Taking God Out of The Public

[DragonFox91]

Can anyone in the older crowd share how much more God used to be in public? What was people’s reactions & was it strong? I was looking thru some old newspapers & saw daily prayers written in them & that’s just not something you’d see today. I remember growing up there was a cross on a hill & they took it down b/c people complained (replaced by an American flag). More stores were closed on Sundays. I’m wondering about prayers in schools. Was prayer common before work? Stuff like that. I hope this doesn’t turn political, it’s more people’s memories & anecdotes I’m wondering about.

 

[HTacianas]

Can anyone in the older crowd share how much more God used to be in public? What was people’s reactions & was it strong? I was looking thru some old newspapers & saw daily prayers written in them & that’s just not something you’d see today. I remember growing up there was a cross on a hill & they took it down b/c people complained (replaced by an American flag). More stores were closed on Sundays. I’m wondering about prayers in schools. Was prayer common before work? Stuff like that. I hope this doesn’t turn political, it’s more people’s memories & anecdotes I’m wondering about.

I remember prayers over the intercom every morning in elementary school. At some point someone decided that we shouldn't read from the new testament because there might be Jews who didn't believe in it. So they decided to only read from the old testament and everyone was happy.

Note that this was nearly twenty years after the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional. We thought they were talking to somebody else.

 

[PloverWing]

My story has a geographic complication to it. The first half of my life was spent in the Bible Belt (southeastern US), and the second half of my life has been spent in the northeastern US, so the cultural changes I experienced were more than just time passing.

In the southeast where I grew up, there was a lot of religious homogeneity. It was acceptable to ask "what church do you go to?" in casual conversation, the way you might ask "what high school do you go to?" Few events were held on Sunday mornings, because it was taken for granted that most people would be in church. Some Blue Laws were still in effect, although I expected them to go away as soon as someone made the effort to challenge them on constitutional grounds.

The area of the northeast where I now live is more secular and more multi-religious. Many people are non-religious, and people who are religious belong to a much wider variety of faiths than just Baptist vs Methodist.

I think the best thing about the religious homogeneity of my childhood was that the community had a rhythm to it, with most people observing Christmas, Easter, and Sunday mornings. (Not Lent and Holy Week, though -- it was a very Protestant area.) It was taken for granted that these were times when people were doing religious stuff, and other events weren't scheduled for those days.

Looking back, the biggest negative is that we probably squashed some people's religious needs without really intending to be rude. How many Jews and SDAs were stuck with sporting or scouting events held on Saturdays? How many atheists uncomfortably sang along to "Joy to the World"?

But if the community really is religiously homogeneous, there's a relaxing comfort to it, being able to live a communally religious life together.

 

[frank sears]

I was around people who swore a lot when I was a kid, even though the general attitude seemed to be one of respect toward God. A person who boldly proclaimed that God did not exist would have been considered some kind of a pervert. Then and years later, when I became a young man, most people knew very little of what was actually in the Bible.

 

[disciple Clint]

Can anyone in the older crowd share how much more God used to be in public? What was people’s reactions & was it strong? I was looking thru some old newspapers & saw daily prayers written in them & that’s just not something you’d see today. I remember growing up there was a cross on a hill & they took it down b/c people complained (replaced by an American flag). More stores were closed on Sundays. I’m wondering about prayers in schools. Was prayer common before work? Stuff like that. I hope this doesn’t turn political, it’s more people’s memories & anecdotes I’m wondering about.

My thinking is that not everyone was a practicing Christian but everyone accepted Christian morals, crime was not condoned, people did not shoot people for little to no reason, the streets were safe and kids were allowed to be kids. Parents actually gave guidance and punishment when needed. Sex was not something discussed in public let alone in grade school. People when out of their way to help others and did not expect anything in return.

 

[DragonFox91]

I was around people who swore a lot when I was a kid, even though the general attitude seemed to be one of respect toward God. A person who boldly proclaimed that God did not exist would have been considered some kind of a pervert. Then and years later, when I became a young man, most people knew very little of what was actually in the Bible.

Makes sense. Kind of like how 'gay' was a slur & homosexuality considered bad. Even by many people who didn't care for God or understood that it came from the Bible.

 

[St_Worm2]

Hello @DragonFox91, back (as late as the early to mid 70's) movies and tv shows included God/talk about Him regularly (because it was still considered to be normal to do so by the mainstream public).

Two examples that come quickly to mind are,

1. the TV series (50's - 60's) called Dragnet and,
2. John Wayne moves (like True Grit and Rooster Cogburn)
​

In (what is perhaps the most disturbing Dragnet episode of all time, because a baby dies), a young professional couple argue with police using the Bible (Ephesians 6) to defend their beliefs (mostly in regard to marijuana use), and then Sgt. Friday corrects their misinterpretation of the Bible by using the Bible as well (Ephesians 5). Both the couple and the police recited their verses from memory to each other, just FYI.

This was a prime time tv show in 1967, which means that their use of the Bible (even in 1967) was still typical/considered to be mainstream. The episode that I am referring to is called, The Big High, just FYI.

As for movies in the 60's and 70's, like the ones staring John Wayne that I mentioned above, talking about God, the Bible, asking for prayer and engaging in prayer itself, etc., were commonplace. In fact, in True Grit, three of the main characters argue over which one of their three denominations is better, and why

God bless you!!

--David

 

[ViaCrucis]

I was born in 1982. My elementary through middle school (K through 8th grade, or roughly from the age of 5 until 14) I attended private religious schooling, with the exception of my 7th grade year which was homeschooled through Pensacola Bible Institute homeschooling materials (lessons were in the form of VHS tapes).

My high school career was from 1997 through 2001, which was my entire experience of American public education.

My entire childhood I had been effectively told that it was illegal to even be a Christian in public school, so I went into high school believing that I was basically breaking the law by bringing my Bible to school and reading it between classes. However, it turned out that I had been told a lot of nonsense by a lot of people, because nobody cared. I was free to read my Bible, pray, and talk about my faith openly. There were students who made fun of me, but then there were also a lot of fellow students who just accepted me even though they weren't religious. There was only one time where I was told I was crossing a line, by a minor faculty member (an office worker, not a teacher) told me that it was inappropriate for me to have Bible verses safety-pinned to my clothing (late 90's skater-punk aesthetic) and it was my non-religious friends who encouraged me that it was my right to free speech so I should ignore it--and, nothing came of it, because I did have my rights to free speech. Teachers never gave me trouble, they were if anything supportive of my self-expression even though they themselves weren't Christian.

Perhaps I'm not "old enough" to be included in this discussion. But my experience of American public education in the late 90's in one of the least religious regions of the United States (the Pacific Northwest) is that I was encouraged to believe and say what I wanted.

I never felt any need to have my teachers, who didn't share my faith, pretend to be members of my faith. It didn't make any sense for my American History teacher, who was Jewish, be anything other than Jewish.

Every year me and students and a few teachers would join the "See you at the flagpole" event which was common at the time nationally. Nobody had any issues with it, it was just perfectly ordinarily fine.

I'm just not sure I understand what the hubaloo over "prayer in school" is about. I mean, I wouldn't feel particularly comfortable with school-led Islamic prayers, or Mormon prayers, had those been the norm; so I don't understand the problem with simply recognizing that the United States is a secular nation that takes seriously the Constitutional right to freedom of religion.

I, for one, don't want my religion to be co-opted and perverted by my government.

-CryptoLutheran

 

[The Liturgist]

Chiefly I remember better attendance at Sunday services, which were more reverent, with more formal attire and more beautiful music. What I miss the most is being able to go into most churches and find that they agreed on central points of morality, for example, abortion and sexual immorality are wrong, and being able to hear traditional church music with not an electric guitar or drum kit in sight. Either a capella or accompanied chorales on the organ, or rarely in the poorest chapels, a piano, but usually everyone had at least a compact Hammond organ in the 1970s.

Christianity was widespread to the point that companies feared offending the Christian community; it still is widespread but due to various political and economic changes companies now focus on pleasing a minority of the far left as virtue signaling, a trend which started as Political Correctness in the 1970s and has steadily gotten worse and worse with the Woke movement. At Disneyland they no longer say “Ladies and Gentlemen” for fear of offending some perverse demographic.

In my youth the nearby Knotts Berry Farm theme park, whose founder, Walter Knott, opened it by accident in the 1930s and 40s as a roadside attraction which exploded in popularity due to his popularization of the boysenberry and the fried chicken dinners cooked by his wife starting in the 1930s, turning into a full theme park like Disneyland around the same time, was a friend of Walt Disney, and in the early years of Disneyland the parks opened on alternate days in the off season to avoid squeezing each other out of business. Walt Disney was a Christian, and his films featured subfle Christian iconography, for example, stained glass windows formed from trees in the forest in Sleeping Beauty (1959), and Walter Knott had a chapel at Knotts Berry Farm, and you could access the park for free on Sunday to attend services there. I remember going as a kid, albeit my family paid for tickets as we intended to go on rides after church, and the pastor delivered a really interesting sermon which involved the history of the Wandering across Sinai by Israel to the Promised Land, tracking the narrative of the Promised Land across the Pentateuch, from a Christian perspective.

Clifton’s Cafeteria in downtown Los Angeles was another Christian owned business: their cafeteria with a theme like Sequoia National Forest featured a chapel accessible via a narrow walkway on the second floor. You could sit down inside and press a button, and hear a recording of organ music play while a beautiful poem was read, which was about God creating the giant redwood trees and humanity. There was a cross on top of the chapel so no one would be confused as to its identity.

Things like this were common.

 

[inquiring mind]

Someone mentioned ‘respect,’ and that stands out in my memories (school years later 50s to later 60s). No matter what one’s religious belief was, the extent of it, or whether they believed at all, generally there was respect in the public toward God and religion that you just don’t see or feel today. Same with respect toward older people… it’s declining rapidly too, and already gone in a lot of cases.

 

[J_B_]

I was around people who swore a lot when I was a kid, even though the general attitude seemed to be one of respect toward God. A person who boldly proclaimed that God did not exist would have been considered some kind of a pervert. Then and years later, when I became a young man, most people knew very little of what was actually in the Bible.

Yeah, I always found that odd. Many of my relatives were hard-drinking, heavy-swearing, sex-obsessed people who would smack their kids if they didn't sit up straight and say their prayers. It was a different time, though it's hard to say if it was better.

My grandmother had some wild stories from the 1920s, and she told me she discussed with my grandfather whether they should not have kids because of Hitler, etc.