God’s revelation shapes every aspect of how we live, including how we approach education. Every curriculum rests upon a creed; every lesson conveys a worldview. The question is which creed, which faith? We welcome, therefore, the intellectual honesty that identifies God as the source of our rights, our duties, and the author of the best path to human flourishing.

Few arenas today expose the myth of a “secular” or “neutral” public square more than America’s public schools. As classrooms have become battlegrounds over everything from gender identity, to pronouns, to Critical Race Theory, each movement has presented itself as a comprehensive moral system, necessary for inclusion and justice. The roots of today’s turmoil stretch back to the mid-twentieth century, when the Supreme Court expelled prayer and Bible reading from public schools in the name of “separation” and “neutrality.” In removing public acknowledgment of God, however, the Court created a vacuum, which has been filled in recent years by “woke” ideology.

Over seventy-five years ago, Carl F.H. Henry recognized the inevitability of worldview formation in his The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism. Henry’s influential work appeared the same year as the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling, Everson v. Board of Education, set out an ambitious agenda of achieving a separation of church and state—beginning with public school classrooms. Each subsequent legal, cultural, and political battle during the past three quarters of a century has confirmed what Carl F. H. Henry laid out clearly. When divine revelation is banished from education, some rival authority inevitably takes its place. The question is not whether a faith will shape the moral imagination of the next generation, but which faith.

This essay traces that exchange of faiths by setting today’s educational and cultural conflicts within its historical and theological context. It begins with the postwar crisis of conviction among evangelicals, focusing on Carl F. H. Henry’s response to two Supreme Court decisions that effectively secularized public education. Henry rightly diagnosed the impossibility and undesirability of moral neutrality in education and the peril of severing divine authority from divine revelation. Dark as the picture was in Henry’s own day, however, the current Supreme Court has begun reversing course. Henry’s warnings appear increasingly vindicated, as modern “woke” ideologies in education reveal themselves not as neutral systems but as rival faiths contending for cultural dominance.

A Crisis of Conviction

The debate was lively that Sunday morning in the pastor’s study of Metropolitan Baptist Church (today Capitol Hill Baptist Church) in Washington, DC. For three weeks during the summer of 1962, a hand-selected group of religious leaders, intellectuals, government officials, and military officers convened by Carl F. H. Henry—including, Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, and Senator A. Willis Robertson of Virginia—had been debating the Supreme Court’s explosive decision in Engel v. Vitale.^[1] The Court had struck down the long-standing practice of opening each school day in New York with a brief, non-denominational prayer written by the State Board of Regents: “Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon Thee, and we beg Thy blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers and our Country.” Writing for the majority, Justice Hugo Black declared that “it is no part of the business of government to compose official prayers for any group of the American people to recite as a part of a religious program carried on by government.”^[2]

Like many evangelicals, the group of Baptists gathered on Capitol Hill were sharply divided on the decision. As Baptists, they agreed that government had no business telling Christians how to pray. Yet as American citizens, the purging of public education of every vestige—not simply of Christianity but even of theism—seemed to portend disaster.

Metropolitan’s pastor, R. B. Culbreth, however, saw that an even greater danger loomed. Preaching the following Sunday, in a sermon titled ‘What Makes America Great?,’ he argued that the real crisis lay not in the recitation of a state-written prayer, but in the growing effort to purge God’s truth from education altogether. “It is the duty of the public schools to teach truth—all truth,” he insisted. “The Bible in the public schools is part of the great body of truth and should be taught as any other book that reveals truth.”^[3] The issue was not compulsion but conviction—whether a nation once founded upon divine revelation would now embrace an education system that pretended truth could be taught apart from God.

Turning to Scripture for the nation’s diagnosis, Culbreth quoted Psalm 33:12, warning that America’s future rested on its submission to divine authority:

“God’s statement is: ‘Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord.’ This is not—blessed is that nation that ignores God, or forgets God, but the nation that makes God its Lord is the one blessed. Is America determined to depart from that which has made her great? Pericles built a civilization upon culture, and it failed; Caesar built a civilization upon power, and it failed; our forefathers founded our Nation upon Christianity, and America will live so long as the Lord is our God.”

The very next day, Culbreth’s sermon was entered into the Congressional Record as part of Senate Concurrent Resolution 81 on ‘Nonsectarian Prayers in Public Schools,’ introduced by Senators Robertson and Thurmond—two members of Henry’s Sunday school class.^[4]

Yet even as Culbreth thundered from the pulpit, Henry watched from his editor’s desk as many evangelicals wavered. In fact, when the Court went still further the following year, deciding in Abington School District v. Schempp (1963) that even voluntary daily Bible readings and recitations of the Lord’s Prayer in public schools in Pennsylvania and Maryland violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, evangelicals stayed largely silent. “Not a single church group or Christian organization availed itself of the opportunity to file a brief in support,” Henry wrote following Schempp. In fact, he wrote, many evangelicals had come to “countenance and even support the suppression of prayer and Bible reading in public schools.”^[5] How had it come to this?

The Court’s Secular Turn

From the beginning, the American experiment presumed the public importance of religion. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 declared that “religion, morality, and knowledge” were “necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind,” and therefore that “schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.”^[6] Early public schools in the colonies and the new republic routinely taught moral virtue from the Bible, recited prayers, and read Scripture selections as part of the daily curriculum.^[7] As Justice Joseph Story later explained in his 1833 Commentaries on the Constitution, the purpose of the First Amendment was not to exclude religion from public life but “to prevent any national ecclesiastical establishment,” while ensuring that Christianity—through “encouragement from the state”—might continue to inform public virtue and education.^[8]

This consensus endured well into the nineteenth century. Public schools, though “common,” were not secular in the modern sense. They aimed to form the moral character of citizens, assuming that virtue and piety were prerequisites for republican liberty. The First Amendment was understood as ensuring religious liberty and preventing state coercion—not as banishing God from the classroom. Only in the mid–twentieth century did this understanding begin to erode.^[9]

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