Did you know that when our Founders were writing our
Constitution, they debated whether they should add a list of rights to it?
They were afraid that if they listed these rights, the
government might think that these were the only rights that the people were
entitled to. They also thought that the
government might think that government was the one who gave them these rights. And some thought also that there’s no point
in saying that we have a right to something if there is nothing in the
Constitution that gives the government the power to restrict that right.
They used the example of freedom of the press. They asked why they should have to say that
the press is free if there is nothing in the Constitution that gives the
government any right to restrict that freedom.
By saying that the press has a
right to be free might suggest to some that the government has power to
restrict the press in some way if they wanted to.
Eventually they decided to list some of these rights, and so
the first ten amendments to our Constitution are called the Bill of Rights.
Among the first rights to be named is that “Congress shall
make no law . . . prohibiting the free exercise [of religion].” The statement is absolute, no law shall be
made, and the exercise of religion shall be free. And since this is part of the First
Amendment, it is as if to say that this right is at the foundation of who we
are as a people.
But this statement, this right, only makes sense under
certain conditions. For our country to
recognize the importance of free exercise of religion among the first rights
listed in guiding our country says a lot about our country that needs to be
heard and discussed today.
I submit that
this one statement in the First Amendment defines our nation in at least three
ways.
Some people today will want you to think that what the
Founders of our nation intended is not important today. They will say that our Founders could not
foresee the many ways that our nation would change over the years, and
therefore we have to change our understanding of the Constitution and our
country to adapt to new circumstances.
On the contrary, to change the intended or original nature
of our country to conform to modern thinking is, frankly, a form of treason. When nations fight wars, the primary goal is
not to kill people. They only kill
people in order to achieve that goal. The goal is essentially to change the
government of the nation they are fighting against.
One side wins, the other side loses, and the winner imposes
its will on the loser. Maybe it takes
control of some land or absorbs that nation into itself. If it can be done peacefully, all the
better. We may talk about things like
conquest or retaliation with regard to war, but what it boils down to is
changing the government of another nation, whether changing its leaders or changing
its policies,
When people in our own country try to change our government,
our country, from what it was intended to be to something else, then they are
doing the same thing as if another country had attacked us and imposed its will
on ours. It isn’t any less insidious or
treacherous if it is done slowly over generations than if it is done quickly
through a coup or a war.
So what our Founders intended for our country is essential
in deciding everything we do as a country. Politicians and courts and Presidents can act
as if what the Founders intended for our country isn’t important, and there is
nobody to compel them to try to keep or restore our country to its original settings,
but people need to learn what our country is supposed to be like and keep
talking about it and keep judging the things that are happening in our country
as to whether they are right or wrong based on that information.
So what exactly does the right to free exercise of religion
mean for our country?
1) It means
that religion, as understood by the Founders, was consonant with the highest
values of our country. Countries have
values just like people do. If our
country was founded to be a secular country, as we are constantly being told, then
there would be a value system higher than that of religion or religious values,
and free exercise of religion could not be promised.
But free exercise of religion is a right, so government has
no authority to restrict it. So the
Founders assumed a religious nature for our nation. John Adams famously said that “our
Constitution is made for a religious and moral people. It is wholly unsuited for any other.”
We are being told today that religious people must restrict
their rights or conform their actions to public demands because it is necessary
for the rights of other people. Our
Founders saw no conflicts between religion and other people’s rights.
Notice that the rights affirmed in the Bill of Rights are
all things that people are free to do without the intrusion of government or
things that the government cannot do to its people. There is nothing that compels anybody to do
anything for or to somebody else. Now we
are told that people have rights to things that require other people to do things
for them, whether by their actions or by the government taking their money and
using it to give things to people that they now have a right to have.
The very idea of a secular nation is shown to be wrong by
the mere fact that these rights were considered to be given to us by God. Atheists and secularists don’t like anything
about religion and God influencing public policies, but the whole idea of human
rights as found in the Constitution is based on God and a particular
understanding of that God.
So, yes, it was religion that influenced the very idea of a
free nation, our nation. This fact alone
should prove that the idea of the separation of church and state is wrong as it
is currently understood. The Founders’
views of God showed them that independence was the right course of action.
2) The right to
free exercise of religion means that the Founders had a particular religion in
mind. The Founders weren’t philosophers
who hypothesized: what about this religion, or that religion? They knew that there were all kinds of
religions in the world and that they have competing ideas of truth.
Religions all have very different practices on what is
normal or moral behavior. In India, they
used to burn alive the widows of their newly deceased husbands in one huge
bonfire. It was the English who governed
the country and who reintroduced Christianity back into India who were
responsible for ending that practice.
Religion isn’t just about doctrines, what you believe about
a God who is out there somewhere.
Religion is a whole encompassing worldview that defines your views of
truth and falsehood, right and wrong, good and evil, good and bad, worthy and
unworthy.
Laws are based on these kinds of values. You can’t promise on the one hand that religious
exercise is free, and then, based on an entirely secular worldview of moral
relativism and cultural equivalency, make laws that limit what religious people
can do.
That may sound like religious people are given a blank check
to do all manner of things in the name of their religion. But the moral code of Christians was well
known, to the Founders and to the public.
The moral code for our country was basically summarized by
the Ten Commandments, which we used to display in our schools, court houses,
and in the public squares, plus the general command to love your neighbor. Our nation felt quite safe allowing and even
promoting this free exercise of religion.
Our First Congress had Bibles printed to be used in all the
public schools. I am reading now the
basic reading books used in our public schools during the 1800s. They are very explicitly Christian in their
content. Much of it could be used just
the way they are in Sunday School, the teaching arm of the Christian
Church.
Christian morality gave us love thy neighbor, compassion,
helping people in need, mercy, kindness, forgiveness, giving, self-sacrifice,
honesty, integrity, hard work, responsibility, respect, courage, self-control,
discipline, humility, trust, honesty, loyalty, faithfulness, patience, promoting
marriage, saving yourself for marriage, having children only in a marriage, and
working through hard marriages rather than breaking up a family.
I’m not saying that these virtues are not found anywhere
else, but Christianity was the value system which embraced all of these virtues,
and they were equally embraced by our country. No, not everybody lived by these virtues, but
these were all considered to be virtues and the right way to live.
So when the Founders said that the free exercise of religion
is a fundamental human right, they had Christianity in mind.
But if free exercise of religion is a fundamental human
right, then it must apply to all religions and not just to Christianity.
So this leads to the third meaning of religious freedom in
our country.
3) The right to
free exercise of religion in our country would also mean that our Founders were
not expecting or planning to create a diverse nation where everybody under the
sun would or could come here and “do their own thing.” There are religions that have practiced human
sacrifice, the burning alive of widows, honor killings, and female genital
mutilation. So, no, I do not believe
that they were dreaming of an America where everybody could come here and
freely practice their religion from back home.
They were thinking of those people who already constituted this new nation.
A few years after the Constitution was ratified, the United
States went to war with four Muslim nations on the northern coast of
Africa. They were hijacking our ships
and taking our sailors captive. Our
leaders couldn’t understand why they were doing this, so in talks with them,
the Muslim leaders showed them from the Koran that it was their duty as Muslims
to wage war against the infidels. That’s
what Muslims do.
So while our leaders believed that freedom of religious exercise
is a human right, I don’t believe for a minute that they expected, wanted, or
would have allowed massive migration of Muslims into our country, knowing that
there would inevitably be a clash of cultures at some point.
If you read the early writings, you know that there were
some Muslims in our country. But you
also know that our Founders fully expected that differing ideas would be fully
debated, and the truth would win out. They
did not understand religions as personal preferences like one’s taste in music
or food. Religion was about truth.
Christian exercise was not muted so as not to offend those
of other religions. The country took a
stand as a Christian nation as evidenced by the use of the Bible in its public
schools.
As for the idea of diversity and the mass migration of
differing cultures into our country, if you read the Preamble to the
Constitution, you will see that our government was founded to form a more
perfect Union
[how can diversity create union?],
establish Justice,
which would mean the securing of
our rights, like having free exercise of religion,
insure domestic Tranquility
[how can you have tranquility when
everyone disagrees on what is right and wrong, good and bad],
provide for the common defense,
which would mean keeping our
government and our country from changing into something they were not intended
to be,
promote the general Welfare,
which means to promote what is
best for the citizens of our country before that of the rest of the world,
and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our
Posterity,
which means to see that we don’t
ruin the future for our children because of something that we want to do today.
We shouldn't do things that endanger our nation’s future, like
accumulating massive debt that can’t be paid down or bringing in masses of people
whose values are very different from our own.
Immigration is forever. Hundreds
become thousands become millions.
Government exists for the happiness and security of its own
people. Happiness is their word. In modern political speech, you could use a
slogan like America First.
Conservative Christians and lawmakers keep trying to pass
laws to protect religious freedom. I
believe that is a mistake. By trying to
pass these laws, they are saying that the First Amendment didn’t really address
these issues, and we are trying to get something that wasn’t a part of the original
plan.
On the contrary, they need to reassert all that the First
Amendment promises, that the First Amendment is enough to guarantee them these
right. They should be challenging the
assumption that our Founders intended our nation to be a secular nation and
that religion, specifically Christianity, has no place in our public
policy.
It is often noted that John Adams and our Congress stated once
that our country was not founded on the Christian religion. But this statement was made in 1797 in
dialogue with the Muslim pirates before we went to war with them. We had been paying them tribute, buying them
off, to keep them from attacking our ships.
When you see the context of their statement, you understand better the
point of the statement. They were trying
to avoid giving them any further reason for hostile action.
Muslim countries are run by the Koran. That is their highest law and forms their
legal system. Christianity does not form
our legal system or spell out the form of our government. So what they said was factually true, but perhaps
a little incomplete.
Christianity is not related to our government like the Koran
is related to the government in Muslim countries. But Christianity did form the basis of our
moral values as evidenced by the Declaration of Independence and the high place
the Bible had in our public schools.
Christians are concerned today over the increasing
government restrictions on religious freedom.
They would do better if they focused on what kind of nation we were
founded to be.
Even if we were founded as a Christian nation, should or can
we still insist on that since we have become a very diverse nation since
then?
The choice is either being a Christian nation or a secular
nation. If we choose to be a secular
nation, then we are no longer the nation that was started in 1776. We should change our name so as to not
confuse the two nations with each other.
We will become increasingly diverse with very little to bind
us together. We can expect to have
continual strife as major cultures, value systems, and truth systems clash,
with nobody willing to compromise.
Frankly, that is a dim prospect for the future of our nation.
As a secular nation, we have no choice but to bring in as
many different cultures and religions as possible. Diversity is our strength, so we are told. But expect then to have a society continually
at war with itself, with every group fighting for its own truth, validation,
and piece of a shrinking pie.
Apart from a major religious revival, as in Christian
revival, it is getting harder and harder for many to make the case for returning
to our Christian roots, because there are so many people here now who have
brought their other worldviews, i.e. religions, here. Since 1965, our leaders have focused on
diversity in our immigration policies, so any kind of national consensus keeps getting
harder to attain.
But Christianity lost its foothold in America, not because
it proved unworthy or because Christians became indifferent to their religion,
but because the court called supreme ruled its exclusion from public life, and
lawsuits, court rulings, and a few generations of children growing up under the
new rules made it seem passé or at least marginalized in modern America.
The Christian Church needs a religious revival in America,
and it often tells us that our hope is not found in politics. But if we don’t challenge the assumptions
about our nation’s history and founding, that revival will do very little to
change our country, because our schools, our government, and our courts will
still be doing things based on secularism, because they believe that is how our
country is supposed to be. And they will
still be restricting the way that the Church can interact with society and what
the Church can say publicly.
The Church needs to challenge the thinking that it is
forbidden for it to talk politically and to be involved politically. Our country is a representative country, and Christians
must insist on being represented as well.
It’s not humility to let the heathen, the atheists, and the secularists
run the country, the schools, the media, and then mourn that our country is
going to hell. The Church needs to challenge
the idea that schools and public life must be devoid of anything having to do
with God.
All those lawsuits about crosses in public places and
Christian organizations in public schools need to be challenged and thrown
out. Christians need to become more
vocal. This is their country too, and the
country that their children will grow up in.
This is the country that used to be the leader of the free world, a
light to the nations, an example of what freedom and religious freedom can do
for a nation.
There may well have to be acts of civil disobedience where
people defy a government edict, law, or regulation, and the Church needs to be
ready to stand with these people when this happens and force the government to
back down.
Jesus said that if someone strikes you on the cheek, you
should turn the other one to him. If
someone strikes me on the cheek, I will try to do that. But if someone starts striking my wife or my
kids, I will try to stop them. And that
it takes force, I will use it.
If Christians think it virtuous to let the heathen, the
secularists, and the atheists take over their country, that’s one thing. But for the sake of your children and
grandchildren, you need to fight to get back the country that our forefathers
left to us, what some famous people from our past called “the last best hope of
earth.”
