Public Schools Promoting a Religion

A newspaper report on Wednesday stated the following:

A pagan mother's challenge to the distribution of donated Bibles at a local school has prompted the Buncombe County Board of Education to reevaluate its policies regarding religious texts.

Ginger Strivelli, who practices Witchcraft, a form of Paganism, said she was upset when her 12-year-old son came home from North Windy Ridge intermediate school with a Bible.

The Gideons International had delivered several boxes of the sacred books to the school office. The staff allowed interested students to stop by and pick them up.

"Schools should not be giving out one religion's materials and not others," Strivelli said.

According to Strivelli, the principal assured her the school would make available religious texts donated by any group. But when Strivelli showed up at the school with pagan spell books, she was turned away."

The report also stated the following:

You can either open your public school up to all religious material, or you can say no religious material,” Michael Broyde, a professor and senior fellow at Emory University's Center for the Study of Law and Religion said. "You can't say, 'You can distribute religious material, but only from the good mainstream faiths.'“ …

"Our country was founded on Judeo-Christian principles, not on Wiccan principles,” Bobby Honeycutt, who attended public schools in Weaverville during the 1970s, said.

“Our children have access to more non-Christian print material in the libraries and online than they really do Christian stuff,” he said.

While many Weaverville Christians see recent events as a threat to tradition, others see a purpose in enforcing church-state separation in public schools, because even the nation's traditional faiths have divisions.

I want to make some comments on this.

1. Public schools are already promoting a religion. By and large they are teaching students a worldview of evolution and millions of years—and as fact. They are promoting the pagan religion of millions of years and evolution, the religion to explain life without God, in the guise of “science” to generations of kids (many of whom attend church). Sadly, even most Christians don't understand the difference between operational or observational science (the science that builds our technology) and historical science (dealing with history and beliefs about the past).
2. This woman who practices witchcraft obviously has no problem with evolution being taught at the school. She is happy for that religion to be imposed on students. It is important to understand there are ultimately only two religions in the world—one starts with God's Word and the other with man's word. The bottom line here is that this woman does not want the Christian worldview taught to students; she wants the secular worldview taught.
3. It is interesting to note the comment about Christians who “see a purpose in enforcing church-state separation in public schools.” This is another major problem in the church. Most Christians think there is a neutral position in such matters, but there is no such position as a neutral one. One is either for Christ or against—one walks in light or darkness. Christians need to understand that if a curriculum is not for Christ, it is against. If the teacher's worldview is not for Christ, it is against Christ. The false idea of neutrality has resulted in generations of kids from the church being taught the pagan religion of evolution, which is contributing to the Exodus of youth from the church we are seeing right now (and as Barna once again has publicized—see this news report).

The research for our book Already Gone clearly shows that the teaching of evolution and millions of years has a direct correlation on this exodus.

What we are seeing here is a conflict of two worldviews, and the consequence of the change of worldviews in the culture because of the change in foundation (i.e., a change in religion) from God's Word to man's Word.

Christians need to wake up to the fact that, by and large, public schools are churches of secular humanism and that sadly most of the teachers (even though there are some Christian missionaries in the system) are the high priests of this religion imposing an anti-God worldview on generations of students. Yes, there are some students who have been equipped to defend the Christian faith and stand on the authority of God's Word, but they are a minority even from those who attend church.

You can read the entire news report on the Fox News website.

Thanks for stopping by and thanks for praying,

Ken