Censorship by Design: Criminalization of Child Evangelism
First Things First, Part 1
Debra Rae | 21 March 2015
Bible literacy and good news
are rare commodities in our postmodern world. Thankfully, light continues to
shine, even in darkness. Since 1937, an interdenominational, nonprofit
organization, Child Evangelism
Fellowship, has reached over 15.6 million children worldwide with clear,
age- appropriate presentation of the Gospel (“Good News”) of Jesus Christ. CEF
has supported 62,393 Good News Clubs all the while helping 609 national
missionaries in 93 countries stay in children’s ministry through the
Sponsor-A-National program.[1]
Compliments of CEF, 190
countries have received nearly twelve million pieces of Gospel literature. Lives
remarkably changed testify to its value, and the Evangelical Council for
Financial Accountability attests to the ministry’s integrity. Nonetheless, CEF
faces formidable “censorship by design” in tireless efforts of secularists to
criminalize child evangelism through after-school clubs. Fashioning
well-meaning CEF volunteers as pawns of the Political Right, Good News Club
antagonists advance their own political agenda in the interest of “a modern
secular democracy” ostensibly envisioned by our nation’s founders.[2]
First Things First: Our
Founding Principles
One such Founding Father,
Patrick Henry was an attorney, orator, and politician in the 1770s. Having served
as first and sixth post-colonial Governor of Virginia, Henry was adamant, "It
cannot be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great nation was
founded, not by religionists, but by Christians; not on religions, but on the
Gospel of Jesus Christ. For this very reason peoples of other faiths have been
afforded asylum, prosperity, and freedom of worship here."[3]
In 1812, Francis Scott Key
echoed Henry’s sentiments adding, "The patriot who feels himself in the
service of God, who acknowledges Him in all his ways, has the promise of
Almighty direction; … he will therefore
seek to establish for his country … the name of a Christian nation." Key
is credited with having written lyrics for our national anthem.[4]
Read the remainder HERE.
Read the remainder HERE.
“A Christian nation” attracts and embraces the
grace of God—as did French Huguenots, Puritans at Plymouth, and devout early
settlers of the new world. Founding principles allowing for religious freedom,
rule of law, free enterprise, and right to private property are firmly embedded
in Bible truth; but the label does not presume each and every founder, settler,
parishioner, and citizen to be “Christian” by faith, nor “godly” by nature.[5]
Notwithstanding, a two-part
work published in 1835 and 1840, Democracy
in America, recounted observations of a famous French statesman and
historian, Alexis de Tocqueville. He observed that Christianity in the United
States reigns “by universal consent” and “without obstacle.” In his view, a
politician attacking Christianity would find himself alone and abandoned by his
constituency.
Tocqueville’s work was
distinguished as "the most comprehensive and penetrating analysis of the
relationship between character and society in America that has ever been
written." He explained the religious aspect of America ”belongs to the
whole nation and to every rank of society. … There is no country in the world where the Christian religion retains a
greater influence over the souls of men than in America.” Its
influence is “powerfully felt over the most enlightened and free nation of the
earth.”
Supreme Law of the Land
Not until he heard her pulpits “aflame with
righteousness” did he grasp the secret of America’s genius and power. “America
is great because America is good,” he opined; and “if America ever ceases to be
good, America will cease to be great.”[6]
Time-and-time again the
Christian underpinning of America has been memorialized through Supreme Court
judgments proclaiming our civilization and its institutions to be emphatically
Christian (Church of the Holy Trinity v.
United States, 1892). In a word, we are “a Christian people” (United States v. Macintosh, 1931) .[7]
Religious
Education (Noah Webster)
Indisputably, education in religion was central
to our Founders. Signer of the Declaration of Independence Benjamin Rush wrote,
"The only foundation for a useful education in a republic is to be laid in
religion. Without this, there can be no virtue and, without virtue, there can
be no liberty; and liberty is the object and life of all republican
governments."[8]
Having begun in 1789, and reaching its peak the
first decade of the 20th century, the Sunday school movement set the
standard for America’s public education movement.[9]
America’s acknowledged father of public
education, Noah Webster proclaimed
the Bible to be her “basic textbook in all fields." Without it, he
warned, "Education is useless." Webster further charged government
with responsibility for disciplining youth “in sound maxims of moral,
political, and religious duties" as contained in the Bible.
In 1832, Noah Webster published his History of
the United States in which he expressed sincere desire that “our citizens
should early understand the genuine source of correct republican principles”—namely,
the Bible. He believed the Christian religion is “one of the first things in
which all children under a free government ought to be instructed.”[10]
·
America’s First Textbook: The Bible
While many textbooks were employed in public
schools, among the most important resources used were the Hornbooks (containing
the Lord’s Prayer), over 500 different catechisms, the New England Primer,
Webster's Blue-Backed Speller based on God’s Word, and McGuffey Readers that, other
than the Bible, "represent the most significant force in the framing of
our national morals and tastes."[11]
The Bible, in fact, was the public school’s
central text, which Patrick Henry praised as "worth all other books, which
have ever been printed." For good reason, the New Haven Code of 1655
required that children be made "able duly to read the Scriptures … and in
some competent measure to understand the main grounds and principles of
Christian Religion necessary to salvation."
Over decades, the United States Supreme Court
obliges teaching what the Bible alone can teach, a pure system of morality (Vidal v. Girard’s Executors, 1844).
Traditionally, the Court noted, organized education in the West was church
education, primarily study of the Word and ways of God (McCollum v. Board of Education, 1948).[12]
Vociferous opponents of Child Evangelism
Fellowship ignore that the Supreme Court ruled secularism, not Christianity, as
unconstitutional (Engle v. Vitale,
1962, as quoted in Stone v. Graham). Given
that the history of man is inseparable from the history of religion, facilities
of government cannot offend religious principles (School District of Abington Township v. Schempp, 1963).[13]
Eerily prophetic, Benjamin Rush warned that removing the Bible from public schools
would result in an explosion in crime. Even so, the tide turned. In 1850,
Horace Mann sold America on the fanciful notion that, in one hundred years,
secular education would solve crime and poverty; thereafter, reform under the
likes of Jonathan Edwards and George Whitfield took a dive, sadly so.[14]
Secular
Education (John Dewey)
In the 19th and
early 20th centuries, the liberal theology movement captivated the
mainstream. Although secularism evolved slowly, it effectively fashioned John
Dewey’s Progressive Education Movement. Organized in 1919, the Progressive
Education Association denounced rote learning, recitation, and conventional
textbooks. Eventually, it promoted affective and holistic curricula, cultural
relativism, and cooperative consciousness. By Dewey’s death in 1952, the overwhelmingly
Protestant character of early public schools had vanished. No longer was public
education “Christianized.” It now was solidly “secularized.”[15]
Education in the 21st
Century
As the 21st century
unfolds, a new course is being charted. The mission of today’s educational
reform was best stated by Dr. Shirley McCune at the 1989 National Governors
Conference—namely, “What we’re into is the total restructuring of our society.” Eventually, “change agents” (teachers)
will train all “human resources”(students) for placement in specific,
pre-determined, entry-level vocations with the best interest of our global
economy in view.[16]
Honored as a 1999 Teacher of
the Year by then President Clinton, Barbara Ray Gilles applauded this integrative,
whole-systems approach to learning. “The school of the future,” she mused,
“will draw more from the principles of kindergarten than from ‘higher education.’”
Children will “follow their bliss” as they become meticulously groomed workers,
not thinkers; followers, not leaders; group members, not individuals;
subjective feelers, not objective thinkers—in short, secularists, not
Christians.[17]
Bereft of qualifications
commonly attributed to greatness, “one solitary life” has affected the life of
man on earth more than all the armies that ever marched, all the navies that
ever sailed, all the parliaments that ever sat, and all the kings that ever
reigned. Yet study of the central figure of history is inexplicably censored
from modern public school curriculum; and after-school clubs—e.g., the Good
News Club—are indicted by secularists for proclaiming this fundamental message:
Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world.[18]
More to follow in Part 2.
[2]
Katherine
Stewart. The Good News Clubs: The
Christian Right’s Stealth Assault on America’s Children (USA: Public
Affairs, a Member of the Perseus Books Group, 2012). 7.
[3]
William
J. Federer. America’s God and Country:
Encyclopedia of Quotations (St. Louis: Amerisearch, Inc., 2000). 289.
[4]
Quoted
in William J. Federer, America’s God and
Country. 351-352.
[7] Quoted in William J.
Federer, America’s God and Country. 599-603.
[8]
Quoted
in William J. Federer, America’s God and
Country. 543-544.
[9] Debra Rae. ABC’s of Globalism: A Vigilant Christian’s
Glossary (Lafayette: Huntington House Publishers, 1999). 249-254.
[10]
Quoted
in William J. Federer, America’s God and
Country. 675-682.
[12]
Quoted
in William J. Federer, America’s God and
Country. 595-596, 603.
[13]
Quoted
in William J. Federer, America’s God and
Country. 604-605.
[15] Debra Rae. ABC’s of Globalism: A Vigilant Christian’s Glossary.
249-254.
[16]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ncWjY7vcy4 (Governors’
Conference on Education, Wichita, KS (11-2-1989), accessed 15 March
2015).
In addition to her credentials as an authority in public
education, Dr. Shirley McCune co-authored The
Light Shall Set You Free, a book on New Age spirituality to pass on the
Universal Laws of the Ascended Masters of the Ancient Wisdom. Her book teaches
that enlightened individuals will
collaboratively build the Seventh Golden Age of the Earth.
[17]
Barbara
Ray Gilles and Richard S. Kirby. Nurturing Civilization
Builders: Birthing The Best Schools In The World (Seattle: Ideal Profit, 2004).
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