Unpublished 134. American Culture (typed)
[1959. Bible Presbyterian Reporter Mar. and 1961. The Southern Presbyterian Journal, 10–11.]
American Culture
Gordon H. Clark, Ph.D.
MISS VERNA M. HALL had been invited to speak to a small P. T. A. meeting. When the school board learned of that she planned to speak on the Christian background of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution they cancelled her invitation. Christian ideas in the nation’s history are too un-American to be aired before the parents of the school children.
As a result of this experience Miss Hall has published a 481 page volume, Christian History of the Constitution of the United States of America: The American Christian Constitution Press, San Francisco, 1960. The volume contains a great deal of documentation, both from European and American sources. Some of it is unfortunately second-hand. On the other hand there are sixty-nine pages photographically reproduced from the 1714 edition of John Locke. This great English philosopher exercised a great influence on American government; his separation of the three powers is a great bulwark against statism and totalitarianism: but his social compact theory, still popular, is no more Christian than that of J. J. Rousseau.
Books of this type are needed in these days, for the public school system often seems bent upon eradicating all memory of Christianity. A Pennsylvania parent complains that the public school in his town prohibits the pledge of allegiance to the flag because it contains the words “under God.” In Colorado a fifth grade teacher had his contract revoked a few days before the beginning of school in September because he had concluded a Christian camp during the summer. And these two are not isolated examples.
In such a situation we may devotedly hope that Christian parents will found and operate their own schools, both for the purpose of giving their own children a good education and for the purpose of producing a contrast with the public schools whose bigoted secularism distorts history by omitting the most important factor in American culture.