On a busy Memorial Day weekend a few years ago, Christian Overman and his wife, Kathy, went to the Seattle Center to set up a video camera and record randomly selected participants answering the following question:
"How do you define 'right' and 'wrong,' and how to you determine the difference?"
After 1.5 hours of nearly back-to-back interviews, with no shortage of willing participants, not a single person made even a passing reference to the Bible, to the "Golden Rule," to the 10 Commandments or to any other specifically Judeo-Christian measurement of morality.
Jesus was never mentioned, nor was God.
What did people make reference to?
The following samples of responses given that day explain why the United States is so horribly, unavoidably divided (3:48 minutes):
How did our nation arrive at this point?
In the 1960s, we removed Bible readings from public schools, and in the 1980s, we removed the 10 Commandments from the classroom walls. We forgot that Noah Webster ("the Schoolmaster of the Nation") told us education was "useless without the Bible."
In the Preface to his Dictionary of 1828 (which not only shaped the way Americans spelled, but how Americans thought), Webster declared:
"In my view, the Christian religion is the most important and one of the first things in which all children, under a free government ought to be instructed...No truth is more evident to my mind than that the Christian religion must be the basis of any government intended to secure the rights and privileges of a free people."
Today we want freedom from Christianity, not freedom via Christianity.
How's it working out?
Webster referred to the Bible as "the only book which can remedy, or essentially mitigate, the evils of a licentious world."
In a letter written in 1836, he asserted: "Any system of education...which limits instruction to the arts and sciences, and rejects the aids of religion in forming the character of citizens, is essentially defective."
What grade would Noah Webster give our schools today?
Could the removal of the Bible from our public schools have anything to do with our nation's stunning inability to provide a fitting answer to the basic question, "how do you define 'right'' and 'wrong,' and how do you determine the difference?"
Why is the U.S. so horribly divided?
Watch the video again.