When former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee stated this week we shouldn't be surprised to see violence in the schools because God isn't welcome in the classroom, he wasn't saying anything new.
In December 2005, 700 Club televangelist Pat Robertson told residents of Dover, Pennsylvania they should no longer call on God in time of need. He was reacting to U.S. District Judge John E. Jones' decision that rebuked the Dover school board for its thinly veiled attempt to bring creationism into the science curriculum using the euphemism of "Intelligent Design." In Robertson's view, a God unwelcome in the textbooks is a God who will be unresponsive to prayer, at least in Dover.
In October 2006, the then CBS Evening News lead anchor, Katie Couric, introduced a segment called "Free Speech" in which an angry father of a Columbine victim also railed at the absence of God in schools. In his case, he was responding to the October 2, 2006 massacre of six Amish girls at the West Nickel Mines School in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. His was a curious argument as all his talk of the evils of evolution promoting "survival of the fittest" didn't match the sight of a secluded, very religion-oriented private girls' school and a community that astonished a nation with their emphasis on forgiveness and comforting the shooter's family.
It seems when many advocates claim God is missing from public schools, they really mean two things. One is the lack of teaching of Biblical principles, primarily creationism. The other is the legal impediments to public prayer. To be clear, it's important to distinguish public prayer from simple, personal prayer as defined in Matthew 6: 5-8. There, Jesus discourages hypocritical public prayers and encourages private communication with a God who knows "your needs before you utter them."
But, sidestepping scriptural instructions, voices like those of Huckabee and Robertson imply God's protection is conditional on adherence to specific religious doctrine. One wonders how the survivors of the West Nickel Mines tragedy would respond to such views. Or those who've endured natural disasters like Hurricane Sandy which are, of course, indiscriminate in their destruction.
Article comments
1 - Baronius
No no no no no no no no no. Huckabee isn't saying that God will take away his protection of schools if we don't acknowledge him. He's talking about something much more mundane. If we as a society fail to teach morals and piety, we make ourselves more susceptible to evil impulses. It's an argument that even an atheist historian would make.
2 - Baronius
I should add that sometimes Robertson does talk about God's wrath and judgement (as with Haiti), but he's widely perceived as a nut. I really doubt that Huckabee was saying anything like that.
3 - Dr Dreadful
Huckabee wasn't being that broad, Baronius. He specifically decried the absence of God from public institutions, not the absence of morals. He makes the logical error of assuming morality to be impossible without the guidance of a deity.
Whereas I think your hypothetical atheist historian would point out that the record of human history shows that whether a society is pious or not makes very little difference to its capacity to generate atrocities.
4 - doodlebugger
Yes, we need more guns and creationism in America. Then we'll be just like Somalia.
This article is astonishingly stupid.
5 - Baronius
Dread, my point was that Huckabee was talking about the natural consequences of the absence of God, not the supernatural. He wasn't seeing divine judgement coming down on the school like a hurricane. He sees decaying people doing decaying things.