With the Ten Commandments and prayer barred from many American classrooms, what is taking their place? Even though most of the nation’s first and most prominent universities were founded in the name of Christianity, most of today’s educators are ignoring the foundation of truth—God’s word. Students are being taught that there are no absolutes and that there is no ultimate authority except the self. Instead of learning God’s eternal law, they are learning humanism and materialism.
How did our educational systems shift their emphasis? Many universities that were founded to teach the Bible and uphold God’s moral law had, by the 1960s, become havens of nihilism and anti-God sentiment. Beginning in the 19th century, they adopted the structure, and later the ideals, of the German universities and philosophers.
Key among these philosophers was Friedrich Nietzsche, whose philosophy was not merely atheistic but was strongly anti-God. He wrote: “God is dead; but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown. And we—we still have to vanquish his shadow, too” (The Gay Science, Nietzsche, 1882, section 108). Nietzsche is now dead, but his philosophy lives on to this day in anti-God minds. During the tumult of the 1960s, it even leapt out of philosophy books and into the news headlines, when the respected TIME magazine asked on its April 8, 1966 cover: “Is God Dead?”
Many intellectuals of the 18th and 19th centuries saw correctly that Christianity had strayed from its apostolic origins and had taken on the pagan customs of the surrounding society. But instead of rebuilding modern education on Christianity’s true foundation, many intellectuals sought to destroy that foundation altogether! They rejected one kind of false religion and its false education, but sought to replace it with godless education rather than godly education.