The Transformation of Michele Bachmann
Even at the start Michelle Bachmann was willing to violate laws and lie for jesus where it suited her.
The minutes of the school’s board meetings show that Bachmann, who was a member of the board, and her fellow-administrators repeatedly violated that rule. The C.E.O. of New Heights was Dennis L. Meyer, an evangelical-Christian activist and former schoolteacher who ran a prison ministry. At one of the first meetings, on July 20th, Meyer set the tone for how the school would be run: “Denny encouraged the board to do things and move forward not because we ‘think’ it should be done a certain way, but because God wants us to.”
The July 30th meeting opened with a prayer: “If we stay focussed God will keep being glorified by the things He does through us.” At the August 4th meeting, the board agreed to rent space at the school to a Minnesota church and heard from Dr. Robert Weaver, of Bethel University, an evangelical school in St. Paul. They discussed a “possible Bethel connection.” At the August 11th meeting, Meyer read from Deuteronomy: “Do not go out and strike rock; move by faith.”
Soon after the school year started, parents began to notice that New Heights had a strong Christian orientation. At an October meeting, a board member asked whether a document called “20 Key Principles of Christian Management” was officially part of the school’s “documentation,” as Meyer had claimed in a memo to the board. Denise Stephens, a parent of a student at the school, told G. R. Anderson, Jr., a reporter for the Minneapolis City Pages, that creationism was being advocated and that students were not allowed to watch the movie “Aladdin,” because it involved magic and paganism. The school district warned New Heights that it risked losing its charter. “I told Mr. Meyer and Ms. Bachmann some of my concerns and indicated that I was not going to be able to support something that seemed to be headed in a direction contrary to the state law,” David Wettergren, Stillwater’s superintendent of schools at the time, told me. About six months after the school was founded, Bachmann and Meyer resigned from the leadership. With the two of them gone, the school purged the curriculum of its religious orientation. “The school pulled itself together, so we continued to charter it,” Wettergren said.
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