A guest post by AWR Hawkins:
Beginning in the early 1900s there was a seismic shift in attitudes toward the relationship between education, societal norms, and Christianity. As this shift sharpened in focus, Christianity came to be viewed as nothing less than the enemy of freedom redefined, and a concerted effort has since been made to jettison it from our culture. Yet the question remains: Can there be freedom without Christianity?
During the first two decades of the 20th century, the Progressive Movement sought to separate education from religion, and particularly from Christianity. The goal was secularized education in the name of science: the false dichotomy was that Christianity and science were mutually exclusive.
Although the Progressive Movement’s glory days died with America’s full-fledged entrance into World War I, progressives themselves did not cease to exist. In obvious as well as not so obvious ways they continued to pursue their goal of education divorced from religion, and slowly broadened their goals to include the pursuit of a general society divorced from Christianity’s influence as well.
Perhaps the continued activity of the progressives was best exemplified in 1947, when the Supreme Court suddenly discovered that the true intent of the First Amendment was to separate Church and State in a way that gave the State control over where religion could or could not be practiced. (This decision would open the door to later ones barring prayer in schools, prayer before football games, prayer before graduation ceremonies, etc., ad nauseam.)
In the 1960s, those pursuing this secularism coupled it with a pursuit of freedom, but it was freedom redefined via a blend of humanism and hedonism. It was the not the freedom on which Thomas Jefferson pledged his life, his fortune, and his sacred honor “with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence,” but a cheaper thing through which radicals impressed by Bolsheviks, Socialists, and Fascists, looked to turn our nation’s order upon its head.
As the 1960s passed, the radicals that had come to age during that decade began permeating all levels of society, seeking positions of power from which to fundamentally change America. These were those for whom the phrase…
…“freedom of religion” came to mean “freedom from religion,” and theirs was an unvarnished push to finally separate the American conscience from Christianity’s puritanical dictates.
And they quickly achieved results. First, by broadening ideas of freedom of expression to include fighting against their own country during the Vietnam War, these radicals formed a patchwork of societies and alliances that were used to subvert our war efforts. Then, in 1973, they struck one of their greatest blows to our society via their victory in Roe vs. Wade, the Supreme Court case which trumped every state law by making abortion-on-demand a legal, federal right.
In a relatively short amount of time, the radicals took over academia, so that students who had been raised in Christian homes could be taught history that was devoid of all Christian references. (Sounds somewhat Orwellian, doesn’t it?) They turned the Founding Fathers into racists, and explained away the religious convictions of those great men by making their Judeo-Christian heritage the cause of all the world’s problems: from the oppression of women to the exploitation of the poor and arrogant belief in the superiority of Western Civilization.
Through tactics of shame combined with bald-faced lies, the new academics taught children of proud Americans to shun their parents patriotism and choose instead to understand that our every gain has come at the expense of others around the world, who, though just as deserving as us, were marked as deviants by our white forefathers and the capitalists who succeeded them.
So where are we after one decade of the 21st century if not in a place where patriotism has become a dirty word, everything the left opposes has become racist, and Christianity’s tenets are lost in a religious concoction mixed by radicals who are bending over backwards to credit Islam with some portion of civilization’s existence? Women, young and old, can go to “health centers” and use abortion as the ultimate form of birth control post facto, homosexual marriage is the new civil right, and criticism of our own fighting men and women is so ubiquitous that it rarely raises an eyebrow.
And through all this, has the freedom from Christianity that was foundational to 1960s radicalism given us more liberty or less? Has it expanded our freedom, as the mind-altering drugs of the counter culture promised to do, or has it rather removed the very basis for our freedom and turned our mono-cultural into a multi-culture that is too splintered to stand united?
These are important questions that need both to be asked and to be answered.
Dr. AWR Hawkins is a columnist for HUMAN EVENTS, a writer for Pajamas Media, and a Visiting Fellow at the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal. He received his Ph.D. in U.S. military history from Texas Tech University ("Wreck ’em Tech!"), where his studies were focused on the Vietnam War, the U.S. Navy, the Civil War, and Early Modern Europe.