Did you read the recent story about the longtime substitute teacher in Phillipsburg, NJ who was fired after he shared a Bible verse with a student and gave him a Bible? This is a true story. The teacher, Walter Tutka, was standing by a door at a middle school when one of his students straggled in slightly late. Tutka quoted the Bible verse to him, “The first shall be last but the last shall be first.”
The kid didn’t know it was from the Bible, but was curious about the quote, so a few days later, he went up to Tutka and asked about it. At that point, the teacher shared that it came out of the Bible.
Over the next few weeks, the student kept coming up to him to ask more about it. Finally, he approached the teacher in the cafeteria during lunchtime and asked where to find it in the Bible. So, Tutka took a New Testament out of his pocket and showed it to him. At that the child mentioned that he didn’t have a Bible, so Tutka gave him his. For that, the school board voted to terminate Tutka’s employment, accusing him of breaking two board policies – distributing religious literature on school grounds and not being neutral when discussing religious material.
Of course, both of these accusations are absurd on their face. First, he was not distributing religious material. He gave the kid a Bible during lunchtime when the child asked for it. Secondly, America does have the first amendment to the Constitution which allows anyone to talk about whatever they want in a school building, or any other place, during non-instructional time.
If this attack against religion applied equally to every faith, that would be one thing, though that is actually impossible. Some belief system will be the default in every circumstance. In the case of our public schools, that default is atheistic Secular Humanism. Many who adhere to the beliefs of this system squawk mightily when this point is made, insisting that Secular Humanism is not a religion. And, in fact, they contend that they want to keep all religious expression out of the public square. These people really don’t get it.
Secular Humanism is not the absence of religion, it is a religious philosophy all its own. It must be believed by faith and there is nothing to support it as the truth about how reality is structured. The truth is, the entire concept of schools being “secular” is a joke. They begin their instruction with the religious belief that God does not exist, and insist that everything taught must be done with that presupposition in place. We must teach science as if God doesn’t exist. We must teach psychology and sociology and economics and philosophy and history and everything else as if God does not exist – and there is, literally no evidence that this assumption is true.
Wake up, Christians! It is only going to get worse.
So, what can we do about it? There is strength in numbers. And how do we get numbers? We must massively share the truth about Jesus Christ to those who don’t know him. Without that, we will increasingly to see the Walter Tutkas of the world drummed out of the public square.