Public School Teacher Sues School for Banning God

Steven Williams, a fifth grade public school teacher near San Francisco has filed suit against his school district and principal for prohibiting him from using American historical documents, including the Declaration of Independence, in class because of their references to God and Christianity.

Good for Mr. Williams. Do you see how insane this situation has become — the one I chronicle in my book? So opposed to Christianity are the secularists that they want to not just prevent the promotion of Christian values, but to remove all historical references to Christianity. In other words, they are so obsessed with purging Christianity that they’re willing to remove essential facts from history. Even under the most tortured interpretations of the First Amendment Establishment Clause, there is no way any public school can legally bar references to Christianity. The law even permits the teaching about religion. But this isn’t even that.

It’s just an incidental reference to it in a historical document. The result is that the anti-Christian, politically correct thought police want to revise and distort history to pretend there was no Christian influence. To remove the Christian influence is to remove a great part of the historical record.

This isn’t the first time this has happened, by the way. In my book I mention the work of New York University psychology professor Paul Vitz, who examined sixty widely used social studies textbooks used by eighty-seven percent of public school students. He couldn’t find any reference to the spirituality of the Pilgrims. Vitz said, as quoted on p. 68 of my book, “Are public school textbooks biased? Are the censored? The answer to both is yes, and the nature of the bias is clear: Religion, traditional family values and many conservative positions have been reliably excluded from children’s textbooks…. There is not one story or article in all these books in which the central motivation or major content is connected to Judeo-Christian religion…. In grades one through four these books introduce the child to U.S. society — to family life, community activities, ordinary economic transactions, and some history. None of the books covering grades one through four contains one word referring to any religious activity in contemporary American life…. Religion, especially Christianity, has played and continues to play a central role in our culture and history. To neglect to report this is simply to fail to carry out the major duty of any textbook writer to the tell the truth.”

That’s my point exactly. When you remove all references to something as predominant as Christianity, you necessarily distort the truth. The record is not just incomplete; it’s fundamentally erroneous. And people say I’m exaggerating about the paranoia of the secularists wanting to effect a pure “separation of church and state.” This doesn’t even qualify as church and state. We’re talking about factual references in a historical document or text, not the slightest endorsement of Christian beliefs. Amazing.

Update: I should have mentioned in the original post that one of the first bloggers to report this story, which actually surfaced a few days ago, was John Bambenek.