Children Have Been ‘Sacrificed On the Altar of Safety’: Dennis Prager

Children Have Been ‘Sacrificed On the Altar of Safety’: Dennis Prager
Host of The Dennis Prager Show and co-founder of PragerU, Dennis Prager interview on Crossroads on March 16, 2022.
Masooma Haq
Joshua Philipp
Updated:

Dennis Prager believes radical secularism is pervasive in the United States and the world and that leftism has taken over many peoples’ inherent search for meaning, allowing them to be manipulated by a politically motivated group of elites.

Prager, host of The Dennis Prager Show and co-founder of PragerU, said in a March 16 interview for EpochTV’s “Crossroads“ program that extreme secularism is behind the policies that sacrifice the well-being of children, policies that—if left unchallenged—will lead to totalitarianism.

“Children were sacrificed on the altar of safety,” Prager said. “We have sacrificed children, their health, their well-being, their education, their mental health. We have the highest suicide rate among kids in American history, the highest depression rate, and the worst educational rate.”

He said many people blindly followed the state and kept schools closed to in-person learning for over 18 months, even though there was evidence from countries such as Sweden showing that allowing children to attend school had no deadly consequences.

“All thanks to idiotic, irrational obedience to idiotic, irrational authority, ’the state says’ is to half this country what ’the Lord says’ is to a religious Jew or Christian,” he said.

Prager said the United States is currently facing the consequences of hundred years of radical secularism, in which secularists were looking for meaning.

“Religious people have meaning. Secular people look for meaning, and I don’t blame them for it. You can find meaning in horrible things or beautiful things,” he said, adding that leftists feel just as passionate about their socialist agenda as religious people feel about their faith.

“Fighting for communism was for communists what fighting for Christianity is for a Christian. No difference whatsoever,” said Prager. “Their faith was as deep. They were willing to die for it.”

Because leftists don’t have meaning that comes from religion, they have found meaning in various social causes, Prager explained.

“As I said, nobody does lose a sense of meaning. They supplant it with a new source of meaning,” said Prager. “I think that leftism saving the planet because of computer models of human life being destroyed, that’s a secular meaning.”

Prager said science is no longer based on truth or evidence, and that this shows the United States is seeing the culmination of decades of radical secularism.

“A hundred years ago, no one said ’men give birth.‘ I mean, we have reached the apotheosis of idiocy,” said Prager. “Not only are you a hater if you say ’men do not give birth,’ you are going against science.”

He said casting aside Judeo-Christian values—values the United States was founded on and that have allowed it to prosper—is undermining our society. An example of this is the left’s recent denigrating of the Founding Fathers because they owned slaves, which Prager said is a destructive point of view and that the Bible says we should judge a person in the context of their generation.

“Slavery was universal—every society, every culture, in Africa, in Asia, in Latin America and America. So you don’t judge people on whether they had slaves,” Prager said. "You judge people on whether they created a system that would get rid of slavery, and they did. None of them defended slavery.”
A young girl and her teacher wear masks in the classroom at an elementary school in Central Falls, R.I., on Feb. 9, 2021. (AP/Screenshot via The Epoch Times)
A young girl and her teacher wear masks in the classroom at an elementary school in Central Falls, R.I., on Feb. 9, 2021. AP/Screenshot via The Epoch Times

Prager believes if our society continues down this road of radical secularism, it will lead to complete totalitarianism.

“If they win, you will have totalitarianism because people cannot live in chaos, so they will seek strong rulers to tell them what to do,” said Prager. “And the proof is that they sought it during COVID.”

Prager said that during the pandemic, people willingly wore masks even though they were irrelevant, and kept their children out of schools for two years even though there was evidence that in-person schooling was safe and remote schooling was detrimental.

By contrast, he thinks if the United States can embrace Judeo-Christian values, they will give people meaning and society will become better.

“That is very meaning-giving, a society based on liberty, ‘In God We Trust,’ and ‘E Pluribus Unum, from many, one,’“ he said. ”That’s the best avenue to a good society ever made. And I think building a good and free society is damn meaningful.”

Masooma Haq began reporting for The Epoch Times from Pakistan in 2008. She currently covers a variety of topics including U.S. government, culture, and entertainment.
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