Dr D James Kennedy
First, there is no question that Christianity is foundational to our liberties. This country was founded by a society that was overwhelmingly Christian. In 1776, 98 percent of the people in American professed to be Protestant Christians, 1.8 percent professed to be Roman Catholic Christians, and 0.2 percent professed to be Jewish. That means that 99.8 percent of the people in America in 1776 professed to be Christians. In 1620, they were all Christians, in 1630 when the Pilgrims came, they were...
Candy Canes Sweatshirts and Jewelry Oh My
Yes, to many the Bible is now offensive and so are candy canes with a Christian message. For four years, a Bible club at a Reno, Nevada, high school had distributed candy canes containing the words Jesus Loves You without incident. But in 2002 the school administration denied the club permission to dispense the candy because the message was potentially offensive. To its credit, the school reversed its position when the Pacific Justice Institute intervened. One wonders, though, whether the...
Americas Christian Roots
AMERICA IS THE GREATEST, FREEST NATION in the history of the world. Is our freedom an accident or the result of specific influences that preceded and accompanied the founding of the republic If it's the result of specific influences, what were they There are two major schools of thought on these questions one is that the American tradition of freedom is the product of secular Enlightenment ideals, and the other that American freedom is a direct outgrowth of the Christian religion. Resolving...
Character and Textbooks of the Early Schools
In all the early American schools, including colleges, teaching was restricted mostly to religious instruction. The schools assumed little responsibility for teaching subjects like science, secular literature, or art. The Bible, used for teaching both reading and religion, was the chief textbook in the lower grades, and homes or churches were the classrooms. Other textbooks were hornbooks, the New England Primer, and the Bay Psalm Book A hornbook consisted of a sheet of parchment pasted to a...
Under
In September 2001, the Wisconsin state legislature enacted legislation requiring Wisconsin school districts to have students either recite the Pledge of Allegiance or sing (or have played) the national anthem daily. The following month, on October 8, 2001, the Madison, Wisconsin, school board, by a vote of 3-2, banned student recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools and prohibited students from singing the national anthem and substituted an instrumental version. Board member...
Church at Odds with Its Motto
When it comes to Christianity, some reporters seem unable simply to report the news. In a Washington Post news story-not an editorialreporter Craig Whitlock wrote about the controversy surrounding sectarian prayer in the Maryland State Senate Chambers. He quoted one pastor as praying, Father, it is an abomination to you for leaders to commit wickedness. We pray you will guard their minds from Satan's evil thoughts. We pray that you will keep our leaders from doing evil. We pray that our leaders...
The War in Perspective
This section examines the broader picture of Christian influence in America. Chapter Eleven traces America's Christian beginnings. Because our schools are no longer emphasizing America's Christian origins-indeed, our culture has taken pains to rewrite our history free of factual references to the strong Christian influence that dominated this nation in its formative years-many Americans are doubtlessly unaware of this history. The purpose of this chapter is to set the historical record...
Bible Clubs
What about student Bible clubs Should they be allowed to meet on school property Or does their obviously religious purpose make them intolerable Northville High School in Michigan told Connect for Christ, a student Bible club, that it could no longer meet during seminar period at school, but continued to permit other noncurricular clubs to meet. The principal said that because the Bible club was religion-based it could meet before or after school, but not during. Two of the club's students,...
Press Attacks and the Great Commission
Sometimes the press just doesn't understand the commitment some Christians have to their perceived duty to honor Christ's Great Commission, set forth in Matthew 28 19-20, sending them to preach the Gospel the world over. This could be seen in the incredulity of certain critics that Dayna Curry and Heather Mercer, the two Christian missionaries who were rescued from an Afghan prison for evangelizing, would dare consider doing it all over again. Brad Buchholz, writing in the Austin American...
Academic Freedom and Tolerance Speech Codes
Most people have heard of the speech codes existing on campuses across America that censor politically incorrect speech. It has been estimated that ninety percent of American universities have speech codes. Ostensibly, they are most often adopted to promote a peaceful educational environment. These codes gained prominence in the 1980s, and many professors and students have felt their sting. In one disturbing case, a seventy-four-year-old professor was yanked from his classroom during class and...
Targeting Individuals Temple Universitys Gulag
Attacks by university professors, students, administrations, and related groups have turned the university campus into a zone of hostility toward all things Christian individuals, organizations, and Christianity itself are subjected to inexcusable treatment. Michael Marcavage, a student at Temple University, knows this all too well. He was unhappy when he learned in the fall of 1999 that the play Corpus Christi-where Jesus is portrayed as a homosexual who makes love to his disciples-would be...
The Tolerance and Academic Freedom Charade
There was a near perfect illustration of the need for a professor to watch her back at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana. There, Professor Janis Price, an education instructor for fifteen years, committed the grievous sin of subjecting her students to a hostile environment. What did that hostile environment consist of She placed issues of Dr. James Dobson's magazine Teachers in Focus on a table in the back of her classroom. She advised students that the publication contained articles...
Dr Marvin Olasky
I don't see Christians as singled out for discrimination in American society generally-after all, big chunks of American society are heavily populated by Christians-but the bias is clear in two sectors of society (academia and media) that in turn influence others. I see five reasons for such academic and media scorn two arising from dominant values within those sectors, two from weaknesses within Christianity, and one connected to God's mysterious will. First, since Christianity has the most...
State Constitutions
At the time of the Revolution, all but a fraction of the American colonial population was Christian, and largely Protestant. At least seventy-five percent of the colonists had grown up in Puritan families. More than half of the remaining twenty-five percent were followers of Calvinism, in one form or another. Some argue the Calvinist influence was much greater. Indeed, according to scholar John Eidsmoe, many, if not the vast majority of colonial Americans came from Calvinistic backgrounds. The...
Dr Michael Novak
It is clear that virtually all of the top hundred founders of the United States-including the ones who signed the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution, or both-held that republican governance and respect for individual human rights are inconsistent with atheism. As Tocqueville notes, they gave a whole series of reasons why they believed that atheism undermines the beliefs and practices on which republican governance and respect for human rights rest. We in our own day are testing...
Dr James Dobson
Conservative Christians are subjected to such virulent hostility primarily because we pose a threat to the leftist, immoral agenda of the media and entertainment industries. When believers conform to the dictates of scripture, they have the temerity to stand against abortion, euthanasia, population control, condom distribution, pornography, sexual license, and the tax-and-spend policies of liberal government. Above all else, religious conservatives are hated because some of them-very few,...
Christianity Can Be Dangerous
So, while some say Christianity is pro-choice, others, such as the magic-comedy team of Penn & Teller, say it is something to fear. Such was the message the act delivered during their offering of an X-rated parody of Christ's crucifixion, to the horror of many of the spectators at the World Magic Seminar, a magician's convention in Las Vegas. In the skit Teller was in costume as Christ and was on a full-sized cross that was wheeled into the room on a cart. A midget in an angel costume...
Anti Christian Art Choice on Earth
While our politically correct culture is quick to denounce anyone who shows the slightest insensitivity to homosexuals and most other groups, Christians again receive no such respect. In fact, the culture revels in anti-Christian art and theater, and in various other ways disrespects Christianity and the things it holds sacred. For eight years, during the Christmas season, Planned Parenthood has been promoting Choice on Earth Christmas cards, adapted from the biblical text Peace on Earth. The...
National Public Radio and Public Broadcast Service
National Public Radio (NPR), the taxpayer-funded radio organization, is notorious for its reputed liberal bias. On December 19, 1995, Andrei Codrescu uttered inflammatory anti-Christian remarks in his All Things Considered commentary on NPR. Referring to Christ's rapture of His church, Codrescu said, The evaporation of four million people who believe in this Christian crap would leave this world a better place. Later, when pressed for an apology, Codrescu unrepentantly said he apologized for...
Double Standard
As we can see, in modern America it is taboo to disparage or ridicule any group or to do anything that the most hypersensitive might find offensive. Yet that prohibition does not seem to apply to protect Christians or Christianity. It just depends on whose ox (or pig) is being gored. A billboard in Pensacola, Florida, depicting Jesus Christ with an orange slice above his head instead of a halo, paired with the caption Jesus was the prince of peas, is a good example. The billboard, ostensibly...
Federal Level Rotunda Prayer
The separationists grow even queasier when religious meetings or events take place in the halls of the federal government. When both houses of Congress passed a resolution allowing the Capitol Rotunda to be used for prayer sessions by members of Congress, Americans United for Separation of Church and State (AU) were none too pleased. If members of Congress want a religious service, they can go to their houses of worship, said AU president Barry Lynn. The U.S. Capitol is not a revival tent....
World that Was Very Much Accepting
In 1999, New York's Whitney Museum of American Art, supported by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), was displaying the notorious Piss Christ by Andres Serrano, a close-up photograph of a crucifix submerged in a vat of Serrano's urine. This gem had been around since around 1989. Liberals had no objection to Serrano earning a federal grant with this vulgar work, and, of course, Serrano, ever the professional, was incredulous that people deemed Piss Christ offensive. I didn't think it...
No Christ Banning Jesus from City Council Meetings and State Government
Prayers in the name of Jesus before city council meetings are now being challenged throughout the land. And it doesn't seem to matter to separationists whether or not the prayer is initiated by the city. Just the utterance of Christian blessings at meetings is objectionable. At a November 1999 city council meeting in Burbank, California, the minister ended his invocation prayer with in the name of Jesus Christ. Someone in attendance was offended and filed a suit in the Superior Court of Los...
Making Judges Tolerant
San Francisco is one city that appears to have an anti-Christian bent. To accommodate a local bar association resolution, San Francisco Superior Court judges and commissioners adopted a policy prohibiting judges within their jurisdiction from membership in any organization that discriminates on the basis of sexual orientation by excluding members on the grounds that their sexual orientation renders them 'unclean,' 'immoral,' or 'unfit.' Presiding Judge Ronald Quidachay said, It has long been a...
History Revisionism Excising Christianity
It's one thing to prohibit public schools from endorsing a particular religion, but does that mean that all references to Christian influences in our history should be expunged from our textbooks Federal law is clear that schools may teach about religion, and schools are certainly not required to falsify history and delete Christianity from our heritage. Nevertheless, there has been a conscious decision to sanitize our history textbooks of information concerning the dominant presence of...
Staggering Double Standard
Media elites may not be poor, but they often act in uneducated ways. On CBS's Early Show in June 2000, anchor Bryant Gumbel interviewed Robert Knight of the Family Research Council on the United States Supreme Court decision affirming the Boy Scout Association's constitutional right of association in denying the position of scout leadership to homosexuals. Gumbel, thinking the camera was off, was caught mouthing what appeared to be his judgment that Knight is a f ing idiot. CBS refused to...
Subversion of School Policy
In addition to forbidding school choirs from singing the Lord's Prayer or other religious songs at graduation ceremonies, some schools restrict the outside activities of their choirs as well. To commemorate the first anniversary of the September 11 massacre, the Central Baptist Church in Sanford, Florida, organized a memorial service honoring the victims of the attacks. The church invited the local school board members, other community leaders, and the general public. The church asked the...
Types of Education
Though education in early colonial America was emphatically religious, it varied in type in different areas of the country. The New England colonies, under the control of the Puritans, developed a compulsory educational system in the early 1600s. People of many different sects, none being dominant, inhabited the Middle Atlantic colonies of New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware. Such pluralism made common schools undesirable, and parochial schools sprang up to accommodate the various...
Discrimination by Public Facilities
In Kern County, California, the County Parks and Recreation Department charged religious groups-mainly Christian church groups-an hourly fee to use a county-owned facility, while allowing other community groups to use the structure for free. The New Life Assembly, a Christian congregation located in Delano, California, filed a suit seeking equal access to the county facilities and to stop discrimination against religious groups. No organization should be penalized because it has a religious...
No Ministering to Prisoners
The Christian-purging mentality has also manifested itself in objections to faith-based Christian charities. It doesn't matter if the state doesn't favor faith-based charities over secular ones a complete ban is demanded. Faith Works is a faith-based organization that ministers to prison inmates, providing treatment and rehabilitation for those addicted to alcohol and illegal drugs. The Wisconsin Department of Correction's parole conditions sometime include attending treatment programs for drug...
Military Honor Guard
Of all the prohibitions against God in the public arena, perhaps none is as inappropriate as the one involving prayers at funeral services on government property. At no time is prayer a more comforting influence, yet bogus church state concerns once again have swallowed the free exercise rights of participants. Patrick Cubbage, a fifty-four-year-old Vietnam combat veteran and retired Philadelphia policeman, worked as a military honor guardsman at Brigadier General William C. Doyle Veterans...
No Easter Good Friday DustUp
Governmental deference to the Easter tradition causes separationists similar anxiety. In Monona, Wisconsin, for example, city officials made the audacious decision to close the public library and City Hall offices on Good Friday afternoon-partly because the library staff has a half-day off under their union contract. The library was only closed from noon to 3 P.M.-some Christians traditionally observe Jesus' crucifixion during this period-and City Hall was closed the entire afternoon. Monona...
The Clash of Homosexual Rights with Religious Freedom
It is a mistake to view some of these changes in the law expanding homosexual rights in a vacuum, because they often come at the expense of religious freedom. A case involving a Christian doctor and a lesbian makes the point. Guadalupe Benitez of San Diego wanted to have a baby, but faced two immediate obstacles. She is a lesbian and had fertility problems. Her health care provider referred her to the North Coast Women's Care Medical Group (NCWMG), reportedly the only OB-GYN provider under her...
No Ten Commandments
The struggle of Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore for the free exercise of religion in respect to the Ten Commandments is part of a national campaign to resist separationists trying to restrict the influence of these universal norms on American life. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and other separationist groups have been waging a vigorous campaign against such displays. In November 2001, the ACLU of Kentucky simultaneously sued four Kentucky counties-Garrard, Grayson,...
Anti Religion Dress Codes
The anti-religious bias in the private sector even extends to dress codes. Western Newspapers, Inc., of Prescott Valley, Arizona, prohibited one of its employees from wearing offensive clothing. What was offensive Two polo shirts with small embroidered religious symbols, one a fish reading Jesus and the other an American Bald Eagle reading, Isaiah 40 31. In another such example, Cindy Dunn of Springville, Alabama, filed a lawsuit for religious discrimination against a Target store in...
Sex Education
WITH ALL THE PROBLEMS ACCOMPANYING teenage sexual activity, one would think our education establishment would err on the side of discouraging promiscuous sex. In addition to student pregnancy and the escalation in sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), a recent Heritage Foundation study reveals that sexually active teenagers are far more prone to depression and likely to commit suicide than those who refrain from sex. Yet sex education is captive to another agenda. It is another tool being used...
Conclusion
The War against Christianity in education isn't limited to the K- 12 public schools. Battles are also raging on university campuses throughout America. Academia is dominated by administrators and professors who are often hostile to Christianity and the Christian worldview. Our finest education institutions are sometimes so preoccupied with indoctrinating students that true academic freedom and inquiry are lost in the process. Just like our public grade schools and high schools, our colleges...
PC Attack on American History AntiChristian PC Culture
Once a symbol of America's faith heritage, Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts, is now saturated with political correctness. No longer are vacationing families treated to stories of the Pilgrims who were on a mission to gain religious freedom. Instead of being touted as the cradle of American democracy as it was once, the site has been transformed into a city ashamed of its past. On the grounds is a new monument plaque that documents the devastating effect of Christianity on America, the Pilgrims'...
Limbaugh
How Liberals are Waging War Against Christianity All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast....
Humanism
To UNDERSTAND THE SECULAR VALUES the education establishment is actively promoting in our public schools, we need to review the humanistic movement in America that began in the nineteenth century. In 1876, former rabbi Dr. Felix Adler helped to establish the Society for Ethical Culture in New York City. This led to many other such societies that were later unified in the American Ethical Union, also founded by Adler, in 1889. The American Ethical Union was a seedbed for what would become...
Catholic Bashing TV
While evangelical Christians are often singled out for ridicule by Hollywood, a strong case could be made that Catholics are targeted every bit as much, even more, some would argue. To their credit, a number of Catholics and Catholic organizations, such as the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, led by William Donohue, have done a thorough job monitoring anti-Catholic discrimination. Each year the league compiles a report on anti-Catholicism, which documents the ongoing saga....
More Important Subjects
It's not just Christianity per se that is given short shrift. Our founding fathers are also in disfavor with the popular culture and so are sometimes written out of history or downplayed to the point of ignoring their contributions. As Dr. Paul Vitz demonstrated, history and social studies, along with other subjects, are manipulated in public schools to conform to the ideological bent of the education establishment. The New Jersey Department of Education recently omitted America's founding...
Grand Democratic Strategy
Readers of the Houston Chronicle may think they know where this is all going to go-especially after the Chronicle covered a group called the Texas Faith Network (TFN), an organization opposed to fundamentalist theology and activism in the education and political arenas. At a TFN conference in Houston, participants concluded that the true enemy in the war on terrorism is, as you might have guessed, religious fundamentalism. Newsweek's Howard Fineman caused quite a stir in some circles when he...
Academic Freedom and Tolerance Porn
Pretty much anything is a legitimate subject of academic inquiry on college campuses, besides Christianity. James Madison University, for example, held a SexFest, which featured such enlightening endeavors as a demonstration of how to put on a condom when drunk. At many universities, pornography has been elevated to a noble discipline inside the classroom. Even so-called Christian-based universities, like Wesleyan in Middletown, Connecticut, have degenerated into this practice. Wesleyan offered...
God Better Not Bless America
Not just purely religious expressions are forbidden on school grounds, but anything-words, symbols, or messages-that can be associated with Christianity. When Breen Elementary School in Rocklin, California, placed the message God Bless America on the school marquee after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the ACLU accused the school of committing a clear violation of the California and United States constitutions, as well as the California Education Code. It must be replaced...
Education and the Constitution
The subject of education is notably absent from the body of the Constitution and was mentioned only once in the debates of the Constitutional Convention and then only with the issue of whether a national university should be established at the seat of government. The likely reason is that education was still largely a private issue, with exceptions, and under the control of the church. Thus, under the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution, the matter of education was left to the states....
George Washington
Secularists have frequently leveled the charge that George Washington was a Deist. If the father of this nation wasn't a Christian, they reason, we would be hard-pressed to demonstrate that America itself has Christian roots. Again, the facts resoundingly refute the revisionists on this point. The skeptics refer to Washington's generic references to Providence rather than to Christ as proof of his non-Christianity. But that is selective reporting at its most egregious. Washington was a...
Nancy Pearcey
Christians are called to be missionaries to their world, and that means learning the language and thought forms of the people we want to reach. In America, we don't need to learn a new language, but we do have to understand the thought forms of our culture in order to communicate effectively. The most significant change in modern times is a divided view of truth-which means that challenges to Christianity come in two different forms. On one side, there's postmodern relativism, where nothing is...
Judicial Appointees
One of the most contested battlegrounds involving Christians in public service has been the president's nomination of Christian conservative lawyers to the federal bench. The Senate has the constitutional power of advice and consent over presidential judicial appointments. In recent years, Senate Democrats on the Judiciary Committee have adamantly opposed conservative nominees and, particularly, conservative Christian ones. In many cases, opposition is so fierce that Democrats won't agree to...
The Prayer Police
For most people, the rising wall of separation wasn't apparent until the Supreme Court outlawed state-sponsored prayer in public schools in Engel v. Vitale (1962). The problem arose when the New York Board of Regents tried to compose an innocuous, nondenominational prayer that could be recited in New York public schools. The text of the prayer was simply, Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon Thee, and we beg Thy blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers and our Country....
Public Appointees
The framers, of course, never intended to erect an absolute wall of separation between church and state. And to the extent they did prohibit the intermixture of government and religion, the ban was intended to work only one way The federal government was barred from establishing a national church. Under no interpretation of the First Amendment, however, are individuals who happen to be religious prohibited from serving in government or from engaging in politics, directly or indirectly. This...
New England Colonies
As Calvinists, the New England Puritans believed that education was a principal avenue through which children would become conversant with Scripture. They also considered it essential for society to achieve social and religious stability and to develop a particularly well-read clergy. In 1636, John Harvard, a godly Gentleman and a lover of Learning, established Harvard College to raise up a class of learned men for the Christian ministry so that the tongues and arts might be taught and learning...
Hinduism Mother Earth
Pumsy and DUSO aren't the only vehicles for injecting nontraditional values into our public schools. In White Plains, New York, in 1999, a group of Roman Catholic parents sued the Bedford School District for introducing New Age themes in the schools. One complaint was that a third grade teacher asked students to make worry dolls during a lesson on India. Some believe that worry dolls can ward off evil spirits. Another objection was that the teacher asked the children to make paper...
Congressional State and Local Chaplains
Not even chaplains are safe from the chilling world the separationists are trying to create, as seen when a Sacramento atheist brought a lawsuit seeking to declare congressional chaplains unconstitutional. This man might be dismissed as a renegade crank, except for one thing. The man is Michael Newdow, the same man who single-handedly succeeded in removing God from the Pledge of Allegiance and who now objects to Congress's use of chaplains, because he sees it as governmental endorsement of...
President George W Bush
Secularists have been particularly bothered by President George W. Bush's open professions of his Christian faith. Their noticeable concern first arose during one of the early presidential debates in 1999, when the moderator asked the candidates to identify their favorite political philosopher. Quite spontaneously and unflinchingly, Mr. Bush responded, Jesus Christ, because he changed my life. Following the debate, certain members of the media were highly critical of Bush's injection of Christ...
No Cross Getting Cross over the Cross
Crosses on public property have been common in America throughout history, and only recently have they been characterized as offensive as part of the cleansing of all things Christian from the public square. In the early 1930s, San Francisco erected a 103-foot-high by 39-foot-wide cross on city land atop Mt. Davidson, the area's highest point. The monument was dedicated in an Easter Sunday ceremony in which President Franklin Roosevelt participated by way of a telegram. The cross became a focal...
The Battle for the Academy
WHILE ALMOST ALL OF AMERICA'S FIRST COLLEGES and universities, including Harvard and the other Ivy League schools, were founded as Christian institutions, today secular liberals who are openly hostile to Western civilization, traditional values, and Christianity dominate their campuses. Just as with the teachers in our public schools, university professors inject their biases into their classrooms. There is hardly any pretense of values-neutrality, as secularists present their indoctrinating...
Suppressing Christian Speech at School The Anti HarassmentSubterfuge
As we've seen, the gay and lesbian lobby has been quite successful in securing tolerance for itself and intolerance against Christians, particularly in public schools. The lobby pushes anti-harassment policies, which are deceptively titled because they do more to chill politically incorrect speech disapproving of homosexual behavior than to prevent harassment. Under these policies, students who express their opposition to homosexual behavior are subject to punishment. Pennsylvania State...
Professors on the Attack
One would think that, of all people, university professors would be guardians of academic freedom and tolerance for the diversity of ideas in the classroom. But the reality on campus is quite different. Usually the educational experience is centered in the classroom, and classrooms, of course, are under the near-dictatorial control of professors, many of whom use their classrooms as controlled settings in which to impose their anti-Christian bigotry on sometimes unsuspecting young students....
The War in Our Public Schools
Discrimination against Christians and the suppression of Christian religious expression pervade our society, and its perpetrators are legion. This survey begins by examining our country's education system, for two reasons. First, modern misinterpretations of the First Amendment's Establishment Clause-Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion-are often rooted in Everson v. Board of Education,1 1947 Supreme Court case dealing with public funds and education. Second,...
Religion Disqualifies Scholarship
The same Christian beliefs that disqualify football coaches can also make students ineligible for scholarships. Michael Nash, a junior at Cumberland College in Williamsburg, Kentucky, received a Kentucky Educational Excellence scholarship based on academic achievement and college board scores. That is, he thought he received one until the school notified him otherwise in October 2002, having discovered that he would be majoring in philosophy and religion. Regulations prevented the state from...
The Separatists and the Puritans
By the early seventeenth century, England, under James I, had developed into a land of acute religious intolerance. The church governing body became increasingly concerned over two fanatical movements, the Separatists and the Puritans. The Puritans were the much larger group, but were perceived as a lesser threat to church authority because they merely wanted to purify the church from within. The Separatists were a smaller group that began as a congregation under Pastor James Robinson in...
The Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause
The two religion clauses of the First Amendment appear at the beginning of the Amendment. Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion (the Establishment Clause) or prohibiting the free exercise thereof (the Free Exercise Clause). As constitutional scholar George Goldberg stated, It was equally agreed that, just as the federal government should be prohibited from telling people how to worship, it should be prohibited from telling them how not to worship. The framers had a...
Rejecting the Unique American Culture
Bradley Thompson, chairman of the Department of History and Political Science at Ashland University in Ohio, attended the annual meeting of the American Historical Association, the largest organization of academic historians in America. Thompson said that what he saw and heard shocked him. The ideas expressed at this conference, he noted, were utterly subversive of American culture and values and will eventually make their way into your child's classroom. He said there were over 200 panels,...
The Pro Life Taboo
While Christian expression is in disfavor in certain circles, so are views grounded in Christian principles, such as pro-life advocacy. And this manifests itself in contexts other than opposition to judicial and executive branch nominees who are pro-life. Donald J. Grant, a medical ultrasound technician in Minnesota, has sued his employer, Fairview Health Services of Minneapolis, for failing to accommodate his religious beliefs as required by the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The action is based on...
Fueling the Agenda Postmodern Hogwash
Sokal's experiment and findings are a fitting lament for the deplorable moral and academic condition of many of our college campuses, which is the byproduct of the American cultural elite's rejection of absolute truths and traditional values in favor of postmodern relativism. Sokal is not exaggerating about this growing tendency on many campuses to reject the very concepts of truth and falsity. Bridgewater State College in Massachusetts offers a history course in which a number of books are...
The Constitution
As we have seen, biblical principles, more than any other influence, inform the United States Constitution. As much as I love, esteem and admire the Greeks, I believe the Hebrews have done more to enlighten and civilize the world. Moses did more than all of their legislators and philosophers, said John Adams. Between the time of the signing of the Mayflower Compact in 1620 and the drafting of the United States Constitution in 1787, New England Christians wrote some one hundred different...
The Politics of the NEA
The gay agenda has received quite a boost from the National Education Association (NEA) in recent years. Indeed, the NEA has been instrumental in promoting most of the progressive ideas of the education establishment. The NEA describes itself as America's largest organization committed to advancing the cause of public education Was it advancing that cause when it adopted a plan on February 8, 2002, to make schools safe and hospitable for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered students and...
Muzzling Public Officials Employees and Appointees
THIS SUBJECT MATTER OF THIS CHAPTER overlaps to a degree with that of Chapter Six, because oftentimes the banning of Christian symbols and activities from public property also involves individuals active in some capacity with the public sector. This chapter chronicles the battle against public employees, officials, and appointees, centering on the common thread of anti-Christian prejudice that underlies most of these cases. Public Employees Government Employees We begin with the ACLU, which in...
The Declaration of Independence
The conventional wisdom reinforced by our public schools and universities is that Thomas Jefferson and the founders of this Republic were Deists and Enlightenment humanists whose philosophy was secular and rationalist. According to modern thinking, these ideas, traced further into the past, originated with the Greeks and Romans and when the founders used religious terms or referred to a deity, their terms were generic at best, and at worst, were cynical attempts to dupe and win over the common...
VMI Dinner Prayer
The taboos against state-sponsored prayer have also made their way onto college campuses. The Virginia Military Institute (VMI) in Lexington, Virginia, has conducted dinner prayer ceremonies since the 1950s. During the ritual, the cadets march to dinner in formation, then hear a prayer from a school chaplain, which changes daily. In May 2001, the ACLU filed suit against VMI on behalf of Neil Mellen and Paul Knick, two cadets who objected to the prayer ceremony. The school defended the...
Jesus Freaks Bozos and Losers
Broadcast media mogul Ted Turner has become notorious for his anti-Christian comments. Although he is the founder of the CNN cable television network, Turner apparently feels no obligation to temper his derisive remarks. And despite the continual contempt he has shown for Christianity, we've not heard a word of protest from the tolerance police for his flagrant intolerance and insensitivity. In a speech at a United Nations peace summit on August 29, 2000, Turner openly denigrated his Christian...
Hollywoods Negative Slant
But it's not just what Hollywood does for Islam that concerns many observers. It's also how Tinseltown negatively portrays Christians, many of whom were offended by the controversial movie The Last Temptation of Christ because of its irreverent and heretical presentation of Christ as sinful and lustful, of the apostle Paul as a liar, and of Judas Iscariot as a hero. But since the release of that film in the late 1980s, Hollywood has arguably become even more militant and disrespectful toward...
Harvard Students Fear of
With all the anti-Christian, anti-conservative propaganda disseminated by professors in the classroom and through other aspects of campus life, not to mention the media and the dominant culture, many college students develop a pronounced aversion to Christianity and traditional values. Thus molded, they follow the example of their teachers and become fully capable of waging war on their own against any of their peers who have the audacity not to submit to the status quo. Consider some students...
Christian Friendliness Frowned Upon
When corporations, on the other hand, express a friendlier attitude toward Christianity, they are often subjected to severe criticism from tolerant forces in society. One television producer in Boca Raton, Florida, sued her employer, asserting that the company's stuffing of Scripture into pay envelopes and holding Bible study sessions in the office created a religiously hostile workplaces' An openly lesbian city employee of Oakland, California, sued her personnel director for announcing at his...
John Ashcroft
That Attorney General John Ashcroft has been a thorn in the side of anti-Christian groups became obvious during his controversial Senate confirmation hearings, and criticism of him only intensified after he took office. The outspoken Christian beliefs of Ashcroft, son of a Pentecostal preacher, have rankled his detractors, so when he began conducting Bible study and prayer sessions at his office in the justice Department (though not during work hours) his opponents fell on him anew. The...
No Christmas Banning the Holiday
One of the truly hot-button issues involving a Christian presence on government property concerns Christmas celebrations and displays. Ditsy Carmen Suarez, a resident of Miami-Dade County, Florida, noticed during the 2002 Christmas season a prominent holiday display at the Miami-Dade County Permit and Inspection Center when she entered the building. She was surprised to discover that, while a Jewish symbol and one celebrating Kwanzaa were on display, Christian symbols were conspicuously absent....
Death Education
Death education is another avenue through which certain favored spiritual influences have been infiltrating public schools. Tara Becker is a former student of Columbine High in Littleton, Colorado, the school where the horrible student-on-student mass murder occurred. At a pro-family conference in 1985, Becker told of her exposure to death education at Columbine. According to Jayne Schindler, a conference attendee, Tara explained that the subject of death was integrated into many of the courses...
Americas Liberty at the Crossroads
THE GREAT AMERICAN STATESMAN Patrick Henry said in his later years, Oh, how wretched should I be at this moment, if I had not made my peace with God. On his deathbed he affirmed his Christian faith to his doctor with even greater conviction, poignantly recognizing that Christianity had been under constant attack but always emerged victorious. Doctor, said Henry, I wish you to observe how real and beneficial the religion of Christ is to a man about to die I am, however, much consoled by...
State Endorsement of Non Christian Values and Hypocrisy in Our Culture
As WE'VE SEEN, SEPARATIONISTS OBJECT to the slightest scintilla of Christianity in the public sector (and the private sector). But they either overlook or actively encourage the state's endorsement of certain secular values they deem worthy, from the homosexual rights agenda to the precepts of radical feminism-including a woman's unfettered right to terminate her pregnancy-on to the promotion of antiChristian obscenity masquerading as art. When the smoke from the often cacophonous debate that...
Prayer Free Pomp and Circumstance
Even under conservative Chief Justice Rehnquist-though not because of him-the Supreme Court has added further restrictions on school prayer. In Lee v. Weisman (1992), the court, in a 5-4 decision, held that it is unconstitutional for public schools to include prayers given by clergy at their official graduation ceremonies. In this case, the principal, Robert E. Lee, had made the decision that a prayer should be given and selected the clergy member who was to deliver the prayer. That was too...
Hollywood Bias
Sanitizing and Excusing Violence by Islamic Extremists The mean-spiritedness that characterizes so much of the news media's treatment of Christianity is also on display in Hollywood, where, among other things, we again see a sanitized treatment of radical Islamic violence. Author and movie critic Michael Medved pointed out that Hollywood's latest crop of terrorist movies depicted terrorists as anything but Islamic fanatics bent on killing Americans and destroying the United States. In the movie...
Local Level
We begin at the local level, with events surrounding a public housing development in New York City in the wake of September 11. Following the terrorist attacks, the American people forged a stronger bond than any in recent memory. In seeking to help the people in New York City deal with their shock and grief, many religious leaders came forward to offer spiritual guidance, counseling, and assistance. Pastor Joan Daily, a longtime resident of a public housing development in Woodside in Queens,...
From the Halls of Government
If prayer and Bible studies in public housing authorities and government-owned recreational centers in towns and cities agitate secularists, such meetings in the halls of state government really make them nervous. In February 2003, Alabama Governor Bob Riley, his cabinet members, and senior staff began voluntary Bible studies each Tuesday morning in the governor's office in the capitol building. Riley said he got the idea while serving in the United States Congress, where many congressmen...
Demoting Abstinence
In 1997, Louisiana Governor Mike Foster began the Governor's Program on Abstinence, in which he authorized the expenditure of 1.6 million of federally allocated money per year for five years to abstinence-only sex education programs aiming to lower the state's teenage pregnancy rate. The money was made available from the federal government through the 1996 Welfare Reform Act. The Louisiana ACLU went ballistic, charging that the abstinence programs were Christian-oriented and that spending...
Promoting the Gay Agenda
It is no secret that gay activists are promoting the homosexual agenda in schools, with the idea that a transformation of students' attitudes about the behavior will lead not only to its acceptance in our society, but perhaps even an increase in the number of practicing homosexuals. Activists have developed marketing strategies to accomplish their aims, such as conversion. Paul Rondeau, a doctoral student at Regent University, explained that one method to convert children into accepting the gay...
Separation of Church and Wall Street
Like their public sector counterparts, private sector employers are also guilty of anti-Christian discrimination. Moreover, many private corporations choose to police themselves by cleansing from their products and corporate culture anything that speaks of God. Federal law requires that employers reasonably accommodate the sincerely held religious beliefs of their employees, unless they can demonstrate such accomodations will cause them undue hardship. But in Lodi, California, a company fired a...
Dr Ravi Zacharias
Our culture does preach tolerance as among the highest virtues. And yet it is intolerant of Christianity just as it lashes out at hypocrisy as the worst vice, and can be hypocritical in its own deductions based on the worldview that it assumes. But to be tolerant of something is not the same thing as believing something that is tolerated to be true. Rightly understood, the willingness to coexist with counter-perspectives is the best use of the term. Yet a person generally uses tolerance to...
Yo Mamas Last Supper
Our popular culture is often anti-Christian, and the government itself at all levels sometimes gets in the act-with total disregard for the usual hypersensitivity to church state involvement. The Brooklyn Museum, for example, is no stranger to controversy involving antiChristian expression. In 2001, it placed on display a work of art known as Yo Mama's Last Supper a color photograph by Renee Cox, a Jamaican-born Roman Catholic, depicting twelve black men and a nude woman at Christ's Last...
Jesus Pro Choice
In this vein, Reverend Mark Bigelow, a clergy advisor for Planned Parenthood, wrote a letter on November 22, 2002, to Bill O'Reilly, host of Fox News Network's The O'Reilly Factor. Even as a minister, said Bigelow, I am careful what I presume Jesus would do if he were alive today, but one thing I know from the Bible is that Jesus was not against women having a choice in continuing a pregnancy. Jesus was for peace on earth, justice on earth, compassion on earth, mercy on earth, and choice on...
Wards of the State
One of the problems of public education is that it inevitably teaches values and all too often those values are not those of the parents but of education bureaucrats whose values and ideas can be very different from what parents want for their children. The great British historian Christopher Dawson noted this as a growing trend of the twentieth century and expressed it eloquently and sadly in these words M odern education and propaganda give the community such control over the thought and...
Homosexual Seminars and Gay Studies
More and more these days, it has become fashionable, if not almost mandatory, for universities to promote the idea that homosexuality is completely normal and that homosexual behavior is exempt from moral evaluation. It's simply an alternative lifestyle as routine and acceptable as heterosexuality. And woe to those who interfere with this message Professor Mike Adams shared his experience of attending a seminar at UNC-Wilmington instructing students on how to better display sensitivity toward...
Unequal Access
In 1984 Congress passed a law requiring federally funded high schools to provide equal access to all noncurricular student-led groups wishing to meet on school grounds. The law is based on Wid mar v. Vincent 1981 , a Supreme Court case that prohibited publicly funded universities from discriminating against religious groups in the use of campus facilities. It is a matter of equal treatment if the university opened its facilities to some groups, it had to for religious ones. The court didn't...
The Genesis of the Wall of Separation Everson v Board of Education
In the mid-1940s, New Jersey resident Arch Everson filed a lawsuit against Ewing Township to prevent state tax revenues from being allocated to transport parochial students to their Catholic high school in Trenton. This lawsuit culminated in the landmark Supreme Court case of Everson v. Board of Education 1947 . The court, ironically, given the legacy of the case, denied Everson's claim, but it did so in language that proved to be the best weapon ever handed to those looking to strip...
Public Sector Attacks
Targeting Churches-Voting, Zoning, and Other Issues One weapon used with increasing frequency by opponents of religious liberty is zoning law. The government wields enormous power in its decisions concerning how communities shall be organized and in determining whether to allow certain activities and to criminalize forbidden conduct. The power to enact zoning laws includes the power to license activities. Through a concerted effort of groups such as the American Planning Association, the...
Local Zoning Laws Against Individuals
Local zoning laws are also used against private individuals seeking to conduct Bible studies and prayer meetings within the confines of their homes, even though zoning authorities normally exercise no such restrictions on non-religious meetings. Art and Norma Ellison of Marietta, Georgia, regularly hosted prayer meetings at their home on Friday evenings for six to eight people. Most of the attendees parked in the Ellisons' driveway and the meetings were neither noisy nor disruptive. The City...
Federal Attacks
Muzzling Christian Pastors and other IRS Suppression of Christian Expression It's no surprise that extreme separationists would object to the public expression of religious views by Christian public officials. But how about the reverse situation pastors offering their political opinions from the pulpit Does the so-called separation of church and state require pastors not to engage in the political arena Is it improper for them to touch on subjects involving politics Of course not-the U.S....
Samaritans Purse to Baghdad
The Reverend Franklin Graham, son of the Reverend Billy Graham, sparked controversy following the September 11 terrorist attacks by characterizing Islam as a very evil and wicked religion during an interview with NBC. In a later Wall Street Journal column Graham sought to clarify his comments, saying he was not contending that Muslims are evil people because of their faith. But I decry the evil that has been done in the name of Islam, or any other faith-including Christianity. He added that the...
Welcome to Human Sacrifice
That's essentially what an elementary school in Pleasantville, Pennsylvania, said, when it organized a school performance entitled Bizarre Bazaar in which third, fourth, and fifth graders were to participate in dramatic re-creations of Aztec human sacrifice. Parents were appalled that human sacrifice would be portrayed in school theater for young, impressionable students. Keith Klinger, one of the objecting parents, said he was very disappointed that those in charge didn't see anything wrong...
Behind the Agenda Left Wing Bias
Some universities have a distorted idea of academic freedom. At the University of South Carolina USC , so-called Guidelines for Classroom Discussion have been established in one required course for a degree in Women's Studies . The guidelines, which set the ground rules for classroom discussion in Women's Studies 797 Seminar in Women's Studies, require students, as a condition of participating, to acknowledge that racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, and other institutionalized forms of...
