The Great Deception: When America Abandoned a Biblical View of Man
Charles H. Spurgeon, known as the ‘Prince of English Preachers’, once said, “If you beat a tiger with many stripes, you cannot turn him into a sheep. The devil cannot be whipped out of human nature.” Spurgeon understood that human nature is fallen, not perfectible by law, culture, or education. Only grace can change the heart.
For America’s first 250 years [from the colonial era through the early republic], the Biblical view of man as a fallen creature was taken for granted in education, law, and culture. Children learned their ABCs through the New England Primer, the nation’s first textbook and catechism.
The Primer’s alphabet was not neutral but theological, weaving the story of creation, sin, judgment, and redemption into the very act of learning to read:
A - In Adam’s fall, we sinned all.
B - Heaven to find, the Bible mind.
C - Christ crucify’d for sinners dy’d.
D - The Deluge drown’d the earth around.
E - Elijah hid by ravens fed.
F - The judgment made Felix afraid.
G - As runs the glass, our life doth pass.
H - My book and heart shall never part.
… and so on through Z - Zacchaeus he did climb the tree, our Lord to see.
The Primer impressed upon young minds the truth that sin is humanity’s deepest problem and redemption its only hope. This consensus shaped the Founding generation. John Adams declared that “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” James Madison echoed the same conviction: liberty required virtue, and virtue depended on Biblical Christianity.
The consensus began to unravel in the late 1800s. The influence of Darwinism [1859 onward] reshaped how man was understood - not as created in God’s image but as the product of impersonal evolution determined by chance and random events.
John Dewey [1859-1952], the father of modern American education, openly rejected Scripture and promoted secular humanism. His philosophy saw man as basically good and perfectible through education and social reform. Dewey’s progressive pedagogy shifted classrooms away from the Primer’s Biblical worldview toward humanistic optimism - away from catechizing children in sin and redemption, and toward the illusion that education could perfect human nature.
That shift was formalized in the mid-20th century. In Engel v. Vitale [1962] and Abington v. Schempp [1963], the Supreme Court expelled prayer and Bible reading from public schools.
There is no such thing as neutrality in religion, for denying God’s existence is every bit as much of a religious belief as believing in Jehovah. Including the Bible in the curriculum, as America’s Founders mandated, was no less a spiritual decision than the radically secular Warren Court’s [1953-1969] prohibition of prayer and the Bible in public schools.
In a single decade, the Biblical catechism of the Primer was replaced by a secular catechism of humanism. What rushed in to fill the void was not neutrality but a rival creed holding that man is good, that society corrupts him, and that salvation lies in education, progress, or politics.
Os Guinness helps us to see the deeper roots of the conflict: “The culture war now at its deepest roots is actually a clash between 1776, what was the American Revolution, and 1789, the heirs of the French Revolution.”
1776 presupposed the Biblical view: man is fallen, liberty rests on virtue, and virtue depends on Biblical Christianity. The Primer taught children to read by teaching them their sin and their Savior.
1789, by contrast, enthroned human reason and denied original sin. It preached man’s natural goodness and perfectibility. But liberty without virtue and accountability to God quickly collapsed into bloodshed and tyranny.
Guinness adds another sobering observation in his book A Free People’s Suicide: “One cannot point to a free and lasting civilization anywhere in history that was built on atheistic foundations.”
The fruits of 1789, whether in Paris, Moscow, or Beijing, have always been the same - revolution without restraint, liberty without virtue, and ultimately, tyranny without God.
This is the choice before us still. Contemporary public education, as it now stands, rests almost entirely on the creed of 1789. It catechizes children daily into the belief that they are naturally good, that morality is self-defined, and that progress alone can redeem society.
Present-day education must either be reformed from the ground up or abandoned in favor of explicitly Biblical alternatives. Otherwise, it will continue to catechize children into 1789 rather than 1776.
The great deception of our age is to believe that man is good, that sin is a myth, and that progress will save us. History proves otherwise. Nations that deny sin collapse under its weight. America’s meteoric rise was fueled by Biblical literacy; our decline corresponds with the rejection of that foundation.
Spurgeon was right: “The devil cannot be whipped out of human nature.” Only Christ can change the heart. If America is to recover, it must return to the truth once etched into the alphabet itself: “In Adam’s fall, we sinned all… Christ crucify’d for sinners dy’d.”
Anything less is illusion compounded by deception.
Thankfully, Gideons and Rahabs have begun to stand.
David Lane
American Renewal Project
