Thursday, July 2, 2009

IN GOD WE TRUST?

The present incarnation of church and state separation can be chocked up to either a misunderstanding of, or an outright assault on, the Constitution. To understand the founder’s actual viewpoint on the balance of religion and government, one must have at least a partial knowledge of history, a subject sorely abandoned by our fine American educational system.

The “Establishment Clause” originated from the social situation in England during our nation’s formation. At that time, politics and religion were rather indistinguishable, and the church both dictated to, and was established by, the state. The king was the head of the church, and if a citizen did not take part in the state religion, their allegiance to the nation was questioned as well.

During that time the people were not free to decide how they would worship, nor were they free to follow any form of morality apart from that which the church codified in law.

So it was with good reason our framers feared theocracy, and with reasoned intent they fought to ensure it would not be part of the new republic. Freedom and feudal monarchy are not synonymous, and to avoid the same from happening here, our forefathers wrote a prohibition directly into our Constitution.

The actual text states, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” What this means is that the government may not create a “Church of the U.S.” Congress may not pass laws requiring religious activity, nor may they require religious affiliation. The law was to be apart from codified clerical doctrine.

In the same regard, the text clearly states that the government may not infringe on personal or corporate veneration either. Congress may not pass laws restricting religious worship, nor may they abolish religion altogether. They recognized every person’s complete freedom to worship by whatever means he or she wishes. And as well, one may choose no worship at all. It is a matter of personal freedom and the point was to restrict government from enacting laws in that regard.

Remember, the whole point of the Constitution was to limit the actions of government, and not to infringe on the freedom of the governed.

However, the courts have somehow bent the interpretation into meaning that there can be no connection between religion and the state whatsoever. This is absurd! The founders were mostly religious men – as was most of the population of the time – and they brought that religious fervor into their debates and discussions concerning our nation’s founding. In recognition of freedom, they celebrated the free thoughts of the citizenry. To this day, religious men and women serve in government and continue to bring that influence into their actions and decisions as public servants. Overlap is unavoidable, and certainly not undesirable.

The Constitution simply states there may be no “laws” enacting religious “establishment”. It says nothing about civic recognition, such as the religious symbolics printed on our currency.

Nowhere does the Constitution consider public acknowledgement of faith to be an abridgement of the establishment clause. If that were so, it would contain specific Prohibitions, and documents such as the Declaration of Independence would have noted a different entity as the one bestowing “unalienable rights”.

Along with this, the question arises as to whether such acknowledgement actually equates to “establishment”. Does the act of hanging a copy of the Ten Commandments in a post office embody an endorsement of Christianity? Let’s widen the context a bit. If the President rids in a Cadillac, is that an endorsement of General Motors? (Seeing as our president is now the defacto CEO of GM, this very well could be, however . . .)

The White House is painted with white paint. Could this be an establishment of white as our federal color? Let the race riots begin at the foot of Capital Hill.

President Obama now owns a Portages Water Dog. Should those of us who breed Standard Poodles be concerned that this is the establishment of PWD’s, and discrimination will now descend on all other breeds?

It’s just as absurd to state that because something is funded with public resources or resides on civic property, Congress is somehow granting establishment!

If you visit the monuments in Washington DC, you’ll run across the Jefferson Memorial. Though Jefferson is noted for being a secular thinker, after reading his words inscribed on the walls of his memorial, you can’t escape that he held some degree of personal faith. So what should we do? Should we grab up the stone chisels and start dissecting out all references to God?

If there had been a clear intent to distance our nation from Heaven, those words would have never made it onto the memorial in the first place!

Obviously the other founders, as well as civic leaders in ages hence, were comfortable with the state recognizing religion. They were quite expressive of their faith in both their personal as well as their public writings. What they wanted to avoid was the “establishment” of any particular religion. Granted, they came from a Judeo-Christian viewpoint and expressed that specific direction. But there’s little doubt that if some of them were steeped in Shintoism, that too would have surfaced. You see, ultimately it wasn’t about religion. The true heart of the establishment clause is a point of freedom.

Later, during the construction of the Supreme Court building, religion was clearly recognized. On the Frieze adorning the south wall, we see a sculpture depicting Moses receiving the law. You can’t get much more religious than Moses. But in that same sculpture, we also see Muhammad holding the Qur’an. So that means Islam is the religion of the court, right?

Before you answer, note that Hammurabi, the ancient King of Babylon is there also, receiving the law from the Babylonian Sun God. And you thought only California had sun worshipers. Even Napoleon can be found amongst the characters on the north wall. He only thought himself equal to God.

The sculpture depicts lawgivers and philosophers, of which there are a few religious icons scattered here and there. But the intent is not to establish a religion, but only to point out a correlation between the building and its purpose; reverence for the law.

Thus, the symbols found throughout the country’s architecture is not a defacto establishment of, or prohibition against, any form of worship. In America, we are (at least we’re supposed to be) free to worship as we see fit, and the government is to take no position, for or against any or all of it. And if a community wishes to heft a Star of David atop their courthouse during the depth of our annual winter holiday season, then so be it. There’s no need for offense, nor is there any concern that we all are being surreptitiously proselytized into Judaism.

More than their zeal for God, our founders were passionate about freedom!

That’s the real point. The left has a very twisted concept of freedom, and while they decry their victimization by it, they work diligently to stifle it according to their will. They seem seriously concerned that we on the right will impose morality upon them, and so they use the establishment clause as a defense.

Because morality is nearly always aligned with religious thought, the establishment clause is religiously applied to keep Christianity at bay. The very essence that was granted to give us our freedom is now being used to curtail it.

As for any success toward establishment, if it were the intent of the Christians, they should be sorely disappointed in their lack of accomplishment. In America our laws are built upon English Common Law, and that upon the concepts laid by ancient Rome and Greece. So the initial basis of our law is secular.

When you consider that our laws are aimed at achieving justice, and that morality is but a byproduct of legislation, then the law can never establish religion. Thus, the state will always remain secular, even when morality plays into the Establishment of the state. God-fearing men will always bring their morality into generating laws, yet the state may never codify morality and demand faith from the people.

What’s even more interesting is that according to the concept outlined in the Establishment clause, a man is equally as free to act morally as he is to be immoral. Yet when weighed by the law, his actions are assessed according to the law alone. A person can act justly, yet live immorally. These are two separate concepts.

Thus the state may be just, without regard to moral standing. This is because morality is not a secular concept. Morality involves a sense of “right and wrong”, not just a system of legal justifications. Morality is also relative. Would you be willing to invite someone to your home, and while serving them dinner, take a carving knife from the kitchen and thrust it into their body? Then, once dead, would you be willing to cook their carcass, portion them into tasty morsels, and serve them to the rest of your dinner guests? In times past in certain parts of the world, that was not only “moral”, but you would be honored according to the greater degree of treachery used to secure your victim. We obviously don’t see that as moral behavior, but why? It’s because of the Judeo-Christian foundation to our society.

Much of our law is based on Judeo-Christian philosophy. For example, bigamy is practiced in many parts of the world. It is also against Christian doctrine. We have laws prohibiting bigamy. So upon what are those laws based?

Obviously we can neither ignore nor deny that the foundation of our morality stems from Christian beliefs.

The movie “Time Changer” explores the concept of isolating morality from Christianity. Now I admit the movie’s message is strongly slanted toward the Christian community. Regardless, it is an interesting concept to consider, in that once you remove religion from morality, you wind up with moral relativism. This is the idea that basically states, “What’s right for me is good for me, and what’s right for you is not my concern.”

This is the pit in which we seem to be descending. Everyone does what is right in his own eyes these days. And strangely enough, it has caused considerable injustice by denying protection to a few in an attempt to create some convoluted moral equity for others. An office worker is “offended” by an angel atop a Christmas tree, and the heavy hand of justice has the whole office cleared of holiday decorations.

Where’s the freedom in that?

The fear that brought about the establishment clause originated from the various Inquisitions. Again, in the centuries leading up to 1776, the church and the state were essentially one. Men of power used God as their scepter, and ordained themselves as near deity in the process. That’s the issue the founders were seeking to curb.

Today, we have the opposite. In modern times, the inquisitions are led by the ACLU (aka: The Anti Christian League of the Unholy), are removed to the courtroom from the abbey, and our high priests are civil magistrates. It’s somewhat ironic that the God-fearing men who established the nation, in their dread of theocratic tyranny, gave us the establishment clause, which is the very tool atheists use to nullify and uproot religious freedom.

Modern society denigrates faith, and somehow our laws have mutated into coercion on the part of the state to eradicate all – or at least Judeo-Christian – religious thought from American society. We are no longer free to express our faith in any public fashion, which, in a sense, violates the establishment clause because it prohibits the “free exercise” thereof.

Through legal “justice”, our unalienable right of free expression is curtailed, and God has been banished from the public square. He’s now just a quaint antiquation.

And what are the results of such tyranny? Crime rates are soaring out of control, substance abuse abounds, and our children are no longer safe to play contently in their own neighborhoods. Just the other day, a woman awoke with a headache while enjoying the afternoon in her own backyard. The source of the pain was later identified as a bullet fired from over a mile away during a street squabble.

Unsafe even in our own homes, we are becoming prisoners through our desire to escape moral confinement.

In ages past, religious expression was common. People didn’t fear teachers bringing the Bible into the classroom, nor were they concerned about the Ten Commandments hanging on the walls of City Hall. They realized that such things were a reminder of our obligations to morality and not that there was an iron-fisted subjugation to God.

Our communities were safe because we believed in the concepts of “right” and “wrong”. People did what was “right”, not because the church demanded it of them; they did “right” because not doing so was “wrong”. And they held these beliefs without any regard to the state whatsoever.

Today, who’s to say? "Right" and "wrong" are outdated concepts that are far to constrictive in the light of progressive thought. In our modern cultural frame, a felon can escape the bounds of prison, tear up a local community, commit new acts of mayhem and violence, and in the end, when apprehended by an armed citizen, is given the right to sue for damages, and collect $millions based on his fractured childhood in a broken home. And the average law-aiding citizen who stopped him, goes to county jail for aiming his legally permitted concealed weapon at the unruly felon. Our laws say that’s “justice”. Our hearts know such things are immoral.

But that’s the way liberals like it. Steal away our right of religious expression and all the bindings of morality go with it. All you’re left with is relative justice through what’s left of the law. And that too becomes perverted as our freedoms evaporate under the weight of civic oppression.

I would love to point out that the Apostle Paul states clearly in the book of Romans that no one is ever justified by the law. We’re saved through faith in God. And through Him, we are enticed into morality. But depending on where that point is made, it’s probably not allowed.

These days, that would be considered “establishment”, and Heaven knows God is not welcome there.

2 comments:

  1. “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” the law word for word

    You wrote this:
    The Constitution simply states there may be no “laws” enacting religious “establishment”. It says nothing about civic recognition, such as the religious symbolics printed on our currency.

    How does the word "respecting" (Constitutional text) translate to "enacting" (your definition)? You don't necessarily enforce something if you respect it, perhaps you are just acknowledging its existence? I don't know if your interpretation is fact but it is fact that the constitution says nothing about "enacting" religious establishment.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Excuse me I mean to say enable instead of enforce, confused my words.

    ReplyDelete

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