When Good Christians Do Nothing
A number of events over the past couple of weeks have again placed the Christian community at odds with public school educators.
A high school valedictorian filed a lawsuit this week against a Colorado school district because she was forced to make a public apology for sharing her Christian faith during her graduation speech.
Erica Corder says she was pressured last year by the principal of Lewis-Palmer High School in Monument, Colo., to write an apology to the school community for her "immature" speech, which made mention of Jesus Christ. If she had chosen not to write the apology, the college-bound graduate would not have been able to receive her diploma.
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Mathew Staver, founder of Liberty Counsel, which filed the suit against Lewis Palmer School District Board of Education on Corder's behalf, called the school district's action "shocking."
"Valedictorians have the right to express their religious viewpoints while at the graduation podium," Staver asserted in a statement.
One week prior, a federal appeals court upheld a lower-court ruling against the distribution of Bibles to grade school students in a southern Missouri school district.
The three-judge panel of the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis backed the decision made last year by a U.S. district judge who granted a preliminary injunction barring the South Iron R-I School District in Annapolis from "allowing distribution of Bibles to elementary school children on school property at any time during the day."
"[W]e reject the contention that the preliminary injunction is invalid because it is content-based," read the decision by the appeals court.
Last week also coincidentally marked the fifth annual "Truth for Youth" week, during which special youth-oriented Bibles were distributed nationwide by students to students. To avoid any legal problems from arising, a list of students' legal rights on public school campuses was displayed on the back cover of "The Truth for Youth" Bible, informing school administrators and officials of the students' right to hand out Bibles during non-instructional school time.
"Many public schools have allowed Planned Parenthood to establish clinics where condoms and birth control pills are being distributed to students, and yet Bibles are forbidden," noted Tim Todd, director of Revival Fires International, which teamed up with the American Family Association and American Family Radio to encourage teenagers to distribute "The Truth for Youth" Bibles during last week's campaign.
"The National Education Association is promoting a liberal agenda to have a homosexual lifestyle, and many are teaching that abortion is just the slopping off of a mass of tissue and that abortion is a woman's choice," he added.
Meanwhile, Christian students are often restrained in the expression of their firmly-held beliefs.
"There has been an influx of Gay Straight Alliance Clubs (pro-homosexual clubs) in America," as Benjamin Lopez, lobbyist for Traditional Values Coalition, has noted in the past. "Any person can come in during any lunch hour and talk to children about the homosexual stance [but] if a student expresses a religious objection to homosexuality, they are told in the classroom that they are discriminating and hateful."
Is there something wrong with this picture?
While polls may show that a nearly-overwhelming majority of the U.S. population professes the Christian faith, the increasingly widespread efforts at schools to indoctrinate our nation's youth with pro-gay, pro-sex, pro-anything-except-Christianity messages may strongly suggest otherwise.
Or maybe these are just signs of an increasingly idle Christian community that is standing by – perhaps waiting for social and religious conservative leaders to intervene – as liberal activists push their agendas into our schools and push faith and moral values out.
As 18th-century conservative Edmund Burke expressed some 200 years ago, "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing."
All concerned Christians today need to stand up in a society that is becoming increasingly hostile to the Church.
Our schools should not be blocking students from talking about Jesus while allowing instructors to say anal sex is just another sexual option – as 8th and 10th graders in Maryland's Montgomery County will be taught in their pro-gay health education courses this fall.
And for there to be change in our schools, what first has to change is the Christian community.
When Jesus gave the commission to make disciples of all nations, he wasn't talking only to the disciples of that time, but even today, undoubtedly. And it's not just up to Christian leaders, missionaries, pastors, or seminarians. It's up to every man, woman, and child who professes Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior.
In the same way, when Jesus told us we are the salt of the earth, it was a call to all believers to be purifying agents and preservatives that must come into contact with that which needs to be purified and preserved.
We not only have the right, but we also have the responsibility and the obligation to be involved in conveying what is right and what is wrong in our schools.
And if we don't take advantage of our God-given rights, then we have no one to blame except ourselves as we watch America's values steadily degrade and the "Christian" majority (if you can even call the majority Christian) become increasingly liberal and increasingly secular.
Rather than just honing in on what liberal activists are doing, with the words of Christ – and even individuals like Edmund Burke – in mind, the question that every believer should be asking themselves is "What am I not doing?"
