If you were the communist leadership of the Soviet Union, and your goal was to eliminate religion from a country of 100 million people, how would you do it? You can’t really force people to stop being religious—because history shows that when you try to coerce religious people into abandoning their faith, you often make them even more devout.
Lenin and his advisers realized they couldn’t simply ban the church, since doing so would only strengthen people’s attachment to it. Instead, they decided to cut off religious education for the young. As long as they could capture the next generation, the old people could believe whatever they wanted. And in many ways, that’s what Americans did as well.
By the 1960s, progressive/secularist pressure succeeded in eliminating prayer and Bible reading from schools across the United States. The claim at the time was that this would make America a truly liberal country, where everyone could believe or disbelieve without feeling pressured. It was supposed to make us freer. It was supposed to make the schools religiously neutral. But the actual consequence was the gradual elimination of the Christian religion from public life – and with it, a much more pernicious form of enslavement to secularist ideology.
One of the key figures in the story of secularizing American education was Madalyn Murray O’Hare, a driving plaintiff in the case that finally ended the use of the Bible in American schools. She was, by all accounts, one of the most repulsive public figures of the second half of the twentieth century. O’Hare admired communist Russia so much that, before filing her lawsuit, she even tried to emigrate to the Soviet Union. Eventually, the Communist Party advised her that she could do more good for their cause as a litigant in America.
She went on to lead the American Atheists organization, becoming a public figure on talk shows and in magazines as an outspoken and abrasive advocate of atheism. It’s extraordinary to think that something practiced in at least half of the nation’s schools since the country’s founding—the saying of the Lord’s Prayer along with Bible readings —was eliminated almost single-handedly by a deranged and angry Marxist woman. The questions we must ask and answer are, “Why did we allow this to happen?” and “What will we do about it?”
The Christian faith is personal but not private. Christian faith played a crucial role in the formation of our nation. And the exclusion of Christian faith from our public institutions has not resulted in neutrality – it has made secularism the established religion in our land. There is no neutrality, and while secularism camouflages itself as neutral, it is actually a religious perspective, a totalizing humanistic worldview. Christian parents must recognize that the public schools are our enemy. They propagate another religion, a rival worldview. While we can work to re-Christianize the schools, in the meantime, we must do all we can to make sure Christian children get a consistently Christian education. We dare not hand our children over to those Marxist indoctrination centers called “public schools.”
While the birth rates of progressives in America have plummeted, their ranks are still growing. How is this possible? They are capturing the children of Christians, and they are doing so through the public school system. “Progressives reproduce in the classroom rather than the bedroom,” as the saying goes. Christians parent who send their kids to public schools thinking these are “our schools,” or thinking the schools are neutral, are playing the fool.
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