Part 2

The History of Religion in Our Schools

Jim Bramlett

The subject of religion in our public schools is one of debate and controversy. It did not use to be so.

It was unthinkable to our Founding Fathers that the Bible and Christian teachings would ever be removed from the schools. At the time, the Bible was the principle textbook in schools, and other textbooks drew upon its truths to educate the young. In fact, Fisher Ames, the actual writer of the final version of the First Amendment, later wrote that the Bible must be kept as the number one textbook. He said that the Bible was the source of morality and behavior in America. Similar testimonies from others are endless. Biblical principles permeated public life.

Benjamin Rush, another Founding Father, signer of the Declaration of Independence and who served in the administrations of three presidents (Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and John Adams), wrote that if the Bible is ever removed from the schools, we would suffer from an explosion of crime! Spoken two centuries ago, Rush was amazingly prophetic.

Our country is experiencing a frightening 40year trend in social breakdown. We are engulfed in a tidal wave of immorality and violence. Surely, evil has been with us since the Garden of Eden. But evil's statistics in the United States were relatively flat until around 1962. That's when the trend lines started up, dramatically, and we started downhill.

The official charts tell an astonishing story. While they show occasional blips of improvement, the trend of teenage unwed pregnancies, teenage sexually transmitted diseases, teenage suicide rate, divorces, and couples living together out of wedlock, has exploded.

Crime has skyrocketed, with random, drive-by killings now common. One major city experienced 22 murders in just one weekend (they averaged 6.6 corpses a day from violence). Prisons are overflowing, pouring criminals back to the streets. And there is the abortion holocaust of some 40 million lives, and the AIDS scourge -- both caused mostly by promiscuous sex. Plus, there is the explosion in drug use.

Not all charts went up; one plummeted -- education quality. Now many public (government) high school graduates cannot even read their own diploma.

Why 1962? Why did the stats begin a sharp change? What started our country on the slippery slope to a national hell, arguably a worse crisis than the Civil War?

Consider 1962 was the year that the Supreme Court declared God unconstitutional, and that He had no place in our public schools. Violating two centuries of legal precedent and tradition, the Court delivered, with Engel v. Vitale, a ruling separating Christian principles from education for the first time in history. It removed prayer from our schools.

The prayer that caused the great controversy was a simple, nonsectarian, 22-word prayer. Take a look at it and consider what this nation has lost since its words were declared illegal and banned "Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence on thee and we beg thy blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers and our country." America desperately needs an answer to that missing prayer.

"God, we do not want you in our schools. Stay out!" This is, in effect, what the highest judicial body in our nation told the Almighty. True, students can still pray privately, but what happened in 1962 was symbolic and reflected national policy toward the God of heaven and all creation.

This nation has offended the Creator of the Universe, who is allowing us to experience just a taste of what life is like without Him. Hell is defined as existence without God. With our choices, we can sample it in this life.

It's almost too bizarre to believe, but it happened. The Supreme Court used only eight words out of context to distort and change two centuries of national tradition and legal precedent. Actually, nothing changed from 1776 until 1947. Then suddenly, with Everson v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court decided to change America all by itself and throw out our religious heritage. They did it by taking only eight words from a letter written by Thomas Jefferson. The letter was to a group of Baptists who were concerned about a rumor that another denomination was about to be made the official national denomination. He wrote to assure them that such would not happen because the First Amendment has erected "a wall of separation between church and state." This, however, was in the context of the entire letter, emphasizing that God's principles would remain in government, but that the government would not run the church.

The Court took these eight words from one letter, not even an official document, and ignored the context of the message, Jefferson's many other words, and the many utterances of other Founding Fathers and all legal precedents, and they contrived a whole new direction for the nation and concept in law "separation of church and state." Translated, in their view, this meant divorcing government from its historic, biblically-based roots and values.

Contrary to the way American citizens have been brainwashed and to what most people consequently believe, the words "separation of church and state" do not appear anywhere in the U.S. Constitution or amendments. (They did appear in the Constitution of the former Soviet Union!) The First Amendment merely states that the Congress shall make no law that establishes a religion, or prohibits its free exercise. The purpose of the First Amendment was to prevent what the Founding Fathers had experienced in Great Britain government control by a single denomination. (By the way, in those days, the word "religion" was synonymous with the phrase "Christian denomination.") The record overwhelmingly proves that they never intended for biblical principles to be excluded from public life.

The Court followed this direction, culminating in the famous 1962 school decision in which there were zero precedents cited. In 1963, they prohibited Bible reading in schools. Then in 1980, the Court ruled that students may not even see a copy of the Ten Commandments! They explained "If the posted copies of the Ten Commandments are to have any effect at all… it will be to induce the school children to read, meditate upon, perhaps… to venerate and obey the Commandments; this is not a permissive objective" (emphasis supplied).

"Thou shalt not steal--thou shalt not kill--thou shalt not commit adultery." Not permissive objectives! Today, thanks to the Supreme Court, the Ten Commandments and the Bible are not allowed in schools and have been replaced by handguns, drugs and condoms. We now have large numbers of diseased, pregnant, illiterate and often dead students the children of America, our future. And many young adults who came from that scene are adrift in life without values and meaning.

Concurrent with the above trend, academia increasingly began to indoctrinate our students with naturalistic/humanistic philosophy that says there is no God, that the world is only a cosmic accident and we a biological accident, that there is no right or wrong, that we are not responsible for our own behavior (someone else, or government, is always to blame), and that life has no meaning. Is it any wonder that many kids do not value life, either in the streets or in the womb, or even their own?

As a nation, we have robbed a whole generation of truth, hope and a meaningful life, and we are paying a tragic price.

It is not too late, but it is late. Shall we continue to sacrifice our children and nation’s future on the altar of religious pluralism and tolerance? Shall we continue to make the great Creator God of the universe only an equal-opportunity god, competing with millions of other would-be gods from the culture of every Third World country?

America has a choice.