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...
Christians as Persecutors
The media sometimes take indirect potshots at Christianity and Christians as well. In an unsigned editorial discussing the discovery of the possible burial box of James, the brother of Jesus, the Boston Globe gratuitously referred to Christianity as a persecutor of Judaism. The artifact, said the Globe, publicized earlier this month in an archeology review, recalls a time when Christianity was a sect of Judaism, not its persecutor Scholars have rediscovered James and are placing him at the...
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...
Private Sector Attacks Purging the Private Sector
It's not always constitutional concerns over government involvement with religion that lead to slights against Christian references and symbols. The anti-Christian virus has leaped from the government to the private sector, infecting much in its path. From our politically correct culture to the offices of corporate America, the private sector is well on its way to adopting a hostile attitude toward Christianity, having bought into the conventional wisdom that a religion of such intolerance is...
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...
Hanging
People often say that the United States Supreme Court has banned displays of the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms. But that's not quite accurate. In Stone v. Graham (1980), the court held that states may not require that the Ten Commandments be displayed in public classrooms, as that would violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. It did not go so far as to say that public school classrooms would not be permitted to hang such displays on their own, though lower courts...
Released Time Programs
Hundreds of public schools across the nation allow students, with permission from their parents, to take Christ-centered Bible instruction off campus during the school day. Such arrangements, known as released-time programs, have been around since 1914, when Gary, Indiana, school superintendent William Wirt originated the concept. It has been estimated that as many as 600,000 students in thirty-two states participate in these programs. The United States Supreme Court held, in Zorach v....
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...
Bashing Christianity
The double standard against Christians comes into yet clearer focus when we realize that bashing Christianity per se is also permissible. Well-known Princeton bioethicist and animal rights advocate Peter Singer makes no secret of his disdain for Christianity. He regards with the contempt the biblical message that human beings are superior to other animals and life forms, which he calls speciesism. One of the things that causes a problem for the animal movement, said Singer, is the strong strain...
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...
Muzzling Freedom of Religious Expression
In 2001, the city of El Cajon, California, ordered the Foothills Christian Fellowship to take down its banner advertising summer Vacation Bible School because it didn't have a special permit, yet allowed the display of other temporary banners throughout the city without requiring any special permits. The only three citations given for violations of the ordinance were against Vacation Bible School banners. The City of El Cajon is quickly deserving a reputation of outright hostile discrimination...
Southern Colonies
Various factors, such as its agricultural dependence and plantation culture, deterred a strong sense of community in the South. These factors, along with a sparse population spread over a wide geographical area, worked against the development of formal education and led to the frequent use of tutors, mostly for the children of the elite. This was in marked contrast to New England, where education was largely driven by community cohesiveness and the Calvinist belief that Christian training was...
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...
Mother Teresa An Insult to Womens Rights
Diversity is the mantra of the politically correct, and should be applied across the board, right This brings us to an example of purging so extreme and so absurd that it can be rationally explained only as an act of utter paranoia about Christianity. In this case, the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) was displeased with the decision of the Madison, Wisconsin, Metro system to place Mother Teresa's picture on its April bus pass. Mother Teresa had been chosen, among other reasons, because...
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...
Middle Atlantic Colonies
Society in the Middle Atlantic colonies was extremely pluralistic. Among the various sects were contingents of Dutch Reformed, Anglican, Lutheran, Quaker, Presbyterian, Roman Catholic, and Jewish. And the people came from different nationalities, including English, Dutch, Swedish, French, Danish, Irish, Scottish, and German. Education was under control of the churches here too, but since no single denomination controlled the state, the churches operated their schools independently. The clergy...
Dr D James Kennedy
Well, I think that there's probably pretty general consensus among most knowledgeable people that the one thing that the tolerant cannot tolerate is Christianity, which they would like to brand as being intolerant. It has also been said that tolerance is the last virtue of a degenerate society. I think that many times people don't realize it, but when you begin to allow every kind of immorality and degeneracy and perversion imaginable, the one thing you will not allow is to have anybody...
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...
National Curriculum Standards
Sadly, this bias is reflected in the NCSS's National Standards for Social Studies Teachers. These social studies curriculum standards, ironically, are called Expectations of Excellence and are used by state education authorities throughout the country in formulating their own state standards. They are based on ten themes, such as Time, Continuity, and Change and Global Connections. Disturbingly, as Kay Hymowitz points out, this yawning list of 'performance expectations' includes no American...
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...
Constitution Undergirded by Christianity
The men who established our constitutional system of government firmly believed that the Christian convictions of the body politic were foundational to American freedom. John Adams said, We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other. By this, of course, Adams was not suggesting that Christians aren't...
Hamilton Madison
How about the three authors of the Federalist Papers Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay These three men did as much as any others to ensure ratification of the Constitution through their profound and learned defense of its principles, contained in those writings now known as The Federalist Papers. Listen to Alexander Hamilton I have carefully examined the evidences of the Christian religion, and if I was sitting as a juror upon its authenticity I would unhesitatingly give my...
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'...
Development of Public Education
During the first colonial settlements, American education was decentralized and mostly private-though there was a movement for compulsory education motivated, ironically, by the colonists' belief in the importance of Christian study. But as we'll see, around the middle of the nineteenth century, starting in New England, the nation began to establish publicly run and funded schools. Matthew Brouillette, The Case for Choice in Schooling Restoring Parental Control of Education, The Mackinac Center...
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....
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...
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...
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...
University Administrators Challenging the Dogma
Speaking of academic freedom and tolerance, campus administrations around the country espouse it fervently but somehow cannot extend the principle to professors and others who courageously think outside the secular box. San Francisco State University took the position that a particular biology professor was no longer appropriate as a teacher of introductory biology. Professor Dean Kenyon, a leading national authority in chemical evolutionary theory, committed the unpardonable sin of exposing...
Christian Clubs
Academic intolerance is particularly acute in universities' discrimination against Christian groups on campus. In December 2002, Rutgers University booted from campus the Rutgers InterVarsity Multiethnic Christian Fellowship because the group required-of all outrageous things-that its leaders be Christians. The group became ineligible to receive university funds and was denied permission to meet or operate on school grounds. The university's rationale was that denying non-Christians access to...
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....
The American Revolution
By the early 1760s the Americans had attained de facto independence from Britain. But the British were facing financial difficulties, having amassed an enormous debt fighting the French and Indian War. Consequently, England increased taxes on the colonists, seeking to make up the shortfall. Contrary to the conventional teaching, the colonists were not radicals seeking a revolution. They were British loyalists-they prided themselves in being English-whom the British had backed into a corner...
Biblical Law as Foundational to American
In addition to the Constitution being established on Christian principles, it is also true that much of our law is based on Christian law and morality. The Ten Commandments are the moral and legal foundations of Western civilization, said Professor Israel Drapkin. America's common law tradition can also be traced through English common law back to its roots in biblical revelation. While the Roman law was a deathbed convert to Christianity, wrote law professor John C.H. Wu, the common law was a...
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...
Major Media to Christians Stay Out of Politics
PBS's Bill Moyers is not the only journalist with a dim view of Christians holding positions of political power. Consider the words of former USA Today Supreme Court reporter Tony Mauro in a USA Today op-ed discussing President Bush's nomination of John Ashcroft for U.S. attorney general. Mauro wrote, In John Ashcroft's America, he said in 1999, 'We have no king but Jesus.' But, said Mauro, In the Justice Department it is the Constitution that is king Ashcroft will need to assure the nation...
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,...
Anti Life TV
Network television also gets its digs in against Christians and their values, such as the high regard they place on human life and protection of the unborn. In Absolute Strangers, a 1991 TV movie, Henry Winkler's character seeks a court order to abort his comatose wife's baby to save her life. Then the absolute strangers show up, two firebreathing pro-life intermeddlers, and fight for legal guardianship over the child so that the pregnancy can proceed to term. Though the movie was based on...
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...
Corpus Christi
Many of the attacks on Christianity in art and theater are sponsored by homosexual forces, prompting one theater critic to ask, Why is it that almost all the contemporary American plays that wrestle with religious issues are by and about gay folks One logical explanation would be that homosexuals are determined to undermine the foundations of Christianity in order to legitimize their lifestyle. College campuses, in addition to offering classes and speech codes biased against Christianity,...
An Academic Lampoons Academia
Alan Sokal, a physics professor at New York University concerned about the declining quality of our colleges, decided to conduct his own little controlled experiment to see how far academic standards had deteriorated. His purpose was to see whether a leading North American journal of cultural studies would publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions. The answer, reported Sokal in an article for Lingua...
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...
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...
