Scholastic Withdraws Anti-Biblical Book from Christian Marketing List     7/10/2002
By Robert H. Knight

Scholastic Withdraws Anti-Biblical Book from Christian Marketing List
By Robert H. Knight

Scholastic Inc. will no longer distribute a book list to Christian schools containing the book Conversations with God for Teens by Neale Donald Walsch, a company spokeswoman told Culture and Family Report on Tuesday.

“It was inappropriate for us to include it in the Inspiring Words catalog,” said Judy Corman, head of corporate communications for Scholastic. “It was a pilot project to send to Christian schools. We should have been more cognizant of what should have been appropriate. Sometimes big publishers make mistakes, and this was a mistake.”

Corman said Scholastic would continue to market the book outside Christian circles. “We’re an 82-year-old company, and we sell appropriate books to appropriate audiences.”

Asked whether she had read the book, Corman said she had. Asked next whether she herself found the themes appropriate for children, she replied, “I’m not going to get into that with you. There are lots of readers who appreciate the book and there are some who don’t.”

She was then asked, “Since Scholastic maintains that it publishes only appropriate books for kids, and Scholastic published this one, would it be fair to say that Scholastic considers this appropriate for kids?” Corman replied, “For certain ages, yes.” She declined to speculate about what age would be suitable, saying, “I wouldn’t hazard a guess.”

On Monday, July 8, Dr. James Dobson exposed the anti-Christian content of the book on the syndicated Focus on the Family radio program and vowed never again to promote or buy books from Scholastic.

Some primary themes in the book: God is not interested in right or wrong. Nudity and sex of all kinds is permissible anywhere. Each person is a mini-replica of God, complete with Godly authority. God will not forgive anyone, since there is no need for forgiveness, since anything one does is right for that person. There is no legitimate authority other than the self, from which all powers flow. Cheating isn’t really cheating. Parents can be consulted, but they are not authorities. Finally, people are not born into Original Sin but Original Power.

Author Neale Walsch, whose Conversations With God was on The New York Times bestseller list for 132 weeks and has sold millions of copies, is a four-time divorced, college dropout New Age guru.

Scholastic included in its marketing kit to Christian schools a sheet with book covers on it. Surrounded by legitimate Christian books such as the Prayer of Jabez for Kids and a Max Lucado set, Conversations with God for Teens occupies the center of the page.

The book begins with a foreword (without any capitalizations) by singer Alanis Morissette. She says she searched for peace and truth after choosing “not to revisit the religion I had left behind from the time I was 12 years old for what I perceived to be its hypocritical messages and its rigidity and exclusivity” (p. ix). Morissette, who, like Walsch, had been raised nominally Roman Catholic, visited India and read Conversations With God, which she describes as “life-altering.” She concludes: “I wanted to get clear about what I felt my true purpose in life was: to evolve, express, define, accept, and love myself and to honor and encourage this in others as best as I can.” (p. xiii)

In Matthew 22: 37, Jesus says man’s purpose is to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” The Bible also contains hundreds of references about loving God and others, and the folly of becoming self-absorbed.

For his part, Walsch provides his own mini-review in his book’s opening chapter: “If you don’t believe in God, consider this book a work of fiction. I won’t mind. It’ll still be a good read. Maybe the best book you’ve ever read. … And don’t think for a minute that it came to you by accident. You called this book to you. (p. 3, italics in original)

Here is a sampling of questions from teens and answers from “God” as created by Walsch:

As for education, Walsch (writing as himself) recommends a complete overhaul of traditional methods.

“You know that so much of the stuff they teach in school is pointless. Where are the classes in Sharing Power, Cooperative Living, Accepting Differences and Celebrating Diversity, Shameless Sexuality, Understanding Unconditional Love?” (p. 4)

Writing as “God,” Walsch gets down to business, saying there is nothing wrong with cheating (“There is only ‘what works’ and ‘what doesn’t work’”). He goes on: “And while you are at it, tell them to try getting rid of grade levels that separate people by age, allowing students to fluidly group themselves by interests and passions.

“And abolish tests, and scores, and marks, and measures, letting the joy in each child be the measure, and the sparkle in each eye and the excitement in each walk be the test, of whether brains are being stimulated or numbed.” (p. 211)

On page 231, “God”calls for euthanasia and for teens to work to “change laws that make no sense.”

On the Conversations with God Web site, a biography of Walsch explains the genesis of his original book:

“In 1992, following a period of deep despair, Neale awoke in the middle of a February night and wrote an anguished letter to God. ‘What does it take,’ he angrily scratched across a yellow legal pad, ‘to make life work?’

“Now well chronicled and widely talked about, it was this questioning letter that received a divine answer. Neale says that he heard a voice, soft and kind, warm and loving, that gave him an answer to this and other questions. Awestruck and inspired, he quickly scribbled these responses onto the tablet. More questions came, and, as fast as they occurred to him, answers were given in the same soft voice, which now seemed placed inside his head. Before he knew it, Neale found himself engaged in a two-way on-paper dialogue. He continued this first ‘conversation’ for hours, and had many more in the weeks that followed, always awakening in the middle of the night and being drawn back to his legal pad. Neale’s handwritten notes would later become the best-selling Conversations with God books. He says the process was ‘exactly like taking dictation,’ and that the dialogue created in this way was published without significant alteration or editing.”

In the endnotes portion of the teen book, Walsch provides resources. They include the Gay and Lesbian National Hotline, with the phone number and the San Francisco street address; the Hetrick-Martin Institute in New York, which was founded by Andy Humm, who once advocated normalizing pedophilia as a “sexual orientation” in a column for a homosexual newspaper; the Web site for Youth for Environmental Sanity; and the Heartlight Learning Community, a “worldwide alternative education movement based on the teachings of Conversations With God.” He also mentions Dr. Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking and Michael Lerner’s Spirit Matters.

Walsch’s thelogy is propounded on his own Conversations With God Web site and a related Web site for teens entitled changers.com, which is a reference to enlightened teens who become “changers” by refusing to live by traditional morality.

Scholastic’s Web site describes the company as “a $2 billion multimedia company with 10,000 employees operating globally,” and “the largest publisher and distributor of children’s books in the world, including the phenomenally successful Harry Potter, The Babysitters Club, Dear America, The Royal Diaries, Animorphs and Clifford the Big Red Dog. Through the company’s unique school and community-based distribution channels, including its book clubs and book fairs, Scholastic reaches 32 million children, 45 million parents and nearly every school in the U.S.”

A Christian alternative is God’s World Publications, based in Asheville, North Carolina. Parent company of World magazine, God’s World has book clubs for children and adults and resources for homeschoolers.

Some Bible verses that you won’t find in Conversations With God for Teens:

(New King James Version)

“You will be like God, knowing good and evil.” (Satan is the speaker) Genesis 3:5b

“There is a way that seems right unto a man, but its end is the way of death.” Proverbs 14:12

“Jesus said to him, ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the first and great commandment.” Matthew 22:37-38

“Because, although they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God, nor were thankful, but became futile in their thoughts, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools.” Romans 1: 21-22

“And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a debased mind, to do those things which are not fitting; being filled with all unrighteousness, sexual immorality, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, evil-mindedness; they are whisperers, backbiters, haters of God, violent, proud, boasters, inventors of evil thngs, disobedient to parents, undiscerning, untrustworthy, unloving, unforgiving, unmerciful.” Romans 1: 28-31

“For such are false apostles, deceitful workers, transforming themselves into apostles of Christ. And no wonder! For Satan himself transforms Himself into an angel of light.” 2 Corinthians 11:13, 14

“Beware lest any man cheat you through philosophy and empty deceit, according to the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ.” Colossians 2:8

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