I became aware that the "Head Start" program for preschool children is not simply preparation for elementary school work when this federally funded program trickled into a church in Maine during Sunday School.  I was music director at the time (the 1980s), and the choir gathered in the church's assembly hall before the start of each Sunday service, as children gathered for their Sunday session.

Wittingly or not, the church had allowed a de facto collusion between secular and sacred teaching.  Unsuspecting families were in fact exposing their children to ideas more in line with paganism than with Christianity.  It was a subtle form of indoctrination.  I was not amused when I saw, among the children's playthings, dolls of both sexes that were "anatomically correct."  Parents who might justifiably object to this  public display of what was formerly a private matter were out of luck.

Unmistakable evidence of tampering with Christian doctrine came during the Sunday School lessons.  Children were being made to understand that Jesus was not at all different from you or me, that He was simply an extra-nice and loving man.  The Christian tenets that He is the Son of God, divine, and without sin were details left out of the narrative.  The relation between Jesus and His Father – to whom the adults on the other side of the church wall would pray ("Our Father...") – was also omitted.  And God loves you, no matter what you do was the only side of Christian theology emphasized.  The "go and sin no more" side was not even whispered.

Bye-bye, sin, bye-bye, guilt, bye-bye, all the best and most humane moral brakes on waywardness and wrongdoing ever manifested in sacred Scripture.

"Sin" and "guilt" soon became dirty words, in fact, and were deleted from the official Christian lexicon.  This was an important step for the political left in their ongoing effort to disable individual responsibility for right behavior and transfer it to the group, a more effective object of control.  Criticism of what was happening was squelched with smears like being "judgmental," "rigid," even "fundamentalist."  Political leftists tend to agree with Humpty Dumpty when he declared that "when I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean."  Pastors who did not follow the new politically correct gospel would soon be in hot water.  Most were sufficiently intimidated to guard their speech and keep their religion to themselves (Brainwash 101).

The distortion of Christian teaching became obvious on both sides of the church wall.  Whether at the pulpit or at the Sunday School tables, sacred text was being altered to conform to the new political commandments.  Minds, young and old, were being closed to the truth about their church and their religion.  The new, watered down, "liberalized" version of Christianity was opening doors to harmful political obsessions like prenatal infanticide, sodomy, and radical feminism.  And a new political bug was being let in called liberation theology, which was a  Marxist appropriation of Christian theology for the spread of communism.  Was it just me finding it difficult to picture Karl Marx assisting Christianity?

When asked for my review and opinion of a new hymnal for children that celebrated this liberalized version of Christianity, I made it clear that its distortions of Scripture, combined with trivialized music, made it an inappropriate hymnal for Christian worship.  The new hymnals were ordered anyway.

It was not long before guest speakers appeared during Sunday services to inform the congregation that changes in the church were on their way.  No details were given, but it was emphasized that the coming changes were needed and were to be accepted.  As I sat in front of the church with the choir, facing the congregation, I watched the faces in the audience as they listened to the sales pitches of these strangers peddling their new agenda.  They all sat like well behaved schoolkids, taking it all in without a murmur of concern from any of the pews.  And I could not help visualizing sheep being addressed by wolves in sheep's clothing (Matthew 7:15).

The alteration of church doctrine in many churches across the land, over many decades, cannot honestly be said to have improved the moral health of America.  Daily headlines confirm the contrary.  It would be smarter to get off the "progress express" and return to the Gospel as delivered by Christ's apostles.  There is solid, good reason to believe that their version of Christianity is the true one.