By Roger Anghis
There are many American’s that don’t understand the relationship between America and the Church. This is because of the failure of two of the most important institutions in America the education system and the church. For a couple of generations, our school system has utterly failed to teach our kids the real history of this great country and the foundation that it was built on. Democrats have even made it illegal to teach our history for several reasons. One reason is that if the real history was taught our students would be proud of our nation and would become patriotic. That isn’t the goal of the left. They want students to believe we were a racist nation, slave lovers when in reality it was only Democrats that wanted slavery, promoted slavery, fought for slavery, and then formed the KKK when they lost the Civil War, passed the Jim Crow laws, and fought giving former slaves the right to vote and even fought the 1964 Civil Rights Act until they found a way to enslave blacks in a different way to the advantage of the Democrat Party. President Johnson, a massive racist, declared “We’ll have those n*****s voting for us for the next 200 years”.
Do we have to ask ourselves how did we get here? Why is America in the shape that it is in when at one time it was the envy of the world? Don’t get me wrong, we aren’t seeing people on makeshift rafts leaving Florida to get to the communist state of Cuba. I don’t believe that that will ever happen but we have seen America take a bit of a nosedive over the last 30-40 years that should have the majority of Americans very concerned. The one political persuasion we have had for decades seems to be the main political persuasion that is on the verge of taking total control over our nation. In a recent poll, it showed that 70% of millennials say they will most likely vote socialist.[1] Socialism is just a step below communism. Why do they want to embrace a political system that has historically been a 100% failure and kick aside what has historically been the most beneficial political system the world has ever seen? I have to lay the majority of the blame on the church.
When our nation was founded, there wasn’t a strong education system established and the people, in general, knew this. They believed that the only way there could be a successful form of government was to make sure that all the people were educated. The interesting point here is they actually demanded that the people be educated on a certain subject for that success to occur. That subject was the Word of God! Our Founders believed, and rightfully so, that the Bible was the source for all knowledge. I wrote in my book Defining America’s Exceptionalism a detailed account of why the pilgrims demanded education. Today’s view that religion and schools should never cross paths is not what the Founders intended, it was the ‘opinion’ of the 1947 Supreme Court. When looked at even on the surface the schools have used the Bible for its main text since the pilgrims arrived in the early 1600s. Then in 1947, the Supreme Court decides that for 156 years the law was being broken, even by those that wrote the law. This is arrogance on steroids.
There are many documented situations that refute the 1947 decision, so I would like to discuss a few of them. From this, we will see what the Pilgrims and the Founders believed to be the most important aspects of education. The first laws providing public education for all children were passed in 1642 in Massachusetts and in 1647 in Connecticut and it was called the “Old Deluder Satan Law”. These colonists believed that the proper protection from civil abuses could only be achieved by eliminating Bible illiteracy.
“It being one chief project of that old deluder, Satan, to keep men from the knowledge of Scriptures, as in former time. . . . It is therefore ordered . . [that] after the Lord hath increased [the settlement] to the number of fifty householders, [they] shall then forthwith appoint one within their town, to teach all such children as shall resort to him, to write and read. . . . And it is further ordered, that where any town shall increase to the number of one hundred families or householders, they shall set up a grammar school . . . to instruct youths, so far as they may be fitted for the university.”[2]
They put a premium on the ability to discern the Word of God. A revised 1690 Connecticut law states: “This legislature observing that . . . there are many persons unable to read the English tongue and thereby incapable to read the holy Word of God or the good laws of this colony . . . it is ordered that all parents and masters shall cause their respective children and servants, as they are capable, to be taught to read distinctly the English tongue.”[3]
Even our places of higher education, something that they cannot be called today, were adamant about knowledge of scripture and that the Bibles was the very foundation of knowledge: The 1636 rules for Harvard stated:
“Let every student be plainly instructed and earnestly pressed to consider well the main end of his life and studies and to know God and Jesus Christ which is eternal life. (John 17:3) and therefore to lay Christ in the bottom as the only foundation of all sound knowledge and learning. And seeing the Lord only giveth wisdom, let everyone seriously set himself in reading the Scriptures twice a day that he shall be ready to give such an account of his proficiency therein.”[4]
Biblical knowledge was not to be denied in the founding era of America. That knowledge was the basis of the greatest educational system in the world at that time. That foundation is what the modern church has let crumble for the sake of humanism and the present downfall of this great nation.
© 2021 Roger Anghis – All Rights Reserved
E-Mail Roger Anghis: roger@buildingthetruth.org
Foot Notes
- More than a third of millennials polled approve of communism
- Defining America’s Exceptionalism, Roger Anghis (Westbow Press, Bloomington, IN) pp. 42-43
- Defining America’s Exceptionalism, Roger Anghis (Westbow Press, Bloomington, IN) pp. 43
- Defining America’s Exceptionalism, Roger Anghis (Westbow Press, Bloomington, IN) pp. 45
