An Open Letter to the Supreme Court of the United States
Greetings, honored justices!
I wish you well, but, alas, I wish that were the only reason
for my writing.
If the United States of America were ever to cease from
being a nation or otherwise fundamentally change so as to be essentially a
different nation, which can only be considered not a good thing, the fault
would be entirely your own.
I can even tell you the single thing that would have been
most responsible for this to have occurred.
I can even put that single thing into one word: religion.
You have insisted that our governments, and all our public
entities supported with public money, cannot favor one religion over another,
or even religion over non-religion.
Honored justices, indeed, this one statement more than any
other will explain the decline and fall of Western Civilization itself, if it
goes that far.
The reason I am so certain of this is that religion,
properly defined, has been at the source of our nation’s founding and Western
Civilization. And this is where the
problem lies.
A religion is a set of beliefs about reality, a
worldview. A worldview is a description
of how life works, what is true, what is false, what is right, what is wrong, what
is good, what is bad, what are the rules, are there any rules. A religion is a worldview that believes that
there is a God and then purports to give information about God, because if
there were a god/God, this would certainly have an effect on life as it
pertains to human beings.
So everybody has a worldview. And if they believe in God, it is called a religion.
Governments, nations, countries all have worldviews as well,
a basic core or system of beliefs that guides the government’s laws and
policies, a nation’s culture, a country’s identity.
To deny a nation the right to define itself with a worldview
that includes God is not only wrong but destructive.
But, but, but . . . .
what about the First Amendment?
The best way to answer that question is with a
question. Wouldn’t it be fair to assume
that the people who wrote and ratified the Constitution and Bill of Rights
would have understood what they meant and then acted in ways consistent with
their meaning, rather than promoting practices that were found to be unconstitutional,
by you, 150 years later?
That very first Congress authorized the printing of Bibles
for use in public schools. The Congress
hall itself was used as a church on Sundays for over 100 years starting from
our country’s earliest days.
Religion is not a list of personal preferences, as one’s
taste in music, one’s favorite authors, one’s favorite food, or chocolate over
vanilla. It is a claim to truth.
Our nation’s Founders saw that in the Bible and
Christianity.
Every nation has laws against murder, but that is very
different from teaching our children that life is valuable, because humans are
created in the image of God.
Our nation teaches us to tolerate other people, which
essentially means to ignore them. Christianity,
and the Bible, teach us to love other people, to actively seek their good.
In the early days of our country, people who didn’t believe
in God were not even allowed to serve on juries or in most cases even run for
public office. Or if they could, they
would never have won. Why? Nobody trusted them. It was the belief that God held people
accountable for their actions that gave people their integrity, and those who
didn’t believe in God and an afterlife were seen as more likely to act in their
own self-interest.
Sure there were nice, honest atheists then, as there are
today, but there is nothing in their belief system that would require that, so
that, even if they were such in the present time, nobody then believed that
this would hold enough in trying circumstances.
Some people have contended that all things religious should
be taught in the home.
I have to ask, what home?
We have taught our daughters, as a nation, that it is more important to
have a career, or a job, than to have a family.
And our economic policies have made it harder for our women to stay at
home even if they wanted to.
And our men are less likely to marry and raise their
children than at any time in history.
Why?
Worldview. Marrying
and raising children together is a Biblical and Christian principle. Certainly you don’t have to be Christian to
have a wonderful family, but without Christianity it wouldn’t be taught as
ideal, but one option among many. True,
some other religions teach that as well, but only religions.
So for a government to be neutral toward religion is really saying
that a nation must necessarily say and live and act and teach that for all
practical purposes there is no God. And
the biggest consequence of this is that government now assumes the role that
God used to play in people’s lives. Yes,
people can still believe what they want in their hearts, but the government becomes
the nation’s keeper rather than each of us his brother’s.
When our nation was founded, and you should know this, the
big question about religion was whether churches were to be a function of the federal
government, as it was in Europe. The
answer they gave was no. That is what
was meant in the First Amendment by establishing religion.
And the simplest proof of that was the very actions of that
First Congress: establishing Congressional chaplains, calling for a national
day of prayer, paying for missionary work among the Indians, printing Bibles
for public schools, even opening every day’s business with prayer.
Christianity defined the (unwritten) rules for our nation: God,
love, honor, work, responsibility, family, honesty, integrity. Now our nation, our culture, our government tries
to make new rules to define our existence: self-actualization; fairness;
equality; tolerance; government as benefactor, ruler, protector; and diversity, which is another way of saying: 'not on the same page.'.
The result is a nation without a sense of responsibility,
whether for others or even for one’s self.
A nation of increasing violence, seeing others as obstacles to one’s
personal happiness rather than as sharers and contributors to it.
We embrace multiculturalism, because we don’t value our
own. We no longer know what made us what
we are or why we ever were like that.
A nation has to decide what kind of nation we will be, what
principles define us and guide us.
Christianity used to define us.
You decided that we could no longer do that, contrary to our entire previous
history. And what you left us is a
secularism, bereft of any personal accountability, duties, obligations, or restraints,
apart from that owed to our government or imposed on ourselves by ourselves.
To tell our government to be neutral to religion is to tell
us to draw without lines, to write without words, to speak without language, to
build a house without walls or foundation.
I have written elsewhere about the four myths of a secular government
in America. It is available on my blog,
poligion1.blogspot.com, but I will send you a copy.
As I said, I wish you well, but I strongly urge you to
reconsider your church-state rulings because you have removed the rudder from
the ship of state.
Thank you.
Respectfully,
Larry Craig
