I’ve had a blog post about 1952-53 in my drafts folder for about a year. Really. I’ve been trying to get a bead on that time period for awhile. That same anxiety that we’re all feeling in the air right now in the US, I think people were feeling back then too. And the seeds of our own undoing were planted then. Here are some facts I’ve gathered:
- Thomas Nelson released its second edition of the Revised Standard Version in 1952, this time including the Old Testament. To religious conservatives, the translators were pretty sloppy, seeming to highlight contradictions between the Old and New Testaments.
- The first conservative evangelical Christian school started in 1952 down in Florida — Keswick Christian School. One of its alumni wrote about her experience in My Fundamentalist Education.
- In 1952 and 1953, the U.S. experienced an outbreak of 58,000 and 35,000 polio cases, respectively, up from a typical number of some 20,000 cases a year.
- President Eisenhower started the “Back to God” campaign.
- The Army-McCarthy hearings were just starting in 1953.
- The babies were still booming.
- I Love Lucy was in its second season.
- The Korean War continued as a hotter part of the ongoing Cold War.
- “Under God” was added to the Pledge of Allegiance, thanks to the efforts of the Knights of Columbus, appealing to a newly-baptized Eisenhower.
- The Supreme Court heard Zorach v. Clauson, and released-time religious instruction diminished after that.
- Dr. Spock dominated the parenting-advice market.
And that’s the way it was . . . back in those blissful 1950s. When television couples slept in separate beds and the “coloreds” drank from separate drinking fountains and “fundamentalism” was not-yet-separated from “evangelicalism.”
This is the world in which Ted Mercer was writing.
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What a time that would be to live in.
Fascinating…I remember reading a brief section about Mercer in one of the “official” BJU histories (I think Turner’s book maybe) and it will be interesting to see source documents and hopefully a more complete picture of what happened there. Do you have copies of Mercer’s letter to the faculty and students?
I love the way you use YouTube Videos to support your points. I watch old films because they help wash the veneer off some of my Grandparent’s stories. (It’s surprising how much people hate this sometimes……)
His fact about the first evangelical school is fallacious. Conservative evangelical Christian Schools have existed in America since the 17th Century.
“His”? ::scratching head::
And it’s not fallacious. You may mean that it’s incorrect, but it’s not fallacious.
And it’s not incorrect either. We all know that a *new* kind of Christian school started in the 20th-century. While the Lutherans were really the only Protestants to have a counter-cultural parochial school and those started early, something different happened in 20th-century America. You see prior to that, we Protestants *were* the public school system. Any history of education in the United States would tell you that. McGuffey readers anyone?
To say that there have always been “conservative Evangelical Christian Schools” is like saying that there have always been homeschoolers. That’s not exactly the case since something different happened with the Prides in the latter half of the 20th-century as well.
So uh, what were you saying?