"America started going to Hell when they took God out of public schools!"
Some Americans have lived by that theory and have willingly promoted it whenever the opportunity arises. I wish America's problems could be that simply defined and resolved, but there were trends happening prior to the 1962 Supreme Court decision to ban school-led prayers in public schools that are responsible for the path that would lead us to where America is today.
Since blaming the negative direction of America on the banning of school-led prayers in public schools continues in 2023, I wanted to dispel that notion by sharing some of the events that preceded the Supreme Court decision on prayer in public school.
On my talk show today on WWL, I talked about the controversy over prayers in public schools that can be traced back to the 18th and 19th centuries. In 1890 it was the Catholic parents who objected to school-led prayers because the prayers being said were believed to be too Protestant. There was a debate over which Bible to use.
The economic prosperity of the late 1950s inspired the migration of families to America's suburbs, and the 1960 Supreme Court ruling that banning birth control pills was unconstitutional started the sexual revolution, and the battle against segregation was ramping up.
There were a lot of changes going on in America before the ruling on school-led prayers that determined the course of American history and the many problems that are still being blamed on the banning of school-led prayers suggest a simplistic approach to actual problem-solving.
The first step toward solving a problem is determining what caused it, and as long as enough Americans continue to buy into the idea that our country's big problems were caused by the ban on school-led prayers, then we have little hope of actually finding real solutions.
In the audio player above is the full conservation on the air about the false premise that America started going to Hell when school-led prayers were banned from public schools!
