Summit Ministries

Summit Ministries is a Christian organization founded in 1962 by Dr. David A. Noebel. From its organizational campus at the base of Pike's Peak in Manitou Springs, Colorado, Summit Ministries cadres conduct two week sessions in which high school and college students from across America are intellectually inoculated against the ideas that gave rise to the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution: formal logic, rationalism, physics, and Darwinian evolution. Tellingly, pluralism is also denounced. This is intended to safeguard their fundamentalist Christian faith from the threat of conversion to Secular Humanism, Marxism-Leninism and Postmodernism which they might encounter in liberal arts curricula. Students also pledge allegiance in reverential ceremonies to both the United States flag and a Protestant Christian flag. Nationalisms are constructed around one or more of four characteristics which identify members of the nation: language, race, religion, and common historical experience. Patriotisms differ from nationalisms in that they are promote popular attachment to the state and its secular institutions rather than with the nation as such. Summit Ministries thus seeks to replace American Patriotism with a Fundamentalist Protestant Christian Nationalism.

Noebel, who also publishes textbooks for parents who homeschool their children and has run unsuccessfully for Congress, is highly critical of a number of intellectual celebrities including but not limited to Richard Dawkins, John Dewey, Erich Fromm, Bertrand Russell, Margaret Sanger and Carl Sagan. The National Education Association, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the MacArthur Foundation are also targets for denunciation.

Noebel's political philosophical obsessions may be found in his Understanding the Times: The Religious Worldviews of Our Day and the Search for Truth, Eugene, Oregon: Harvest House Publishers, 1991, ISBN 1565072685. This work maps contemporary intellectual currents in the United States as an ideological struggle between Marxism-Leninism, Secular Humanism and Biblical Christianity. New Age spiritualism is discussed almost as an afterthought. One of the stranger elements in Understanding the Times is that science fiction author Isaac Asimov is repeatedly identified as one of the prime villains in the struggle.

Among the Summit Ministries Board of Directors is Georgia State Senator Preston Smith.

Contact details
P.O. Box 207 Manitou Springs, CO 80829 Phone: (719) 685-9103 Web: http://www.summit.org

SourceWatch Resources

 * Political ideas in science fiction
 * Students for America
 * Carl Sagan