WAGNER: How belief followed the Bible out the classroom door

For several decades religion has been declining in all of the Western countries. Some people even use the term “post-Christian” to describe the West today.In April 2020, the American Enterprise Institute, a respected think tank, released a study of the decline of religion in the United States entitled, Promise and Peril: The History of American Religiosity and its Recent Decline, written by Lyman Stone.Stone uses various criteria to measure the decline of religious influence, and then offers an explanation as to why it occurred. Most interestingly, his explanation highlights the role of public education in the secularization of America.The question of how to measure the degree of religious influence in a society is not simple. However, one common method is to examine church membership and attendance data.According to Stone, church attendance in the US peaked between 1925 and 1955 and has been in decline since then.Furthermore, the increase in sales of non-religious books relative to religious books and the decline in references to religion in court decisions — both of which occurred during the twentieth century — are also evidence of the decline of Christianity in the US.During the same time period, there was a trend away from giving children biblical names, although certain boy’s names such as David and Michael remain common.All of these factors point to a decline in Christian influence in society.Therefore, Stone concludes, “Religiosity is declining in America. The share of Americans who are religious is declining according to every metric, just as the social and legal position of religion is deteriorating as well.”Strikingly, he then suggests that the biggest single factor contributing to this decline has been the expansion of government-controlled education.According to Stone, “religious beliefs and behaviours are established at a young age and do not usually change much over time.” Put another way, “religiosity is determined early in life: Kids raised without religion tend to become nonreligious adults and vice versa.”This means increasing secularization is largely the result of fewer and fewer children having a religious upbringing.Therefore, Christianity has been declining in America because, over time, decreasing numbers of children were being raised and educated with the Christian worldview and increasing numbers were being raised and educated with a secular worldview.Stone suggests that this is a result of public schooling: “More educational spending by the (generally secular) state to teach children may teach not just math and reading but also a worldview or life orientation. . . . It is striking that religiosity declines so much between age 12 and 18, before children have left the home. Most likely, instead of a religious school supporting and encouraging religious behaviour and instruction, high school becomes a season of secularization.”The worldview underlying curriculum and the values embraced in a school influence children’s religious perspective. During the latter half of the twentieth century, the curriculum of public schools became increasingly secular. According to Stone, the secularization of public education was followed by an increasing secularization of American society.In his view, the available evidence indicates the decline of Christianity is largely the result of the influence of government schooling: “It was not until the mid-20th century that public education began to become as thoroughly secularized as it is today. But the generations that attended public schools after the 1940s spent much of their life in schools that were far more secularized and these are the generations during which religiosity has declined.”Christian influences, such as the Lord’s Prayer and Bible reading, were thrown out of the public schools decades ago in both Canada and the US. Today, public schools commonly celebrate Gay Pride month and the ideology of the sexual minority movement. Christian religious influence was expelled but a new ideological perspective has taken its place.Perhaps to some degree this reflects significant changes in society, but it also contributes to those changes.If the West — and Canada in particular — was ever to return to its Christian roots, doing so would require a large-scale movement of children out of public schools and into private or home education. Such a change could not happen soon enough.

WAGNER: How belief followed the Bible out the classroom door

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