Australia has a program in its schools that, at first glance, you’d have to be crazy to be against. It’s called Safe Schools, and it is an anti-bullying campaign.

Well, at least that’s how it has been promoted.

In reality, Safe Schools has become a pro-LGBTQI indoctrination system designed by one academic Marxist with hopes of replacing the Australian flag with a red one, and another who has, in academic theory, supported pedophilia. The program consists of: allowing students to wear whatever uniforms that they want; encouraging schools to allow bathroom use by any gender; promoting homosexual and transgender role-play in the classroom with students as young as eleven, and points children to this website, which endorses chest-binding, penis tucking, and (at one point) contained links to a website called the “tool shed,” an online shop for the purchasing of sex-toys.

I kid you not.

Oh, and the best part? Schools that are participating in the pilot program can have their identities concealed. That’s right. As pointed out here, all schools participating in Queensland are unnamed. This ‘anti-bullying’ campaign is so positive that the government decided it would not reveal which schools are participating. Not even to the parents of children enrolled in the school.

The outcry in Australia has been huge, and many major players behind the program have realized that they have played their hand a little too early. In fact, after an official inquiry, the program has already been altered.

The changes notwithstanding, the anti-bullying campaign is actually resulting in bullying—of the children who feel uncomfortable about participating—sometimes even by their teachers.

Stories are rolling in from around the nation detailing the explicit nature of what is being taught. One such story is of a heterosexual thirteen-year-old boy doing some research on his home computer. His homework? To “find a picture of a male celebrity on the internet and explain to the entire class why he is sexually attracted to that male.”

And much of this is without parents’ consent, and is not optional.

On the flipside, religious education in state schools is optional. Not only is it optional, but there have been numerous attempts to reject the involvement of religions, in particular Christianity, from schools. Recently a man took his complaint against government supported school chaplains all the way to the High Court.

I wonder what he would have to say about Safe Schools? Because, you see, the thing is—Safe Schools is religious education.

The so-called ‘secular’ is not a-religious, it is religious. The point has been made many times in the past, and made recently and clearly by James K. A. Smith, who determines the religiosity of secular systems by recognizing their liturgies. But not only does secularism have liturgical practice, it also contains much of what would commonly be pointed to as primary foundations required by religion: creation, fall, gods, sects, atonement, and redemption.

The Creation Myth

I say myth, because that’s the word that the academics use to denote religious creation stories. They’re myths because they’re unproven. Just like the random nothingness that created everything according to the secularists. In the beginning was nothing. And nothing said, “Let there be quarks, gluons, and Higgs-Bosons,” and there was. And nothing saw it and said … nothing. And then all the bits that came from nothing exploded, and suddenly there was everything. And nothing saw it and said … nothing.

The Pantheon and its Sects

Like other religions, there is not just one god in Secularism, but many: the god of sex, worshipped by the thronging ignorant masses; the god of technology, followed by the transhumanists; the god of nature, idolized by the environmentalists, and the god of academia, revered by the Marxists.

The Sacrificial Atonement System

The secularist religion, like others, believes in a form of sacrificial atonement. Whereas for many religions it’s animals, and for Christians it was Christ, the secularist’s sacrificial system is much cleaner. Each year millions of tiny human babies are sacrificed on the altar of applied science, and each sacrifice is dedicated to a particular demi-god. The sex-worshippers abort to further their sexual liberation; the transhumanists in order to carry out experiments to further their scientific progress; the Marxists because babies are nothing but oppressive shackles that remind us of the constraints of gender, and the environmentalists because there are too many people in the world. Interestingly when they speak of reducing the population for the sake of Sumatran Tigers, they never themselves climb upon the sacrificial altar and give up their lives. Babies are much more convenient. And much less like them.

The Fall

Just as in Christianity, the secularists know that something is wrong with us. They don’t know what exactly, but it is clear through their rhetoric that humanity is not quite what it should be. Each of the sects has a different answer for this: the Marxists say that it’s inequality and oppression; the environmentalists say its man’s abuse of nature; the transhumanists say it’s nature’s abuse of man; the sex-worshippers say it’s sexual repression, and the nihilists say it doesn’t matter.

The main god

At its heart, the religion of Secularism follows itself. That is, it worships humanity. If a religion is marked by a zealous love of the god at its head, then Secularism is clearly a religion, as it is marked by a zealous love for oneself. To love yourself is the answer to all of life’s problems. The major teachers preach this from the pulpit of the media on a daily basis. Ellen tells us to be true to ourselves. Oprah’s website reminds us that you can’t love others until you love yourself. The individual—you—are at the heart of your own worship. No wonder so many people are jumping onto the Secularist bandwagon. This is a religion that promises to cost nothing and gain everything.

The redemption story

Redemption is where, like many religions, the denominations of Secularism start to disagree. Where the environmentalist says that redemption from our brokenness will come when we are at one with nature in a harmonious coexistence, transhumanism says the opposite:

“If it is natural to die,” said FM-2030, (a transhumanist who rejected his human name and replaced it with 2030 in the belief he would live for one hundred years to see the year 2030), “then to hell with nature. Why submit to its tyranny? We must rise above nature. We must refuse to die.”

Death is evidence of the fall, and it is death that must be conquered. Eternal life is the goal, just as in most religions, and it is the transhumanist sect that is doing the best and most important work to achieve this goal. The redemption of humanity will come when humanity has eternity in its grasp, and this will be achieved through applied science and technology. I said earlier that the sex-worshippers were the largest sect, and they are. But every member of every sect also has a little idol of technology in their home, and usually one in their pocket. They sacrifice their time to it daily. According to the secularist, it is technology—through the genius of humanity—that will be the savior of our species.

The Default Religion

Secularism is in no ways above religion, it operates on the religious level, and fulfils all of the same basic functions. For this reason, Safe Schools is not the only ‘religious’ element of secularism in schools. The fact is that there is no such thing as ‘religiously neutral’ education. All education is religious, and such a claim is not new. In fact, as Christopher Dawson pointed out in The Crisis of Western Education, John Dewey, “in spite of his secularism, had a conception of education which was almost purely religious.”

As G.K. Chesterton wrote, “When you stop believing in God, you don’t believe in nothing, you believe in anything.” It is also true that when you stop worshipping God, you don’t worship nothing, you worship anything—usually yourself.

That is what Safe Schools is doing. It is teaching a zealous self-worship. It is no less religious that Islam, Christianity or Judaism.

In Australia, perhaps our schools will be a lot ‘safer’ when we recognize that there is no such thing as value-neutral education. As warped as the program is, it would make more sense if it were included as a part of opt-in religious education, and if the secularists finally admitted that they are not neutral. They are yet another religion with their own worship to fulfill, sacrifices to make and redemption to enact. They have a mission, to go out into the world and fill it with their disciples. And our schools are their seminaries.