Evangelicals, Public School, and History

Over the last decade, my scholarly passion has been Chrsitianity; its history, influence, variations, and its Bible. I have studied the Bible extensively. I have studied (analytical) criticisms of it. I have studied apologetics. And I have studied theories as to its origins.

However, today I ran across a fact that I had never really paid any attention to; in CNN of all places. They had an article, Bible text for schools, that got me to thinking. The fact was that the number of evangelical/fundamentalist Christians has been rising over recent decades. I had heard it before, but never really thought about what it meant. This morning I did. I guess the reason was that it was presented in a story about a new bible textbook not aimed at been religious propaganda, so it could be presented in public schools.

So the question is, why was there a dramatic increase in fundamentalists recently? I think (and this is only an idle observation) that it is directly linked to the removal of religious influences in public schools 50 years ago. After all, most fundamentalists are under 50.... (And yes I do know that that is an invalid statistical conclusion because there is no connective evidence between age and religious views) Could it be that these Christians who whine about the removal of Christianity from schools by the Supreme Court are right, and it did create a Monster? That being this large pool of fundamentalist Christians.

I think I will have to ponder this a bit more and write about my thoughts in a day or so.