Supreme Court and Bible in Schools

ONLY THE BIBLE IN THE CLASSROOM WILL SAVE OUR REPUBLIC

A note from
OCPAC FOUNDATION PRESIDENT
BOB LINN

The profound transformation of the American mind is best illustrated by the fact that, from the origins of public education in the mid-17th century, to its progression to the mid-20th century, prayer and Bible reading were classroom essentials.

Ideas like these are sparking
controversy in today’s news.

The Bible in public schools was a necessity in the minds of the American founders. When the state of Massachusetts specified classroom content in the General School Law of 1647, it noted the importance of Bible reading in the classroom because it was known that the absence of the Bible in school was:

“One chief project of that old deluder, Satan, to keep men from the knowledge of the Scriptures.”

It was not long before our founders were challenged.

When the French atheist, Stephen Girard, became a naturalized citizen in 1778, the wheels were set in motion for the first cultural assault upon the soul of the young nation.

He sought to bring the cultural suicide of France’s Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Voltaire to the shores of America by leaving two-million-dollars, a portion of his vast wealth, to a school in Philadelphia in which no Bible reading would be allowed.

Because it was well known that atheism rendered the U.S. Constitution inadequate as a governing document, the specification of the founding of a secular school entailed a legal battle which ascended to the U.S. Supreme Court.

In 1844, in the case of Vidal v. Girard’s Executors, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against the proposed anti-Christian curriculum.

The vote was unanimous. Justice Joseph Story wrote the opinion:

Why may not the Bible, and especially the New Testament, without note or comment, be read and taught as divine revelation in the college – its general precepts expounded, its evidences explained, and its glorious principles of morality inculcated?

Where can the purest principles of morality be learned so clearly or so perfectly as from the New Testament? Where are benevolence, the love of truth, sobriety, and industry, so powerfully and irresistibly inculcated as in the sacred volume?

With the court’s support, the city of Philadelphia rejected the proposal for a non-Bible-reading school. The city’s legal team wrote:

The plan of education proposed is anti-Christian, and therefore repugnant to the law. The purest principles of morality are to be taught. Where are they found? Whoever searches for them must go to the source from which a Christian man derives his faith – the Bible.

Both in the Old and New Testaments [religious instruction’s] importance is recognized. In the Old it is said, “Thou shalt diligently teach them to thy children,” and the New, “Suffer the little children to come unto me and forbid them not.” No fault can be found with Girard for wishing a marble college to bear his name for ever, but it is not valuable unless is has a fragrance of Christianity about it.

Aggressive atheism had proven devastating to Girard’s France. With the intent to eradicate Christianity from France, the Jacobins, in June, 1793, established a calendar based on the “autumnal equinox” rather than the traditional designation of AD, Anno Domini, “in the year of our Lord,” the Christian calendar referenced in the U.S. Constitution.

There is no better symbol of the French atheistic revolution than the guillotine of Robespierre. It is a tribute to the secular mind.

The American Revolution stood in stark contrast with its pastors leading the way to establish the rule of law through a government grounded in Christendom. It was a concept of liberty based on morality rather than the untethered vice of the French and their atheism.

Our Republic was birthed on the shoulders of devout Christian men whose writings are replete with statements of the nation’s dependence upon Divine Providence.

And, with those ideals, came their insistence on Bible reading as a requirement for every American child.

FOR THE FOUNDERS, BIBLE READING
IN ALL AMERICA’S SCHOOLS
WAS THE ONLY PATH
TO PRESERVE THE REPUBLIC  

Among the most prominent of all the founders is Dr. Benjamin Rush. He is remembered as the Father of American Medicine, the Father of Public Schools under the Constitution, and one of the first organizers of America’s first anti-slavery society.

Perhaps as significant as anything, he was a signer of the Declaration of Independence, was a member of the Continental Congress, and led the effort in Pennsylvania’s ratification of the U.S. Constitution in 1788.

In 1791, Dr. Rush wrote A Defense of the Use of the Bible as a Schoolbook. Fourteen times, he speaks of the importance of using the Bible as a schoolbook. He stated: 

We profess to be republicans, and yet we neglect the only means of establishing and perpetuating our republican forms of government, that is the universal education of youth in the principles of Christianity, by means of the Bible; for this divine book, above all others, favors that equality among mankind, that respect for just laws, and all those frugal virtues, which constitute the soul of republicanism.”

DIAGNOSING AMERICA’S CULTURAL DECLINE

When we look for the reasons for the radical decline in American culture, we have to look at the ledge from which we have fallen.

Our founders were neither Deists nor secularists, but men steeped in Christian thought. More than a third of all the documents quoted by our founders were Bible quotes. The Bible is referenced four times more than either Montesquieu and Blackstone, the two individual men most quoted. John Locke was the third most referenced individual author, but Biblical passages are noted ten times for every one of Locke’s.  

OUR CHILDREN MUST BE EXPOSED TO THE BIBLICAL TEXT IN SCHOOL IF OUR REPUBLIC IS TO SURVIVE

Confirming the clarity of understanding our founders had regarding the inability of a society founded in atheism to be governed by the U.S. Constitution, John Adams wrote: 

Religion and morality alone can establish the principles upon which freedom can stand. Religion and virtue are the only Foundations not only of republicanism and of all free government, but of social felicity under all governments and in all combinations of human society.  Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other. ~ Founder and U.S. President, John Adams

Manhattan Institute’s Dr. Eric Kaufmann published his own research regarding the crisis of secularism in 2010 in his analysis of 21st century demography and politics, Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?

As he nears the end, he notes the vacuous nature of atheism, secularism’s inability to inspire a people, and the more impoverished emotional state of those who have abandoned religious zeal. In closing, he states simply that: 

The religious shall inherit the earth.

Oklahoma’s path to prosperity is found only in a return to the Biblical foundations of freedom bequeathed by America’s founders. The work being done by Oklahoma statesmen to remove the pornography, the atheism, and the anti-Americanism from our classrooms would be applauded by every one of those founders who stood on the protection of Divine providence as they pledged to each other their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor in their stand for Christian liberty.            

Walters and the Board of Education, along with tens of thousands of fellow Oklahomans, are taking to heart the words of Ronald Reagan’s January 5, 1967 inaugural address as Governor of California when he said:  

Perhaps you and I have lived too long with this miracle to properly be appreciative. Freedom is a fragile thing and it’s never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by way of inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation, for it comes only once to a people. And those in world history who have known freedom and then lost it have never known it again.

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