Vine & Fig Tree
I'm trying to define my job description with Vine & Fig Tree. I think it should be "teacher." (Some would say I'm really a "propagandist.")
My first job out of college was teaching.
My mother taught in California Public Schools for about 30 years.
I want to be a teacher.
Unfortunately, public schools won't let me teach what I think needs to be taught.
I want to teach people (of any age) that we must repudiate violence if we want "Peace on Earth."
Why won't government-run schools let me teach that?
Because government uses violence to fund their schools, and violence to put kids in desks.
I appreciate the temptation of compulsory school laws.
But I don't believe in compulsion.
So I have to rely on competition in a Free Market
I want to sell a homeschool program for those who were deprived of my curriculum when they were kids.
I don't want to teach "The 3 R's" (reading, writing, arithmetic).
I want to impart the "worldview" that leads to "Peace on Earth."
It's the worldview that made America, England, Australia, and other "Western" nations better places to live than North Korea or Iran or the "former" Soviet Union.
This worldview was taught in every public school classroom in America in 1776 (the year America's "Declaration of Independence" was signed).
But not consistently.
Students were taught that some violence was necessary to keep society going. Like:
If they could interview an American public school graduate for 30 minutes, Every American teacher in 1776 would say today's Americans are victims of educational malpractice. Given the fact that public school graduates would not be able to refrain from picking up their "smartphone" in the middle of the interview, a colonial American teacher would also find public school graduates horrifyingly rude, disrespectful, and ill-mannered.
But public school students have all been trained to believe that they are far more "evolved" than Americans were in 1776 -- even though today's students cannot read the books and newspapers that ordinary Americans read 200 years ago. Or do the same math problems. Or ride a covered wagon across a continent. Or see the value in any of those things.
So I'm accused of trying to sell something I think people "need" instead of what they "want."
So where do I go from here?
I've chosen my curriculum and I have my lesson plans all laid out for the year.
But no students.
(Actually, I haven't really tried to get students. Been too busy to run "the school." Now is the time to start.)
(And I've been too fearful. More on that.)
I toyed with the idea of calling it a "Life Coaching" program instead of a "homeschool program for adults."
I don't know what to call it, or how to market it.
My biggest problem right now is psychological. My agenda is too big for my boots. How to go from here?
Before I graduated from high school, I had come in contact with R.J. Rushdoony [Google], founder of the "Christian Reconstruction" movement. I wanted to be "the next Rushdoony" when I grew up. Neither one has happened yet. I became a "Chalcedon Scholar" and wrote a regular column for The Chalcedon Report.
I also began publishing for an organization I formed called Vine & Fig Tree, which obtained tax-exempt status from the IRS as a non-profit corporation. More Info
Legal Education
Suppose your parents were given a blood test, and based on this test, the government determined that your parents were "high-risk" cases of costing the Medicare system a great deal of money later in their lives, so the government was firmly requesting that you put your parents to "sleep" within 180 days. Would you obey that order? I wouldn't. The Bible says "Honor your mother and father" and "Thou shalt not kill." My allegiance to God is greater than my allegiance to the government. That is unacceptable to the government. Rushdoony was a proponent of Christian education, frequently appearing as an expert witness in Christian school cases vs. the increasingly-secular government. I worked with homeschoolers and studied law to help defend them in court. This was when homeschooling was illegal in California. By the time I passed the California Bar Exam, it was less persecuted. But then I was told by a Federal District Court in Los Angeles that because my allegiance to God was greater than my allegiance to the State, I could not be permitted to take the oath to "support the Constitution" required of all would-be attorneys, so I could not get a license to practice law. [Details] Public school teachers are also required to sign a similar loyalty statement, so I cannot become a public school teacher. I would not be able to become a naturalized American citizen had I been born in a foreign country. There are numerous court cases establishing this.
"Seminary"
I shared the pulpit at a small church in Anaheim, CA with David Chilton, until he joined Gary North, James B. Jordan and the "Reconstructionists" in Tyler, TX. Greg L. Bahnsen, one of the leaders of the "Christian Reconstruction" movement and a pastor in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, wanted to see if he could get me ordained in the OPC by apprenticing me, rather than through the modern "seminary" system. I thought that was quixotic, but I enjoyed his one-on-one mentoring. Bahnsen was a Christian scholar with integrity and a sharp mind. Scholarship is a virtue.
I do not believe any institutional church would allow me to become a member.
After passing the Bar Exam, I spent the better part of a decade with a small group of Christian anarchists who rented a large house in the "wrong" part of town and opened its doors to those who were homeless and wanted to get clean and sober, find a job, and save up first- and last-month's rent for a place of their own. We gave shelter and encouragement to over 1,000 people during the time I lived there, with an average of about 19 people at a time sharing our home, and served tens of thousands of meals and passed out thousands of bags of groceries to the poor in our neighborhood. We held weekly candlelight vigils in front of the Seal Beach Naval Weapons Station to question militarism and violence.
When my father got lung cancer, I helped him gulp down 70 pills a day and pumped into his heart two liters of an anti-cancer solution under an FDA clinical trial. After his death I moved my mother back to Missouri where she was born, and the house was destroyed by a tornado. After being taken by helicopter to the hospital, she came back to my care on a feeding tube. For six years she was immobile, and for the last three years of her life my full-time job was turning her over in bed every three hours to avoid bed sores. She died a few hours before 2015 began.
2015 and Beyond
During all of the above, I have been researching and writing, preparing to advance the Vine & Fig Tree vision, and have produced in the neighborhood of 2,000 webpages and blog posts. Some of them have been duplicated on other sites by people I don't think I've even met.
I have also been a candidate for U.S. Congress, both before and after I moved to Missouri. I haven't been able to get out of the house to do much campaigning recently, but I've still managed to be the top vote-getter among Libertarian Party Congressional candidates in Missouri for the last few elections.
Create an alternative to compulsory atheistic government schooling, for adult victims and younger sufferers.
I don't know exactly how to do this.
Online, offline.
I discuss the marketing issues here.
"Peace on Earth" and the Vine & Fig Tree vision should be a self-evident "why." Human beings are hard-wired in the Image of God to long for these pictures of a humane, prosperous, and peaceful human society. Such a world depends on people possessing a Biblical worldview, beating "swords into plowshares," and repudiating violence, especially the systematic institutionalized violence which we call "The State."
Since I was born, the U.S. Empire has killed, crippled, or made homeless tens of millions of innocent human beings -- most of them non-white. I don't see how any faithful Christian can avoid the conclusion that the U.S. government is the most evil and dangerous entity on the planet. Other governments, like North Korea, might be more evil, but they are not more dangerous. The U.S Federal Government is at war with Christian civilization and is the enemy of humanity. Its tentacles of atheism and death stretch around the world. This is the logical conclusion of the very concept of "The State." As Lord Acton might have better phrased it, "government corrupts."
Vine & Fig Tree
P.O. Box 179
Powersite, MO 65731
417.598.8303