But, as Christianity began to die in the West, something else occurred: Western peoples began to stop having children. For the correlation between religious faith and large families is absolute. The more devout a people, whether Christian, Muslim, or Jewish, the higher its birthrate. In New Square, New York, in the first wholly Orthodox Jewish community in the United States, the average family has ten children.3 In Kostroma, Russia, Vladimir Alexeyev, father of a poster family of sixteen children, and his pregnant wife have a home full of icons. “Even before we were believers,” Alexeyev told the AP, “we found meaning in this.”4 In the Baptist state of Texas, the birthrate among whites is higher than among white folks in sybaritic California. Wherever secularism triumphs, populations begin to shrink and die.
In 1999, Pope John Paul II convoked a continental Episcopal Synod to take the pulse of the faith in the Old Continent. The news was not good. Secularism, reported the bishops, “poisons a large section of Christians in Europe. There is a great risk of de-Christianization and paganization of the Continent.”5 Fewer than 10 percent of the young people in Belgium, Germany, and France attend church regularly. There is not a major city in northwest Europe where half the newborns are baptized.
A 1999 Newsweek survey found that 39 percent of the French profess no religion and only 56 percent of the English believe in a personal God.6 In Italy, only 15 percent attended Sunday mass, while in the Czech Republic, Sunday attendance at church barely reaches 3 percent.7 What we are creating, said Czech president Vaclav Havel, is “the first atheistic civilization in the history of mankind.”8 Havel went on to ask:
Could not the whole nature of our current civilization with its shortsightedness, with its proud emphasis on the human individual … and with its boundless trust in humanity’s ability to embrace the universal by rational cognition, could it not all be but the natural manifestation of a simple phenomenon which, in simple terms, amounts to the loss of God.9
But as this new “atheistic civilization” rises in Europe, the peoples needed to sustain it have begun to die. It appears an iron law: Kill a nation’s faith, and its people will cease to reproduce. Foreign armies or immigrants then enter and fill the empty spaces. By de-Christianizing America, the cultural revolution has found a contraceptive as effective as the little pill of Dr. Rock. But how did a nation as “churched” as America and as steeped in traditional Christianity as the United States in the 1950s permit itself to be publicly de-Christianized, almost without a fight?
“AMERICA IS A Christian nation,” Gov. Kirk Fordice famously said back in 1992.10 Before the Mississippi governor sat down, he was being denounced as an intolerant bigot for not using “Judeo-Christian.” Yet, as Gary DeMar writes in America’s Christian History: The Untold Story, the governor was right about America’s origins and first 250 years.
The earliest settlements in America were Protestant enterprises. Jews and Catholics were only tiny minorities. When the author was in parochial school in the 1940s, nuns spoke proudly of how one of fifty-seven signers of the Declaration of Independence was a Catholic: Charles Carroll of Carrollton, Maryland.
In the First Charter of Virginia, the colonists’ declared goal is to “spread the Christian religion to such people as yet live in darkness and miserable ignorance of the true knowledge and worship of God.” “In the name of God, Amen” are the first six words of the Mayflower Compact, which proceeds, “by the grace of Gold … having undertaken for the glory of God and advancement of the Christian faith …” In the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut in 1639, the assembled declared, “The word of God requires that to maintain the peace and union of such a people there should be orderly and decent government established according to God … to preserve the liberty and purity of the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ.”11
Reflecting on this history at a prayer breakfast of the International Council of Christian Leadership in 1954, Chief Justice Earl Warren said:
I believe no one can read the history of our country without realizing that the Good Book and the spirit of the Savior have from the beginning been our guiding geniuses … . Whether we look to the first Charter of Virginia … or to the Charter of New England … or to the Charter of Massachusetts Bay … or to the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut … the same objective is present: a Christian land governed by Christian principles. 12
DeMar establishes the truth beyond refutation. A century before Governor Fordice, the U.S. Supreme Court declared in 1892, “This is a Christian nation.”13 “America was born a Christian nation,” said New Jersey governor Woodrow Wilson in 1911, “born to exemplify that devotion to the elements of righteousness which are derived from the revelations of the Holy Scripture.”14 In 1931, Justice George Sutherland reaffirmed the court’s 1892 decision, calling Americans “a Christian people.”15
At Placentia Bay, where he crafted the Atlantic Charter with Winston Churchill, FDR declared that America was “founded on the principles of Christianity” and led the American and British sailors in singing “Onward Christian Soldiers.”16 In a 1947 letter to Pius XII, Harry Truman affirmed, “This is a Christian nation.”17 In a 1951 Supreme Court decision, Justice William Douglas wrote,”We are a religious people and our institutions presuppose the existence of a Supreme Being.”18 Added Jimmy Carter, “We have a responsibility to try to shape government so that it does exemplify the will of God.”19
The reaction to Fordice—visceral, bristling, hostile—tells us more about our cultural elite than about the beliefs of the Great Silent Majority. But the cultural revolution has been rewriting history and replacing true history with bogus history—that America never was a Christian country and only bigots like Governor Fordice insist on saying so. As for President Carter’s assertion that we have a “responsibility to try to shape government so that it does exemplify the will of God,” that, according to the Supreme Court, is forbidden by the First Amendment. If you wish to reshape American society through law, says the court, you may use as guides the books written by Karl Marx, Rachel Carson, Betty Friedan, or Al Gore, but not the books written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John.
HOW WAS AMERICA de-Christianized? Answer: Tyrannically, and with surprisingly small resistance from a people whose forebears rank among history’s fiercest enemies of undemocratic rule.
Half a century ago, the Supreme Court was captured by judicial ideologues who understood its latent power to reshape society. Using the incorporation clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, the Court asserted a right to impose on the states all the restrictions the Constitution had imposed on Congress. At that point, the Tenth Amendment was dead, and the states of the Union became subject provinces of the Supreme Court.
Where the First Amendment prohibited Congress from making any law “respecting an establishment of religion,” and required Congress to respect the “free exercise” of faith, the Supreme Court reinterpreted the words to justify a preemptive strike on Christianity. All Christian Bibles, books, crosses, symbols, ceremonies, and holidays were ordered out of the public square and public schools. Out went Adam and Eve; in came Heather Has Two Mommies. Out went paintings of Christ ascending into heaven; in came pictures of apes ascending into Homo erectus. Out went Easter; in came Earth Day. Out went Bible teachings about the immorality of homosexuality; in came the homosexuals to teach about the immorality of homophobia. Out went the Commandments; in came the condoms.
Going back fifty years, the Supreme Court has inflicted an almost uninterrupted string of defeats upon the faith of our fathers. In 1948, voluntary religious instruction was outlawed in public schools. In 1962, school prayer went. In 1963, voluntary daily reading from the Bible was declared unconstitutional. In 1980, a Kentucky law that called for posting the Ten Commandments on classroom walls was overturned because the Commandments serve “no secular purpose.” In 1985, Alabama’s “moment of silence” at the start of the school day was declared unconstitutional. In 1989, the Supreme Court ordered a Nativity scene removed from the grounds of the Allegheny County
Courthouse outside Pittsburgh. In 1992, all prayers at high school graduations were prohibited. In 2000, students were forbidden to pray over the loudspeakers at high school games.
Having sat for three decades on the bench, Chief Justice Rehnquist had heard enough and issued a stinging dissent. This Court’s decision, said Rehnquist,
bristles with hostility to all things religious in public life … . Neither the holding nor the tone of the opinion is faithful to the meaning of the Establishment Clause, when it is recalled that George Washington himself, at the request of the very Congress which passed the Bill of Rights, proclaimed a day of “public thanksgiving and prayer to be observed acknowledging with grateful hearts the many and signal favors of Almighty God.”20
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Sensing Christianity was on the run, lower courts began to outdo the Supreme Court. In 1996, the Ninth Circuit ruled that a large cross erected as a war memorial in a public park in Eugene, Oregon, violated the Constitution. In 1999, the Sixth Circuit ordered the Cleveland Board of Education to cease opening its meetings with a prayer, though Congress does every day. The Eleventh Circuit outlawed any invocations, prayers, or benedictions at high school graduations.
Since 1959, Ohio has had as its state motto, “With God, All Things Are Possible.” It is used on state documents and tax forms, and is on a bronze plate in the sidewalk at the entrance to the statehouse. In 2000, a three-judge panel of the Sixth Circuit ordered the motto removed. Why? Because the words come from the New Testament. Even worse, they are Christ’s own words. Had Ohio adopted as a motto Nietszche’s “God is dead” or the line from Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov that states that if God is dead, all things are permissible, that would be fine.
Shock rocker Marilyn Manson once said, “Each age has to have at least one brave individual that tries to bring an end to Christianity, which no one has managed to succeed [sic] yet.”21 Cheer up, Marilyn, the Supreme Court is in your corner. In May 2001, it upheld a U.S. appellate court decision ordering Elkhart, Indiana, to remove a six-foot granite pillar engraved with the Ten Commandments from the lawn of City Hall. The pillar had stood for over forty years. By six to three, the Court refused to hear the town’s appeal. However, a dissenting chief justice pointed out to his colleagues that a portrait of Moses carrying those same Ten Commandments adorns a wall in the Supreme Court’s own courtroom.22
RELIGIOUS RIVALRY is a zero-sum game. Every gain for one faith is a loss for another. The rise of Christianity was recognized as a mortal threat in Jerusalem by Saul of Tarsus, who held the coats of the men who stoned St. Stephen the Martyr. Islam’s conquest of Arabia and North Africa alarmed Christian Europe. The Reformation and the rise of Protestantism were a crisis for Rome. Where communism triumphed, Christians went to the wall. And when secularism was awarded custody of America’s schools, it was a crushing defeat for Christianity.
From kindergarten through twelfth grade, the public schools shape the hearts and minds of America’s children and the future of the nation. This is where children are taught what to believe, what to value, how to think, how to live. Now, Christianity, like some vagrant, has been ordered off the school grounds, another bloodless coup of the revolution. How great a defeat was it? Spend an hour with the Humanist Manifesto of 1973.
You will find there the dogmas that govern what is now taught, and what is no longer taught, in public schools. “Faith in a prayerhearing God … is an unproved and outmoded faith.”23 “Traditional moral codes … fail to meet the pressing needs of today.”24 “Promises of immortal salvation or fear of eternal damnation are both illusory and harmful.”25 “Science affirms that the human species is an emergence from natural evolutionary forces.”26 Children emerge from schools receptive to these ideas, because they have been imparted by their teachers in what was included and what was excluded from classroom discussions where Christianity was an unwelcome intruder.
Secular humanists have not concealed their agenda. Their manifesto asserts a “right to birth control, abortion and divorce,” and adds, “The many varieties of sexual behavior should not in themselves be considered ‘evil.’”27 Freedom “includes a recognition of an individual’s right to die in dignity, euthanasia and the right to suicide.”28 Now that the exorcists of the ACLU have purged Christianity from the public schools, these secularist dogmas are taught as truth to children. Thus, while America remains a predominantly Christian society and country, her public institutions and popular culture have been thoroughly de-Christianized.
REMARKABLY, THIS MANIFESTO was published within months of Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew rolling up a forty-nine-state landslide over the choice of Consciousness III, George McGovern, in the “acid, amnesty, and abortion” campaign of 1972. But despite liberal defeats in 1972, 1980, 1984, 1988, and 1994, the Humanist Manifesto —miles outside America’s mainstream when first published—is being gradually implemented by the Democratic party as Republican resistance fades. On one point, however, the manifesto is deceptive. It asserts that “the separation of church and state and the separation of ideology and state are imperatives.”29 But secular humanism is a faith, the faith of America’s elite, and it is being imposed by the Supreme Court. Perhaps the greatest success of Christianity’s great rival is to have convinced Christians it is not a rival, just ideas reached by reason alone.
Christians have been dispossessed by a militant minority, whose beliefs were alien to Middle America, but which managed to have its allies capture the Supreme Court and impose its agenda by diktat. Whatever may be said against the ACLU, it does not lack for patience and perseverance. As Cervantes said, give the devil his due.
Christians who still believe the Court only created a level playing field for all faiths are whistling past the graveyard. The Court just took their stadium into receivership and turned it over to their rivals. What Christians have lost, they will not get back without a struggle. In When Nations Die, Jim Nelson Black is particularly hard on Evangelicals:
But one of the greatest reasons for the decline of American society over the past century has been the tendency of Christians who have practical solutions to abandon the forum at the first sign of resistance. Evangelicals in particular have been quick to run and slow to stand by their beliefs. In reality, most Christians had already vacated “the public square” of moral and political debate by their own free will, long before civil libertarians and others came forth to drive us back to our churches.30
This may be too harsh, but Christians need a wake-up call if they are not to lose their country, and they need leaders prepared to fight to save it. C. S. Lewis warned against a spirit of compromise that was but a cloak to cover up the nakedness of irresolution and timidity:
As Christians we are tempted to make unnecessary concessions to those outside the Faith. We give in too much … there comes a time when we must show that we disagree. We must show our Christian colours, if we are to be true to Jesus Christ. We cannot remain silent or concede everything away.31
By the twenty-first century, the de-Christianization of our public life was complete. Easter celebrations, Nativity scenes, Christmas carols, and Christian books, stories, pageants, and holidays had all but vanished from public schools and the public square. The schools were no longer run according to the wishes of the parents of the children who attend them, or the taxpayers who sustain them, but according to the dictates of courts imposing the agendas of the ACLU and Humanist Manifesto.
In Republic, Missouri, the ACLU, suing on behalf of a Wiccan witch, managed to get the image of a fish cut out of the city seal because the “symbol is often found in Christian establishments, not non-Christian ones, and … most of the people who wrote letters supporting the fish identified it as a Christian symbol.”32
In May 2001, the ACLU sued the Virginia Military Institute on behalf of two students who wanted to put an end to the saying of grace before evening meals.
The dethronement of God from American public life was not done democratically, it
was done dictatorially, and our forefathers would never have tolerated it. Why did people of a once-fighting faith permit it, when prayer, Christmas carols, Bible reading, and posting the Ten Commandments were backed by huge majorities? Because we live under a rule of judges, Congress is unwilling to confront. If America has ceased to be a Christian country, it is because she has ceased to be a democratic country. This is the real coup d’état.
“Here, sir, the people rule!” Americans once proudly boasted. It is no longer true. We do not live by majority rule in America. We live under the rule of minorities whose vision of what America ought to be is shared by five justices on the Supreme Court, most of whom not one in ten Americans could name.
WITH THE DE-CHRISTIANIZATION of America has come the overthrow of the old moral order based on Judeo-Christian teachings and the establishment of the new moral order of the Humanist Manifesto . Again, this was not done by popular vote, but by court order. Abortion had been a crime; now it is a right. So sayeth the Court. Voluntary school prayer now violates the First Amendment, but nude nightclub dancing no longer does. When Colorado voted in a referendum to stop the legalization of homosexuality, the Supreme Court decided that the motives of the voters were suspect and threw it out.
The Death of the West Page 19