The Day God Lost

Editorial Commentary on the Butler Act of March 13 1925

Khen Lim



Image source: jasongoroncy.com

On this day, ninety-one years ago, the state of Tennessee in America passed into law a new piece of legislation called the Butler Act, which stops public school-teachers from denying God’s account of the origin of man. It was this law that resulted in the Scopes Trial that pitched Creationism against Darwinism. 

While the Butler Act reinforced the law for decades thereafter, it was in 1967 that a teacher Gary L Scott who successfully sued the state for wrongful dismissal, citing his First Amendment right to free speech. He didn’t leave things at that but instead took up his fight with a class action lawsuit, looking for permanent injunction against enforcement of the law. Within three days, the Butler Act was no more.

History teaches us that these sets of events were where Christian lost the fight against the progressives, atheists, liberals and modernists (PALM) who collectively, through early efforts by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), sought tenaciously to dismantle God’s influence firstly in education and then later throughout all aspects of public life. 

Image source: themadmailman.wordpress.com

Today brazen schoolteachers and lecturers outwardly and openly dismiss the Christian faith and mock God with a fiery determination to challenge His sovereignty not only in classrooms and lecture theatres but also in courtrooms, legislative assemblies and even supermarkets and departmental stores. 

As the PALM community becomes increasingly outspoken and tenaciously vitriolic, knowing that the law has constantly supported up, Christians feel they are losing the fight and are slowly but assuredly being painted to a corner.

But we can still win this if only we fortify our focus on God and not the war.