Posted on 10/25/2014 8:50:22 AM PDT by lightman
SECULARISM The aggressive secularization of America
As an American I have watched with sadness, the eroding of our Christian values and standards of living. When I was in grade school, each day was begun with the reading of the Bible, broadcast over the intercom system (yes, we had the technology when I was little). At my graduation from high school, there were two public gatherings in the gym, the first being the baccalaureate service, where the minister chosen by the seniors gave an inspirational address, and religious hymns and patriotic songs were sung. The second public gathering was the actual graduation ceremony. The baccalaureate service is long gone from the American scene, found, as it were, to be an unconstitutional infringement on the separation of Church and State.
Gone, also, are the student Christian organizations, banned as they were, from the use of public school facilities, again on the basis of the separation of Church and State. Yet many of these same schools have given over classroom space for Muslim students to perform their required prayer times.
Our courts have aggressively moved to push the Christian faith further from the public forum. Attacks toward public displays of religious themes, such as the Ten Commandments, Nativity Creches, and even crosses from the graves of soldiers, have increasingly become the norm. There is even a movement to force police and fire department chaplains to remove the cross from their badges, something we've all vowed to resist.
This aggressive move towards secularism has increasingly become a part of American foreign policy, with the move to pressure other countries to follow our lead. Just as the Russian Revolution was supported, in the very beginning, by the anti-monarchist sentiments of the American government, so too, are we seeing an increase in the negative attitudes of the American government towards the rise in power and influence of the Russian Orthodox Church. At a time when our governmental leaders are pushing Christianity from the public forum, we criticize the Russian government because of it's close ties with the Russian Orthodox Church. We even question the sincerity of Russian leaders Orthodox faith, perhaps because we know that many of our own leaders have put on the veneer of being Christian, for political survival.
Russians know the dangers of aggressive secularism, having suffered seventy years of state sponsored atheism, and many Russians look with amazement at what they see as American capitulation to a secularism that has promoted a sort of state atheism of it's own.
The Moscow Patriarchate has announced a "War on Aggressive Liberalism", and called upon believers to fight the "anti-clerical forces" and "false values of aggressive liberalism." The Patriarchate will not sit back complacently, and watch a replay of the rise of anti-Church forces that hurled the Russian people into the dark days of the Communist aggression against the Church, and against believers.
The same forces that are aggressively seeking to discredit the clergy, divide Russian society, and turn Russians away from their temples, is at work in the United States. The time has come for all Christians to stand firm, and resist the forces of aggressive secularism. Whether we be Russian, Canadians, British, Greeks, or Americans, we need to stand united, and work to return Western civilization to her Christian roots.
As Americans, we need to make sure our governmental leaders know that we will not allow our nation to make war, either in reality, or in theory, against a land that is attempting to return Christ to the centrality of their national identity. Russia is not our enemy, and to treat her as such, is certain to further erode the American way of life. We can not continue, as a nation, to place profit, worldly influence, military power, and oil, over and above our Christian values, for to do so will lead to our certain doom.
An American Catholic Bishop stated recently: "I shall die in my bed, my successor shall die in prison, his successor will die as a martyr in the public square". God will protect his Orthodox Church from the Gates of Hell...but the blood of the Martyrs waters the seed of the Church.
With love in Christ, Abbot Tryphon
The Very Reverend Igumen Abbot Tryphon is the spiritual leader at All Merciful Saviour Orthodox Christian monastery located on Vashon Island in Puget Sound near Seattle, Washington State. The monastery is within the canonical jurisdiction of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia.
Save Thy people, O Lord,
and bless Thine inheritance.
Grant victory to Thy Church over her enemies,
and protect Thy people by Thy Holy Cross!
I attended a small school in southern Missouri in the 50s and early 60s. The one and only time I ever heard a prayer in school was at the baccalaureate service.
Before advocating for prayer in public school, ask yourself, which denomination’s prayer? Catholic? Protestant? Muslim? Most likely it would be all of the above and more and remember, the atheists would demand their time too, all led by and “approved” by the teacher’s union.
No thanks.
All kids already can pray and in public school too, nothing stopping them, except parents who never bother to teach them to pray.
Saw a bumper sticker today:”SECULAR HUMANIST”.
God can only bless a people that consents to accept the blessing.
Treating God like a skunk for the sake of some ginned up “high mindedness” is only going to leave a curse, because there is now no room for blessing.
Nobody’s asking for Christian secular theocracies here, in fact the attempt to formulate the term reveals what an oxymoron it would be.
That said, politicking is not the answer — at least it couldn’t be, without the power. The power comes through embracing and praising the Lord for who He is.
There is a wide range of prayers that are not a grinding axe of some particular branch of Judeo-Christian theology. I firmly assert that we are not wrong to give Islam a cold shoulder here, however.
I’d agree nonetheless that we can’t try to do this on the cheap, and pump it from the political or social side. It has to work by pull, by love from the Lord accepted.
However you also should not stand there caviling if and when the Christian intensity in this land grows to the point that yes, they will pray publicly. Because that is to ask to throw the day to the exaggerated sensitivities of dogged nonbelievers.
And to make it a trilogy, people should always consider getting out of the public school format altogether if it proves so inimical to the life of faith that it compromises the same.
We used to say the Lord’s prayer at the beginning of every school day. Why was it ok then, but not now? The answer to this question tells us the problem.
"An eight-year-old girl was expelled from school for saying grace over her lunch in the school cafeteria." Read more here.
Good observation. The pressure does not stop where the secular humanists claim it should. They keep on moving the line in a game of Calvinball. Of course as Christians we do, or at least should, see the spiritual skirmishes behind the earthly wars. God and the devil are both vying for adherents, so to speak.
In today's climate of multiculturalism and militant secularism, I agree with you.
Silent prayer in school by individuals happens every day....Ronald Reagan said that as long as there are math tests there will be prayer in school.
There should be a time of silence to allow a less distracted prayer, if that is what the students wants to do. Let the militant secularist meditate on Lenin or Mao.
The school should provide the silence. The Church and home should supply the prayer with which to fill that silence.
If we ever forget that we are One Nation Under God, then we will be a nation gone under.
President Ronald Reagan
The Lord's prayer is a Christian prayer. Muslims, Mormons, Buddhists and atheists would demand and get equal time.
Judaism, a religion which I respect, might also find the Lord's prayer offensive.
But the prayer was recited for years with no issues.
It would appear the problem, then, is immigration.
”Culture” is the way we raise children. School is therefore patently culture. The reality of the founding of the US is that the Constitution of the United States identifies itself as having beenDone in Convention by the Unanimous Consent of the States present the Seventeenth Day of September in the Year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and Eighty seven and of the Independence of the United States of America the Twelfth.That is to say, the Constitution - written by politicians to be debated upon in the states and voted on by “We the people” - calls Jesus Christ “our Lord.” It didn’t have to use that nomenclature, if it had been more rather than less popularly acceptable to avoid it.
The Bible is the largest selling book of all time, and traditionally scholarship would be considered woefully deficient which did not include biblical familiarization, at the least. The bottom line is that if the Bible isn’t acceptable in government school, government school itself is deficient as a cultural institution.
~The same forces that are aggressively seeking to discredit the clergy, divide Russian society, and turn Russians away from their temples, is at work in the United States. The time has come for all Christians to stand firm, and resist the forces of aggressive secularism.~
I don’t know much about Tryphon or how things are going in Seattle but secularism is the least problem for his ROC colleagues back in Russia.
I have a better idea.
Shut down the government schools. They aren’t religiously neutral. They have never been religiously neutral. Why?
Answer: Because a religiously neutral school is impossible. Such a state of philosophic neutrality can not exist in the mind of any sentient human.
What is needed is complete separation of **school** and state!
No school is religiously neutral. Such a state of philosophic neutrality can not exist in the mind of any human. That government runs schools is a First Amendment and freedom of conscience abomination. It was so from the very beginning.
Please read up on the history of government K-12 schooling. They exist in large part due to the anti-Catholic prejudices of the 1800s and were an attempt to force Protestantism on Catholic children.
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