“The culture wars are being fought in virtually every sphere of life—government, business, law, politics, commerce, education, the sciences, media, the arts, entertainment, religion, marriage, family, health care, and popular culture to name just a few. Each of these spheres produces seemingly unrelated instances of cultural conflict. Yet, it is in the accumulation of such present-day moments of conflict that we gain an understanding and direction of the cultural drift. The purpose of these posts and the books I have written is to participate in the redemption of culture in all institutions of American life through sharing the truth of the biblical worldview which was at the heart of the nation’s founding and formed the central cultural vision by which it is to be governed.
Over the last 15 years I have written and posted many articles about American culture from the perspective of the biblical worldview. Therefore, I have selected a few of the posts that continue to offer time-tested answers to the questions of life and the turmoil found in modern society that we encounter every day.”
Larry G. Johnson
Education in America – Part II – Secularization of American Education
As we have seen in Part I, education in North America at all levels was an indisputably Christian enterprise from the arrival of the Pilgrims in 1620 to the early part of the 20th century. The Bible and other books reflecting a biblical worldview were the foundation of American education, that is, the original common core curriculum. In Part II, we will describe the destruction of the original biblically-based common core curriculum by the humanistic progressive education philosophies of John Dewey and others. The churches were the principal founders of the first colleges and universities in the American colonies and whose purpose was for the training of pastors. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, colleges and universities expanded their academic portfolios, and the cultural ties […]
Education in America – Part I – America’s Original Common Core Curriculum
There has been considerable discussion in the press and halls of education with regard to The Common Core Curriculum Standards Initiative, an attempt by the educational establishment to standardize and strengthen educational standards and expectations at the elementary and secondary levels. Quoting from the Initiative’s English language arts standards, “As a natural outgrowth of meeting the charge to define college and career readiness, the Standards also lay out a vision of what it means to be a literate person in the twenty-first century.” In developing core curriculum standards, it would be worthwhile for the curriculum designers to spend some time reviewing what it meant to be a literate person in America from the arrival of the Pilgrims in 1620 to the beginning of the twentieth […]
American Exceptionalism – Part III – R.I.P. or Revival?
John Adams said, “We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion…Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” In other words, the America of the Founders was based upon the assumption that people who accept the biblical worldview are capable of governing themselves internally where ethical and moral issues are concerned. Thus, the architects of America’s early government structure envisioned the Republic supported by a foundation of common morality, and that morality rested on the bedrock of the Christian faith. As we noted in Part II, Christianity and Christian principles that permeated and bonded with the principles of civil government formed the […]
American Exceptionalism – Part II – The Essential Ingredient of America’s Greatness
In Part I we looked at the origins and spread of the concept of American exceptionalism as well as the claims of its deniers and detractors. In Part II we will discuss the one essential ingredient that led to America’s exceptionalism and why exceptionalism’s deniers and detractors are so adverse to any consideration of its reality in the history of the nation. To be exceptional is a condition of being different from the norm; also: a theory expounding the exceptionalism especially of a nation or region. In their book titled Understanding America – The Anatomy of an Exceptional Nation, James Q. Wilson and Peter H. Schuck assembled a collection of essays which examined Alexis de Tocqueville’s declaration that America was “exceptional.” In their summation, the […]
American Exceptionalism – Part I – Myth or God’s Blessing?
What is this thing called “American exceptionalism” that surfaces periodically in political speeches, esoteric articles and books in the academic world, and an occasional mention on talk radio? The term “American exceptionalism” is of recent origin (less than 100 years) but the concept of the unique and exceptional nature of the United States has been recognized and accepted for more than 200 years. The unique and exceptional nature of the United States was noted by numerous Founders during and after the American Revolution. However, widespread recognition of the unrivaled and exceptional nature of the United States in comparison to the rest of the world began with Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, a monumental study of America. The visiting Frenchman described what he saw during […]