Forced to do Pagan Rituals, Chicago School Children Win Payout

After being caught red-handed forcing children to participate in Hindu rituals during class time, government schools in Chicago will be paying millions of taxpayer dollars to the victims. Unfortunately for other students across the nation, this scandal represents the tip of the iceberg of pagan indoctrination in American public education.

The scandal in question involved a partnership between the Chicago Board of Education and the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace. Working together, government schools and the New Age foundation forced children to either participate in bizarre pagan rituals or remain silent as classmates chanted Hindu mantras.

Perhaps even more alarming, at least some of the children were told not to tell anyone, including their own parents, about the pagan religious activities. According to court documents, there were even “nondisclosure agreements” included. Children were told to especially avoid informing “religious” parents about the indoctrination program.

The plaintiffs

The lead plaintiff in the case, then-16-year-old student Kaya Hudgins, recounted how she was ordered to participate in “Quiet Time” despite personal objections. The scheme included a “private one-on-one Hindu ‘Puja’ worship ceremony” in a dark room, religious chanting and paraphernalia, and even “secret mantras” that were actually the names of Hindu deities — deities that biblical theology has always held to be demonic.

“I was just a teenager when I was pressured into a program I didn’t understand and wasn’t allowed to question,” Hudgins said in a statement after the settlement was reached. “No student should ever be forced into a religious practice against their will — especially not in a public school. This settlement is a step toward accountability and a reminder that our constitutional rights don’t stop at the classroom door.”

Hudgins, who is Muslim, explained that she and other students were taken individually to a small room to chant and place a fruit offering in front of an altar. On the altar were brass cups of incense and rice, along with a photograph of a Hindu guru known as “Brahmananda Saraswati.” That guru, sometimes known as “Guru Dev,” launched the global “Transcendental Meditation” movement in the mid-1950s.

Under the class action settlement, approved last week by U.S. District Court Judge Matthew Kennelly for the Norther District of Illinois, more than 750 former students were involved. Chicago’s government school system and the foundation in question agreed to pay a total of $2.6 million as part of the settlement. It seems half of the funds will come from taxpayers and the remainder from the foundation.

But this is not the first time taxpayers and the foundation have been forced to pay up for forcing the pagan indoctrination on students. In a previous case that made headlines recently, another Chicago student — a Christian who said she refused to kneel before anyone or anything except Jesus Christ — received a cool payout of $150,000.  Similar cases in years past in other areas have also resulted in payouts to victims.  

Attorney John Mauck of Mauck & Baker, a law firm with a history of getting involved in religious liberty cases, represented the students. He celebrated the outcome. “This settlement vindicates the concerns of former students and parents that the initiation ceremony and daily meditation regime were effectively demonic invocations and thus violated the Establishment Clause of the Constitution,” said Mauck.

The attorney also expressed hope that the award would protect students from being forced by government schools to participate in pagan rituals in the future. “We hope this settlement will deter those who exploit young people and that it will encourage the Chicago Board of Education to be wary of harming students by allowing wolves to prey on the sheep they are obligated to protect,” added Mauck.

False religion in schools

As The Newman Report has been documenting for years, paganism and anti-Christian religious indoctrination have become a staple of what passes for “education” in government schools today, all across the nation. Aside from Hinduism, Buddhism has also been invading classrooms nationwide under the guise of “meditation” techniques and “mindfulness” education.

In fact, peddlers of these programs openly boast of teaching this supposedly “secularized” Buddhism and Hinduism to government-schooled children across America. In a video on “Mindfulness in Education” by expert Amy Burke, the very first quote comes from an Indian guru and so-called “World Teacher” by the name of “Jiddu Krishnamurti,” from his book “Education and the Significance of Life.”

The decision to quote this particular guru offers significant insight into what this is all about. The guru, adopted and trained by the head of a Luciferian cult known as the “Theosophical Society” that inspired the National Socialist (Nazi) movement, was blunt about his pagan agenda. “You want to have your own gods – new gods instead of the old, new religions instead of the old, new forms instead of the old – all equally valueless, all barriers, all limitations, all crutches,” Krishnamurti explained.

Just a few years ago, California’s State Board of Education voted unanimously to mandate an “ethnic studies” model curriculum in the state’s government schools. That program, created by a radical anti-Christian bigot who called for a “counter genocide” against “white Christians,” forced elementary school students to chant prayers to the demonic Aztec gods of human sacrifice, cannibalism, and war.

Islam is becoming increasingly popular in government classrooms too. All over the country, including some of the most conservative states in the union such as West Virginia and Tennessee, government schools have been caught forcing children in middle school or younger to declare their submission to the Islamic deity Allah. Countless students have been instructed to recite the “shahada” conversion prayer as well.  

The U.S. government has been peddling the outrageous schemes. Indeed, in a document funded by the U.S. Department of Education, school personnel were taught how to excise alleged “Christian privilege” from America’s public schools. Also recommended: “Infuse curriculum and school activities with intellectual traditions that originate in the Muslim World.”

Just last week, The Newman Report exposed Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s $5 million “grant” to further Islamic “education” in the state. The money will help an Islamic school already subsidized by taxpayers in the state to expand from 300 to 3,000 students by building more classrooms, a gym, and much more.

Even before the invasion of blatant paganism and Islam, children were being force-fed a dangerous false religion invented by U.S. public school system “founding father” John Dewey and dozens of his allies. Dubbed “humanism” by Dewey and his cohorts, the movement’s manifesto rejects the existence of God and moral truth. And yet, as U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart argued in a famous dissent, SCOTUS essentially established it in the early 1960s when banning Bible and prayer.

Going all the way back to the first individual to propose that the government should be educating children, occult spirituality has been a critical element of the agenda. Utopian textile manufacturer and commune founder Robert Owen, a communist who inspired the Prussian indoctrination system that eventually inspired the American public school system, actually boasted of communicating with “spirits” through Ouija boards and other means.

And looking ahead, the United Nations’ World Core Curriculum is deeply rooted in New Age paganism as well. In fact, according to the global education scheme’s primary author, then-Assistant UN Secretary General Robert Muller, the global education program is based on the teachings of Alice Bailey, the founder of the infamous Lucifer Publishing Company (now known as Lucius Trust). The WCC is also based on teachings from the spiritual entities she claimed to be channeling known as “Ascended Masters,” Muller admitted.  

Government schools are blatantly indoctrinating American children into false and demonic “religions” that are entirely incompatible with the Bible and the foundational principles of the United States. This is one of the most urgent crises facing the nation. While the settlement in Chicago is a positive development, it barely represents a chink in the armor. It is past time for a total rethink of education

Alex Newman is an award-winning international journalist, educator, author, and consultant who co-wrote the book “Crimes of the Educators: How Utopians Are Using Government Schools to Destroy America’s Children.” He writes for diverse publications in the United States and abroad. Originally published at Liberty Sentinel.