Tuesday, December 2, 2025

Godly To Ungodly The Slow Secularization Of The USA

Godly To Ungodly

The Slow Secularization Of The USA

Bodie Hodge, M.Sc., B.Sc., PEI

Biblical Authority Ministries, December 2, 2025 (Donate)

Get The Bible Out!

The people of the United States, particularly Christians, were shocked in the 1960s. The Bible was suddenly removed from classrooms in state schools. The Bible, which was a staple in every classroom since the inception of the country in 1776, was no longer permitted to be read and prayers to God were removed as well.

Image requested by Bodie Hodge (ChatGPT)

The major Supreme Court ruling that removed state-mandated Bible reading from public-school classrooms in the 1960s was Abington School District v. Schempp, decided on June 17, 1963. In this case, the Court declared that public schools could not require students to participate in Bible readings or recite the Lord’s Prayer, ruling that such practices violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

This decision followed Engel v. Vitale in 1962, which struck down school-sponsored prayer. Together, these decisions ended government-directed devotional exercises in public schools.

Many Christians, who were the majority by far, reacted and started Christian schools and put Bible class back into the curriculum. But they modeled their schools and curriculum as if they were 1960s schools and simply added the Bible class back in.

Many failed to realize that Christian ideas and biblical teachings had slowly been removed from other subjects, years before. Logic, literature, science (e.g., biology, chemistry and physics), and history had already scrubbed God and His Word. How many Christian schools and curriculum restored these subjects to their formed glory? Few actually.

The Secular Religion(s)

What happened to this country that once stood on godly values and biblical truth for so long? It was a slow, steady attack that lasted through multiple generations. This attack is called secularism—or more properly the religion of secular humanism.

Like Christianity, which has a multitude of denominations, so does secular humanism (often simply dubbed humanism or secularism). Variations of this religion can include:

·       Naturalism (i.e., on the natural world exist—nothing spiritual or supernatural like God)

·       Materialism (i.e., the only things that exist are material like matter and energy, hence no immaterial entities exist like God)

·       Evolutionism (i.e., modern Epicureanism, Darwinism, Lamarckism, etc.)

·       Atheism/agnosticism (i.e., atheism says “there is no God”; agnosticism says one can’t know if God exists and is often called (soft atheism”)

·       Empiricism (i.e., philosophical view that knowledge comes strictly through the senses)

·       Relativism (i.e., the belief that truth, morality, or knowledge is not absolute but varies and changes arbitrarily depending on individuals, cultures, or contexts.)

·       Sexual humanism (i.e., the sexual immorality movement [SIM] which is the LGBTQIAA+ and other deviant sexual religious fervor permeating our culture)

·       Veganism (Watsonism [from Donald Watson, its modern founder] which is a philosophical way of living based on the evolutionary concept of man and animals being co-equal on an evolutionary chain)

Adherents of these secular religions often attempt to convince people that these secular forms of humanism are not religious, but they are. They all take man’s ideas as superior to God and His Word—hence man is seen as the ultimate authority above God—which is what humanism is.  

Generated image of the signing of the Humanist Manifesto; requested by Bodie Hodge (ChatGPT)

An obvious way to see that these humanistic worldviews are religious is to see how these beliefs are in contradiction to religion—like Christianity. They have friction between their tenets, origins accounts, and beliefs—in other words they are not compatible with one another. If they were truly non-religious, they would have no “dog in the fight” when it comes to origins or morality which are religious interests.

The Secular Attack On The USA

The secular attack in the USA is much older than most realize. It traces its roots to the late 1700s and early 1800s with people like James Hutton and Charles Lyell. They began looking at earth history through the lens of geology by leaving God and His Word, the Bible, out of it.

In doing so, they elevated man’s ideas in the interpretation of fields like geology. Instead of the understanding that the majority of the rock layers with fossils being evidence of a global Flood of Noah’s day, they rejected that! Instead, they proposed the rock layers were laid down slowly over long ages—millions of years. In other words, they said God got it wrong.

Then Charles Darwin applied these humanistic ideas to biology and reinvented a form of evolution (which was an ancient Epicurean belief). Others applied secular ideas to physics and chemistry. The next thing you know, evolution and millions of years dominated universities by the 1870s and most colleges fell to a secular worldview.

Then these ideas were pushed into state schools and by 1925, the famous Scopes Trial over creation versus human evolution in Dayton Tennessee saw Genesis and creation attacked from the stand as the world looked on. Though the creation worldview won that day in Tennessee, it set a stage to which led to a decline in Christian influence in schools.

Kids would go into history and science classes and be taught evolution then go to logic classes and see the fallacies in the evolutionary worldview. Something had to give—and logic was thrown out of the regular curriculum in the 1950s. Education has spiraled down into unrecognizable forms today.

Then finally, the 1960s arrive and the Bible is essentially thrown out along with prayer in the USA’s highest court. Then people suddenly take notice and asked “what happened?”

Though the court cases make it sound as though the government cannot permit religion in state schools, and there is a public perception that religion has been kicked out of schools, this is a huge misconception. Christianity was kicked out, but secular humanism remains as the state religion reigning in classrooms.

Textbooks, teachers, and class assignments commonly push big bang, millions of years, and evolution in most classes especially in science and history. Naturalism dominates state schools and state museums and even the much of the modern media. The point is that religion is very much a part of modern school systems—it is simple the religion of secular humanism and its variants.

When Christianity was kicked out it was replaced by another religion—the religion of secular humanism in its various forms. Interestingly, these court decisions appealed to the Establishment Clause of First Amendment of the Constitution to refuse the Bible in the classroom and yet the very people writing and ratifying the Constitution openly called for Bibles and funding them for use in the classroom showing they clearly didn’t view this as unconstitutional or contrary to the First Amendment! 

Image requested by Bodie Hodge (ChatGPT)

Yet, here we are after generations have been immersed in humanistic views and ideals and morality. Now we are in an age where morality has effectively been destroyed in our culture—even within the church! Drugs and suicide are commonplace. Sexual immorality and sin along with broken marriages affect millions of people in the USA. Entire denominations have embraced secular origins stories and threw out (or heavily reinterpreted) God’s creation in Genesis.

Sadly, many churches just mix their Christianity with secular humanism (i.e., adding big bang and millions of years to the doctrine) or ignore the problem altogether. We even hear claims that the Bible and Christianity had little influence on founding fathers of this nation—or that they were largely deistic or otherwise, unbiblical.

Education has been so degraded by secular “storytelling” that we are in a culture where people have forgotten the cherished and good Christian influence of our fledgling nation surrounding 1776. It makes one wonder what can be done.

What Do We Do?

Sometimes, we need to pause and be still and know that God is God. God says:

Be still, and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth! (Psalms 46:10, NKJV)

Rest assured that Jesus Christ is still King of Kings and Lord of Lord (Revelation 17:14) and sits on the throne of God (Luke 22:69) reigning over all nations on the earth—including the USA. Hosea 4:6 says that God’s people are destroyed for a lack of knowledge.  

One thing we can do is get back to the Bible and trust what God says. Another thing we can do is understand our history as a nation. The Bible has been integral since the colonies began. And so, it was time to go back to the founding documents for the colonies, states, and country and grasp the culture and the preaching and the day.

I hope this is an exciting path of understanding the foundation of this nation and how it was predicated on God time and time again. Enjoy:

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Bodie Hodge, Ken Ham's son in law, has been an apologist since 1998 helping out in various churches and running an apologetics website. He spent 21 years working at Answers in Genesis as a speaker, writer, and researcher as well as a founding news anchor for Answers News. He was also head of the Oversight Council.  

Bodie launched Biblical Authority Ministries in 2015 as a personal website and it was organized officially in 2025 as a 501(c)(3). He has spoken on multiple continents and hosts of US states in churches, colleges, and universities. He is married with four children. 

 

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Godly To Ungodly The Slow Secularization Of The USA

Godly To Ungodly The Slow Secularization Of The USA Bodie Hodge, M.Sc., B.Sc., PEI Biblical Authority Ministries, December 2, 2025 ( Don...