How many times have you heard that Christians are all about censorship? Don’t believe it. It’s secularists who are the real censors. The latest secular act of censorship was changing the words of Lee Greenwood’s song “God Bless the USA” with “We Love the USA.” This was done at Stall Brook Elementary School in Bellingham, Massachusetts. What a great thing to teach children. It’s OK to change the facts to fit your worldview.

It’s not surprising that NBC edited an audio tape to make George Zimmerman sound like a racist. The methodology was taught in elementary school.

Parents were outraged at the change, but instead of using the song as written, with God in the title, the school pulled it from the children’s concert. Here’s what Lee Greenwood had to say about the controversy:

“We can’t take God out of the song, we can’t take God out of the Pledge of Allegiance. We can’t take God off of the American currency. Let us also remember, the phrase ‘God Bless the USA’ has a very important meaning for those in the military and their families, as well as new citizens coming to our country. The song is played at every naturalization ceremony behind the national anthem. If the song is good enough to be played and performed in its original setting under those circumstances, it surely should be good enough for our children.” (Source)

What’s going to happen when these elementary students get to high school and have to study their state Constitution that mentions “the Supreme Being, the great Creator and Preserver of the universe,” “God,” and that “the happiness of a people, and the good order and preservation of civil government, essentially depend upon piety, religion and morality; and as these cannot be generally diffused through a community, but by the institution of the public worship of God, and of public instructions in piety, religion and morality”?

Textbook censorship has been going on for decades in our nation’s government schools. For example, elementary school social study books deal with the founding era of America. This would naturally include material on the Pilgrims.

Paul Vitz writes in his book Censorship: Evidence of Bias in Our Children’s Textbooks that one classroom text had 30 pages on the Pilgrims including the first Thanksgiving, “but there is not one word (or image) that referred to religion as even a part of the Pilgrims’ life. One mother whose son is in a class using this book wrote . . . that he came home and told her that ‘Thanksgiving was when the Pilgrims gave thanks to the Indians.’ The mother called the principal of this suburban New York City school to point out that Thanksgiving was when the Pilgrims thanked God. The principal responded by saying ‘that was her opinion’ — the schools could only teach what was in the books!”1

Censorship takes place every day in government schools. The folks at Stall Brook Elementary School just got caught doing it in the open.

1. Paul C. Vitz, Censorship: Evidence of Bias in Our Children’s Textbooks (Ann Arbor, MI: Servant Books, 1986), 3. [↩]