald's flagrant bigotry, ignorance, and reductive worldview corrupted the ACE educational material. We'll see how Donald carefully molded an alternate 'reality' to emotionally abuse parents and subsequently exploit an extremely captive audience of students. In the next post, Donald will explain how he (was) a literal prophet from God, in a way that would require a rewrite of Revelations. And probably Isaiah. For sure the Gospels.

In this installment, we are going to explore one of Donald’s many glaring contradictions while highlighting a few of the malicious ways he used information to obscure reality and abuse his audience. The following examples don’t go too deep on any one topic, but rather explore a telling contradiction within his worldview.

God Votes Republican

Donald Howard started Accelerated Christian Education, ACE, as a safe white space in response to desegregation, Communism, and LeSBiAn RECrUitmEnT in public schools. He advocated that teaching a child -anything- shy of “Christian Americanism” (See: Christian Nationalism) is antithetical to the “moral Absolutes” established by God. So, in 1970, he set his hands to work on reshaping Christian Education around the globe. In just over a decade, ACE had grown from one school in Lewisville, Texas, to ~10,000 schools worldwide. Today, they boast having schools in 140 countries.

Donald explained his belief system over the course of five manifestos that get progressively more deranged and dangerous with each new installment. Summarized, it goes: All Christians are (preferably middle-class) pro-American capitalists who derive their values from a strict, literal interpretation of the Bible, while everyone else is working together as patsies for the literal devil.

Its necessary to understand that 'Christian' is the flavor of his Americanism, not the other way around. It will become clear throughout this series that Donald was never a Christian who also thought God would approve of Republican talking points. From the beginning, he was a far-right Nationalist invoking the name of Jesus to insulate his arguments from criticism. Think Tucker Carlson on the streets and Nick Fuentes in the sheets. Like his modern day contemporaries, Donald merely used the Bible to exploit God's credibility. From Jewish conspiracies and talking about “immigrants diluting Western values,” to agitating for violence against LGBT+ youth and domestic terrorism. The Bible was reduced to bite-sized pieces and then filtered through Donald's made-with-Americanism lenses. Here’s an example from his first manifesto:

Exhibit 1

Is it an oversimplification to state that the entire welfare program is unscriptural and contrary to God’s laws? The person who concludes that “Christian socialism” was practiced in Acts 6 should read and note that giving for social purposes in the Bible was always voluntary on the part of the giver and not regulated by an agency or the government.

To Save a Nation, page 37

I think Donald demonstrated the answer (yes) in response to his own question. All of his published work could be summarized as an erroneous oversimplification.

Further, Acts 6 has nothing to do with “giving for social purposes.” You might be able to say Acts 6 discusses the division of labor, I guess? But it has nothing to do with giving. Giving himself the power to interpret what the Bible means, by deciding what it’s leaving out, gave Donald the privilege of putting words in God’s mouth. His only objective was to make his audience scared enough to send their kids to ACE, and angry enough to vote the way he wanted them to.

Donald's published work is nothing less than low-effort, high-intensity propaganda using Christianity and God as marketing props. Even the PACEs, the work-booklets used by ACE schools, are an outlet for his personal talking points:

Exhibit 2

After the Flood, God instituted human government. In the ninth chapter of the book of Genesis, God instituted capital punishment for the crime of murder:

"And surely the blood of your lives will I require; at the hand of every beast will I require it, and at the hand of man. At the hand of every man's brother will I require the life of man. Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the image of God made he man." (Genesis 9:5-6)

God authorized human government, in His Name, to have the power of life and death. If a man took the life of another, God demanded that the murderer's life be forfeited to the state. God-ordained government is to act as a restraint on selfishness and to regulate man's societal interactions when it is necessary.

Collectivism, PACE 133, page 15

So, our loving God believes governments giving to the poor is socialism, but governments slaying (undefined) evil-doers is peachy?

Here’s Genesis 9. There is no mention of a human government or forfeiture of life to the state. No definition of “God-ordained government,” and not one mention of selfishness or greed in the entire chapter of Genesis 9. Nothing about human government regulating man's societal interactions, or a description of “when its necessary,” and absolutely no definitions or examples of these things from Donald.

You can ignore the most glaring contradictions when using God as a meat-shield:

Exhibit 3

The substance of Truth, Ideals, Perfection, and Absolutes is on the RIGHT. The Left is the furthest extreme from that basic element. Evil in Scripture does not have a substance; it is a departure from that substance or an absence of that good. Righteousness is an absolute expressing God's character, measuring the mark of deity. Sin is to "miss the mark." "Thou shalt not kill" is an absolute. Hegel said, "There are no absolutes." He was over on the Left.

World Awakening, page 80

So which is it? Is killing an absolute you shan’t cross, or are governments called on by God to slay evil doers? "Thou Shalt not kill" is probably the most relative phrase in the entire Bible, in the sense that, some people take it to the extreme of not killing animals, while others think it's okay to kill during war, or self-defense, or what-the-heck-ever. Catholics believe suicide is a mortal sin. We'll see shortly, Donald Absolutely does not have a problem with genocide, much less murder, as long as it's directed at gays, commies, or anyone who wants to feed the poor without making them first pass a drug test.

Also, one of Hegel’s contributions to philosophy concerned contradictions. There are nearly two centuries worth of people debating Hegelian dialectics and I cannot find anywhere that Hegel actually said “There are no absolutes.” However, an example of a Hegelian contradiction would be “There are no absolutes,” itself being an absolute. Just like “this statement is false.” It can only be true if it is false. That was kind of his whole thing.

Hegel could be a fun conversation, but Donald steers every conversation into boring Republican talking points.

UPDATE: 8/17/2024 To really drive home the fact that Donald wrote these PACEs himself, here is an image from the ACE educational material (PACEs) that is written in the same petulant tone, with nearly the exact same wording as in Exhibit 3. Shout out to a reader for sending me this, thank you ArtisticK67

Exhibit 118

Worth noting - Exhibit 3 comes out of the blue in a chapter where Donald is arguing that, without capitalism, there would be no missionaries, and probably no Christians in the Third World, so God must be a capitalist. Here is an image of the whole page. You can see for yourself that he is literally talking about missionary trends over a 14 year period, and then just squirrels into this hot-take. In a chapter about Christianity owing its success to capitalism, he still had to take a beat to dunk on the libs. And for all the claims he made, there’s not a source in cite.

Exhibit 4

Sourcing your material is much less time/cost efficient than memeing something sensational. He got away with producing material like this by intentionally cultivating an audience of white, mid-to-upper class, right-wing Christians who were already caught up in the Red Scare, Satanic Panic, and offended by the increasing visibility of the LGBT+ community. By simply saying the things they already wanted to hear, he leveraged the panic of the day to convince parents that they and their families were under a direct, coordinated attack from their own government and the legions of Satan. Then, he sold the solution to desperate parents. Exhibit 5 will take us through this cycle. I need to point out that I am not altering these Exhibits in any way, I am recreating them as exactly as possible from Donald’s manifestos.

Keep an eye out for the Freudian slip, and notice how the stakes escalate:

¹ Humanists = Communists = Satanists = Socialists = Leftists = Minorities = Anarchists= Atheists = Cultists = Relativists = Educators = Judges = Philosophers = Homosexuals = Mental Health Professionals = Feminists… you probably get the idea

Exhibit 5

Humanists will not stop until all prayer or religious acts are banned universally from all "public" places.

The definitions of public place is even under scrutiny.

A private company, Touley Engineering and Manufacturing Co., was sued for holding employee prayer sessions in the plant.

The owner, a Christian, explained that no one was being forced to pray. Employees were simply asked to attend-on company time, at company expense.

But U.S. District Judge Earle Carroll banned the mandatory employee prayer sessions." Judge Carroll's ruling was made in Phoenix, but he extended it to cover even a Florida branch of the company. The judge negated plant owner J.O. Townley's "rights" (of determination by private property owners) in the pursuit of "wrongs" of non-religious critics.

Actually, no one's rights were being violated. But, some may ask, what about the right of the employee to worship as he pleases?

He was not told to worship; there was no attempt to get him to violate the law or his own conscience. He was only asked to attend, and he was paid for his physical presence. The employee had a "right" to withhold attention, reverence, or worship.

It is simply another example of legal intrusion and the loss of rights through judicial interpretation.

Such social changes and the trend away from God toward decadence seem to have an agenda all their own. Educators, judges, and philosophers are aggressively seeking these social changes. Never mind that many see them as detrimental to our youth, families, local and national interests, and-as evidenced by the "perilous times" in which we live-to the detriment of mankind. The HUMANIST REVOLUTION traded prayer for violence. It's difficult to trade Theism for Humanism and come out ahead. There must be some way to get prayer back into the schools!

Teen Turmoil, page 114, 115

Using this NYT article for reference: Donald implied that someone with no relation to Touley maliciously sued them because of their prayer sessions. The truth is that the later mentioned “employee,” Louis M. Pelvas, just wanted to be allowed to work during this mandatory Christian bible study/worship service. He tried discreetly listening to a pocket radio with a earphone during the mandatory service, but they wouldn't allow him to. His attention was required by the company. When he sued on the grounds of religious freedom, the company retaliated and tried to move him to their Florida location (from Arizona). They said if Louis wouldn't go, they'd fire him. Louis refused on the grounds that he would have the exact same problem of compulsory prayer in Florida, so Touley Engineering canned him. After a few years of back and forth legal battles concluded with Louis not receiving compensation for the mistreatment endured and his unlawful termination. On the flip side, Touley Engineering was barred from requiring religious participation, which has helped expand the legal scope of the 1st amendment, to the benefit of American workers. Louis wasn’t trying to limit any religion itself - his problem was with being conscripted into God’s Touley’s religious army. Louis ended up working for a Baptist lady, saying ''but she doesn't beat me on the head over it,'' demonstrating that Christians and atheists can get along.

In the whole story, there isn’t one mention of any, much less “all prayer or religious acts” or “public places” being under scrutiny. At no point in the real story was Touley Engineering told they couldn't have company prayer sessions. Merely, that they couldn't make religious participation a requirement for employment. What's especially stupid is that rulings like this equally protect Christians from being required by their employers to participate in *insert any religion. But clarifying that point doesn't motivate parents to buy your substandard education program. Everything is so much more invigorating when the literal legions of Lucifer are coming for your Bibles by exploiting “judicial interpretation.”

The Donald Howards of the 1970s begat the Alex Joneses and Steven Crowders of the 2000s, which is why this conversation matters today.

We're living through a point in time in which two people can live on the same street, but exist in completely different realities. One reason, of course, is the internet. The internet has made it easier to create and fall into echo-chambers, as well as see the worst humanity has to offer on either side of the aisle. Other than being a good person on and off the web, there isn't much you or I can do about the Internet's pitfalls. Another primary factor is the unregulated private education industry in the US (and many other nations). This project is meant to investigate Donald Howard’s use of Accelerated Christian Education in cultivating this incompatible, alternate reality that many of us find ourselves debunking over and over again. Hopefully this examination can assist in restoring some small piece of reality by steering well-meaning Christians away from Donald's propaganda factory, and, in the process, maybe repair something within ourselves as well. Along the way, we’ll pick up the tools to deconstruct modern fascist propaganda and restore our own awareness of the world around us.

I'm not here to dunk on Christians, or to advocate for the public school system. I'm not going to remap education in America. My role in this conversation is to take on Donald Howard and discredit him as an educator, journalist, reporter, and a Christian. I feel confident that at the end of this series that you’ll be comfortable with me revoking his Pearly Gates pass.

UPDATE: 10/05/2024 We’re 237 Exhibits in at this point, and I’m convinced this dude was the Devil.

In closing, we're going to let Donald take this “moral Absolute” about killing so far that we actually come out the other side with clarity:

Exhibit 6

The Third Bloc is confused. U. S. newspaper reporters visit countries like Chile whose government had the character to jail the Communists and attempt to end the communization of Latin America. What happens? The reporters visit the jailed anarchists and print only their "human rights" smokescreen. But anarchists forfeit their rights². The question in the mind of Chile's new pro-western and anti-communist President, Augusto Pinochet Ugarte is "On whose side is the U.S.?”

Rebirth of Our Nation, page 58³

The question isn't "Whose side is God on?" or "Is God on my side?" It's a question of whether America has the character to be on the side of a fascist dictator. God doesn’t even make an appearance. What’s even dumber - Pinochet knew which side the U.S. was on. The current US President, Gerald Ford knew the answer - per a well-cited Wikipedia article [Also: 1,2,3,4,5]: "After his rise to power, Pinochet persecuted leftists, socialists, and political critics, resulting in the executions of 1,200 to 3,200 people, the internment of as many as 80,000 people, and the torture of tens of thousands. According to the Chilean government, the number of executions and forced disappearances was at least 3,095. Operation Condor, a U.S.-supported terror operation focusing on South America, was founded at the behest of the Pinochet regime in late November 1975, his 60th birthday."

U.N studies put the number of political detentions at this time in Chile at 250,000 people. That’s people, not instances. That’s 2.3% of Chile’s population at the time - put to scale, that would be 7.86 million Americans in 2024. As long as you dedicate it all to God, no harm no foul, amirite?

This well resolves the prior confusion about the Absolute “Thou shalt not kill.” It wasn’t contradiction taking place, it was continuity. Biblical character is expressed by torturing someone if it's in (undefined) pro-western interests. Performing a violent military coup is righteous if you're establishing an anti-communist dictatorship (confirmed in multiple future Exhibits, like 28). Anyone declared an (undefined) anarchist loses their rights and “forfeits their life to the state,” but it’s government over-reach to protect Louis Pelvas’s religious freedom because the violator was a Christian company.

God made rules to point in one direction, away from Donald and anyone sharing his immutable aspects. This recurring theme negatively effects every single history, social studies, or government PACE in the curriculum. It’s also a blueprint for every other type of misinformation found in the other PACEs, like science.

I’ve decided the first specific issue we are going to deal with is Donald’s homophobia. It is flagrant, it’s brutal, it will make you want to exhume his corpse to spit on it. Unfortunately, we have to do it. Understanding just how much Donald haaated gay people will put his “militant fundamentalism” and political calls-to-action in their proper, dangerous context. In the future, it will help us understand some of the mechanisms behind his racism and sexism.

While writing up that series, I’m going to put out a few smaller posts to help bridge the two topics. Thank you for reading!

But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hung around his neck, and he were drowned in the depth of the sea.

Matthew 18:6

1. Exhibit 7

humanism is the basic antichristian doctrine and philosophy. Its basic premise is: “there is no God!”

Communism is the political expression of Humanism.

Evolution is the scientific expression of this irreligious faith.

Relativism is the expression of Humanism in law, economics and education.

Satanism, drugs, witchcraft, the occult, and sinful worldliness are the expression of it in Religion.

Immorality, abortion, AIDS, suicide, violence, crime, and divorce express Humanism in society and culture..

..Humanism seeks to dethrone God. We are in the final stages of preparation for the ultimate confrontation. The collision between the two forces -God and Antichrist- is inevitable.

Teen Turmoil page 179

2. God given life and rights get forfeited quite frequently around here

3.