On his radio program earlier this week, Family Research Council President Tony Perkins declared that the separation of church and state is to blame for the Americans who have left to fight alongside ISIS because “[r]adical secularism that has driven the defining characteristics of our Western culture, our Judeo-Christian heritage, from our schools, our entertainment and even our government has left in its place a void, a vacuum.”
In a column for the Christian Post yesterday, Perkins expanded on the claim, adding that the same “atheizers” who are responsible for Americans joining ISIS are also the cause of “hip-hop gang banger music” and the “the appalling phenomenon of teens ‘sexting.’”
He also links ISIS recruitment, hip-hop and sexting to a new AP U.S. History exam, which he says teaches “anti-Americanism” and to “a jihad in the classroom” consisting of what Religious Right groups claim is an insufficiently hostile portrayal of Islam in textbooks.
“Our young people need to know the truth about America’s storied past,” he writes. “And those who deny it to them are actually feeding the flames of jihad.”
Where there is no vision, the people perish. Americans have been shocked to see the brutality and barbarism of the Islamic militants of ISIS. Americans have been stunned by the revelations that their fellow Americans have joined the ranks of ISIS are taking up the cause of the caliphate. Pundits and politicians alike have publicly pondered the question as to how young Americans can be sucked into such an evil venture. While it may be troubling, the answer is not hard. Atheizers have been driving out of our schools, our entertainment, our military, and our government the very definition of who we are: our Judeo- Christian heritage. What has been left in its place has been called a naked public square. But just as nature abhors a vacuum, something was bound to rush into this void.
We see this in the violent nihilism of the hip-hop gang banger music from which Hollywood sucks billions of dollars .Into this naked public square has rushed a morbid hatred of women, an ugly sexualized pop culture, and the appalling phenomenon of teens “sexting” lewd pictures of their classmates—in our children’s schools.
We see in the Advanced Placement U.S. History standards anti-Americanism foisted on some of the brightest of our young people. In place of the heroism of Bunker Hill and that “stillness at Appomattox,” of the sacrifices of the Boys of Bedford on the beaches of Normandy on D-Day, we see people whose salaries we pay teaching our young people to have contempt for their country and its history.
There has been a jihad in the classroom as students are given an air-brushed history of Islam and too often taught that Christianity is the root of many repressive attitudes toward women and minorities.
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George Washington, a Christian, was the first ruler in history to address the Jews as equal fellow citizens. That is just one of the amazing truths about America that make us an exceptional country.
Our young people need to know the truth about America’s storied past. And those who deny it to them are actually feeding the flames of jihad.
Without a creedal vision that a society can unify around, the people of the nation will perish. Unless we are content to allow ISIS or some other radical belief to fill the void left by secularism, we must rediscover America’s Founding, Christ-centered vision.
