I'm a member of an exclusive club, one that admits no new members. This closed club requires no application fee to join and has never had any dues to pay. The club has no meetings and, in fact, has never met. If you're not already a member, you can't join--that sums it up.
UNIQUE
What club is this? It's not an organization that I joined because of any merit or achievement I garnered, earned, or was awarded. It's a club based on birth. It's made up of my generation of Americans: I am a member of the last fully Christianized generation in America, and sad to say, there will never be another like us.
What I mean by that is not that all members of my generation are or were born again, but that my generation is the last to be heavily soaked and influenced in the culture which Christianity produces that we can say that my generation is the last one to have been so blessed, so "Christianized."
MRS. NELSON AND HER RECORD PLAYER
Allow me to give you some examples of the Christian soaking we received. In the second grade, Mrs. Nelson was our teacher. Mrs. Nelson taught us all subjects from math to music. There is one and only one thing I remember from the music she taught us. One day she brought out the record player and played a song for us. It was "The Lord's Prayer" set to music. You've probably heard it, but not like we club members did; we heard it in a public school, Dupre Elementary School, to be exact.
In each elementary school in the city there was a special day for all 5th graders. It was the day representatives of the Gideons came and presented every 5th grader with a Bible; we were proud to receive that little New Testament. I carried it around in my back pocket.
LOVE AND MARRIAGE
Divorce? There was no such thing in my experience, with one exception. I only knew one person, just one person, all through elementary school, junior high, and high school whose parents were divorced. Just one. Marriage was forever in this life. That's the way it was in a Christianized society back then.
THE PUGILISTIC ARTS
Speaking of high school, there were around 1,300-1,400 students in mine. My senior class was over 400. During my years traversing those secular halls, none of us ever saw a policeman in the building, "resource" or otherwise, and I never saw one fight inside the school building or on the school grounds.
DISCIPLINE
Teachers maintained order by a demerit system. A student would receive one demerit if he was late to class or if he talked during class or if he ran in the halls or chewed gum, things like that. The most demerits in one whack a teacher would give a student were five, and that was for being absent without excuse or some exhibition of direct disrespect. I never saw any exhibition of direct disrespect, not once, not ever. Verbal disrespect sometimes reared its rebellious head, but it was in a private conversation, in hushed tones.
The reason that the demerit system kept us in line was simple: anyone receiving more than 10 demerits in a semester had to come to school on the last Saturday of that semester and endure an 18 weeks' written test in every subject he was taking--English, algebra, history, every subject. The grades on those tests would be factored into a student's final semester grades in each subject.
I went though high school having received one demerit. That was good because I couldn't have passed an 18 week's test in any subject. Only Robert E. Lee and Charles Mason have better records than I; they graduated from West Point with no demerits. Both graduated in 1829; Mason was first in his class; Lee was second.They bested me there too; I was so far away from being number one in my class, that my ranking wasn't listed to save embarrassment.
Another factor in the Christianized atmosphere was the dreaded paddle. Our P. E. instructors (the coaches) had their own and used them when the need arose. Each teacher's paddle was "The Board of Education" that got to the seat of the matter. One typing and business teacher had her own paddle and wielded it with a mighty hand.
STARTING THE DAY
At the beginning of each school day, there was "Morning Watch" during which someone from one of the local churches spoke to those who assembled in Room 143. (There's a picture of them in my yearbook with heads bowed and the words at the bottom of the picture call them, "The Watch Worshipers.") Each home room had a Morning Watch representative who would report to us and encourage us to attend. (The representative from our homeroom was Martha Nelson, a friend with whom I still have occasional contact.)
THE YEARBOOK
Also in my yearbook is a picture taken around Christmas time of a group in the drama class. They're practicing for a Christmas play and they're dressed as shepherds, kneeling at the manger. Also in that yearbook the writers printed a quote from Genesis, attributing it to "Genesis 13:8" from the King James Version.
THE BIBLE COURSE
One of the electives taught in my high school was "Bible." The first semester was the Old Testament, the second semester was the New Testament. We made maps of Israel. We made maps of the Roman Empire in the second semester. We studied the life of Christ and the journeys of Paul. We typed each lesson on onion skin paper and at the end of the year, many of us had our collection of the lessons on that paper bound into a rather large book. I still have mine. Somewhere.
THE CLUB GATHERS
We enjoyed weekly assemblies. One of the assemblies featured a speaker from the military. I think he was of a high rank. This was during the Cold War and he spoke to us about the Russians. I remember two things he said: "The Russians are barbarians with nuclear weapons." We had no problem with that because he was telling the truth. America was superior to those atheists and we knew it.
Then he showed us a slide show ("slide show" sounds archaic; there was no such thing as Power Point). One of the slides was a picture of a Russian woman doing hard manual labor repairing a Russian street along with a small group of men. We immediately laughed, because this was strange to us to see a woman out in the cold with a shovel doing pavement work. To us, that was men's work. Then he told us, sarcastically, "Don't laugh. This is what the Russians call, 'Equal rights for women.'"
We laughed again.
A PEP RALLY
The club had a hatred; it ran deep in our veins and was directed toward the rival high school. At the pep rally in the gym before the big game, the cheer leaders executed our rival's star player in effigy. It was great fun; nobody thought it anything to do with real life. Later, our team won the game.
THE CROWNING TOUCH
The capstone example of our Christianized generation occurred in my Latin class. Our teacher, Mrs. R. P. Johnson, had told us translate at our desks from the textbook, and as we did, she went from desk to desk to help anyone who needed it. When she came to one student's desk, he was having a problem because he didn't know the meaning of a word. It was the Latin word, "redempto," which means "buy back."
The rest of us, diligently working at our desks, could hear Mrs. Johnson as she helped him, and we all heard her when she explained to him, "That word means 'buy back,' we get our English word, 'redemption' from it. That's what Christ did for you, He bought you back."
No student raised an eyebrow and I doubt that any student reported to their parents what Mrs. Johnson said because what she said was a normal thing to say for our Christianized generation. We were used to hearing it. We were soaked.
THE EDUCATION OF THE CLUB
Recently a man who was a substitute teacher said that he was examining the small library in his classroom and came upon some textbooks from the era of our time in high school. He said he was amazed because they would be considered college level textbooks today.
We received an education, a real education. One college professor told me that those students from my club came to college knowing English grammar. (For example, we wouldn't say, "I hope you don't mind ME parking there." We knew better. We would properly say, "I hope you don't mind MY parking there."
We memorized a hundred lines of poetry a year, wrote and presented orally four pre-approved book reports a year, diagrammed sentences, took vocabulary tests, and we knew direct and indirect objects when we saw them.
One other thing: we didn't think were and we still don't think we are anything special. Nobody told us were the greatest; we didn't wear T-shirts announcing how wonderful we were. We were just kids going through the public school system back in the day. We were normal.
This trip down memory lane has been for a purpose: next week, we'll take a look at what it means to our society that my generation is the last of its kind, the last Christianized generation in American history.
TO BE CONTINUED
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