Phil Brennan, NewsMax.com
Tuesday, Sept. 30, 2003

Now, for the first time a courageous American lawyer, author and columnist, David Limbaugh, has gathered a mass of documentation showing how far this war against those who worship Jesus Christ has progressed.

In his new, best-selling book, "Persecution – How Liberals Are Waging War Against Christianity," Limbaugh exposes the outrageous bias and discrimination against Christians.

Wherever the forces aligned against Christianity can find a legal loophole, an agnostic judge, government official, school administrator, professor or teacher, the full weight of the law is employed to drive the faith from the public square.

Limbaugh explains what Christians are facing on dozens of fronts. The examples of the multiple successes of anti-Christian campaign present a frightening picture.

In this first part of a three-part series, NewsMax.com explores the geneses of this campaign, looks back at how America’s government schools developed out of a widespread system of Christian schools, recalls the growth of anti-Christian law, and provides examples of how the war has been fought against the nation’s schoolchildren.

Driving Christianity out of America’s Schools

Even if you were reading ""Persecution – How Liberals Are Waging War Against Christianity" in a freezer with the temperature way below zero, your blood would still boil.

David Limbaugh pulls no punches in reporting the unrelenting assault on Christianity being waged against it by a collection of latter-day Neros who want nothing less than to throw Christians to the lions of total secularism.

Christians, he tells us, "are often subjected to scorn and ridicule and denied their religious freedoms" and are referred to as "Bible-thumping idiots."

One incident he mentions should turn up the heat under the arteries of any devout Jew or Christian who cherishes the Holy Bible as the word of God. He tells the shocking story of a teacher at a Houston middle school who saw two students carrying Bibles. The girls were taken to the principal’s office, and the mother of one was summoned. Upon her arrival the teacher "waved the Bibles at her and exclaimed ‘This is garbage’ and then threw them into the trash can."

Among today’s Neros, the author explains, are "activist judges misinterpreting the law," the idiot acolytes of political correctness, Hollywood movie makers, the overwhelmingly paganistic mainstream media, and "educators" at all levels from preschool to universities.

Limbaugh, a skilled lawyer, goes to some length in explaining the constitutional underpinnings of religious freedom and shows how legions of black-robed tyrants have badly distorted the meaning of the First Amendment, imputing to it shadings and gradations never intended by the men who wrote the Bill of Rights.

This facet of the war against Christianity recently came to the fore during the infamous case of the federal court-ordered removal from the courthouse in Montgomery, Ala., of a monument containing the text of the Ten Commandments.

If You Tell a Lie Often Enough ...

Thanks to the issues raised by Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore, for the first time many Americans were startled to learn that the famous slogan of "separation of church and state" they’ve been told bans government at all levels from allowing religious expression within public facilities or by official bodies is nowhere to be found in the Constitution of the United States.

It is a largely a judicial fiction based on a deliberate misreading of the Establishment Clause "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion" and the Free Exercise Clause, which follows: "or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."

It was not until 1947 that any other meaning than that which forbade Congress (but not the states) from setting up a state-sponsored religion was found. In that year, in the case of Everson vs. Board of Education, Justice Hugo Black took a passage from a private letter Thomas Jefferson sent to a friend in which he mentioned an alleged "wall of separation" and made it a key part of the Constitution, where, as noted above, it is nowhere to be found.

All of the subsequent court actions concerning the state vs. religion grew out of Black’s misleading view of the Establishment Clause. From that point on the courts have steadily eroded the prohibition against the "free exercise" of religion.

The full impact of this misreading of the Constitution became apparent with the Supreme Court’s 1962 decision in Engel vs. Vitale, which outlawed state-sponsored prayer in government schools (it's no longer accurate to call them "public" schools; they serve the government, not the public that pays for them). In that case the prayer at issue was non-denominational: "Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon Thee, and we beg Thy blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers and our Country."

In the first part of his book, Limbaugh laments the damage done to America’s schools that has resulted from the courts’ open hostility to religion, especially to Christianity which has become a target of federal judges seeking to drive Jesus Christ out of the public arena.

He provides an exhaustive history of the growth of public/government education, largely a mid-19th century development that built upon a disparate network of local schools in the various states that were fully Christian in every sense of the word. All education in the U.S. was erected on a platform of Christian schools, and even after public schools became the norm, Christianity was an important part of the curriculum upon which all other subjects were taught.

The author traces the development of secularism in the government school system, which he says many Protestant leaders claim was the result of the work of Horace Mann, a Massachusetts legislator who played a key role in establishing the Massachusetts Board of Education in 1837.

The Thought Police

Limbaugh cites some of the shocking results of the enforced secularization of public education: