Editor’s note: This Speakout was written by Bernie Hendricks of Brookings.
Secular humanism is a religion – so declared a U.S. federal court in 1987. Federal District Court Judge W. Brevard Hand, March 4, 1987, established, “…for the purposes of the First Amendment, secular humanism is a religious belief system, entitled to the protections of, and subject to the prohibitions of, the religion clauses [of the First Amendment]. It is not a mere scientific methodology that may be promoted and advanced in the public schools.’’
The U.S. Supreme Court legal analysis, Grove v. Mead School District, 1985, also affirmed, “secular humanism may be a religion for purposes of First Amendment.”
Two of Brookings’ eminent clergymen/scholars, Rev. Carl Kline and Rev. Larry Ort, have repeatedly charged that our founding fathers positively intended for secular humanist ethics to be the foundational standard in American governance. They have not been forthcoming, however, about the atheistic understructure of that standard and its bias toward erratic and arbitrary social values.
The canon of secular humanism consecrates man as autonomous; ethics, situational; moral values, derived from human experience; “promises of immortal salvation and fear of eternal damnation … illusory and harmful”; evidence of a supernatural Creator of the universe, disavowed; “sexual practices”… “unduly repressed” by the Word of God, and other religious/cultural orthodoxies (Humanist Manifesto II, 1973).
Revs. Kline and Ort have furthermore turned a blind eye to America’s Christian heritage and have earnestly contended that Judeo-Christian principles are to be neither allowed nor tolerated in our nation’s public laws and within public institutions, despite their longstanding legal precedent in U.S. common law.
The original intent of the framers, advanced publicly in their governing acts, their official records of public discourse, and the laws which they passed, expose these secular humanist nationalist guardrail claims as revisionist fiction.
The U.S. Supreme Court cited this standard in Church of the Holy Trinity v. United States, 1892: “… Christianity, general Christianity, is and has always been a part of the common law… not Christianity with an established church… but Christianity with liberty of conscience to all men.”
President Thomas Jefferson openly encouraged and promoted Christian moral principles in public education. While U.S. President (1801-1809), Jefferson “…chaired the school board for the District of Columbia, where he authorized the first plan of education adopted by the city of Washington. This plan used the Bible and Isaac Watts’ Psalms, Hymns and Spiritual Songs, 1707, as the principal books for teaching reading to students” (America’s God and Country).
Secular humanism has long since worked its way into America’s public schools, universities, and the U.S. judicial system, becoming, for all practical purposes, an established religion – based upon three major Supreme Court rulings (1962, 1963, 1980).
For a full 175 years voluntary daily readings from the Holy Bible were legally permissible in America’s public schools, until the U.S. Supreme Court changed course and struck down that right in Abington v. Schemp, 1963. Justice Potter Stewart wrote in dissent: “Permission of such exercises for those who want them is necessary if the schools are to be neutral in the matter of religion. And a refusal to permit religious exercises thus is seen, not as the realization of state neutrality, but rather as the establishment of a religion of secularism.”
For the first time in 174 years, since the ratification of our Constitution, June 21, 1788, the Supreme Court ruled school-initiated prayers to be unconstitutional, Engel v. Vitale, June 25, 1962. Such prayers, “with no compulsory engrossment by students or staff,” were then forever to be banned, school district by school district, across America.
After 192 years of voluntary legal display in U.S. public schools, The Ten Commandments were banned by the Supreme Court in Stone v. Graham, 1980. Despite the “passive and noncoercive nature” of the display, the Court rejected the postings as being impermissible under the Establishment Clause.
The evolving secular humanist jurisdiction over American jurisprudence leaves U.S. common law ultimately obliged to no higher authority than the arbitrary whims of man and changing tides of secular-social philosophies — a virtual open gateway to the progressive development of laws and policies mocking God and His Holy Word, and heaping scorn upon the essential truths of Christianity.
Indeed, in recent years obscene books and themes have emerged as constitutionally protected and encouraged in many progressive enclaves across the country, oftentimes contested by furious parents and citizens, subsequently barred from reading reading passages from those very books at school board meetings – due to their graphic nature.
Prior to the official banishment of voluntary prayer and Bible reading, school-based violence, drugs, woke indoctrination, and mass shootings were comparatively non-existent. Education was singularly focused on the basics of reading, writing, math, science, history, civics, art – to the ultimate benefit of all races and ethnicities.
All that has now changed. The U.S. Department of Justice “Crime in Schools,” 2020-2024, reported: “1,299,063 criminal incidents occurring at school locations” involving “Assault Offenses, Sex Offenses, Kidnapping/Abduction, Sex Offenses Non-forcible, Homicide Offenses, Human Trafficking.”
K-12 School Shooting Database “shooting incidents” were low/stable during the 1960s: 1966 (9), 1967 (7), 1968 (10), 1969 (5). K-12 public school fall 1967 enrollment: 49.89 million.
K-12 school shooting incidents thereafter became highly unstable with recent off-the-chart spikes: 2021 (257), 2022 (308), 2023 (352), 2024 (336). K-12 annual enrollment (2021-2024): 49.5 million.
President John Adams, in his “Proclamation for a National Fast 1798,” decreed: “The safety and prosperity of nations ultimately and essentially depend on the protection and blessing of Almighty God; and the national acknowledgement of this truth is not only an indispensable duty, which the people owe to him, but a duty whose natural influence is favorable to the promotion of that morality and piety, without which social happiness cannot exist, nor the blessings of a free government be enjoyed.”
James Wilson (1742-1798), one of early America’s greatest legal scholars, signatory to both the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution, U.S. Supreme Court Justice (1789-1798), acclaimed this principle: “All human law must rest its authority ultimately upon that law which is divine.”
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