by William Jasper

Our Lady of Fatima warned us that Russia "would spread its errors throughout the world raising up wars and persecutions against the Church." The chief error of Communist Russia is atheism in theory and practice. Russia for 73 years has proclaimed and is still proclaiming in words (its official propaganda) in practice and in laws (which indeed are not laws at all, but have the appearance of law) that God the Father, and Jesus Christ, His only Begotten Son are forbidden to be the primary goal and the chief inspiration of all public and private life.

To those who have eyes to see, the same error has been craftily brought into our countries so as to already raise up persecution against the Church in the United States and Canada. This persecution is masked under the false doctrine of "secularism" or "separation of Church and state" which claims the right of the government, local, state and national to "neutrality" regarding the King of kings and the Lord of lords, Jesus Christ.

This doctrine, in practice, is against Jesus Christ, His Church and the individual members of His Church because they are excluded from expressing their faith in action through their good works in the public domain, allowing only private exercise of Christian religion behind a "wall of separation". This totally goes against the intention of the founding fathers of both our nations as well as against the law of God. This article originally published in the New American on July 16, 1990, illustrates how far this error of Russia has been spread in our midst whereby North America is falling away from Christ and is on the road to Communism.

“Suffer the little children to come unto Me”

       In Woodbridge, Virginia, ten-year-old Audrey Pearson, who is physically and mentally handicapped, is forbidden by the school authorities from reading her Bible during her hour-long bus ride to school.

       A parent resource library for the Mankato, Minnesota, public school system removes the books of popular Christian family counselor and radio personality Dr. James Dobson, citing the "religious content" of his books and claiming that his endorsement of spankings as a biblically correct form of discipline is tantamount to promotion of child abuse.

       Debbye Turner, the current Miss America, is pressured into dropping songs with reference to Christ from the repertoire that she performs in public schools.

       The American Bar Association hosts a conference on Tort liability and religion to train trial lawyers in bringing suit and winning huge judgments against churches. The program is advertised as a seminar for "attorneys who want to be on the leading edge of an explosive new area of law." Seminar speakers describe this "new area of law" as a nuclear weapon. A shocked attorney who attended the conference calls the new Tort suits "the coming nuclear attack on Christianity in America."

       These cases, and hundreds more like them, may fall short of the images we usually think of when we think of religious persecution — thumbscrew torture, lion's dens, the freezing Siberian gulag — but they are causing the thoughtful observers to conclude that, if certain alarming trends continue, these "classic" forms of persecution may not be far off.

       Court decisions, legislation, and public policy in the past several decades reveal an outright and growing hostility toward the free exercise of religion. Under the pretext of promoting "neutrality" and upholding the mythical "separation of church and state" doctrine, judges, politicians, and legal activists have rigidly circumscribed religious expression in the public arena.

       We may exercise our religious freedoms, we are told, as long as we do so in private, within the confines of our churches and our homes. And yet, even in church and home, believers are finding that "compelling state interest" is being cited to justify ever-increasing government intrusion and regulation.

Inverting The First Amendment

       The framers of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights would be aghast at the tortuous twistings of the First Amendment to justify decisions and policies that attack what the amendment was meant to protect. It is a crabbed view of the First Amendment that suggests religion must be exercised in privacy only," says legal scholar John W. Whitehead. "Yet, the apparent instruction of the courts is that religion is to be tolerated only when it is hermetically sealed off in the private sphere, safely tucked behind a 'wall of separation'."

       Examples abound of this new state antagonism toward religion. A federal case currently under way in North Carolina involves a suit brought by the North Carolina chapter of the ACLU against Mecklenberg County Judge H. William Constangy because of his practice of publicly praying for divine guidance at the start of court sessions. The ACLU claims that the judge's brief, non-sectarian prayer represents a governmental endorsement of religion, and so discomforts nonbelieving attorneys in the courtroom as to cause them "irreparable harm."

       Public libraries in Mississippi, Florida, and Arizona have denied the use of meeting rooms to local chapters of the conservative Concerned Women of America because the group opens its meetings with a prayer and much of the content of the meetings is "religious in nature."

       Michael Wooten, pastor of Victory Fellowship Church in Lincoln, Nebraska was arrested by police for "disturbing the peace" when he preached to pro-abortion demonstrators. Taking up a position across the street from a large pro-abortion rally, Pastor Wooten proceeded to preach against the sin of abortion. Hostile pro-abortion demonstrators encircled the law-abiding minister and poked him with their signs. The pastor, not the violent demonstrators, was arrested.

Audrey Pearson Karen Mitchell

       Law student Karen Mitchell and six of her girlfriends stood recently on the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court and, joining hands in a small circle, prayed silently for the nine justices. "Immediately, a police officer came from nowhere to tell us to stop praying," says Mitchell. The shocked coeds were told that it was against the law to pray on the steps of the Supreme Court, that it was considered "demonstrating."

       And, of course, every year around Christmas and Easter it has become a regular ritual for the ACLU or some atheist organization to file suit against cities or counties for allowing the display of a nativity scene or cross on public grounds, even though the displays may be provided by private groups at no cost to the taxpayer.

       The radical secularists cannot tolerate any public expression of Christian belief. This was made abundantly clear by the extraordinary measures taken by the officials of RFK Stadium in Washington, D.C. to censor the biblical messages on banners displayed by fans at Washington Redskins games.

       No other banners were singled out for censorship: only those specifically Christian. Happily, after a protracted court battle, the stadium censors conceded defeat and allowed the fans' offending banner — which said, simply, "John 3:16" — to fly again.

Faith Strikes Out

       In no public arena have the secularizers worked more zealously to banish any trace of God than in the government schools. In Hartford, Wisconsin, for example, third-grader Jennifer Backhous followed her teacher's instructions to "be creative" in making valentines, which were to be displayed in the school hallway. However, Jennifer was crushed to learn from her teacher that her art work could not be displayed along with that of her classmates. That would be illegal. You see, Jennifer had decorated her valentines with (gasp!) "I love Jesus" and "Jesus is what love is all about."

       Kenny Green, a high school senior in Oswego, New York, was told he could not perform a Christian rap song in the school talent show. It was not the rap music that the school officials objected to. It was the Christian message.

       The case of high school valedictorian Angela Guidry of Lake Charles, Louisiana, has received considerable nationwide coverage. In 1987, Miss Guidry, who had compiled a straight-A academic record, was prevented from giving her valedictory speech because it told of her commitment to Jesus Christ.

       Students in Dallas, Detroit, Buffalo, Renton (Washington), and many other cities have been denied permission to form Bible study clubs at school, even though the schools allow dozens of other noncurriculum-related student groups on campus, including Dungeons and Dragons* clubs, chess clubs, scuba clubs, soccer clubs, etc. Students in Pennsylvania and Colorado have been suspended from school for passing out Christian literature to fellow students. School authorities acknowledged that students regularly distributed noncurriculum-related materials on campus and that it was specifically the religious nature of this particular literature that made it unacceptable.

       In yet another incredible instance of bigotry and censorship, a student was reprimanded for praying silently before an exam, and then humiliated further by being sent to the principal's office and assigned to write 500 times "I will not pray in class."

       Then there is the case of Ken Roberts, the fifth-grade teacher from Denver, Colorado, whose fight to have the school's Bible returned to the school library and to have his own Bible allowed in the classroom has received national attention.

       As part of his reading program, Robert's class has a daily 16-minute silent reading period, during which the teacher and students read silently at their desks from any book of their choice. Students may bring a book from home or select a book from the classroom library of over 200 books. Included in that library were two very offensive books: The Story of Jesus, and The Bible in Pictures.

       In September 1987 the school principal, Kathleen Madigan, informed Roberts that he must remove the two books to avoid violating the principle of "separation of the Church and state." He complied. Madigan also ordered Roberts to remove from his desk a copy of the Bible he sometimes read during the silent reading time. He was forbidden to read it in the classroom because students might see him with the Bible, want to read it themselves, and be influenced by it. The principal went even further then, removing the copy of the Bible from the school library, even though books concerning other religions were allowed to remain.

       "Such policies," warns John W. Whitehead, "send an unmistakable message to religious students: Your deepest convictions are inappropriate— sometimes illegal — you are different from your peers, you are second class citizens." It tells them religion is something to be "relegated to 'private' areas where it can't 'infect' public policy."

       Fortunately, many of the cases we have mentioned have been resolved in favor of religious liberty. Some have been won in the courts, some are still working their way through the court system, while others have been settled out of court or are presently in negotiation.

       Audrey Pearson was allowed to read her Bible on the bus after school officials were contacted by attorneys from the Rutherford Institute, a legal defense organization specializing in protection of First Amendment rights. After receiving a letter from Rutherford attorneys, school authorities in Hartford, Wisconsin, also backed down and allowed Jennifer Backhous' valentines to go on display with the other childrens'. Roberts' Bible case, which is being handled by attorneys of Concerned Women for America, is still being adjudicated. Angela Guidry's suit remains tied up in the courts.

       A major victory for religious liberty was scored with the June 4, U.S. Supreme Court decision in Mergens v. Westside Community Schools. By a vote of 8 to 1, the court upheld the constitutionality of the federal Equal Access Act of 1984, which allows religious groups to meet in public schools.

       The suit had been filed in 1985 by attorneys of the Atlanta-based Christian Advocates Serving Evangelism on behalf of a group of students in Omaha, Nebraska, whose request to form a Bible study group had been denied by school officials. The Court ruled that public high schools that accept federal aid and that maintain a "limited open forum" allowing "noncurriculum related student groups to meet on school premises during non-instructional time 'cannot deny' equal access to any other student group on the basis of the content of the group's speech." This ruling is expected to have beneficial impact on similar cases pending in other states.

       The Mergens decision may also encourage many other victims of religious censorship to stand up for their rights. Attorneys for the legal defense organizations that handle most of these religious liberty cases all agree that they see only a tiny fraction of the many violations of the First Amendment rights.

       For every Kenny Green, Angela Guidry, or Audrey Pearson who doesn't cave in to official acts of religious intolerance, there are hundreds more who meekly go along without a fight. This is especially tragic, since many of these cases could be won without ever going to court. Sadly, most students don't even know when their rights are being violated. According to the Williamburg Charter Survey (1988), only 40 percent of American youth aged 15 to 18 know that freedom of religion is guaranteed by the First Amendment.

       Note: This very interesting article was abbreviated due to lack of space. For the complete article please phone or write The Fatima Crusader.

*Editor's Note: Dungeons and Dragons is spiritually and physically dangerous.

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