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clear downward slide for the health and well-being of America’s youth since 1963.

 

I don’t think that we can say that it was just this Supreme Court’s decision on prayer that caused damage to our youth.  All kinds of things have been going on since the sixties that are bad for youth.  But at the very least, this decision against prayer marks (directly or indirectly) a changing pattern within our society-- a change from honoring God in the public arena, to wanting to get God out of the public arena.

 

This new attitude that rejects God within public life was the subject of a speech given once by Rep. William Dannemeyer of California.  Let me quote an extended statement that he made during that speech:

“The Judeo-Christian ethic begins with God, the Creator of man and the world, who gave us moral absolutes and fixed standards.  Moral Relativism denies the existence of God and rejects the application of moral standards to the problems which arise in everyday life.

 

Under Moral Relativism, man is the final arbiter of what rules will apply in any situation.  Some people may ask, how did it come to be that a nation which began its existence based on the Judeo-Christian ethic is now involved in an intensifying cultural war where the current crop of the prophet of Baal,

advocates Moral Relativism, are seriously contending that this philosophy should now dominate American culture?”

 

Dannemeyer believes that our nation began with public standards of right and wrong fixed within the Judeo-Christian world view.   In other words, the Bible– Old

Testament and New– was a public book intended for public consumption. 

 

In effect Dannemeyer is stating that we began in the clear waters of Biblical truth running through the public square and bringing life to the citizens of America, but today we slosh around in a cesspool where “each man does what is right in his own eyes.”

 

How did America drift from a high standard of morality rooted in God’s truth to the moral relativism that predominates our culture today?  Dannemeyer believes that it dates back to the Scope Trials  and also to John Dewey, the atheist who is the

primary architect of public education as we have it in America today.

 

For over a half-century, a strong movement has been afoot within the high walls of education to get God out of the classroom.  James Madison believed that if we make students subject to God first, then they will be good citizens.  Today it is often said that we must get “God” out of children, then they’ll be good citizens. 

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