Beginning in 1962... the courts began to systematically secularize the nation, reflecting its view that God and the Scripture had no place in the public arena.
From the very beginning, I started preaching when I was 16 years old. So I began studying Scripture very seriously. I had done over a hundred revivals in Baptist churches before I was 20. So I am studying the Scripture as a kid and I'm noticing that Christians often wanted to excuse God from things that God doesn't need excusing from.
In the 1960s, various parts of the population became energized and began to enter the public arena to call for the rights of women, students, young people, old people, farmers and workers. What are called "special interests" - meaning the whole population - they began to press to enter the public arena. And they said that puts too much pressure on the state and therefore we have to have more moderation in democracy and they should go back and be quiet and obedient.
In 1962, the Supreme Court banned organized prayer from public schools. Since then, federal, state, and local courts and officials, including public school administrators, have joined in a nationwide search and destroy mission for student religious practices.
All Scripture is God-breathed... but what we have to understand also is that the Canon of Scripture still is coming from a place of a loving God.
The place to find the explanation for the liberal-activist mindset of the courts is in the political arena.
Unless you are terribly, terribly careful, you run the danger-- without even knowing it is happening to you-- of slipping into the fatal error of reflecting the public taste instead of creating it. Your responsibility is to the public consciousness, not to the public view of itself.
In terms of applicability to today's world, many people are trying to domesticate Scripture so as to get the PC answer, the politically correct answer on a wide range of subjects, whether it's homosexual marriage, or a certain view of government, or a certain view of eschatology or whatever. At the end of the day we want also to encourage the kind of reverent handling of Scripture that wants to be corrected by Scripture, that is more eager to be mastered by Scripture then to master it.
Today courts wrongly interpret separation of church and state to mean that religion has no place in the public arena, or that morality derived from religion should not be permitted to shape our laws. Somehow freedom for religious expression has become freedom from religious expression. Secularists want to empty the public square of religion and religious-based morality so they can monopolize the shared space of society with their own views. In the process they have made religious believers into second-class citizens.
Indeed, there is an attack against things Christian in America. We see it in the movies, on TV, in the schools, in the universities, in the public arena, in the courts, and even within some church circles.
Faith should be pulled into the public arena when it affects how we live. If it doesn't, it does no earthly good. What does my faith say about the fact that a girl can't be a nuclear physicist because she's black and from the inner city? My faith says, no, that's not what God intended. It pulls it back into the public arena the idea that there's got to be something fair for all of us.
God the Father is the giver of Holy Scripture; God the Son is the theme of Holy Scripture; and God the Spirit is the author, authenticator, and interpreter of Holy Scripture.
As a young adult, I began to read widely in history, philosophy, and religion - including the Bible. I began to feel that a purely secular view of life was incomplete and that the universe was a fundamentally spiritual place.
Once I returned to the Church and began to see the universe as a place that really did incorporate redemption and really tried to understand the implications of there being a God, my identification with the vampires as outcasts, as outsiders and lost souls began to totally wane. It no longer worked for me. I had done it. It had led me to this point.
Many people are trying to remove religion from public life. Under the banner of pluralism, cultural and political leaders are seeking to push all talk about God out of the public arena.
For centuries, the courts took the view that preserving the discretion of the authorities trumped the rights of victims to hold them to account. It was because of the Human Rights Act that this began to change.
I maintain the rather old-fashioned view that this is my work and it's in the public arena, but that doesn't entitle everyone to know what happened at home before coming here.