The price of kicking God out of the schools

By Jerry Newcombe

Tragically, there have been more school shootings in America. Our prayers are with the survivors and with the families of the victims. Reports even indicate that one coach in the Parkland, Florida, shooting used his own body to shield others. Jesus said, "Greater love has no man than that he lay down his life for his friends."

Many people are clamoring for gun control as if that would solve the problem. Of course, there used to be guns at school – long before there were school shootings.

Rev. Paul Blair, a Baptist minister in Oklahoma of the organization Reclaiming America for Christ, wrote an article recently talking about guns in his own public school background.

Says Blair, "In the school parking lot, every fourth car was a pickup truck, most of which had a rifle rack in the back window, a deer rifle hung on the rack and the windows rolled down. We never heard of such a thing as a school shooting. We knew right from wrong. We knew morality. Most of the students went to church as did most of our teachers."

Of course, guns in the wrong hands can cause many problems. But the real issue gets back to the sinful heart of people.

I have interviewed Christian radio host and author Janet Parshall a few times through the years. One time, in a television interview for our program, "What If Jesus Had Never Been Born?" (based on the book I wrote with Dr. D. James Kennedy), Parshall made this insightful observation: "I can't quite frankly imagine a world where there hasn't been a Christian influence because one has to ask themselves the question, if we extrapolate out of the human experience Christianity, what's left? Well, I think that the answer to that question has to be the basic sin nature of man."

Dr. Kennedy and I wrote a follow-up book called What If The Bible Had Never Been Written? In this 1998 book, we noted, "Many of the humanists' goals have been realized in the public school arena. They have managed to throw the Bible out of the schools. But the result has not been what they imagined. By every conceivable criterion, our public schools are a mess, and the banishing of our rich Judeo-Christian heritage in the schools has everything to do with it."

That was before the school shootings began, in the late 1990s.

Others have said we need heart control, as opposed to gun control. One man, E. Keith Easter, wrote: "Take the guns, planes, subways, knives, cars, trucks, hammers, axes and drugs away and unless we as a people have a heart change, more and more people will find something to use as a weapon."

Dr. Erwin Lutzer, pastor emeritus of the Moody Memorial Church in Chicago, wrote Exploding the Myths That Could Destroy America. Note what he said on the absence of religion and its impact on morality: "An atheist's logic tells him that he is of no more value than a baboon or a grain of sand, yet his life contradicts such a conclusion. He may provide for his wife and family, and if you were to steal his car he would want you to be punished – all this because he is created in the image of God."

Then Lutzer makes a chilling prediction in this 1986 book: "We have not yet seen the full result of humanism in the United States. We are still coasting on the values derived from our rich Judeo-Christian heritage." Unfortunately, more and more people are following that atheistic logic out to its conclusion – and we are seeing the tragic results.

William McGuffey, the 19th century author of the best-selling McGuffey Readers, predicted: "Erase all thought and fear of God from a community, and selfishness and sensuality would absorb the whole man.... Virtue, duty, principle, would be mocked and spurned as unmeaning sounds. A sordid self-interest would supplant every other feeling; and man would become, in fact, what the theory of atheism declares him to be – a companion for brutes."

We hear the growing call for more and more laws, as though a thicker book of regulations could solve the problem. Yet we've seen that even the current laws and protocols are not properly enforced. John Adams noted that a free society must be a virtuous society, writing, "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."

We have a toxic stew in our society, where our schools have so often been turned into zones where Judeo-Christian morality is generally not allowed. I pray for a true national spiritual awakening. I believe it is America's only real hope. Meanwhile, we are reaping what we have sown by essentially disallowing God in the schools.

© Jerry Newcombe