An Alabama school shows an inspiring movie about a football team that beat the odds because of the players’ religious convictions. A divorced woman sends her son to a Catholic school in Kentucky. And a congressman from Virginia proposes a resolution proclaiming American Religious History Week. So what? That’s what we thought. Until, that is, we read how all three are being challenged.
The movie “Facing the Giants” tells the story of a Southern football coach who inspires his players to turn around their losing season by giving “your best to God.” The film, which cost only $100,000 to produce, is so popular that it has grossed more than $10 million. Everyone seems to have loved it, save for a handful of radical secularists. Enter the Americans United for Separation of Church and State. The Tuscaloosa City Schools system was forced to suspend showing the movie because of its Christian content.
When a Kentucky couple got divorced, the mother wanted her son to continue his education in a Catholic school, but the father objected. The judge ruled in favor of the mother. But now the boy is slated to attend a Catholic high school next year and the father is suing on the grounds that the school will indoctrinate his son with religious convictions he does not share; the father is an atheist.
Rep. Randy Forbes recently filed a nonbinding resolution that would support a designated week each May “for the appreciation of and education on America’s history of religious faith.” Americans United jumped in accusing the congressman of “meddling in religious issues.” The resolution’s outcome is uncertain.
All three issues show the mean-spiritedness of radical secularists. Nothing frightens them more than religion, and they will use every tactic in the book they can to blunt it. It is they who are truly frightening.a
