Forming A Worldview

Back when we still lived in Southern New England, I used to listen to a radio broadcast called The Victory Hour. The man who spoke on that program was Rev. Ennio Cugini. When I first started listening to him, I heard him say a lot of things I disagreed with, mostly because they were topics I had no real clue about, like most folks. Thanks to our excuse for a news media, I was politically and theologically illiterate like most folks. Sometimes his comments, thanks to my lack of knowledge, got under my skin and I’d quit listening for a few weeks–but for some reason, I always came back.

As I continued to listen and unconsciously connect the dots as it were, I began to find that what Pastor Cugini was saying began to make sense to me. What he talked about helped me to begin to form some sort of framework to begin to grasp what was going on in this country and his broadcasts aided me in beginning to form a Christian worldview about all of it. To this day, I am indebted to him, and ultimately to the Lord, for his insights.

One thing Pastor Cugini dealt with at some length was what went on in public schools in Rhode Island, which was where his church was. Listening to some of the happenings in public schools that he exposed to his listening audience, I had to consider, for myself, just what was public education all about? What was its purpose? Since, at that time, our son was two years old, you can imagine that these issues concerned my wife and me. After all, it wouldn’t be all that long until he was of school age. And we were not all that sure we wanted him exposed to some of what we were hearing about that went on in public schools.

Shortly after this, we moved to Illinois, and between continuing to get Pastor Cugini’s broadcasts on cassette tapes and beginning to read other material we then came across, by the time our son was four years old, we knew we would not be sending to public school.

In September of 1974 our family took a trip to Oklahoma, where I had lived briefly during 1967. Upon arriving back home, I started reading some of the newspapers that had piled up while we had been away. An article in the Chicago Sun Times for September 29, 1974 really caught my attention. The headline for the article read: “Battle of the books in fundamentalist lion’s den” and it was written by Roger Simon. It dealt with the textbook protest in Kanawha County, West Virginia that had been going on since June of that year, and which I had known nothing about, thanks to the efforts of our intrepid news media, to keep it as quiet as possible. Simon’s article did not do the textbook protesters any great favors.

I can remember holding the article up to my wife and saying, “By the way this is written, those protesters must be doing something right.” Little did I know at that point how right they were! But by that time, we had learned how the “news” media twists things around to make them seem to be what they really aren’t. I was to see multiple examples of this “news” media activity in the decades following and it still goes on today–only today the news media don’t even pretend anymore. They are just out and out socialists and don’t even try to pretend otherwise.